‘I have worked strenuously when I should have worked calmly – I have fought when I should have lain down – I have relied on my individuality instead of my reason – I have shouted and raged when I should have been listening attentively… Failing to paint beautifully we find something else and insist that it is just as good – and what unhappiness follows that lie!’
Augustus John to William Orpen
Ida was dead: but in many ways her influence lived on. ‘Ida keeps teaching me things,’ Augustus told Alice Rothenstein. It seemed to him that she was teaching him at last who he was, solving the everlasting problem of his identity. ‘I don’t know that I feel really wiser through my sorrows, perhaps, yes: but at any rate I feel more “knowing” – I also feel curiously more myself,’ he wrote to Alick Schepeler. ‘…I also feel still greater admiration for my view of things as an artist… ’
If his artistic aims had not altered, he saw them more clearly and was to pursue them with more determination. ‘I still feel extremely confident that given the right woman in the right corner I shall acquit myself honourably,’ he assured Will Rothenstein. ‘…I went to see Puvis’s drawings in Paris. He seems to be the finest modern – while I admire immensely Rodin’s later drawings – full of Greek lightness. Longings devour me to decorate a vast space with nudes and – and trees and waters. I am getting clearer about colour tho’ still very ignorant, with a little more knowledge I shall at least begin...’
It was as if he could make sense of Ida’s death only in his work. Many of his finest paintings, visionary moments of suspended time, matters of volume and reflected light – the liquidity of light spilling from one surface to another – were done in the following eight years. ‘It is so difficult to realize that Ida has gone so far away,’ he told Mrs Netttleship. ‘…If she could only just come and sit for me sometimes. I’ve never painted her – I thought I had so much time, and began by getting at sidelights of her only, counting on doing the real thing in the end – she was such a big subject.’
It was this sense of time lost that reanimated his need to paint, to seize every opportunity of doing so, to simplify life in order to do so. But with seven children to support, almost as many studios, and perhaps Dorelia (at least while she was still pregnant), how was he to start? His predicament was complicated by a new belief in his children. While Ida was alive, he had tended to look at them as interruptions to his work. But because of what they had lost, and what he had lost too, and the identification he felt for them through loss, he began to see them as the very subject-matter of his work. In order to paint them he must have them around him; but to have them around him he needed money; and to get money he would have to paint some commissioned portraits, which was a very hit-or-miss business. However this conundrum was to be worked out, he recognized the direction his painting must take. ‘I must tell you how happy thoughts fill me just now,’ he confided to Alice Rothenstein. ‘I begin to see how it is all going to come about – all the children and mothers and me. In my former impatience and unwisdom I used to think of them sometimes as accidental or perhaps a little in the way of my art, what a mistake – now it dawns on me they are, must be the real material and soul of it.’
The sort of gossip from which Ida had partly shielded him now began to encircle him. He heard it everywhere – ill-informed, excited, curious, full of half-truths and sentimental platitudes.
‘Lady M.F. Prothero to Alice Rothenstein:
I have been so much grieved to hear of Ida John’s death. It sounds terribly sad, – and all those babies left behind! I hear that Mrs Nettleship was with Ida, so I feel she must have had care in her illness. But I wonder if she had been worn out lately in one way or another. The thought of her quite haunts me, – and her heroic conduct all through – I should so much have liked to hear something about her from you, and what is likely to become of those infants. – I suppose John is quite irresponsible and it will fall to Mrs Nettleship to mother them. She, poor soul, has already had a hard struggle, and this responsibility is a heavy one for her to bear...’
It was nevertheless a responsibility Mrs Nettleship resolved to shoulder. The fight between her and Augustus opened up as soon as Ida died. On the following day (15 March 1907) she reported the outcome to her daughter Ursula: ‘Gus is quite willing for me to take them [the children] for the present but we have not made any plans for the future. I think he wants to get away to the country. I want to get a Swiss nurse for the children… They are very pleased to be coming with us.’1
Three days later, having arranged for a notice of Ida’s death to be put in The Times and ordered mourning clothes for the family, she returned to Wigmore Street, carrying off the three eldest children. She was warm with plans for them – what they should precisely wear, what they must eat. The two babies, Edwin and Henry, she left in Paris, on the misunderstanding that they were to be looked after not by Dorelia but Delphine, who ‘is a very good nurse: I don’t mind leaving two babies with her.’
Augustus had not been ‘quite willing’ for his mother-in-law to take the children even on this temporary basis. But he had no alternative. ‘I am nearly bankrupt at the moment,’ he confessed to Will Rothenstein. It was out of the question to saddle Dorelia with more squatters just as her own, Pyramus and Romilly, were ‘beginning to get wise’; and so he grudgingly conceded the first round in this contest. ‘Mrs Nettleship and Ethel N. took David and Caspar and Robin back to London,’ he announced to Margaret Sampson, ‘ – leaving us the incapables.’
He was determined to ‘get them away again’.2 To the Rani he confided: ‘I have tried to make it clear that I shall kidnap them some day.’ His plans were legion. His friends, none of whom lived so bourgeois an existence as his mother-in-law, could each take a child or two and Augustus would then rent a small studio or flat in their houses and travel round the country visiting them. It was not ideal, perhaps; but as a temporary solution it was, he flattered himself, pretty good. ‘It is a pity to scatter them so,’ he agreed with his outraged mother-in-law, ‘ – one will know what to do a little later.’
He could spot one difficulty. ‘Everybody is asking for a baby and really there aren’t enough,’ he regretted, ‘ – but I should like Mrs Chowne to have a little one if I can find one… I wonder if Mrs Chowne can make Allenbury’s and whether she understands the gravity of dill-water.’
The Chownes chiefly recommended themselves as prospective foster parents – probably for Ida’s Henry – because Mrs Chowne was good-looking and her husband, besides being ‘a nice chap’, had ‘painted some charming flower pieces’.3 They had no children, lived in Liverpool where Augustus would enjoy seeing the Dowdalls and Sampsons; and they had known Ida, if only slightly. It was a pilot scheme for the whole exercise of adoption. But it failed, and for the most inconsequential of reasons. Both the Chownes welcomed the idea – but never both at the same time. As an example of diplomacy it was expert. ‘I should hate to disappoint Mrs Chowne,’ Augustus admitted to the Rani, who was acting as a broker in the arrangements. An unending stream of goodwill flowed between them without interruption or consequence, at the end of which there was no more talk of adoption.
The other practical matter that entangled Augustus was the future of the Chelsea Art School. The negotiations had been prolonged and for the most part unintelligible. This had been due to Knewstub’s business methods, which involved muddling the school’s money with that of the Chenil Gallery in such a way that his cheques from both school and gallery were returned to him. ‘It is a great pity that Knewstub is such a tactless idiot,’ Augustus had acknowledged to Trevor Haddon (4 February 1907). The reason why he was ‘nearly bankrupt’ was that Knewstub, who managed the shop at the Chenil Gallery, had lost some hundreds of pounds he had collected from the sale of John’s pictures. ‘I have always been anxious to avoid injuring the business or making things difficult,’ Augustus assured Haddon, who had taken control of the gallery and from whom Augustus agreed to accept repayment at the rate of twenty-five pounds a month (equivalent to £1,215 in 1996). ‘…Believe me I shall not cease to regret the mistakes we made over the school and I wish above all things to avoid causing you embarrassment.’4
It was essential, nevertheless, to end this story of the school happily. He proposed giving it the use, for advertisement purposes, of his name and, if it provided him with a studio, he guaranteed to be on the spot – from time to time. As his understudy, elevated with the name of Principal, he recommended Will Rothenstein. The goodwill of the school had apparently been purchased for two hundred pounds by Mrs Flower, who intended removing it to Hampstead Heath and paying Augustus one guinea for each of his appearances there – provided his understudy turned up when he did not. The trouble was that Will would ask such damned pedagogic questions: What was the exact constitution of the school? Could he have more details of his status there? Was it ‘honourable’, of the first rank, and established on a proper economic footing? Augustus would meet such inquiries at a more personal level: Mrs Flower was ‘a very nice woman – rather remarkable. I think one of those naked souls, full of faith and fortitude’; she therefore merited Will’s collaboration. ‘Knowing her pretty well,’ Augustus added, ‘I have not thought it necessary to treat her too formally – she would be perfectly ready to fall in with any views you or I held… she would give no trouble and understand she takes financial responsibility.’ This responsibility embraced a fine new studio on the Heath ‘she will erect for me, which will be an immense boon’; plus another, in a neighbouring pine grove, where the young pupils could pursue their studies under him. He would invite his friends, Lamb, Epstein, McEvoy, even Lewis, ‘to roost among my trees’. Mrs Flower, he concluded, ‘should consider herself lucky’.
Yet it was not to be. ‘The school we might make of it is too good to let slip too hastily,’ he urged Will Rothenstein (23 July 1907) as their plans for it began to fade. But truthfully he was no longer interested in teaching; only painting.
Without money from this school he had to rely more than ever on ‘the asphyxiating atmosphere of the New English Art Club… Its corrupting amenities – its traitorous esprit de corps – its mediocre excellencies even – !’ he complained. ‘I always want to slough my skin after the biannual celebrations and go into the wilderness to bewail my virginity for another reason than that which prompted Jephthah’s daughter.’
Over the next years there would seldom be a time when his work was not being exhibited in London: at the Carfax and the Chenil, the Goupil and Society of Twelve shows, at groups, academies, clubs. Any new movement or gathering – the Camden Town, the Allied Artists – any mixed show of modern work, automatically invited him, however foreign its aesthetic programme might be. He was untouched by these movements and counter-movements – their interest for him was financial. But he was not hostile to them and they welcomed his co-operation. Fry and Tonks, Will Rothenstein and Frank Rutter – these and other painter-critic-politicians wooed him. He bowed to their solicitations to exhibit, to sit on hanging committees, to become president of societies: but he was above art politics, or at least to one side of them. They were simply a means to an end when other means failed. ‘I am longing to borrow money so as to work till my show5 comes, undisturbed by Clubs and Societies,’ he hinted to Will (22 June 1907). It was the uncertainty of his life that forced him to rely so much on these institutions:
‘Pendulous Fate sounds many a varied note on my poor tympanum – my darkness and lights succeed one another with almost as much regularity as if the sun and the Planetary system controlled them; and the hours of moonless nights are long dismal unhallowed hours. My life is completely unsettled; I mean to say the circumstances of my existence are problematic; but my art, I believe I can say, does not cease to develop… I shall set about a composition soon – with a motive of action in it, controlling all – as in a Greek play.’6
Nothing could have been easier for Augustus, with his dexterity, than to follow with trivial variations the Post-Impressionists in Paris. But he already had enough influences to assimilate, and was not sure how to assimilate more. ‘I want to start something fresh and new,’ he told Will Rothenstein (April 1907). ‘I feel inclined to paint a nude in cadmium and indigo and orange. The “Indépendants” is effroyable – and yet one feels sometimes these chaps have blundered on something alive without being able to master it.’
From the way in which he writes of pictures, Gauguin alone among near-contemporary French painters appears to inspire him.
‘I should like to work for a few years entirely “out of my head”, perhaps for ever. To paint women till their faces become enlarged to an idiotic inanimity – till they stand impassively, unquestionably, terrifyingly fecund – fetiches of brass with Polynesian eyes and dry imperative teeth and fitful craving of bowels that surge and smoke for sacrifice – of flesh and flowers. How delightful that sounds! Can you [Will Rothenstein] imagine the viridian vistas, can you hear the chanting in the flushing palm tree groves and the thumping of the great flat feet of ecstatic multitudes shining with the sacred oil. The “Ah Ah Ah” of the wild infant world?’
Primitive inspiration was not to be found in Paris. Parisian women were what Delacroix once described as ‘on stage’.7 There were those who would say that, by leaving Paris, Augustus turned his back on everything exciting that was happening in modern painting; that had he stayed he would have painted like Derain, who had something of the same panache. But he wanted to find somewhere uninvaded by the twentieth century, a place where the inhabitants still lived the life of their ancestors. He did not, however, plan to live in such a place, merely to spend a holiday there.
He set off in April, patrolling the north coast – ‘right across the top of France’, he reported to Will Rothenstein. Finally he came across what he was looking for: Equihen, a village of primitive fisherfolk not far from Boulogne. ‘The fish women are simply magnificent,’ he wrote to Dorelia. ‘I must get a studio or shed here soon and paint ’em – there’s money in it!’ It was good to get away from the ‘steam music, literary society, bugs and other embêtements’ of Paris. At Equihen one could see the marins getting the fish out of the sea and the matelots selling them – ‘and the women go about in wonderful groups. Just the stuff for me. They resemble a community that live on the river by Haverfordwest distinct from their neighbours – in a village called Langum. The women go all over Pembrokeshire selling oysters in a peculiar costume and the men are supposed to mind the babies.’
To this ‘desolate little place’8 in France he summoned Dorelia and the four babies, Pyramus and Romilly, Edwin and Henry, since there were ‘nice soft sand dunes’ for them to crawl on. After they had settled in, he proposed sending for Ida’s other sons. ‘I am working pretty hard,’ he assured Will Rothenstein, ‘now and then. Having a little studio here is a boon. I like the wenches here and the clothes they wear and I wish I had more money to spend on them… Pyramus grows more lyrically beautiful every day. He is like a little divine phrase from Shelley or Wordsworth. He is more flower-like and “meaningless” than any child I know. He is the incarnation of the daisy. I think I must try to do a “Mother and Child” of him and Dorelia.’
The Mother was now trying to bring about a miscarriage and for much of the time feeling too ill to sit to Augustus. Once more he experienced ‘those submarine days when one begins to wonder what manner of beings live above the air’.9 The frustration that had consumed him at Ste-Honorine began again to smoulder. ‘Meet me at Boulogne next Saturday will you?’ he suddenly invited Alick Schepeler. But she hurried north again. ‘As to my work, I haven’t got at it really,’ he admitted to Henry Lamb (13 June 1907). ‘But my “head” still yields enchanting suggestions. In fact call it what you will it is my best friend, tho’ I have other loyal parts. Sometimes I feel myself as if slowly and surely settling down on some scrap heap.’
At this critical moment an invitation arrived from Lady Gregory. She asked him to come over to Ireland, stay with her at Coole, and do a portrait of her other guest that summer, W. B. Yeats. Augustus hesitated. ‘It may be that I shall draw Yeats’ portrait,’ he wrote to Alick Schepeler, ‘ – I am so hard up.’
‘Sin openly and scandalize the world.’
W. B. Yeats to John Quinn, describing Augustus John’s moral code
The invitation to Coole Park originated from Lady Gregory’s son, the artist Robert Gregory, at whose marriage Augustus had been best man. He had been helpful to Gregory over his work while in London, and this invitation was in the nature of a repayment. Appropriately, it was a business proposition. Yeats was then revising his collected works in preparation for A. H. Bullen’s edition the following year. This edition was to contain a portrait by some contemporary artist. Yeats had wanted Charles Shannon to do an etching for the frontispiece, but ‘Shannon was busy when I was in London,’ he explained to the American art patron John Quinn (4 October 1907), ‘and the collected edition was being pushed on so quickly that I found I couldn’t wait for him.’ It was then that Robert Gregory put forward Augustus’s name, to which Yeats nervously agreed: ‘I don’t know what John will make of me.’
Augustus, too, was nervous – financially, ‘I should like very much to visit you – and perhaps Yeats’s drawing would make it possible,’ he wrote from Equihen to Robert Gregory, ‘but just now it is difficult for me. How much will the publishers pay, do you think? I would be glad to do the drawing. But as you see I am a long way off… ’ In reply, Lady Gregory sent him a fee of eighteen pounds in advance (equivalent to £875 in 1996), plus a suggestion that should he wish to draw some of the family, they might buy some of his drawings. The deal thus tentatively struck, Augustus sailed for Galway.
He arrived at Lady Gregory’s big plain house in September, a flamboyant youth in a blue jersey and earrings, ‘with all his luggage hanging from one finger’. Though he had met Yeats at the Nettleships’ and at the Rothensteins’, he had never studied him as a subject. ‘Yeats, slightly bowed and with an air of abstraction, walked in the garden every morning with Augusta Gregory, discussing literary matters,’ he remembered. It was as an embodiment of Celtic poetry that Yeats presented himself to Augustus. The flat dense colour areas of the oil portrait,10 done as a preliminary study for the etching, suggest some comparison with Gauguin; and the design and colour are strong. Yeats, dressed in a white shirt and black smock, wears a loose cravat tied in a bow at the neck. Against the dark mass of his clothes and hair, the flesh-tones are wonderfully pale – a whitish-yellow; and this consumptive complexion with its dreamy expression is enhanced by a brilliant backcloth of emblematic viridian that isolates and freezes the poet by its density and airlessness. It is a romantic portrait: this is what Augustus did best. For a moment Yeats fulfilled his ideal of a poet, and this ideal has been beautifully caught.
Apart from the oil portrait, Augustus did numerous other studies11 from which to work up his etching for the frontispiece. ‘I felt rather a martyr going to him [Augustus],’ Yeats had reported to John Quinn (4 October 1907). ‘The students consider him the greatest living draughtsman, the only modern who draws like an old master. But he makes everybody perfectly hideous, beautiful according to his own standard. He exaggerates every little hill and hollow of the face till one looks a gipsy, grown old in wickedness and hardship. If one looked like any of his pictures the country women would take clean clothes off the hedges when one passed as they do at the sight of a tinker.’
Having glimpsed his studies with pen and brush, Yeats was certain at this stage that Augustus’s ‘best work is etching, he is certainly a great etcher with a savage imagination.’ Shortly afterwards, to his horror, the etching arrived. It made him, he complained to Quinn, ‘a sheer tinker, drunken, unpleasant and disreputable, but full of wisdom, a melancholy English Bohemian, capable of anything, except living joyously on the surface.’
Part of the trouble lay with the reactions of Lady Gregory and of Annie Horniman, who was financing the Bullen edition. ‘I send one of the John etchings,’ Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory. ‘I admire it very much as an etching & shall hang it on my wall with joy but it is of course a translation of me into tinker language. I showed it to Miss Horniman… & she flew into a rage over it. If she could afford it she would buy up the plate and destroy it.’
Lady Gregory agreed with Annie Horniman. The etching was a horror. If it showed a tinker, then it was a tinker in the dock for chicken stealing. ‘John has done a terrible etching of Yeats,’ she had written to Quinn (22 December 1907). ‘It won’t do for the book but he may do another, he promised to do two or three. Meanwhile I am trying to get Shannon to draw him. It is rather heartbreaking about John’s for he did so many studies of him here, and took so much of his time… But if they are not like Yeats, and are like a tinker in the dock, or a charwoman at a prayer meeting they and the plate shall go into the fire.’
Yeats, swinging this way and that, drifted into a complex panic. He could not use John’s ‘melancholy desperado’ as the sole portrait. ‘I confess I shrink before the John thing,’ he told Florence Farr. But what should he say to John? ‘I don’t know what to write to John,’ he confided to Lady Gregory, ‘ – whatever I say he will think I want to be flattered.’ Eventually he wrote praising the etching but telling him that he expected a violent letter about it from his publisher – who indeed did refuse it in violent language.
Augustus seems to have remained philosophical – at any rate his confidence was unshaken. ‘Lady Gregory, much as I love and admire her, has her eye still clouded a little by the visual enthusiasms of her youth and cannot be expected to see the merits of my point of view,’ he explained to Alick Schepeler, ‘tho’ her intelligence assures her of their existence. Painting Yeats is becoming quite a habit. He has a natural and sentimental prejudice in favour of the W. B. Yeats he and other people have been accustomed to see and imagine for so many years. He is now 44 and a robust, virile and humorous personality (while still the poet of course). I cannot see in him any definite resemblance to the youthful Shelley in a lace collar. To my mind he is far more interesting as he is, as maturity is more interesting than immaturity.’
It was almost impossible for any artist to see Yeats as Lady Gregory saw him. If Augustus had portrayed him in her eyes as an ugly ruffian, Shannon, by an unlucky chance, was to make him look damnably like John Keats; Jack Yeats, of course, could only see him through a mist of domestic emotion; Mancini turned him into an Italian bandit; Sargent into a dream creature. And so on. Yeats flirted with the idea (‘it will be fine sport’) of introducing the lot of them into his collected works, one after the other, ‘and I shall write an essay on them and describe them as all the different personages that I have dreamt of being but never had the time for. I shall head it with this quotation from the conversation of Wordsworth: – “No, that is not Mr Wordsworth, the poet, that is Mr Wordsworth, the Chancellor of the Exchequer”.’
In Bullen’s edition a mild Sargent drawing took the place of Augustus’s etching. But in subsequent editions it is most often one or other of Augustus’s portraits that have been chosen as the frontispiece.*1 ‘I enclose a photograph of a portrait painted by Augustus John in 1907,’ Yeats wrote to Harold Macmillan on 2 October 1933; ‘I suggest it as a frontispiece of my forthcoming volume of Collected Poems… John is, I think, more admired by the readers of books today than Sargent.’
Yeats was never really so opposed to Augustus’s interpretation as Lady Gregory. This first etching had been a shock, but the more he looked at all the etchings and drawings and the portrait in oils, the more convinced he had become of their merit. On leaving Ireland he wrote to Quinn (7 January 1908): ‘I would like to show you Augustus John’s portrait of me. A beautiful etching, and I understand what he means in it, and admire the meaning, but it is useless for my social purpose.’ Years later he wrote: ‘Always particular about my clothes, never dissipated, never unshaven except during illness, I saw myself there an unshaven, drunken bar-tender. And then I began to feel John had found something that he liked in me, something closer than character, and by that very transformation made it visible. He found Anglo-Irish solitude, a solitude I have made for myself, an outlawed solitude.’
Though fearful of his ‘savage imagination’, Yeats was taken with Augustus. His attitude, like Augustus’s towards him, mingled romance with an ironic perception of character.
‘He is himself a delight,’ Yeats told Quinn (4 October 1907), ‘the most innocent, wicked man I have ever met. He wears earrings, his hair down to his shoulders, a green velvet collar and had two wives who lived together in perfect harmony and nursed each other’s children on their knees till about six months ago when one of them bolted and the other died. Since then he has followed the lady who bolted and he and she are gathering the scattered families. Of course, nobody round Coole knew anything of these facts. I lived in daily terror of some benevolent gossip carrying on conversation with him like this,
“Married, Mr John? Children?”
“Yes.” “How many?” “Seven.” “You married young?”
“Five years ago.” “Twins doubtless?” – after that frank horrifying discourse on the part of Augustus John, who considers himself a particularly good well-behaved man. The only difference is in code… He is the strangest creature I have ever met, a kind of fawn… a magnificent-looking person, and looks the wild creature he is.’
Augustus was on his best behaviour at Coole. Painter and poet would sit up late in intimate talk, each out-charming the other. ‘He is most delightful,’ Augustus told Alick Schepeler, ‘nobody seems to know him but me – unless it is the Gregorys, but that is my conceit no doubt.’ Except for these late-night conversations, Augustus spoke little, worked hard and would wander off for long solitary walks in the wooded park round Coole where he had located ‘a region which is obviously holy ground’. Needing to escape out of doors, he passed many evenings rowing idly on the lake, with only the swans, which Yeats had celebrated, for company. Then, to the apprehensive admiration of Robert Gregory and the astonishment of everyone else, he would surge indoors, do wonderful athletic things on the drawing-room floor, rush out again and climb to the top of the tallest tree in the Coole garden, where he carved a cryptic symbol. Poets, playwrights and patrons struggled among its lower branches, but ‘nobody else has been able to get up there to know what it is, even Robert stuck halfway.’12
By the time he left, Augustus had seen enough of Ireland to know that it was rich territory for him as a painter. Already he had vast schemes to paint all Galway. He would return, several times; and the last time he would again paint Yeats.
‘God knows I am buffeted mightily by fate.’
Augustus John to Alice Rothenstein
At Equihen Augustus had left a situation full of passionate uncertainties.
Attended by one of her sisters – ‘voluptuous Jessie’13 – Dorelia had gone through an illness culminating, to the satisfaction of everyone, in a miscarriage. Nothing could be wrong with this unless it was the timing, which coincided with the arrival of Mrs Nettleship, bringing with her Ida’s three eldest boys, David, Caspar and Robin.
Augustus had wanted to surround himself with all his children this summer, and to spend his time working over them and the admirable sea-girls. He had not reckoned on Mrs Nettleship’s presence, nor on the unpainterly school clothes with which she had decked out her grandchildren – quite wrong for late-fifteenth-century Italian work. It was a shock – yet he was determined to prove the optimist. ‘This is a jolly place,’ he wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘My numberless kids are all here now. I have a dilapidated studio to work in. The fish people here are very amusing. The girls look fine in their old costumes. Multitudes of children teem in the gutters together with the debris of centuries.’
He was resolved not to put up with the children’s noise, but to enjoy it. After all, it was natural, and enjoyment was necessary for work – it accelerated his perceptions. Yet it was elusive. Everything seemed to rub away at this quality of enjoyment at Equihen, and in the most abrasive manner. Before Mrs Nettleship’s commanding presence, the beauty of Nature seemed to hesitate and retreat; even alcohol could no longer call forth those ‘delightful sensations old Debaucheries used to procure me… angelic glimpses secreted like pearls in piggeries.’14
In a letter to Henry Lamb (5 August 1907) he wrote: ‘I wish this house were on wheels.’ Wherever he was he wanted to move on. He had been enchanted by the magic lake or turlough at Coole, islanded, and mysteriously rising and subsiding. What he desired now was a miraculous encampment that contained all possibilities, that moved yet rested, that congregated the right people – artists and comedians, women and children – but that had hidden places into which he could retire. In such a place the tension between the necessities of involvement and solitude would disappear.
‘I understand that solitude is not always and ever good for a man,’ he advised Henry Lamb. ‘Are we not much too solitary?… I think company is better medicine than loneliness. Let us see new faces, lest the old ones grow old under our tiring eyes, and damn it we are artists not misanthropists. Anthropology is our business. Solitude be damned. One seeks solitude – with one’s woman only.’
These were brave-sounding words, but they trumpeted a virtue of what, for Augustus, was becoming a necessity. He needed more solitude, not less; more opportunity to train his memory in recapturing the fleeting moment; more emphasis on sustained imagination. But this gypsy way to artistic fulfilment was new and needed to be worked out.
Henry Lamb was ‘no ordinary personage’, Augustus was to assure the art patron Lady Ottoline Morrell (20 September 1908), ‘and has the divine mark on his brow’. Lamb was still taking his apprenticeship to Augustus very seriously. While Euphemia was becoming the very model of a John model, Henry was allowing the John style to grow over him. His drawings resembled Augustus’s, and so did his clothes. He had let his hair grow long; he failed to shave; he fastened on gold earrings. He was spectacularly handsome. With his hypnotic deep-blue eyes he fascinated men and women alike, and his entrance into any gathering was almost as striking as that of the maître. When the Chelsea Art School went into a decline – or rather when Augustus’s attendances there declined – Lamb quitted it and with Euphemia followed him to Paris. By the beginning of 1907 he was living in the rue Cels and studying under Jacques-Émile Blanche at L’Ècole de la Palette, an académie of some twenty students which included Duncan Grant.
Ida had liked Lamb. It would be ‘rather nice to have a Lamb on the doormat’, she had written to Augustus, on hearing at the end of 1906 that Lamb was coming over. When he did come, they discussed the French translations of Dostoevsky. Dorelia liked him too: they often played the piano together. After Ida’s death, Dorelia and Henry drew closer. ‘Dorelia will I hope buck up under your sunny influence,’ Augustus encouraged him (13 June 1907), ‘ – yours is evidently the touch. My person is like a blight on the household.’ Meanwhile Augustus was doing countless studies of the alluring Euphemia. She was an excellent model, especially when nude. The presence of this girl, with her pale oval face, husky voice and honey-coloured hair, had already provoked a rather sharp inquiry from Alick Schepeler. ‘I have never had time or inclination to consider her very seriously,’ Augustus airily defended himself. ‘I have simply taken her for granted. It is true I have thought her rather eccentric...’ Then, in Paris, immediately following Ida’s death, time and the inclination had coincided. So the two households, the Lambs and the Johns, mingled, amoeba-like, revolved and came together again in a formation of rich complexity. ‘Could we not form a discreet form of colony’, Lamb soon began wondering, ‘…in couples. For the sake of symmetry I could double myself no doubt at suitable intervals.’15 To those looking on their fantasies appeared madness. ‘Do you think he [Henry] is all right in his intellect?’16 his brother Walter Lamb had asked Clive Bell, who was spending part of his honeymoon in Paris. But it was Euphemia’s scattiness that struck Vanessa Bell as being so extreme, and her sister Virginia agreed (‘my head spins with her stories’17). As Maynard Keynes later remarked to them, Euphemia enjoyed more sexual life ‘than the rest of us put together’.18
‘What will Mrs Lamb do?’19 Ida had asked before Euphemia arrived in Paris. What she did was to fight with Henry (‘using dinner plates and knives in their battles’), drift uncomfortably apart from Augustus, and fall in to the thankless arms of Duncan Grant. ‘That Lamb family sickens me,’ Grant complained to Lytton Strachey (7 April 1907),
‘and that man John. I’m convinced now he’s a bad lot. His mistress, Dorelia, fell in love with Henry and invited him to copulate and as far as I can make out John encouraged the liaison and arranged or at any rate winked at the arrangements for keeping Nina [Euphemia] out of the way, although Henry didn’t in the least want to have any dealings with Dorelia. However it was apparently all fixed up that they should “go on the roads” together when Nina was (according to her own story) found with a loaded revolver ready to shoot herself (and Henry as far as I could gather). So Henry was left by himself… Dorelia and John seem to be the devils and the others merely absurd...’
This account, which suffers from being overcoloured by Euphemia’s testimony, nevertheless indicated how Augustus remained separated from Fry’s group of Bloomsbury painters. He felt ill-at-ease in their educated presence; and they were disconcerted by his deliberate thoughtlessness and irrationality. There seemed no common ground between his pursuit of ‘meaningless’ beauty, and their imposition of ‘significant form’. To Bloomsbury, Augustus John was a meteor, dazzling and self-destructive, a brilliant phenomenon that was burning itself out. ‘Oh John! Oh… what a “warning”! as the Clergy say,’ Lytton Strachey exclaimed in reply to Duncan Grant (12 April 1907). ‘When I think of him, I often feel that the only thing to do is to chuck up everything and make a dash for some such safe secluded office-stool [the Treasury] as is pressed by dear Maynard’s [Keynes’s] happy bottom. The dangers of freedom are appalling! In the meantime it seems to me that one had better immediately buy up every drawing by him that’s on the market. For surely he’s bound to fizzle out; and then the prices!’
To Bloomsbury eyes, Augustus appeared to live a life based upon the casual whim. They could not know the annihilating force of his solitude, or sense the panic. He seldom defended or explained his way of life. It was based upon a natural law of self-interest. If some desire swept through you, then you gave expression to it with all your being – physically, vocally, at once and until it was exhausted and you were left empty or filled by another desire. Lock antlers, copulate and procreate; work, accept risks and avoid deceits. Those who acted upon their emotions lived longer because they lived by a deeper biological reality than social convention. However admirable your motives for bottling up feelings might be, the contents of the bottle often turned to poison. There was a danger in modern society of the animal in man being neglected, and human history dwindling into devious tributaries. Such pollution of nature and exploitation of human nature revolted John. He preferred the simple life.
Yet it was surprisingly difficult to achieve the simple life. What could be more simple, for example, than to invite Henry Lamb to Equihen? And what, in the society of Mrs Nettleship, could be more amusing? ‘I hope you will come and bathe here,’ had run his innocent invitation. But instead of Henry, Euphemia arrived, dressed rather improbably as a young man and followed by an enthusiastic, but bankrupt, Swede. Having relieved Augustus of some of his Irish money, the Swede hurried on to Paris, while Euphemia, falling ill with a mysterious disease, was condemned for a week to bed. ‘She makes an irresistible boy,’ Augustus admitted to her husband, ‘ – I feel, myself, better after assisting at her recovery.’
According to Euphemia, she had been given a knife by Madame Maeterlinck with which to kill Dorelia. But while she lay asleep under a van, Augustus had joined her and they had both been arrested as practising homosexuals. In gaol she was obliged to take off her clothes to prove their innocence. But how much could you believe such stories from someone who also claimed to have been responsible for Ida’s death (‘I got a sage femme for her, but she was dirty and infected Ida. Her hair turned quite white in one night and her head shrank...’20)?
Although she was not to allow him a divorce until the late 1920s, Euphemia had already parted from Lamb and was starting out on an exotic career. ‘Henry has left Nina perhaps for ever,’ Duncan Grant wrote to Lytton Strachey, ‘and the white haired whore still goes on eating “crèmes nouveautés”.’ Her adventures were to lead her, in one guise or another, into many memoirs – as ‘Dorothy’, for example, in the Confessions of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666, who wrote that she ‘would have been a grande passion had it not been that my instinct warned me that she was incapable of true love. She was incomparably beautiful… capable of stimulating the greatest extravagancies of passion.’ For Augustus, who gave her the name ‘Lobelia’, these extravagancies were wonderfully comic. ‘She has made the acquaintance of a number of nations,’ he assured Lamb (5 August 1907); and he told Dorelia (April 1908) that ‘Lobelia had 6 men in her room last night, representing the six European powers, and all silent as the grave.’
For Lamb himself, Euphemia remained a unique experience. ‘I always feel grateful for the privilege of having been so closely associated with so much beauty & genius & glorious energy of character,’ he wrote fifty years later. But the great figure of Lamb’s life was to be Dorelia. It was almost inevitable, fulfilling his role as Augustus’s alter ego, that he should fall in love with her. Since he was an artist, this also made destiny-sense to Dorelia. Already they had begun a love affair – the second of Dorelia’s two ‘discreditable episodes’ – that was to continue, with intervals, over twenty years. During those years, Lamb never lost hope that she would free herself from ‘the August clutches’ and come to live with him. ‘There is a fair chance of it all coming off some day,’ he was still writing in the summer of 1926.
For the time being their involvement remained part of the entente cordiale, an agreeable échange that had no unpleasant repercussions: except with Mrs Nettleship. Ada Nettleship had never liked Dorelia, and everything she learnt this summer confirmed her in this dislike. Obviously Dorelia was quite the wrong person with whom to entrust Ida’s boys. It was not simply a matter of immorality: it was incompetence – an incompetence so superlative it made Mrs Nettleship dizzy. It was out of the question for her grandchildren never to be washed, never brushed or combed, decked out in fanciful rags and left unsuperintended. Their bedrooms were full of unchecked frogs, absurd grasshoppers and other scattered atrocities: it was bedlam. Even Augustus was forced to own that ‘this crêche-like establishment is a little too heroic – in the long run’.21 Within a week of arriving at Equihen, the boys had been drowned en masse – or rather almost drowned, being uniquely rescued by a local fisherman who ‘was getting food for his rabbits on the cliff when he heard their screaming’, Mrs Nettleship explained to her daughter Ursula (19 July 1907). ‘He has never saved anyone before and he hopes to get a medal.’
So different were these goings-on from the calm atmosphere at Wigmore Street, she felt as if she had landed on a distant world where no one knew what was right or wrong, and no normal standards applied. Every day was a carnival, and the amoral beauty of it all drove her frantic. ‘There never seems time for anything here,’ she complained to Ursula, ‘ – the weather is so lovely, we are out all day and in the evening we are too sleepy to do anything. It is almost irritating that this place is so lovely – I hate it all for being so placid and “only man is vile”… Something must come to relieve this tension.’
Something did come and it brought the tension to breaking point. Dorelia had succeeded in not telling anyone that her children this summer were suffering from ophthalmia, a painful eye disease. She had even forgotten it herself and, by arranging for all the children to share a single sponge and towel, had spread the infection to two of Ida’s children, Edwin and Robin. Mrs Nettleship was appalled. Here was actual proof that Dorelia could not be trusted. She dismissed Dorelia’s argument that many of these sicknesses cured themselves, and briskly herding Ida’s untainted sons together she drove them out of the infected area. ‘I should like to bring them back right away,’ she told Ursula in London, ‘but Gus does not think it matters!… He says the village children get over it all right and so will ours!… He is nearly driving me mad… I have never known anyone so impossible to deal with.’ At the same time, fearing to lose the boys altogether, she had to check her temper. Nor could she leave while the ophthalmia persisted, since no one did anything to cure the disease unless she herself insisted on it being done – Dorelia still preferring what she called ‘natural methods’. At first, Mrs Nettleship’s monumental diplomacy seemed to be effective, especially when Augustus, responding to the strain of their holiday, remarked that the two families could never be brought up together. ‘If either of our boys [David or Caspar] get ophthalmia I shall use it as a weapon,’ Mrs Nettleship promised.
Twelve days later, diplomacy had disappeared and ‘it is war to the knife’. Each side had marshalled a team of doctors with strongly opposing advice. ‘Gus is hopeless – just one mass of selfishness – not thinking of anyone, but his own desires – and so surly and cross,’ Mrs Nettleship reported to Ursula. ‘How Ida can have endured it I can’t imagine – he has no heart at all.’
Another twelve days and Mrs Nettleship had returned to Wigmore Street, triumphantly carrying off with her David, Caspar, Robin, and the urn containing Ida’s ashes. ‘We had a healthy respect for Grannie Nettleship,’ Caspar remembered. This tubby woman with grizzled hair and plump face was strict but not ungenerous. The boys were chiefly looked after by Ursula, the elder of their two aunts. ‘We had to wash and scrub thoroughly in preparation for an inspection by Ursula before being accepted as adequately clean,’ Caspar wrote. ‘We wore shoes and socks regularly and had our straggling locks cut short.’22
All this was distressing for Augustus. ‘I am saddened to realise that I have allowed an immoral and bourgeois society of women to capture my 3 eldest boys,’ he admitted to Henry Lamb (17 July 1907). ‘It will be the devil to get them back again but it must be done when opportunity offers. Perhaps I may ask you to assist me one day in recovering them. Can you shoot? I cannot stand finding those chaps in the hands of people among whom I shall always be a stranger, and no longer in the brave and beautiful attire their mother gave them to wear. I cannot leave them with people who although they are Ida’s mother and sisters did not even know her.’
Mrs Nettleship was used to getting her own way and, once back in Wigmore Street, she set about consolidating her advantage. She knew that Augustus did not want to prolong the present arrangement, yet sensed he was somehow in two minds. His uncertainty was catching and she could not make up her own mind as to what her best tactics should be. If she wanted to mollify him she might approach him via her daughter Ursula; if she wanted to frighten him she would appeal to Edward Nettleship – ‘Uncle Ned of Nutcombe Hill’, said to be a dragon of a man. Finally, after canvassing opinion among various aunts and cousins, she did both. Ursula acted at once, writing to assure Augustus that, if the children were left with the Nettleship family, she would see to it that their education was not old-fashioned and would look after them herself. In his reply, Augustus sets down his feelings with unusual explicitness:
‘Be sure that if any consideration could induce me to part with the children it would be the fact that you alone would have them. The immediate future has an unsettled aspect for me. Homeless, penniless and lawless I present a pretty spectacle of a paterfamilias! But thanks to you things begin to look much more tractable.
I want badly to retain the children as Ida’s and mine – to keep them in the atmosphere they were born in – a delightful atmosphere and not at all dreadful you know – and to think of them being educated into ordinary little early Victorian bourgeois prigs is a horrid thought! You have eased me of that apprehension at least… and you would have some of Ida’s sublime gigantic composure in dealing with them – I really was beginning to fear I shouldn’t recognise them in a year or so, or they me. I was preparing myself for the moment when they would approach me and earnestly implore me to get my hair cut!
In addition to these perhaps morbid fancies the spirit of opposition was kindled somewhat on finding my section of the family treated to a kind of super-discreet aloofness – and the three kids in question hardly to be viewed and that only under formidable escort… I must have a try at getting people to know that Dorelia is a Person and a very rare and respectable being, to wit full of sense and sensibility, having no shams in her being, indeed a kind of feminine genius I fancy. I would like to mention that had she been only my “mistress” we would not be together now. Had she not been a worthy soul, do you think I could have stood it so long? I say this as no superior person, believe me – I might say like Hamlet “I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse myself of things it were better my mother had not borne me. I am proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my back than I had thought to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such a fellow as I do, crawling between heaven and earth!”
But Dorelia was loved of Ida and her very good friend in spite of appearances and all great mistakes not withstanding. Barring their mother she had more to do with the children than anyone else; and because Ida happened to die it doesn’t strike me as indispensable to hurry D. out by the back stairs. In a word she has been and so far remains part of my family and I should like her always to continue to give the children the benefit of her honesty and simplicity and affection, and help to dress them bravely too – as she knows how to. For without brave attire I can’t put up with them.
It would be a frightfully difficult thing to take them away from you even now: but I don’t want to. They can always pay you visits… But I suppose it’s not impossible that you may have babies of your own some time and you might think that better than having other people’s babies… since my proposal to reassume the parental responsibilities sooner or later – friendliness and Patience have to become established...’23
While Augustus was writing this letter to Ursula, Uncle Ned was sharpening his pen up at Nutcombe Hill. With long-drawn-out relish he was preparing himself ‘a good slapping letter’ for Augustus. It was congenial labour. He lingered lovingly over the vituperative phrases, savouring them, hardly liking to let them go. He was still remorselessly chewing over all this when he received from Ursula Augustus’s letter and, as he read through it, it occurred to him that his carefully charged time bomb fell ‘rather flat’. It was a sad waste, but at least a little of his invective could be discharged vicariously.
The letter he now (28 September 1907) addressed to Ursula shows between what bewildering changes of background some of Ida’s sons were to pass their formative years. At first, Uncle Ned allowed, he had thought the fellow must have been mad drunk when he wrote, ‘but on re-reading, there is too much essential coherence for that. He [Augustus] whines that he is penniless and homeless and lawless (the last evidently, like the other two, from his misfortune doubtless, not from any preventable fault!). He wants to keep the children for himself and Dorelia, but he wants you with your gigantic composure to carry on their Bohemian Education when in the intervals of their home life they pay you visits in some place where the atmosphere is “anti-Wigmorian”.’ Such a response, Uncle Ned urged, called in question the whole policy of conciliation. Instead, he would like to hear that Augustus was being instructed ‘in quite simple words that it is his business to put his back into his work to maintain his children’; that no Nettleship worth the name would be a party to brave attire – if ‘“brave” means (as I am told it does) squalid or dirty or gutter-snipe attire’; and that to talk of the inhabitants of Wigmore Street as bourgeois prigs was ‘impudent nonsense’ for which an instantaneous apology was required. This, like music, was what Uncle Ned would like to hear – but it would have to come now from Ursula, since she had opened the negotiations. She must change the tune – but he, if called upon, would conduct her playing. It must, however, be a solo programme – they couldn’t have every aunt and cousin chiming in. Then the dragon roared his last paragraph of flame:
‘I think that subtle, absolutely selfish and introspective as he is, and morose and bad tempered to boot, he is a coward at any rate when dealing with women; and that hard hitting, at any rate now, is at least as likely to succeed with him and Dorelia (who of course is doing her best as wire-puller) as any other plan… Dorelia wants to keep him; she does not really want Ida’s children.’24
So with both sides convinced of the other’s immorality as parents, the autumn passed; and, for their winter quarters, they took up entrenched positions in this war to the knife.
‘Do we not rise on stepping stones of our dead selves – or am I wrong?’
Augustus John to Caspar John
In one respect at least Uncle Ned had misunderstood the situation. He had attributed calculation to Augustus and Dorelia, and in doing so had stumbled on an untruth that made his generalship of incalculable value to the enemy. ‘Wire-pulling’ or any other species of long-term cunning had no part in Dorelia’s make-up. Her gift was for taking things as they came – and when they didn’t come, but hung around some distance off, she had little talent for advancing on them. The present suspended state of affairs did not bring into play her best qualities. To a degree, her desires were the very opposite of what Uncle Ned had represented: as her affair with Henry Lamb showed, she did not inevitably want to keep Augustus. But she did want one or two of Ida’s children. Her point of view was beyond the comprehension of the Nettleships.
Over the summer, over the autumn, Dorelia and Augustus had debated the situation as fully as two inarticulate people could. They hit on all manner of schemes for taking care of the future, but without Ida they were strangely undecided and, despite much activity, made little progress. There were two main plans: first that they should continue living together; and secondly that they should not. The first plan came in many forms. One night, for example, Dorelia dreamt of ‘a lovely country… terrific mountains and forests and rivers – the people were Russians but I think it must have been Spain’;25 and next day they were hot for setting off to find this place. Then, their mood changing, they thought of settling for a house in England. ‘We must have an aquarium in the country,’ Dorelia affirmed. ‘We might get one in exchange for a baby or something.’26 It was that continual ‘or something’ that foxed them.
Dorelia’s difficulty was the adoring Henry Lamb, whose presence acted like that of a magnet upon a compass. She simply did not know what to do. ‘I haven’t the faintest wish to get married,’ she informed Augustus (September 1907). ‘I think it would be best if I went on the road and left you in peace which I should be only too glad to do if you would let me have one of the children – Caspar or Robin – he would be better with me than in that virginal atmosphere [Wigmore Street].’27
Lamb, who was to walk through Brittany from inn to inn the following summer with Caspar in a sack over his shoulders, had already been sounded out by Augustus in connection with the children. The argument was simple. Since Lamb was apprenticed to Augustus, what could be better than apprenticing one of Augustus’s sons to Lamb? It was a merry scheme. ‘I found Robin overwhelming!’ he recommended. ‘When one sings or even whistles to him, he lies back and closes his eyes luxuriously. It is he who should be your pupil… ’
During the next three years, the relationship between Augustus and Dorelia was to be more fluid and circumstantial than at any other period. Sometimes they lived on wheels together, sometimes the Channel flowed between them. Sometimes they were close; sometimes they seemed to move apart, carried this way and that by currents they could not control. ‘Don’t worry,’ Dorelia reassured him, ‘as I think either plan extremely desirable.’ There were indeed times when any plan seemed desirable – but still they could not decide. Yet whenever Dorelia drifted too far away, Augustus would suddenly be resolute: ‘Beloved, of course it’s you I want.’28
*
One thing at least had been agreed: they could no longer afford, scattered through two countries, quite such a multitude of unsuitable flats and studios. On returning to London, Augustus wrote to Lamb (‘mon cher Agneau’) asking him to sell the lease of his studio in the cour de Rohan. Though he would make other parts of France his second home in the future, he was never again to live in Paris. Ironically, perhaps, this parting was to coincide with his meeting with Picasso. ‘I saw a young artist called Picasso whose work is wonderful in Paris,’ he had written that summer (5 August 1907) to Lamb. And two months later, once his studio was let and all connections with Paris severed (4 November 1907), he had become convinced that ‘Picasso is a wonder’. The two painters, fellow-sympathizers with society’s outcasts, had visited each other at their studios, and Augustus who saw ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, was greatly impressed by Picasso’s work, chiefly because, like his own, it was steeped in the past, drew part of its inspiration from Puvis de Chavannes, and revealed ‘elements derived from remote antiquity or the art forms of primitive peoples’.29 Some of Augustus’s paintings done at this time, such as the ‘French Fisher-boy’30 and ‘Peasant Woman with Baby and Small Boy’,31 show resemblance to Picasso’s Blue Period, and indicate a direction his work might have taken had the circumstances of his life been different.
But only in London could he sell his work. Lack of money was the Nettleships’ best weapon and he was determined to disarm them. However, for the first few days, having nowhere else to go, he was obliged to put up in, of all places, Wigmore Street. ‘I took a small studio here (28 Wigmore Street) which I now see is quite impossible,’ he informed Lamb (25 September 1907). After a short period of ‘perfect hell’, he stopped off with Ambrose McEvoy’s playwright brother Charles at 132 Cheyne Walk, then landed up at Whistler’s old studio in 8 Fitzroy Street, ‘a fine place’, where he stayed, intermittently, for almost a year. It was his sole foothold in London, from where, at the prompting of his spirit, he liked to wander off to pubs and music halls, to the Café Royal or, in some painted wagon, to remoter spots.
‘I am thinking of raising a little money with a preliminary show of drawings alone,’ he notified Lamb on 11 November 1907. The results of this exhibition at the Carfax Gallery that December were encouraging. ‘The show opened most successfully,’ he told Dorelia. ‘I sold about £225 [equivalent to £11,000 in 1996] worth the first morning. ’Twas a scene of great brilliance. Epstein and his wife looked grand.’ After it was over he wrote to Lamb: ‘I hope now to paint pictures for the rest of my life.’ But he had other plans too. ‘I must have a press,’ he told Dorelia. ‘I long to bring out a book of etchings. It might be called “etchings of Innocence” or “Phantasmagoria” or “The Simple Way”...’
Over the next months there were plenty of opportunities to sell his work: etchings and drawings at the Society of Twelve into which he was planning to elect Lamb; drawings and paintings at the NEAC, which had opened that winter with the ‘paltriest of shows’. He was arranging a one-man summer show at the Chenil Gallery, and hoped to send in something big to the celebrated ‘Exhibition of Fair Women’ to be held by the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and ’Gravers in February and March 1909 at the New Gallery. It was the field work for this last affair that gave him most trouble. He had been presented with a huge canvas by William Nicholson: the problem was how to fill it. ‘I have a scheme for a picture of fair women [the virgins of Damascus suing Tamburlaine for money] in which Lobelia ought to figure,’ he apprised Lamb (24 December 1907). But Lobelia, alias Euphemia, had temporarily vanished and he had to look elsewhere. ‘I just passed Bertha in the street (the girl in black tights),’ he wrote hopefully to Dorelia. But Dorelia, unlike Ida, was determined to be firm with him. ‘That barmaid has disappeared from my ken,’ he reassured her. Next he unearthed ‘La Seraphita’, his still unfinished (as he now thought of it) portrait of Alick Schepeler, named after Balzac’s ambiguous novel. ‘Having changed the background it now looks rather remarkable,’ he wrote to Lamb (10 January 1908), ‘ – her face embodies all that is corrupt, but the thing has a monumental character and the pose is perfect I think.’ The picture showed Alick in a tight black dress, standing on a mountain top with strange ice-floes growing at her feet. It needed only a few more sittings. ‘Seraphita still stands upon her crest and smiles her smile of specious profundity to a nervous and half-credulous world,’ Augustus assured Alick. ‘I hope you will come and see me here… when I will show you some things.’ But again Dorelia, who particularly disliked Alick, put her foot down, and again Augustus yielded: ‘I have written to the Schepeler and said goodbye so now you cheer up and get well, there’s an angel.’ Finally it was a superb picture of Dorelia herself, ‘The Smiling Woman’, which he submitted to the Exhibition of Fair Women.32
Though he himself was doing good work, the English art world depressed him. Of many fellow artists, with names like Bone and Dodd, he held no high opinion. In his letters over this period he seems to have been most excited by some drawings of Alfred Stevens, and some ‘reproductions of wonderful pictures by Gauguin’. Of his contemporaries, Gwen was still the best. He had persuaded her to exhibit two pictures, both oil on canvas, at the NEAC show in the spring of 1908: her first portrait of Chloë Boughton-Leigh, and ‘La Chambre sur la Cour’ with herself seated, sewing at a window opposite her cat at the rue St-Placide. ‘Gwen’s pictures are simply staggering,’ he told Dorelia. ‘I have put up the prices to £50 [equivalent to £2,400 in 1996]. They will surely sell.’
As for his own work, ‘I seem to make millions as usual,’ he apologized to Lamb (10 January 1908) to whom, out of the blue, he sent a present of five pounds. But although no one exhibited more than he, no one in certain moods disliked it more. ‘Would that I could leave exhibiting alone for years and years,’ he confided to Lady Ottoline Morrell (20 September 1908). ‘Perhaps some day I may be able to buy back the rubbish I have sold and have a grand auto-da-fé.’
The English art scene was dim, but there were some bright stars. ‘It is surprising to find men in England apparently alive to the tendency of modern art to symbolism,’ he wrote (17 January 1908) to Lamb, who had recently been telling him about the work of Van Gogh.
‘I met [Roger] Fry the other night and he is quite a lively person – on the other hand “Impressionism” is still lectured on as the new gospel by certain persons of importance. I feel utterly incompetent to cope with problems outside art – without my wife, whom I want. Terrible glooms and ennuis visit me in the evenings when I can think of no one I want to see and am yet tormented in solitude. Sometimes I have tried seeing how much I can drink in one night but it’s a dismal experiment. At any rate I have nearly done a large painting which I think is lovely – a nude virgin by a lake. I am thinking of giving up models altogether.’
He suffered very energetically from the great malaise of the times, Edwardian neurasthenia, treating it with complex diagnoses, simple prescriptions. ‘I am myself a prey to chronic pulmonary bronchial and stomach catarrh but occasional spells of country air keep me going.’ His symptoms were tremendous, and he became the very battleground for contests between his valiant phagocytes and every marauding macrophage. ‘My macrophags are having a fight for it,’ he reported back from the front line of this war. But the real culprit was that malign monster, London. ‘The London people are sickening,’ he informed Ottoline Morrell (20 September 1908). He had taken up riding, and this stirred his blood about a bit. ‘You must come and ride over the downs with me,’ he invited Lamb (14 December 1907). But Lamb always fell off his horse and Augustus got so hot riding, and afterwards so cold – it could not be good for his ‘corpuscles’.
After the banishment of Alick Schepeler he felt more hemmed in than ever. He could not help thinking of the clairvoyant Ida sometimes. ‘It is terrible,’ he told Michel Salaman. ‘I can’t realise she is gone so very far away.’ The only way to make sense of her death was to paint as she would have wished him to paint. But so much seemed impractical without her. He was seeing Dorelia only intermittently: it was an impossible situation. So he turned to Ida’s Liverpool friend the Rani: ‘La plus chère de toutes les dames!!’ he greeted her in his wildest handwriting. ‘Let me have a word, please – I live here [8 Fitzroy Street] now. They tell me you are coming to London for the Slade dance – if that’s true – mightn’t I see you – yourself. I have heard with incredible joy how much better you are for Canary carryings-on. Let me then assure myself – formally – visually – tangibly of your well-being… After the ball come and rest under my lofty roof – there’s a little angel.’
Like a Colossus chained, he seemed incapable of independent action except under the impulse of terrific necessities; while by others, for a time, he could be led as simply as a child. Only at present he had no one to lead him, no one opposite whom to play a new Augustus. Self-escape, by one means or another, was essential. ‘For the moment dreadful glooms blot out the glittering vistas of life – even debauch would afford me no illusion,’ he confessed to Lamb (14 December 1907), ‘…nor bring back a sense of triumphant reality. In a word I am in a sorry state. Perhaps the fog will lift before to-morrow...’
He was about to meet a woman altogether different from any he had known before who, opening up the panoramic comedy of his life to new ironies, would dispel this fog. And for special reasons, Dorelia could not object.
‘You are able to do so much for me in spirit. And I, what can I do for you?’
Augustus John to Ottoline Morrell
Lady Ottoline Morrell had already heard about Augustus John before she met him. The artist Jimmy Pryde had described him in his black billycock hat as looking like ‘Christ come to Chicago’, and living a ‘here to-day and gone-to-borrow sort of life’.33 She had seen some of his paintings at Charles Conder’s Chelsea studio in 1906 and been startled by the expanses of bare flesh. But Conder said John was a great artist, a great man, a man who would dare anything. She listened and longed to meet him. For she too dreamed of doing daring acts in some great cause. ‘Conventionality is deadness,’ she counselled herself in her diary. ‘Your life must break bounds set by the world.’34
She met him not long afterwards with Conder. Tall and intensely silent, he had an air that was somehow méfiant. Gold earrings he wore, and a suspiciously dark sweater. His hair was shaped like that of some figure in a Renaissance picture, and he watched everyone with a curious intentness. It was the eyes that first mesmerized her – his eyes, then his voice, then his hands.
‘They were remarkably beautifully-shaped eyes,’ she recalled,
‘and were of that mysterious pale grey-green colour, expanding like a sea-anemone, and more liquid, more aesthetically and poetically perceptive, than any of the darker and more definite shades. His voice, when he did speak, was not very unlike Conder’s, only rather deeper and more melodious, but like Conder’s hesitating – and he also had the same trick of pushing his hair back with one of his hands – hands that were more beautiful almost than any man’s hands I have ever seen.’35
Lady Ottoline was every inch as strange a figure as Augustus. When they met again early in 1908 at a smart dinner party in Lowndes Place, he felt self-conscious in his uncomfortable dinner jacket, shy and rather aggressive, until he caught sight of Ottoline: then he forgot himself. Tall, with deep mahogany red hair, a prognathous jaw, swan’s neck and bold baronial nose, she had the features to command his self-forgetfulness. She was, he later calculated, ‘a yard or two too long’, but he liked people who were ‘over the top’.36 In a high-voltage oil portrait, painted nearly a dozen years later, he depicts her as some splendid galleon in full sail, triumphantly breasting the high seas. Her head, under its flamboyant topsail of a hat, is held at a proud angle and she wears, like rigging, several strings of pearls (painted with the aid of tooth powder) above a bottle-green velvet dress. Her eyes are rolled sideways in their sockets like those of a runaway horse and her mouth bared soundlessly. This portrait, though not unfriendly, produced a furore, and people asked themselves how Lady Ottoline could have allowed the artist to paint such a fantastic likeness of her. ‘I hope it will give you pleasure, that you won’t think it ill-natured as some foolish people did,’ he wrote. Truth had called it ‘witch-like’, Everyman ‘snake-like and snarling’, The Star a ‘grotesque travesty of aristocratic, almost imbecile hauteur’, and the Daily News concluded: ‘she is not flattered’.37 Eventually Augustus was to grow rather nervous over her reaction to this press comment. ‘I would like you to have that portrait but I don’t think it’s one you would like to hand down to posterity as a complete representation of you,’ he told her (10 February 1922). He need not have worried.38 She brushed aside the paper storm, went on to buy another portrait and hung it for all to see over the mantelpiece in her drawing-room. ‘Whatever she may have lacked it wasn’t courage,’ Augustus acknowledged in Chiaroscuro; ‘in spite of a dull and conventional upbringing, this fine woman was always prepared to do battle for Culture, Freedom and the People.’
Lady Ottoline was to stimulate Augustus as she did many novelists and painters: Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence; Simon Bussy and Duncan Grant. To stimulate the imaginations of such men was her talent – almost her genius. She had crossed over from her aristocratic homeland (she was the daughter of a duke) to this country of art and letters, and she offered those artists and authors whom she admired excursions to her native country. ‘We were all swept in to that extraordinary whirlpool where such odd sticks and straws were brought momentarily together,’ wrote Virginia Woolf. ‘There was Augustus John very sinister [?] in a black stock and a velvet coat; Winston Churchill very rubicund all gold lace and medals on his way to Buckingham Palace… There was Lord Henry Bentinck at one end of a sofa & perhaps Nina [Euphemia] Lamb at the other… There was Gilbert Cannan who was said to be in love with Ottoline. There was Bertie Russell, whom she was said to be in love with. Above all there was Ottoline herself.’39
At her house in Bedford Square – a symphony of pale grey walls and yellow taffeta curtains – Augustus first made contact with the smart world, for which, in years to come, he would develop such an intermittent taste. It was like a rich food that melted in the imagination but, in larger quantities, sickened the stomach. Yet in 1908 this drawing-room world was appealing, offering him an attractive theatre where he could assume a different role. He needed to move from one self to another, to play many parts like a travelling mummer. He also needed to come under the influence of someone he could admire.
Ottoline provided just such a potent theatrical influence. Sitting next to each other at dinner in Lowndes Square they talked of troubadours and Romanies, of Balzac and Dostoevsky, French Primitive painters and Russian anarchists; and then, abruptly, Augustus demanded: ‘Will you sit to me? Come and see me tomorrow in my studio.’ This signalled the beginning of a friendship, important to each of them, that was to last until Ottoline’s death in 1937. The very next morning she went round to Fitzroy Street chaperoned by the Member of Parliament for South Oxfordshire, her husband Philip Morrell. ‘We knock, and John himself appeared – in his usual clothes; a greyish suit, the coat long and full in the skirts, and with a bright green velvet collar, a large silk handkerchief round his neck. He waved us in.’40 After inspecting his pictures and making arrangements for sittings, they were introduced to Clive and Vanessa Bell. ‘Vanessa had the beauty of an early Watts portrait,’ Ottoline recorded, ‘melancholy and dreamy. They stood in front of the picture of the lake [‘The Childhood of Pyramus’], Clive Bell gesticulating in an excited way, showering speechless admiration, Vanessa, head bent, approving.’41
Augustus fulfilled Ottoline’s pictorial notion of genius, and she was soon deeply enamoured. The impression she gives of his appearance speaks eloquently of her excitement. ‘His dark auburn hair was long and cut across the front like a fringe, and with a square beard, his curious pale face and sea-anemone eyes, he might have been a Macedonian king or a Renaissance poet. He had a power of drawing out all one’s sympathy.’42
Over these first months he did many pen-and-wash watercolour drawings of her; and she grew more infatuated by him. She did not really see herself as the sibyl Augustus saw, but his sketches were so ravishing she could not resist them. Nor could she resist going again and again to his studio though, preferring to be either upright or recumbent, she was ‘not much good at sitting’, Augustus noted. Each visit to Fitzroy Street sent her into a turmoil of emotions. With every step along the short walk from Bedford Square what tension there was! Before advancing, she would bombard him with a heavy artillery of gifts – fine editions of Wordsworth and Goethe, Browning and Plato, even Euripides, the works of Synge and eventually of Strachey. Augustus fell back. She was, he told her, ‘the most generous woman in the world’. Perhaps too generous. ‘You keep giving me things,’ he remonstrated (8 June 1908). But she could not stop, and the first trickle of presents became a downpour. There was about their relationship a curious reversal of roles: it is Ottoline who plays the masculine part, bold and despairing, almost aggressive at times. Augustus is shy, rather coyly flattered by all these attentions, sometimes embarrassed, usually cautious. She invites him to concerts of love music, and to tragic melodramas. She sends him a little watch which keeps breaking – a kind of stop-watch; she sends him rings for his fingers and assorted jewellery including a magnificent opal. By every post the presents pour in – lilies (which Romilly ate) for his studio, and lotions for his hair; variously coloured scarves and cloaks for his hypochondria; a green shawl, a rug, and a capacious wool quilt for his bed which, he claims, will keep his whole family warm. If Augustus created the John-girl with her characteristic tight bodice, long-waisted full skirt and broad-brimmed peasant hat, Ottoline must have contributed generously to Augustus’s own appearance. Her most triumphant adornment was a large replica of Thomas Carlyle’s hat which ‘is stupendous’, he proclaimed (24 May 1909). ‘It reduces even the rudest street gamin to speechlessness. But it is not a hat for every day of the week.’
Nor was their romance an everyday affair. His rapid mobility and hibernating illnesses made him an elusive lover. Yet this elusiveness only scalded her imagination the more. She was haunted by thoughts of him: his poverty, his vagabond freedom, the complex simplicity of his life, the poetry in his paintings; those mesmerizing eyes and long fine sensitive hands; his deep resonant voice echoing in her mind. At parties she would introduce his name into the conversation for the pleasure of hearing people talking about him. But so often what they said distressed her. Most conventional Englishwomen looked on her as affected or even amoral simply for knowing such a raffish creature. Even other artists and writers failed to hit the right note – Henry James, for example, who produced an off-key mot: ‘John paints human beings as if they were animals, and dogs as if they were human beings’; or Lytton Strachey, who likened him to Byron. Ottoline could accept that some people thought Augustus mad – perhaps he was divinely mad. But was he also ‘bad, and dangerous to know’? It was natural that Henry James should think so, for Henry James was already out of date, and Ottoline welcomed the new moral climate. ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’43 Virginia Woolf wrote of this time. But Virginia also thought that ‘the wonderful Ottoline Morrell’, with her open-eyed, open-armed worship of the arts, was ‘very simple and innocent’. And so, in his complex and wicked fashion, was Augustus.
Despite her intoxication, there is shrewdness in Ottoline’s observations. Her heart might beat for the legendary Augustus, but her intelligence comprehended the man. ‘Engagements were intolerable to him. When I mixed in an ordinary London life, the figure of this man, so unquestionably remarkable, living a life so completely different from anything I saw around me, haunted and disturbed me’.44
Mysteriousness, which he so highly prized in women, she had discovered in him. It was like a grain of love-powder that itched and irritated, that stimulated and would not leave her in peace. Above all, it was his melancholia that affected her, the silence that alternated with his flashing high spirits, the sudden boldness that interrupted his courtly manner with women.
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of their relationship was that they hardly ever quarrelled. His moodiness and her possessiveness seemed made for difficulties, but she could not get past his melancholy and her possessiveness had little to feed on. Often he would call her ‘an angel’ – yet with the knowledge he could not travel with an angel very far. They remained on friendly but still quite formal terms until 30 May 1908. That day Ottoline sailed across to his studio and told him frankly of her love. He was unlike anyone she had met. She felt excited by his ‘direct, ruthless, animal gypsy side, loving primitive men and women, and things ugly and cruel’; and she was even more responsive to his ‘simple nervous sensitive side – the imaginative, idealist poet’. Without knowing it, he had become the most important person in her life. She felt sure she could ‘develop’ him, form a ‘creative flame’ between them, share their ‘experiences of the soul’. She wanted to be his inspiration – and she wanted something else. Talking to him she began to lose the burden of her loneliness. She saw that he was lonely too – otherwise he could not listen to her so sympathetically. She felt she could ease his loneliness. She wanted to be his lover. Later that night, after she had left, Augustus wrote to her:
‘When you were in my studio to-day I wished I could cry – I should have felt more intelligent – perhaps – with the delicatest and noblest woman loving me so infinitely beyond my deserts. Do you know what a horror I have of hurting a hair of your head and bringing a shadow into your thoughts… and you are trying to assure me you are just like others are! Is it not something to realise that change and development is possible still – that one is not yet altogether finished and one is still young! still adolescent! still living...’
Four pages he wrote that night, and he ended with a sentiment that might have drawn a rueful smile from Ida: ‘Since my wife’s death there have been few opportunities of excitement or intoxication that I have let pass...’ Nevertheless, he concludes: ‘We cant go on thus, darling that you are… Good-night, angel.’
Yet the affair did go on. Like the little watch she gave him, it was always stopping: then starting again. So far as was possible, Augustus acted honourably. He discouraged her quite gently, and from reasonable motives. ‘You must know that I do care for you,’ he told her (17 June 1908), ‘…and how I hate to pain you… but I see the inevitable… Forgive me Ottoline.’ It is possible, of course, that, though she was an eyeful, he was not sexually very attracted to her, but some of his letters suggest an attraction. It is also possible that, seeing her as a patron for his work and as someone who would introduce him to prospective purchasers, he was at pains to avoid a situation that, by promising too much, might alienate her. But again his correspondence does not corroborate this. It is true he did benefit a little through Ottoline’s friendship,45 but those letters in which he writes of pictures invariably petition help for his friends, particularly Epstein and Lamb.46
For Augustus love affairs were explorations within himself of new possibilities, symbolized by his request to each woman to rechristen him. Ottoline called him Elffin. When he no longer signed himself Elffin, their affair (though not their friendship) was at an end. Each love affair was an opportunity to get away from the dull old stamping grounds and make new discoveries. But when the new continent had been thoroughly explored, the new discoveries mapped and assimilated into the central empire of the self, there was no more renewal: and interest died. Once the passion had gone, the dead-end of a relationship would depress him dreadfully. It is this he sees as the inevitable outcome of his affair with Ottoline – unless, that is, like some of his best pictures, they could end it while it was yet unfinished.
He warns her clearly that prolonged contact between them can only lead to disenchantment. He needs her – as a model. ‘I am aware of my brutalities – and all my agonies and joys, and will continue as God made me,’ he writes (28 July 1908), ‘…and will do yet the work that no one else can do quand même? He blames his character for their difficulties. ‘I should be called Legion and you know only one or two of me yet.’ Some of these selves were not attractive – and he had no control over their comings and goings. ‘I felt I was fated to cause you in the long run more pain than happiness – and that I could not acquiesce in,’ he writes in another letter (21 December 1908). ‘I dislike sailing under colours none of my hoisting...
‘With every wish to be honest I suppose I cannot escape those notorious disabilities which I must share with all true Welshmen...’
Truth gradually gives way before the romantic assumptions held by each of them on behalf of the other. ‘You are the most generous soul in the world and I the mouldiest,’ he asserts (June 1908). But Ottoline maintains that it is she who is worthless – worthless without him. He is a genius: what do her petty pains and cares matter beside his needs? She will come to him tomorrow. Her letter awaits him when he gets back very late to Fitzroy Street, and at four in the morning (4 June 1908), in some panic, he replies: ‘Ottoline, Don’t come to-morrow. I am not able – yes you are too great for me, vulgarly tragical or unhappy.’ But Ottoline only wants to serve him. She feels humbled before his goodness, his concern and tenderness for her. If only she had more to offer him. The postman hurries back and forth with their bits of paper, delivering questions, answers, counter-questions, often whole conversations on a single day. Even so, in their haste, they cannot always wait for him but must dash out to convey some vital postscript by hand. ‘It is you who crush me with your goodness – no, exalt me!’ Augustus contradicts her (3.45 p.m. 4 June 1908). ‘Never will I cease to love and honour you, dear Ottoline. It is you have genius… Elffin.’
Truth gives way: but it never disappears beneath the haze of protective romance, for other people are involved. One of these is Ottoline’s husband, Philip Morrell. Augustus’s attitude to him had commenced jocular: ‘Keep Philip happy,’ he counsels her (9 June 1908), ‘and make him blow up the houses of Parliament.’ But Ottoline cannot conceal her feelings and soon the situation grows awkward. ‘I think it is evident that your husband don’t like me,’ Augustus protests (8 January 1909). The possibility of a scandal that, since it involved a Member of Parliament, would hit the headlines alarms him to the point of pomposity. ‘I was not really surprised that Morrell should have been out of humour,’ he informs Ottoline (18 December 1908). ‘I felt I was cutting rather an offensive figure in your house. I should be very sorry to disturb so admirable a personage as your husband. I have nothing but respect for him and would never question his right to object to me...’
The other person involved was Dorelia, whom Augustus was anxious to avoid offending. Whenever he sees Dorelia, he reassures Ottoline: ‘Do not harbour the thought that I am going to forget you’; or ‘I hope you will never suspect me of indifference’. But there is never any doubt, particularly after her return from Paris to London, that the incorruptible Dorelia comes first – about this he is specific: ‘I love no one living more than Dorelia, and in loving her I am loyal to my wife [Ida] and not else,’ he explains to Ottoline – then adds: ‘You are certainly wonderful – Ottoline… There will always be that infinitely precious cord between us – so fine, so fragile that to strain it would break it… Bless you, Ottoline. Elffin.’
Although Dorelia was very strict at this time, and very suspicious, there were several reasons why she did not object to Ottoline. Their relationship was partly a business one; and besides, Lady Ottoline Morrell was utterly unlike the barmaids, actresses and models Dorelia had so far come up against. Then, until March 1909, she had not met Ottoline.
They met for the first time in Augustus’s studio one day while Ottoline was sitting for her portrait. Dorelia seemed to take little notice of Ottoline; but Ottoline studied Dorelia keenly. ‘She had the dignity and repose of a peasant from a foreign land,’ Ottoline noted in her diary, ‘…nonchalance and domination towards the children, a slightly mocking attitude to John, and shyness, méfiance, towards me, which melted by degrees. Between my sittings we sat round the large table for tea, the children eating slices of bread and jam, John looking a magnificent patriarch of a Nomad tribe, watching but talking very little. I saw that in every movement Dorelia made there was such grace and rhythm that she was indeed a stimulating model for any painter.’47
From this day Ottoline set out to make a friend of Dorelia. It was uphill work. The two women were so different – Ottoline sophisticated and histrionic; Dorelia simple and laconic. To complement Augustus’s Carlyle, Ottoline bought Dorelia a large straw hat. She put it on without a word, but with her special smile, and looked beautiful. Yet despite all Ottoline’s overtures of friendship, Dorelia remained unforthcoming, and when Ottoline invited her with Augustus to a dinner party with the stars of Bloomsbury, Virginia Stephen, Roger Fry, Clive and Vanessa Bell, she received a disconcerting refusal:
‘Dear Lady Ottoline. Thank you very much for your invitation but I cannot come as I think it rather ridiculous to be introduced to people as Mrs John. I do not know the Bells.
John asks me to say that he will be pleased to come. I’m afraid you’ll think I’m rather ungracious.’
While Dorelia was still in Paris, Augustus and Ottoline had seen each other several times a week. But even then Ottoline had come to realize that ‘what I can give him is not what he wants. He calls for something strong, reckless and rampant, which will carry him off his feet, and he knows too well that it is not mine to give.’48 What he gave her was a tantalizing glimpse of another world. ‘He would appear in my imagination as if he passed through the room, suddenly making the conventional scene appear absurd.’49 He gave her this glimpse, but he did not take her into his unconventional world – or at least not for long. And Ottoline, who seemed ready to risk everything, wanted more.
According to one of Ottoline’s biographers, Sandra Jobson Darroch, their affair ‘reached its peak around July 1908’;50 according to another, Miranda Seymour, ‘the relationship appears to have reached a climax in December 1908.’51 Both biographers agree that it was on the wane after Dorelia had returned to London and met Ottoline.
‘I have always been so excessively anxious to feel myself quite alive that I have plunged with needless precipitation into the most obviously fast flowing channels where there are rocks & bubbles & foam & whirlpools,’ Augustus had written to Ottoline in the summer of 1908; ‘…this plan has saved me from deadly morbidity at any rate if it has not improved my complexion.’52
There is no telling where this plan might have led Augustus and Ottoline had not Dorelia brought them to land with what may have been a shrewd stratagem or an instinctive move, merging the troublesome subplots of their lives.
In September 1909, the two women were shopping in London – Dorelia loved pretty shoes, Ottoline noticed – and stopping their taxi at 8 Fitzroy Street, Dorelia went in for a couple of minutes, leaving Ottoline in the taxi. Ottoline knew the Fitzroy Street studio intimately. It was here that Augustus had begun painting her; here that she had declared her love to him. But Augustus had recently handed over the place to Henry Lamb on his return from Paris, and it was Henry who suddenly appeared at the window of her taxi and invited her in.
Arrayed in tobacco-coloured frock coat and breeches, Lamb had flowered into an astonishing spectacle since parting from Euphemia. Ottoline could not take her eyes off his slim visionary figure, his almost translucent face and hair like pale flames. She took him and Dorelia and a girl who was in the studio, Lamb’s mistress Helen Maitland, who was a friend of Dorelia’s, back to her home in Bedford Square for tea.
Soon Ottoline and Henry were in friendly correspondence. Fortunately Henry found it easier to decipher her letters than Augustus had done, and could be more precise in his answers. ‘You say my friends can be yours, if I will,’ he replied to her, ‘yes, but are you ready to make enemies of my enemies?’53 By this time Augustus was becoming one of those enemies as Henry struggled to escape the straitjacket of imitation. ‘John and his set have done much to ruin and deface him and make him disbelieve in good,’54 Ottoline decided. Henry had all Augustus’s moodiness, and she was filled with a similar desire to ‘develop’ him into a happier person. ‘If God will work in me I may be able to help him.’
Early in 1910, Henry was to give up the Fitzroy Street studio. ‘Apparently vagabondage is my destiny,’55 he proclaimed to Ottoline. But his destiny still seemed to lie in Augustus’s footsteps. By the spring he was established among the rich coloured rugs and exotic flowers, the silks and stoves, of a coach house rigged up by Ottoline as a studio next to her country house at Peppard. While Philip Morrell went electioneering, Henry sketched Ottoline naked in the beechwoods, and was enveloped in her erotic maternal embrace. It was the start of a complex love affair full of the rocks and whirlpools Augustus had warned her against. That spring and summer Henry replaced Augustus as the most important person in Ottoline’s emotional life. ‘I burn to embrace you & cover all of your body with mine,’ Henry wrote to her. ‘…I kiss your face & your body all over but your face – where your beautiful spirit is most expressed – I return to & kiss all over again.’56
But even at the height of their passion, Ottoline still knew that ‘all his heart is given to Dorelia’.57
Despite this, and the disappearance of ‘Elffin’ from her life, Ottoline remained a useful friend to Augustus and Dorelia. Not the least of her uses – and the one that first melted Dorelia – was to the children. And with these they needed all the help available.
‘Though I admire children, I wouldn’t care to take charge of a nursery.’
Augustus John to John Davenport
Like a pair of skilled jugglers, Augustus and Dorelia had kept revolving in the air every one of the schemes they had introduced into their act at Equihen. To be or not to be married; to live together, or apart, or both – and where or anywhere: the range of alternatives spun before their faces ever more fantastically.
For much of the winter of 1907–8 Dorelia had stayed on in France. There were many matters to occupy her: sorting out ‘clothes, curtains, cushions etc’ from the studios – ‘and then there is the accordion and various musical instruments’, including the gypsy guitar Ida had never really learnt to play. Dorelia gave up her apartment and, with Pyramus and Romilly, moved through a series of hotels. She was seeing a good deal of Lamb and something of Gwen, spending much time ‘making clothes for the kids’ of the most anti-Wigmorian cut. She ordered Augustus to send her supplies of wool, money and tobacco; and she waited.
Augustus had begun to ‘look for a house about London’, he told her. He relied for success on a coincidence between what he happened to find and what his dreams of the perfect life happened to be. While exploring Hampstead Heath he dreamed fervently of Toulouse. Wyndham Lewis was thinking of going there, and anything Lewis could do… But then a brilliant notion seized him. Spain! A young friend, the celebrated practical joker Horace de Vere Cole who, in the guise of the Sultan of Zanzibar, had ceremonially inspected Cambridge, now (with a perfectly straight face) recommended a castle in Spain. ‘I met the Sultan of Zanzibar in Bond Street,’ Augustus reported to Dorelia. ‘He said he was going to Spain with Tyler.’ Royall Tyler,58 he added, was ‘my latest friend’, a Bostonian and a profound student of Spanish matters. ‘He is going to go mad one day,’ Augustus predicted, ‘ – I saw it in his hand and he knows it.’ The more he thought of Spain, the less attractive Hampstead or even Wantage (which he also scrutinized) appeared.
By April 1908 he had set off in pursuit of some Spanish gypsies, picking up Dorelia in Paris on the way. From the Hôtel du Mont Blanc in the boulevard Edgar-Quinet, where Gwen and Dorelia had stayed when they first came to Paris, he wrote to Ottoline (28 April 1908): ‘Spain is cruel – but I have blood-thirsty moments myself… Have you ever found it necessary to strangle anybody – in imagination? There is indescribable satisfaction in it. At other times I feel more like bringing people to life. My Variability is rather disconcerting and hardly makes life easier. I must learn discipline and consistency.’
Spain, which had seemed for a few moments a likely winner among his many schemes, now began to fall back. In fact he got no nearer the Spanish border on this occasion than Paris itself, and it took him almost another fifteen years to complete the journey. His indecision was assisted by Dorelia who was preparing to ‘wander about’ France with a few of the children. ‘It would I think be out of the question to allow her to take Edwin for the reason that her own two boys are quite enough to keep her busy,’ Augustus appealed to Mrs Nettleship, ‘although she could cheerfully take charge of the whole lot… I know no princess with maternal instincts unsatisfied, unfortunately, who would open her gates to my poor boys. Perhaps I may meet one...’
Some final decision was becoming urgent. ‘Travel as we may,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia, ‘we want a pied-à-terre somewhere.’ In the interval there was nothing for him to do but go back to Fitzroy Street. ‘I haven’t taken the house yet – it seems to me sometimes quite unpractical without Ida,’ he wrote to Mrs Nettleship.
So far as the children were concerned, Augustus was considering farms. He bundled them along to stay with various friends, including Michel Salaman, now a country gentleman, and Ottoline at Peppard, Edna Clarke Hall at Upminster and Charles McEvoy,59 who lived ‘in a pigstye’ at Westcot in Berkshire. But he went there mainly for the sake of the ‘grand’ Berkshire backgrounds which lent themselves to ‘noble decoration’, he informed Lamb. ‘It is unfortunate that the peasants have taken to motor caps and bicycle shirts.’ Then, on his way back with the children, he fell in with a man who told ‘me about the country near Naples [where] he used to live’, Augustus wrote to Dorelia. ‘I asked him how much one could live [on] there with a family – he said £250. I have ordered a passport. It will be ready the day after to-morrow...’
An actual decision could only be wrung out of Augustus by some crisis, and it was Dorelia who now presented him with one, as he began to suspect she might never return from her wanderings.
‘I wish you were here – if you want to be absolutely independent I don’t want to be dependent,’ he wrote to her. ‘…Will you come over? or will I come back? Doing nothing is killing me. I wish you would come south with me. I can’t stand the thought of separating – only if you want to I can do nothing.’60
The danger of losing Dorelia, like another death, concentrated Augustus’s mind. ‘C’est bien que toi que je désire – mon ange,’ he declared, ‘ – c’est bien que toi.’ Whenever Augustus was decisive, Dorelia fell in step with him. Between their various schemes it was now a photo finish, which revealed – a dead heat! For they agreed to marry, and yet not to marry; to marry, so far as the Nettleships were concerned, almost at once; but not to translate this policy very urgently into legal fact. Augustus promised ‘to raise the wind’ in Wigmore Street ‘which is quite willing to blow just now’, and added: ‘I’m beginning to feel myself – ten times as efficient as anybody else.’
This policy of ‘marriage’ was to convince the Nettleships that they proposed taking away the children and making a home for them. Believing that her son-in-law’s life was falling apart, Mrs Nettleship had recently swung into the attack, apprising Augustus that ‘a woman who kills an unborn child is not fit to have the care of children.’ In a heated exchange between the two of them Augustus felt able to answer that, in accusing Dorelia of bringing about a miscarriage, she was condemning Ida, ‘who had tried the same thing’. He himself took the other view – that by ‘annihilating a mass of inchoate blubber without identity at the risk of her life to spare me further burdens’, Dorelia had proved ‘her unusual fitness for the bringing up of children’. Was it not Mrs Nettleship herself who had first ‘instructed Ida in the mysteries of child prevention? – mysteries which she was evidently not equal to mastering, thank God!… I would have killed many an unborn child to keep her [Ida] alive – and even have felt myself perfectly fit to take charge of children.’ Both of them having lost their tempers, Augustus notified Mrs Nettleship that he ‘was taking all the children away and was at last happy at the thought of resuming our ménage where it left off – with Ida there in spirit and in the blood of her kids.’61
By treating Augustus in the way Uncle Ned had prescribed Mrs Nettleship had committed a bad error of tactics. Realizing this, she then sent him a conciliatory letter in which she allowed that to marry Dorelia was ‘obviously the correct thing to do’. But this irritated Augustus further:
‘It is by no means from a desire to be “correct” that I am going to marry Dorelia. It is precisely because she is the only possible mother to Ida’s children now Ida has gone, since I love her, knowing her to be such. And for no less reason would she consent to marry me, or I her. She is entirely and absolutely unselfish as Ida was and as their life together proved, with such proofs as stagger the intelligence. She is besides the only woman who does not stifle one in domesticity and who is on my own plane of intelligence (or above it) in a word the one woman with whom I can live, work and still be a father to all the children. Without her I would have to say good-bye to the children, for I cannot recognize them or myself in a house and an atmosphere which will ever be strange and antipathetic to me as it was to their mother...
If I were not supremely confident that Dorelia and I are able to bring up the children immeasurably better than you or anybody else, I would not hesitate to leave them where they are. But as I distinctly object to the way they are being brought up with you, as I see quite clearly it is not a good way, nor their mother’s, Dorelia’s or my way, I am going to take them away at once...’
By now events had gained a momentum of their own, pulling in Dorelia, who ‘suddenly turned up here [8 Fitzroy Street] to help with the children’. Together they would roam France with four kids, two of Ida’s and Dorelia’s two, he explained to Ottoline. ‘They are not going to be brought up by Philistines any longer. I tell you I had to fight to come to the point.’
From Mrs Nettleship, however, he received literally more than he bargained for. At the end of June he had written to her outlining his plans: ‘I am off to France in a few days and want to take David and Caspar with me – I would like to take them all of course – but am not quite ready for that. I think we may go to Brittany for the summer… I hate the thought of leaving Robin behind – and Edwin – and Henry!’ Events now followed with what he called ‘admirable briskness’.62 Mrs Nettleship replied that she was holding on to the children, and that if Augustus attempted to abduct them she would have him committed to prison. As for Dorelia, she would prefer to see her dead than in charge of Ida’s sons. To this, Augustus sent back an ultimatum: ‘Take your proceedings at once, but deliver up all my children in your charge by tomorrow morning!’
Next morning no children arrived at his studio, and Augustus marched round to Wigmore Street. He gave a version of what then happened in a letter to Wyndham Lewis (28 June 1908). Mrs Nettleship tried ‘to take refuge in the zoo with my 3 eldest boys and only after a heated chase through the monkey house did I succeed in coming upon the guilty party immediately behind the pelicans’ enclosure. Seizing two children as hostages I bore them off in a cab and left them in a remote village for a few days in charge of an elderly but devoted woman. The coup d’Etat was completely successful of course. Dorelia appears on the scene with almost miraculous promptitude and we take off the bunch of 4 to-morrow morning...’
Ida’s son Henry, who was only fifteen months old, missed this escapade and was exempted from the bargaining. For all of them, the results of that morning’s manoeuvres round the zoo were permanent. Though they visited Wigmore Street in their holidays, Ida’s four eldest boys, David, Caspar, Robin and Edwin, were to be brought up by Augustus and Dorelia, along with her children, Pyramus and Romilly; while Henry, the odd one out, was brought up by the Nettleships. ‘It certainly might have been rather better for all of you boys if Ida could have lived,’ her sister Ethel Nettleship wrote many years later to Caspar. ‘…If only Mother [Mrs Nettleship] had been a wise woman instead of being completely haywire through those 7 years. If Father had been alive too – & lots of other ifs...
‘You know Gus really tried with Mother – I mean he was willing to be helped and a wise woman could have done him no end of good – he was so young & I think he longed for it, but his tremendous vitality and passions used to get the better of him.’63
‘I shall always be more or less suspect.’
Augustus John to Dorelia McNeill
‘Paris is amazingly beautiful and brilliant… Was it not mad of me to abduct my children in this way?’ Augustus asked Ottoline (1 July 1908). ‘But I was provoked to the point of action.’
After a week in Paris, Augustus led his troupe off to Rouen, and from there they went by boat to Cherbourg, the appearance of which ‘pleased me well’.64 He had money to last them all three months, and confidence enough to take them anywhere. Leaving Dorelia and the six boys in Cherbourg, he set off on a walking reconnaissance. ‘If my stars prove favourable I shall, I hope, start some beasts and vehicles and what not,’ he explained to Wyndham Lewis.
But his stars glimmered luridly. At Les Pieux he was seized by the police and interrogated on suspicion of loitering with intent, though he had been plainly walking without much intent. Later he was robbed of his money in a restaurant and, without funds, was refused a bed – ‘so I stole into the country by bye-ways and slept under a hedge,’ he told Lamb (July 1908), ‘ – got down to a place called La Royel in the early morning, bathed my poor sore feet and… was refused milk and coffee’. It was not before he reached Flamanville that his luck began to turn. Here he caught up with ‘a modest circus and a number of revellers keeping it up, was recognised by a charming circus man I met at Bayeux 2 years ago… There was also a little Gypsy girl black as night who did the fil de fer. An intoxicated man conducted me down to Dielette where I finished him off with a bottle of wine. In the evening the crazy band drove round in a kind of box emitting gusty strains from various base instruments, the aged philosopher still capering and kissing his hand to the girls – a very wonderful company this – a very wonderful meeting.’
Next day he was again stopped by the police, and it became clear that any crime committed in the neighbourhood would be credited to him. For the rest of his journey he ‘took tortuous ways to avoid the police’, he told Dorelia, sleeping in ditches and fields, under bridges and hedges, often walking through the night. In a revealing letter to Dorelia, written from Diélette (to which, in his efforts to throw off the police, he had secretly doubled back), he confessed:
‘My love of my kind had already vanished and I was becoming a rooted pessimist – as for J. F. Millet, he seemed to me a damned blagueur – a bloody romanticist and liar – as he was in fact. But Dielette renews me – it is astonishing – it is even better than my native town where I ought to have stopped… The place is lovely – so varied – sandy beaches, rocks, harbours and prehistoric landscape behind...
I shall probably be about here all to-morrow, so send me some calculations, I pray you, to guide me a little… You have only to lose your temper to gain everything you want with people.’
To Will Rothenstein he had explained: ‘I don’t want to fix myself long in hired rooms.’ Yet his designs to gather beasts and vehicles together and follow a nomad life through Europe had been hit hard by the police hostility, and he reluctantly decided to assemble Dorelia and the boys in seaside apartments.
They moved into the Maison Delort late that July and stayed there until the end of September. ‘The boys are exceedingly well,’ Augustus reassured Mrs Nettleship, ‘so don’t be anxious.’ They looked, so he boasted to Ottoline (September 1908), ‘like healthy vagabonds’. He himself was anxious about Henry. ‘I trust he is not over-clothed,’ he warned Mrs Nettleship. ‘It is wonderful how children can stand cold if they wear few things.’
The sun shone and he worked hard and happily. ‘I am working up to colour at last,’ he wrote to Ottoline (20 September 1908). ‘Do you know Cézanne’s work? His colours are more powerful than Titian’s and searched for with more intensity.’ His own colours he was now restricting to three primary ones represented by ultramarine, crimson lake and cadmium, with green oxide of chromium. It was with these that he painted ‘Girl on the Cliff’, another exploration of the link between landscape and the human figure.
The model for ‘Girl on the Cliff’ was Edna Clarke Hall. Three years earlier, in 1905, with ‘a happiness that is beyond words’, Edna had given birth to a son. But, like Ida, she soon found motherhood a demanding business that left her no time or energy for painting. ‘It’s a dull life I lead now,’ she told one of her sisters. It might have been all right if her husband Willie had loved her. As it was, life ‘goes on OK as long as I keep quiet and live without thinking or worrying or drawing or reading or anything else’.65
Ida’s death had devastated Edna. ‘I loved her more deeply than I realized – I realize it now,’66 she wrote. Ida was the special ‘friend of my youth’ whose death seemed to symbolize the death of Edna’s own youth.
Noticing her sadness, Willie arranged a holiday for them in France that summer of 1908. He had a ‘peculiar gift for finding places no one had heard of, and at the end of a tortuous sixteen-mile cart ride through the night from Cherbourg, he found Diélette. Waking the next morning, Edna was charmed to see ‘wide stretching sands and beautiful sand dunes, lonely and full of sunshine and blue butterflies and streams that are guarded by masses of flowers, purple ones, and flag leaves.’67
She also found that the sands around the sunlit village were teeming with Johns, and suspected that Willie would be angry. But he accepted the facts peacefully enough, and even allowed her to join the reprobates on their bathing and sketching parties.
As Ida’s friend, Edna felt ill at ease with Dorelia. ‘She never spoke very much to me,’ she remembered, ‘…and she never called me Edna.’ Nevertheless Edna was pleased to be posing for Gus. She seemed a perfect model for him. Something about her beauty in this summer landscape, to which she had so briefly come from the emotional aridity of her home, stirred him. Later, when he showed her the oil painting of his ‘Girl on the Cliff’, her face turned to the sky with the eyes closed, it seemed to her ‘to have in it the spirit of myself – he has put the figure on a cliff with bright green grass full of wild flowers and the sea is blue but dark and the sky almost gloomy.’68
A number of Augustus’s preliminary sketches had been done indoors, the only free area being his bedroom. But the children would keep dashing in and out, excited and uncontrollable, and so he was obliged to lock the door. ‘He showed me two or three rather nice drawings he had done of me,’ she recalled, ‘and then he kissed me in the most enchanting way. There was something very lovely about it. But I drew back – because just then I was in rather a disturbed emotional condition – I had so little of what I needed [and] wanted so much that I wouldn’t let anyone touch me.’69 But when Edna drew back after their kiss he suddenly began to cry, explaining that he had kissed her because the poses she was taking for him were so beautiful.
During the next days, he seemed to be struggling to keep his feelings on that ‘spiritual plane’ he had appealed to when guarding himself against Ottoline’s advances. But Ottoline was ‘rather awful to examine closely’,70 while Edna’s ‘disturbed emotional condition’ seemed to add to her attractiveness.
A few days later, Edna joined Gus and Dorelia for a walk along the cliff top to the next village where Henry Lamb had arrived. Then the four of them went off to an inn where Gus began drinking and, perhaps provoked by Lamb’s company, concentrating all his attention on Edna, his eyes fixed upon her face. Finally, in his deep voice, he began serenading her.
Suddenly Dorelia stretched out her arms in a curious protecting gesture towards Edna, took her hand and hurried her outside. They ran, stumbling along the dark cliff top, back to Diélette, Augustus careering after them, Lamb left by himself. Next day, and during the remainder of the holiday, no one mentioned this episode, and Augustus, smiling and sympathetic, was back at work painting the children and Dorelia.
‘Girl on the Cliff’ was shown at the New English Art Club exhibition at the end of 1909. ‘I am longing for it,’ Edna wrote. But it was bought for £40 and ‘I hadn’t got £40.’71 The buyer was Ottoline, who re-titled the picture ‘Nirvana’, the state of beatitude where all passions are dissolved.72
*
Though he had not liked the idea of taking seaside rooms again (‘It would be cheaper and infinitely better to have a few houses about the place to go to’), Augustus profited by his season at Diélette. ‘I have got, it seems to me, much further,’ he told Ottoline. But the prospect of a London studio and dingy London streets was not alluring. ‘I wanted to get to the Pyrenees or further instead of lingering in the chilly north, but I lack the necessary millions. So back again to the horrors of a Cockney winter. Are there no millionaires of spirit?’ he asked Will Rothenstein.
He returned to London early in October, and within a month he had found a house ‘in Chelsea with a big studio’.73 This was 153 Church Street, off the King’s Road – ‘a good house’, Dorelia decided.74 They took a two-and-a-half-year lease and moved in shortly before Christmas. ‘There is plenty of room and a piano,’ Augustus invited Lamb (23 December 1908). ‘…I hope you will come at once. You’ll have a room to yourself.’
It was also a jolly good place for the boys because of the patch of waste ground, littered with bricks and bushes, that ran beside the King’s Road and was ideal for games. Round the corner, in Beaufort Street, was Epstein’s studio where they would help themselves to clay from the metal tins, roll the pieces into pellets and expertly flick them at one another. They were still sometimes farmed out to friends: to Ottoline (or ‘Ottofat’ as they called her), and to Edna Clarke Hall, who thought they looked somewhat forlorn. But it was a useful arrangement for Augustus who could paint their guardians whenever he came to fetch or deposit them.
London that winter of 1908 was ‘very hostile and the English sillier than usual’.75 Jobless men roamed the towns in their thousands, and Members of Parliament warned one another that blood would soon be flowing in the streets. ‘I hope blood will flow as nothing good can happen without,’ Augustus declared.76 Meanwhile, despite his mood of anarchy, he settled into the shell of his new home as if for protection against storms to come. ‘Perhaps the Epsteins may come to dinner to-day,’ he wrote to Ottoline (26 December 1908), ‘ – now that we are bourgeois folk with carpets and front doors and dining-rooms.’
Wanderers, you have sunrise and the stars;
And we, beneath our comfortable roofs,
Lamplight and daily fires upon the hearth,
And four walls of a prison, and sure food.
But God has given you freedom, wanderers!77
A broken collarbone partly accounts for Augustus having ceased wandering and turned bourgeois that winter. But, with the coming of spring, mended and eager, he resolved to abandon his carpets and comfortable roof. For three months, he had chafed within his prison walls, finding some relief in reading Dostoevsky’s Les Possédés, ‘a wonderful book’, and submitting himself to be ‘overhauled’ by a new doctor, ‘a celestial emissary in disguise’, recommended by Ottoline. ‘I am tired of nerves and glooms,’ he confided to her (13 January 1909), ‘and one could certainly surmount them, unhandicapped physically.’ By February he was already feeling ‘dangerously healthy’, the proper condition in which to take the open road.
During this interval, while dreaming of the freedom which would soon overtake him, he threw off a wonderfully dandified and belligerent portrait of the painter William Nicholson. ‘I have started Nicholson,’ he wrote to Ottoline on 8 January 1909, ‘ – as a set off to his rare beauty I am putting in a huge nude girl at his side. This will add to his interest, I feel… ’ Eventually, as one of several cross-references between the two artists, he put in one of his own paintings – a girl, fully clothed, against a mountainous landscape at the lower right-hand corner of the composition, where his signature would have been.
The bold composition, with its low-key palette and associations with the royal pictures of Velázquez, was a style much favoured by Nicholson himself, who seems to stare from the canvas in alarm. There are also ironic references to William Orpen, who specialized in this genre of grand-manner portraiture, and had painted Augustus in a similar pose in 1900 as well as the Nicholson family in 1908. ‘William, overcoated, yellow-gloved, the picture of a Georgian buck, glares from the corner of an overdark eye at the beholder,’ wrote Marguerite Steen: ‘a superb piece of coloratura painting… one of the finest of John’s portraits, though not quite convincing as a likeness of the sitter. Still, perhaps in those days William did look like a gentleman pugilist, or perhaps this aspect of his personality was called out by their mutual fondness for the ring.’ For several years Augustus himself believed this to be his best portrait which, in the words of Andrew Wilton, ‘set the standards of his career as portrait painter: ambitious, slightly scandalous yet old masterly, respectful of mind and character rather than social rank, and not too serious’.78 He had recognized in Nicholson an excellent subject, but unless commissioned he could not afford to paint him. So Nicholson himself provided the canvas and commissioned the painting for a hundred pounds (equivalent to £4,700 in 1996), which he nevertheless forgot to pay and for which Augustus forgot to ask. It was a gentleman’s agreement, and when, some years later, the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge bought the portrait for a thousand pounds, the two painters happily pocketed five hundred each.
Even before this portrait was finished, there came over him the absolute necessity to travel. Ever since the birth of Pyramus, the caravan which Augustus was buying from Salaman had lain gently disintegrating on Dartmoor. But recently he had moved it up and anchored it strategically at Wantage, where it was given a lick of fresh paint. A brilliant blue, it stood ready for adventurings. On his first expedition, he took along John Fothergill, architect and innkeeper, as companion. They trundled off on 1 April. ‘I called on [Roger] Fry at Guildford and found him in a state of great anxiety about his wife who had just had another attack,’79 Augustus reported to Ottoline (8 April 1909).
‘He sent off his children that day. I was sorry as I wanted to take them on the road a little. Fry came down and we sat in the caravan awhile. Next day I hired a big horse and proceeded on through Dorking and up to a divine Region called Ranmore Common… I called at the big house to ask for permission to stop on the common and was treated with scant courtesy by the menials who told me their man was out. So on again through miles of wild country to Effingham where, after several attempts to overcome the suspicion attaching to a traveller with long hair and a van, I got a farmer to let me draw into one of his fields. At this time the horse was done up and my money at its last.’
So he left his van in the field, along with the sleeping horse and the sleeping Fothergill, and caught the milk train up to London. He had covered eighty miles on the road and it had been highly satisfactory. But this was a mere beginning, a mere flexing of muscles. The summer must be passed with all his family away from front doors and dining-rooms; with the wind in the night outside and the stars in the wind; with the sun and the rain on his cheek.
Ever since the market days at Haverfordwest, since his first visits to the circus and his sight, on the wasteland outside Tenby, of the gypsy encampment with its wagons and wild children, its population of hard high-cheekboned men and women with faces dark as earth, he had felt attracted to travellers and show people. Destiny had drawn him closer to them after meeting that ‘old maniac’ John Sampson when he had begun to pick up their language. Since leaving the art sheds at Liverpool, he had revisited Cabbage Hall on ‘affairs of Egypt’. Elsewhere, encounters with such people as W. B. Yeats, with his addiction to tinkers as well as countesses, and Lady Gregory, with her studies of local myth and dialect, had helped to widen his knowledge. But it was not until the summer of 1908 that he had begun to dream of living as one of them. Two happenings that summer had nourished this idea. While in Paris he had met the gypsy guitarist Fabian de Castro in the luxurious apartment of Royall Tyler. The two of them entered into a deal where Augustus taught the guitarist to paint, while de Castro passed on to Augustus some of the songs from his voluminous repertoire. During these reciprocal classes, de Castro told Augustus something of his background. Now forty, he had been born at Linares in the Province of Andalusia. While still very young he was seized with the Wanderlust, forsaking his respectable family to take up with gâjos and others in the roving line. His conviction that he was of noble descent from the Pharaohs grew fierce and unalterable. He had travelled alone and in strange company, by foot and on the carpet of his imagination, through many lands plying many trades and practising many arts, to which he now intended to add the art of painting. Augustus was enchanted by his stories told with that serious self-mocking gypsy humour which found fun in the most unexpected places. After a day spent in talk, song, paint and laughter, towards evening they would be joined by other dreamers and jokers and exorbitant cronies, ‘Dummer’ Howard, Tudor Castle, Horace de Vere Cole, and together they would set off to see La Macarona and El Faico, the flamenco artists. This was Augustus’s introduction to the flamenco tradition of music and dancing. The intricate rhythms stirred undercurrents of anguish and regret that astonished him. The harsh outcry of the singers, rising convulsively and merging with the insistent humming of strings into an extraordinary ululation, sounded like the lamentations of beings thrust out of Heaven and debarred from all tenderness and hope. Yet the dancers themselves illustrated, with superb precision, the pride and glory of the human body.
After a week was up, Fabian de Castro left for Toledo where, having painted after Augustus’s prescription a huge and unorthodox Crucifixion, he was rewarded with imprisonment for committing an act of blasphemy. Augustus took something of a vicarious pride in his pupil’s accomplishment, though imprisonment in Spain, he admitted, like lunching in England, was a thing that might happen to anyone.
By this time Augustus, reaching Cherbourg, had fallen in with a raucous band of coppersmiths from Baku. ‘I was thrilled this morning – and my hand still trembles – by the spectacle of a company of Russian Gypsies coming down the street,’ he had illegibly informed Will Rothenstein. ‘We spoke together in their language – wonderful people with everyone’s hand against them – like artists in a world of petits bourgeois.’ At once he set about compiling word-lists of their vocabulary, and noting down their songs. This parcel of scholarship he dispatched to Liverpool. ‘It was a difficult job getting the songs down,’ he reported to Scott Macfie (11 August 1908), ‘ – everybody shouting them out, with numerous variations – but they showed the greatest satisfaction on my reading them out… I don’t like extracting words by force from Gypsies – it is too much like dentistry. I prefer to pick them up tout doucement.’
Back at Liverpool, a deep plot had been discovered to expel the gypsies from Europe. This hideous news, reaching Augustus, lodged in his imagination. He followed these children of nature because it seemed to him they had true freedom. ‘In no part of the world are they found engaged in the cultivation of the earth, or in the service of a regular master; but in all lands they are jockeys, or thieves or cheats,’ wrote George Borrow, who inspired a generation of late Victorians and Edwardians to leave their studies for the sunrise and the stars. These gypsies were the supreme anti-capitalists whose belongings were always burnt at death. Augustus’s urge to be closer to them stemmed from his preoccupation with the primitive world from which we all derive. In taking to the road he was not following an isolated whim. He was reacting, as others were beginning to, against the advance of industrialized society, with its inevitable shrinking of personal liberty, its frontiers barbed-wired by a rigmarole of passports and identity cards, by indecipherable rules, reparations, indemnities, by the paraphernalia of permits and censuses. Living in a gypsy community, mastering their ancient tongues, penetrating behind the false glamour to join them round their camp fires in the night, Augustus was searching for a way of holding in equilibrium contradictory impulses in his temperament. His love of travelling people recalls the passion of Jacques Callot, but it was also finding a parallel in contemporary literature, from Arthur Ransome’s Bohemia in London (1907) to the pastoralism of the Georgian poets, the chunky anthologies in paperboards produced by the Poetry Society,80 and in the recovery of folk songs by Percy Grainger, who played a number of them to Augustus on his phonograph (‘he says that England is richer than the continent in folk music’). No wonder the chief ornament of the Georgians, Eddie Marsh, lost sleep wondering whether he could afford a second Augustus John for his collection; and Rupert Brooke, seeing an Augustus John picture at the New English Art Club (1909), felt ‘quite sick and faint with passion’.81 To such poets and impresarios, no less than to art students, Augustus, ‘with his long red beard, ear-rings, jersey, check-suit and standing six feet high, so that a cabman was once too nervous to drive him’, as Edward Thomas reported82 to Gordon Bottomley, seemed a natural leader. Their movement, which was to be shattered by the Great War, sought as if by some spell to freeze the tread of industry across the country. But the best they could hope to win was a little extra time:
Time, you old gipsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?83
‘They’re not Gypsies until they start moving.’ But already, with his comings and goings, Augustus had grown ‘so damned Gypsy like’, in the words of Scott Macfie, ‘that unless one writes at once one runs the risk of missing you’. On his return to London in the autumn of 1908, harried by gendarmes, an event occurred which persuaded him that he had penetrated to the body of the gypsy world.
‘This morning I find a parcel which opened – lo! the ear of a man with a ring in it and hair sprouting around lying in a box of throat pastilles,’ he wrote to Wyndham Lewis, ‘ – nothing to indicate its provenance but a scrawl in a mixture of thieves’ cant and bad Romany saying how it is the ear of a man murdered on the highroad and inviting me to take care of my Kâri=penis, but to beware of the dangers that lurk beneath a petticoat. So you see even in England, I cannot feel secure and in France the Police are waiting for me, not to speak of armed civilians of my acquaintance.’
His broken collarbone that winter and removal to Church Street had enabled him to pursue his gypsy studies at a more bookish level. The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, first born in 1888 and soon issuing songs transcribed by John Sampson ‘on the highroad between Knotty Ash and Prescot’, had died only three years later. But now, like some sleeping beauty, it was being reawakened by the kiss of scholarship and, what it had lacked before, the oxygen of money. They were, as the Devil is said to have remarked when he glanced down the Ten Commandments, ‘a rum lot’, these Edwardian gentlemen: a cosmopolitan band of madcaps and idealists led by the portly and pontificating Sampson and assisted by various willing girls indispensable, in Sampson’s view, to serious gypsy studies. Folklorists and philologists, Celtic lexicographers, Scottish phoneticians and bibliographers from the United States drew together to investigate the gypsy question. The tentacles of the society stretched out to reach anthropologists in Switzerland and linguists in India, embracing on the way such odd bards as Arthur Symons, expounder of French symbolism to the English, and (still at No. 2 The Pines) Theodore Watts-Dunton, author of the sultry bestseller Aylwin, now, in his middle seventies, about to be released from tending the sexually blighted Swinburne and – a final brilliant touch – married to a girl of thirty. Most prominent among them was an intimidating vegetarian ‘Old Mother’ Winstedt, the finest scientific authority on gypsies’ poisons John Myers, and, from Lincolnshire, the Very Reverend George Hall, expert poacher and approver of plural marriages, whose sport was collecting pedigrees. Sampson had hoped that the presence of a parson might give a collar of respectability, so far absent, to the gang’s Borrovian escapades – instead of which, his tattered clerical coat, huge bandage over one eye and habit of smoking a short pipe while drinking beer, produced quite the reverse effect.
All this was made possible by the new honorary secretary of the Gypsy Lore Society, Robert Andrew Scott Macfie, in truth the most endearing of men: and rich. Now in the prime of life, tall, dark and modest, of rueful and compassionate charm, he displayed a chivalry counted upon by the others – and not in vain – to bring in more lady members. He possessed the talent for getting on with everyone, the qualities (much exercised by Augustus) of tact and patience. His interests were wide and his abilities various. A skilful musician, expert in typography and proven bibliographical scholar, he was also a fluent linguist and had soon learnt the Romany tongue. He also claimed authorship of an authoritative and absolutely unobtainable work on Golden Syrup and, after the Great War (during which he served as a regimental quartermaster-sergeant), an inventory of military recipes.
Macfie had been the head of a firm of sugar refiners in Liverpool before being led by Sampson into his gypsy career. Boarding up his large house near the cathedral, he moved to 6 Hope Place, which became the headquarters of the society. Augustus, on his many trips to Liverpool, would often call on him there and was usually relieved of some frontispiece or article for the journal.84 Fired by Macfie’s enthusiasm, he was transformed into a vigorous recruiting officer. Patrons, dealers, Café Royalists and society hostesses who wished to preserve diplomatic relations with him were obliged, as an earnest of their goodwill, to keep up their gypsy subscriptions. All manner of Quinns and Rothensteins found themselves enrolled, and some, for extraordinary feats, were decorated in the field.*2
By April 1909, having put his affairs in order, Augustus was more than ready, in Sampson’s words, to exchange ‘the flockbed of civilisation for the primitive couch of the earth’. He had made what passed for elaborate preparations, obtaining letters of introduction ‘from puissant personages to reassure timid and supercilious landowners, over-awe tyrannous and corrupt policemen and non-plus hostile and ignorant county people in general’.85 He had done more. To the sky-blue van still stationed at Effingham he added another of canary yellow and a light cart, a team of sturdy omnibus horses, a tent or two, and eventually Arthur, a disastrous groom. They mustered at Effingham – a full complement of six horses, two vans, one cart, six children, Arthur, a stray boy ‘for washing up’, Dorelia, and her virginal younger sister Edie. ‘We are really getting a step nearer my dream of the Nomadic life,’ Augustus told Ottoline. ‘The tent we have made is a perfect thing and the horses I bought are a very good bargain… I would like all the same a few little girls running about. Will you lend me Julian86 for one?’ Their camp was like a mumper’s, only, he boasted, more untidy. Undeterred by the scorn of the local gypsy, the convoy moved off to Epsom, where Augustus hit the headlines by protesting against the exclusion of gypsies from the racecourse on Derby Day. Then, the race lost, he set his black hunter’s head towards Harpenden which after many adventures they reached on 9 July. Augustus was exhilarated by their progress. ‘It’s great fun,’ he reassured his mother-in-law. ‘The boys have never looked better.’ And to Ottoline he wrote: ‘It’s splendid… I ride sometimes by the side of the procession, but for the last two days I’ve been drawing the big van with two horses. It’s always a question of where to pull in for the night. Respectable people become indignant at the sight of us – and disrespectable ones behave charmingly… I’m acquiring still stronger views regarding landlords.’87
His next stop was Cambridge, where he secured a commission to paint a portrait of the classical anthropologist Jane Harrison, ‘a very charming person tho’ a puzzle to paint’.88 Yet it was a puzzle he solved beautifully. He had been offered this job on the recommendation of D. S. MacColl, who described him as ‘the likeliest man to do a really good portrait at present’, and who gave him preference over Wilson Steer ‘whose tastes lie in the direction of young girls’. With this opinion Jane Harrison appears to have agreed, writing to Ruth Darwin, the promoter of the portrait: ‘I personally should take his advice… he [Augustus John] seems to me to have a real vision of “the beauty of ugliness”… What I mean is that he gets a curious beauty of line: character, I suppose it would ordinarily be called, that comes into all faces however “plain” that belong to people that have lived hard; and that in the nature of things is found in scarcely any young face. Now this interests some people – I don’t think it ever did interest Steer. If I were a beautiful young girl I should say Steer...’
Augustus’s painting, ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ as David Piper described it,89 pleased its sitter, in particular because Augustus used Steer’s ‘Yachts’, which Jane Harrison owned, as part of the background. To D. S. MacColl she wrote (15 August 1909) in praise both of the picture and the artist.
‘Thank you for finding Mr John. He was delightful. I felt spiritually at home with him from the first moment he came into the room: he was so quiet and real and sympathetic too… He was perfect to sit to; he never fussed or posed me, but did me just as I lay on the chair where I have mostly lain for months. I look like a fine distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it… it seems to me beautiful, but probably as usual I am wrong!’90
Augustus and his retinue had encamped in a field by the river at Grantchester, and every day he would drive to Newnham, ‘working away in utter oblivion’,91 while Jane Harrison smoked cigarettes and chatted with Gilbert Murray. ‘Although a complete dunce,’ he recalled, ‘I enjoyed their learned conversation while I was painting, for in no way did it conceal the beautiful humanity of both.’92 Even so, he was not tempted to advance further into Cambridge and, apart from a visit to James Strachey at King’s to spread the word of Dostoevsky, he made little contact with the university. ‘The atmosphere of those venerable halls standing in such peaceful and dignified seclusion seemed to me likely to induce a state of languor and reverie,’ he wrote in Chiaroscuro, ‘excluding both the rude shocks and the joyous revelations of the rough world without.’93
He was already providing a rude shock to Cambridge life. ‘John is encamped with two wives and ten naked children,’ Maynard Keynes inaccurately reported from King’s College (23 July 1909). ‘I saw him in the street to-day – an extrordinary spectacle for these parts… He seems to have painted Jane Harrison at a great rate – 7 sittings of 1½ hours each. She is lying on a sofa in a black dress with a green scarf and a grey face on cushions of various colours with a red book on her lap.’ Two days later Keynes was writing to Duncan Grant: ‘All the talk here is about John… Rupert [Brooke] seems to look after him and conveys him and Dorelia and Pyramus and David and the rest of them about the river… According to Rupert he spends most of his time in Cambridge public houses, and has had a drunken brawl in the streets smashing in the face of his opponent.’
Brooke excitedly invited them all over for meals at Granchester and took them up the river in punts. Augustus John was, he reminded Noël Olivier, ‘the greatest painter’, and ‘the chief wife’ Dorelia ‘a very beautiful woman’, and the boys ‘brown wild bare people dressed, if at all, in lovely yellow, red or brown tattered garments… They talked to us of an imaginary world of theirs, where the river was milk, the mud honey, the reeds and trees green sugar, the earth cake, the leaves of the trees (that was odd) ladies’ hats… To live with five wild children in a caravan would really be a very good life.’94 Brooke was soon leading special parties from the colleges to the Johns’ field to catch a glimpse of Dorelia making a pair of Turkish trousers, or the children gnawing bones for their supper then falling asleep on straw round the camp fire – and other marvels. ‘We cause a good deal of astonishment in this well-bred town,’ Augustus observed.95
The resurrection of the ‘two wives’ legend seems to have arisen not only because of Edie McNeill, but because of the more improbable presence of Ottoline Morrell who, dressed in her finer muslins, had hesitantly accepted an invitation to join them. ‘Come any day,’ Augustus had wired. ‘…In case of any mistake our field is at Grantchester...’ And he sent her a photograph of some wild-looking people.
After three months in London entertaining her mother-in-law, who had recently been converted to Catholicism, it would be refreshing, Ottoline thought, to be with these ‘scallywags’, as Virginia Woolf called them. She took the train to Cambridge and was met by Augustus with a horse and high gig. ‘Directly I climbed up into the cart the horse, which was a huge ungainly half-trained animal, began to back, slipped and fell down,’ Ottoline recalled.
‘John rapidly descended from our high perch; he stood calmly smoking a cigarette, looking at the great brute kicking and struggling, but made no attempt to help. However, station loafers came to the rescue, and we adjusted the horse and harness. Up we got again, and slowly trotted through Cambridge to a meadow...
How damp and cold and cheerless and dull it seemed. John was morose, with a black eye, the result of a fight… Dorelia and her sister, absorbed in cooking and washing… made no friendly effort to make me feel at home. But after all it would have perhaps been a difficult task to be at home in a melancholy, sodden meadow outside a caravan.’96
The boys, it was true, crowded round ‘Ottofat’ enthusiastically – she was excellent ballast for their kite-flying. But Dorelia, ‘very Leonardo’s Mona Lisa’, Ottoline recalled, ‘very passive, almost oriental – very inarticulate’, left her alone. There was nothing to do but walk up and down in the damp trying to get warm until dinner, which was a crust of bread and some fruit. ‘We did treat her badly,’ Dorelia remembered. ‘We couldn’t imagine what to give such a grand lady to eat, so all she got was an apple. Heard after that the poor dear’s favourite dish was kippers.’ So Ottoline called it a day and hurried back to London ‘chilled and damp and appreciative of my own home and Philip’.
Augustus’s famous fight had been with Arthur, the groom, who had been flung into a pugnacious attitude by the notion of leaving Cambridge. It fell to Augustus to correct him, and between pub and trap they rained blows on each other, Augustus eventually carrying the day. Once recovered he led his troupe off and gained a piece of waste ground near Norwich, where he suddenly abandoned them for an urgent appointment in Liverpool. ‘I hope to camp near the sea near Liverpool,’ he had written to Mrs Nettleship, ‘and ride up to the Town Hall to paint the Lord Mayor.’97 But calculating from recent experiences, ‘it’ll take me 3 weeks to get to you by road,’ he told the Rani (July 1909), ‘so I fear I must give up the plan and come by train.’ So, leaving his women and children with instructions ‘to come on steadily’ or not at all, he walked into Norwich and caught a train on his way to paint one of the most notorious portraits of his career.
*
It was the custom in Liverpool for members of the city council to raise a private subscription of one hundred guineas and to present the retiring Lord Mayor with a ceremonial portrait. The Mayor in 1908–9 had been Augustus’s friend Chaloner Dowdall. Usually the Chairman of the Walker Gallery was invited to choose the artist, but Dowdall had so often collected the money for previous incumbents that when the deputation came to see him he at once asked it to let him handle the matter, ‘and you will have the biggest gate the Autumn Exhibition has ever had – and I shall have a picture worth five hundred guineas within five years time.’ He then offered the commission to Augustus, who willingly consented: ‘I’ld like very much to stay with you,’ he wrote to Dowdall’s wife, the Rani. ‘…Don’t let Silky [Chaloner Dowdall] worry any more. Tell him I’m coming… ’
Augustus was full of notions for this portrait. He proposed to Dowdall, as they went together to buy the canvas, painting not only the Lord Mayor but his whole retinue of attendants which went with him on state occasions. Dowdall, slightly alarmed, demurred on the grounds that his house, though large, could hardly contain so monumental a masterpiece. Augustus, while nodding his head in agreement, nevertheless bought the biggest canvas available. ‘I was an ass not to agree,’ Dowdall afterwards claimed.98
That afternoon Augustus made a rapid watercolour sketch, about twenty-four inches by eighteen, and next morning when the canvas had arrived he set to work, beginning with the two lines – the wand and the sword – on which the design was based. By lunch it was all drawn in. ‘He worked like a hawk on the wing,’ Dowdall observed, ‘and was white, sweating and exhausted.’99 The two of them repaired for ‘a good lunch’ which was served by Smith, the Lord Mayor’s footman. Noticing that Smith and Dowdall got along very well, Augustus suggested that the footman should be included in the picture, and to this Dowdall and Smith jovially agreed. ‘The whole thing was drawn in on the canvas at a single sitting,’ Dowdall recalled, ‘and painted with extraordinary rapidity’
What struck Dowdall as being so remarkably rapid lasted an eternity for Augustus: which was to say a fortnight. Initially it went ‘without a hitch’. ‘It’ll be done in a few days,’ he promised Dorelia. ‘It’s great sport painting jewels and sword hilts etc. My Lord sits every day and all day and I’ve been working like a steam engine.’ The town hall itself made ‘a devilish fine studio’, and he reckoned that the portrait would be ‘a shade better than Miss Harrison’s’.100 His only trouble was the background, ‘which I didn’t have the foresight to arrange first’. After a week this trouble had advanced to the foreground, mainly because Dowdall would assume ‘such an idiotic expression when posing’. This spirit of idiocy seemed to fill the town hall during his second week. ‘It was frightful there,’ he complained to Ottoline (9 September 1909), ‘made all the more impossible by his lordship’s inability to stand at ease. No more Lord Mayors for me. I used to be so glad to get out of the town hall that I roamed about the whole evening not returning till very late. I had but one desire: to submerge myself in crude unceremonious life.’ The formality of it all was soon ‘taking the sawdust’ out of him. Instead of cruising the Chinese opium dens with a notorious character called Captain Kettle, Augustus was expected to spend every evening and night with the Dowdalls, and to voyage back and forth with his subject in an official carriage and pair with two footmen. The Liverpool police had appealed to Dowdall never to let Augustus out of his sight lest his excursions after dark be made a ‘subject of comment in the town, and… be held to prejudice in some way the dignity of his Office’.101 After tasting the freedom of the road, Augustus found this confinement intolerable. He bubbled with impatience, and the result was a curious inspiration: the portrayal of Dowdall as a civic Don Quixote attended by his doubtfully obsequious Sancho Panza, Smith.
Towards the end of the portrait, the municipal strain becoming too much for him, Augustus absconded to Wales. His friend Sampson had recently rediscovered the celebrated gypsy storyteller and great-great-grandson of Abraham Wood, King of the Gypsies: one Matthew Wood who, since 1896, had vanished from the face of the earth. To Sampson he was invaluable, being the last of his race to preserve the ancient Welsh Romany dialect in its purity. Like some hedgehog, he had been quietly grubbing along in a village ‘at the end of nowhere’102 and seven miles from Corwen, called Bettws-Gwerfil-Goch. It was vital to get a haul of his lovely words, ablatives and adverbs ending in ‘ – od’, sense riddles, folk tales spoken as pure Indian idiom, a veritable mother tongue. Having triumphantly tracked him down, like an ‘old grey badger to his lair’, Sampson resolved not to lose such a valuable creature again till he had got to know him ‘as well as his own boots’. He therefore rented a couple of hideous semi-detached Welsh suburban villas set on the hillside overlooking the village from the spur of Bron Banog, and having knocked them into one, moved in two imposing pantechnicons full of chattels, together with Margaret his wife, a dwarf maid named Nellie, their sheepdog Ashypelt, and three children, Michael, Amyas and Honor in the charge of two young ‘secretaries’, the fair Kish and the dark Dora. And Augustus.
He arrived one evening ‘in the best of spirits’, determined to profit by his freedom from Liverpool town hall, and signed the visitors’ book with a flamboyant sketch of himself. The waterfalls and streams, the luxurious green woods below, the three shining peaks of Aran to the south, and the distant sight of Snowdon, delighted him. ‘Matthew Wood with his fiddle and I with my voice entertained the company till late – and there was great hilarity,’ he wrote to John Quinn (September 1909).
‘There were two young ladies present, secretaries of the Rai. After going to bed I became possessed of the mad idea of seeking one of them – it seemed to me only just that they*3 should do something in the way of entertaining me. I sallied forth in my socks and entered several rooms before I found one containing a bed in which it seemed to me I discerned the forms of the two girls. I lay down at their sides and caressed them. It was very dark. Suddenly a voice started shrieking like a banshee – it might have been heard all over Wales. I thought then I had stumbled upon Sampson’s boys instead of them I sought. I told the voice not to be silly and went away. On the landing appeared the two girls with a candle and terror in their eyes. I scowled at them and returned to bed.’
Next morning at breakfast, the maid Nellie demanded an explanation for his presence in her bed that night. Augustus, who had not seen her before, was horrified to observe that she was four feet tall. He explained his mistake was due to the peculiar pitch of Welsh darkness and the odd character of the house which together had left him entirely dependent on his sense of touch. Nellie, very dignified, remarked that this hardly explained the nature of the caresses he had lavished upon her – and the little girl with whom she slept, Miss Honor. Each revelation seemed to make the business worse, and Augustus could only fall back on the claim that he must have been dreaming. He had begun his adventurings like Tom Jones and ended them like Mr Pickwick. By lunch, the atmosphere in the house was so constrained that he decided to slip away. His exertions to make a joke of the matter by suggesting it might have been worse – supposing it had been Sampson’s arms he had blundered into! – were met with silence.
He left without a word, walking down to the village to see about a horse and trap. Here Sampson overtook him to make it clear that he need not return to the house, and upon Augustus assuring him that ‘nothing could have been further from my thoughts’103 and that he was even then on his way, Sampson relented and proposed a drink. ‘We passed several hours with drinks and gypsies,’ Augustus told the Rani. The inn resounded to the melodious din of richly inflected Romany but soon a discord was introduced by Matthew Wood’s half-brother, Howell, a hefty brute who began trying to pick a quarrel with Sampson. Feeling he might owe his friend a good deed, Augustus offered to begin matters by turning Howell out of the pub. ‘This I did and shot him into the road. Then ensued a bloody combat.’ Within the sunlit square each stripped to the waist and, in the style of the old-fashioned prizefight, began battle. After two long rounds Augustus had him on the ground ‘but he was biting my legs. Up came the others, Sampson vociferating blood and death! And the poor Gypsy was led off streaming with gore, howling maledictions in three languages.’
It was well past midnight when Augustus arrived back in Liverpool to find the Dowdalls’ house, out of which he had been so eager to escape, impossible to enter. ‘I climbed over the fence and tried all the windows at the back. I tried to pull down one of those damn lamps,’ he told the Rani. ‘Your house is like a fortress. So I went into Sefton Park and lay under a laurel bush till dawn… about 6 [I] went and washed my gore and grime in the Central Station.’
Though much revived by experiences that would have half killed another man, Augustus was in no frame of mind to do justice to his model, the Lord Mayor, and despite the head not being quite all there to his satisfaction,104 he got off that same day back to Norfolk.
The reception given to the portrait when it was first shown that autumn was extreme. The press called it ‘detestable’, ‘crude’, ‘unhealthy’, ‘an insult’, ‘a travesty in paint’, and the ‘greatest exhibition of bad and inartistic taste we have ever seen’. The art critic of the Liverpool Daily Post (18 September 1909) felt able to describe it as ‘a work worse painted and worse drawn than any modern picture we can remember’, and suggested that it was ‘an artistic practical joke’ which gave Smith grounds for legal action. Another critic (19 September 1909) detected moral danger in the canvas. It was, he declared,
‘an attenuated specimen of what Mr John chooses to call a man, over 20 heads in length, all legs, the pimple of a head being placed on very narrow shoulders and by his side, in a ridiculous attitude, a figure that I fancy I have seen before in a Punch and Judy show. All painted in rank, bad colour and shockingly badly drawn… The public have none too great knowledge of art as it is; to publicly exhibit the work is calculated to do immense amount of harm to the public generally and the young art students who go to galleries and museums for guidance and help.’
‘You are being pounded and expounded (which is worse) in the Liverpool Post just now,’ Scott Macfie informed Augustus (21 September 1909). A strong body of supporters soon counter-attacked. The Liverpool Courier (25 September 1909) interpreted it as a ‘topical allegory’ which had a ‘symbolic value as representing the characteristic relationships of the Labour-Socialist Party and the Liberal Government’. While in the Western Daily Press T. Martin Wood, who described Augustus as ‘the most revolutionary’ of ‘all the revolutionaries who are now alive’, reflected upon the ‘expression of countenance, in which a soul is to be seen’.
Liverpool was sent into an extraordinary commotion by this controversy, the echoes lasting many years. Day after day the Walker Art Gallery was packed with people coming in to ridicule or admire this ‘Portrait of Smith’, as it was now called. Letters of anonymous indignation were everywhere posted in haste, and feelings of fury, adulation and merriment were kept at a high level by all manners of Tweedledum cartoons, satirical verses and stories to the effect that Dowdall had commissioned a gang of burglars to make off with it, only to find they had taken the valuable frame and left the canvas. Though the picture represented a serious attempt, dignified yet witty, to come to terms with grand salon portraiture, Augustus did not immediately help his supporters by stating that he had introduced Smith into the picture ‘for fun’105 – and at no extra cost! But he was obviously taken aback by the venom of some attacks, which he described as ‘stupid, disgusting and unnecessary’.
After its showing at Liverpool, the picture toured the country, always followed by a wake of argument. ‘There is nothing to justify the indignation expressed by the Liverpool worthies,’ one paper proclaimed after it was shown at the NEAC Winter Exhibition in 1911. But the Athenaeum (2 December 1911), as at some new Bonnard, could still ‘marvel somewhat at Mr John’s innocence of the science of perspective’, while other critics invoked the names of Gainsborough, Sargent, Velázquez and Whistler.
One man who stood up for the portrait from the beginning was Dowdall himself. On all public occasions he announced that it was splendid, and went so far as to supplement Augustus’s honorarium out of his own pocket. ‘I consider it a great picture, and for what my opinion is worth, I am prepared to go nap on it,’ he was reported as saying.106 Nevertheless it was to prove something of a white elephant to the Dowdall family, following them from house to house in its atrocious golden frame and dominating their lives. ‘You will have to build a special room to hold it,’ advised a friend.107 Such friends had to enter through the back door at Liverpool since the portrait blocked the entrance hall. It also cost a fortune to insure, required the hiring of a special railway truck to move and, when stationary, attracted crowds of Augustus’s devotees who would call round demanding to view it, making the Dowdalls’ lives a torment. Eventually, in 1918, Chaloner Dowdall decided to sell it. Liverpool, despite its hostility, still felt a proprietary right in the picture and was critical of this decision. But Augustus took a different line: ‘I’m glad to hear you found the old picture useful at last,’ he wrote to him (14 October 1918), ‘and that it fetched a decent price. It was really too big for a private possession of course, failing the possession of a palace to hold it. I don’t forget how well you acted by me at the time.’
The National Gallery had offered Dowdall six hundred and fifty pounds (equivalent to £14,200 in 1996) but E. P. Warren, a private collector who lived with John Fothergill at Lewes House in Sussex, topped this with an offer of one thousand four hundred and fifty pounds (equivalent to £31,700 in 1996). Dowdall asked the Rani whether their son (then aged ten) would prefer to see his father enshrined in the National Gallery at a fairly nominal price or enjoy the proceeds of the full market price – to which she replied, ‘Don’t be a fool!’ So the portrait went to Warren’s beautiful eighteenth-century house where it joined a Lucas Cranach, a Filippino Lippi and, in the garden, Rodin’s ‘Le Baiser’. With his money Dowdall then bought a house, Melfort Cottage, in Oxfordshire with three acres of land where he lived for the next thirty-five years. But the picture had not come to rest. When Warren died, his heir Asa Thomas lent it to the Walker Gallery where it was exhibited in 1932. But Liverpool was still dead set against it, and the gallery’s director refused to buy it. Not for another six years was it bought. ‘I have now to make a confession,’ Sydney Cockerell then wrote to Dowdall (2 June 1938). ‘As London Adviser to the Felton Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria I am guilty of having caused the banishment to Melbourne of your magnificent portrait by Augustus John. It is really too bad as it is perhaps his masterpiece and it certainly should have remained in England. How mad your fellow citizens of Liverpool were to allow it to go out of their hands!’
The price this time had risen to two thousand four hundred pounds (equivalent to £68,500 in 1996) – twenty-four times the original fee. It was shown at the Tate Gallery in London for a month, then left for Australia. Sixteen years later it returned to Liverpool, and to the Walker Art Gallery where, for six weeks in 1954, it was the centrepiece of an Augustus John show having Liverpool connections. ‘It may well be that something of this conflict, aligned in the same way, will divide Liverpool again now,’ wrote Hugh Scrutton with a nostalgia for the aggressive past. ‘…At all events visitors to the Walker Art Gallery can now see this stormy petrel of a picture returned to its original place of showing. And it may be their last chance. For the picture will return to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, in September and it is anybody’s guess whether it will return again within their lifetime from Australia.’108
*
Returning to camp, Augustus found that everything was not well. Arthur had misbehaved with the harness, and Augustus fired him on the spot. They were now, with their various caravans, carts, animals and boys, immovable. In desperation, Augustus wired an SOS to his friend Charles Slade,109 who lived not far off at Thurning. ‘Have fired Arthur can you come help love conveniently at once John.’ Slade galloped over and shepherded the convoy back to his farm. But the travelling life was taking a heavy toll of them. Slade took a number of photographs that September exhibiting the brave equipment with which they had encumbered themselves. The vans, still bright, were in the ‘cottage’ style, with ornate chip-carved porch brackets projecting at the front and rear, and steps which, when the horses had been unharnessed and put out to graze, fitted between the dipped shafts. The tents, to judge from Augustus’s drawings, were of the traditional gypsy construction – a single stout ridge-pole carrying five pairs of hazel-rods shaped into a cartwheel, over which framework blankets could be fastened by skewers or pinhorns.110 There are no horses in the photographs, possibly because they had begun to die off. One stumbled and fell en voyage, projecting Augustus over its head; another collapsed while standing in the shafts ‘and I sold it to the knacker for a sovereign’. Photographs of Dorelia and Edie suggest that they too were worn out by the rigours of road life. The boys, while at Thurning, all caught whooping cough, which they communicated to the Slade children; and the general discomforts of their camp even reached Augustus himself. ‘I shall be damn glad to get on with my own work,’ he grumbled to John Quinn (September 1909). He returned thankfully to Church Street, having agreed to decorate the Chelsea house of Lady Gregory’s nephew, Hugh Lane. He would never go on such a rough-and-tumble journey again, but it was not long before he began speculating about agreeable variants. ‘I don’t suppose we shall return this summer,’ he admitted to Slade, with whom he had left a number of his vans and sons. ‘I wish I had the vans in France. Do you know how much it would cost to heave them over the Channel?’
‘John is – has always been – one of my greatest friends, the only man who now has imaginative genius.’
Arthur Symons to Gwen John (27 October 1919)
‘I have been seeing a lot of Arthur Symons lately,’ Augustus wrote to Ottoline (1 October 1909). ‘I’m afraid he’s about to break down again and that will be the end. He reads me poems that get more and more lurid.’
They were an ill-assorted pair. The son of a puritanical Wesleyan minister, Arthur Symons had been brought up along nervously conventional lines and indoctrinated with a vast dose of the Knowledge of Evil. Against the effects of this upbringing he had received a vaccination at the hands of Dr Havelock Ellis who, during a week’s visit to Paris, introduced him to the debauchery of cigarettes and wine. Upon such weeds and fruit was Symons’s celebrated Knowledge of French Decadence brought to birth. He was a man, in George Moore’s words, ‘of somewhat yellowish temperament’, who, according to Will Rothenstein, ‘began every day with bad intentions… [and] broke them every night’. His spirit was eager enough, but his body, undermined by the chronic illnesses which afflict those who will outlive their contemporaries, was weak. Though much obsessed with notions of sex, he was not a passionate man but something different: a passionate believer in passion. The rhyme was preferable to the deed, and he would dizzy himself, in verse, with visions of belly dancers, serpent charmers and other exotic temptresses. More prosaically, he had married Rhoda Bowser, a strong-willed scatterbrain and occasional actress. He needed about him people who were strong, people who had an appearance of strength greater than his father’s had been. It was this quality that attracted him to Augustus.
They had met in Gordon Craig’s studio in Chelsea early in 1903 – ‘one of the most fortunate events of my life’, as Symons remembered. The following spring, when Augustus held his show at the Carfax Gallery, Symons wrote a glowing appreciation of it in the Anglo-French paper, Weekly Critical Review (2 April 1903). Many years later, in an article entitled ‘The Greatness of Augustus John’, in which he selected Augustus as ‘the greatest living artist’, Symons recalled his first reaction to the Carfax exhibition. Two sentences from Baudelaire had occurred to him: ‘Je connais pas de sentiment plus embarrassant que l’admiration’; and ‘L’énergie c’est la grâce suprême’. These two sentences sum up very well the commerce of their relationship. Symons traded his admiration in exchange for Augustus’s stimulating treatment. He set out to please, sitting for Augustus, dedicating books to him, deferring to his literary taste, assailing him with congratulatory poems; and he set out to take from him something he badly needed: energy. Wilde had once described him as ‘an egoist without an ego’. Augustus appeared to supply this ego from the dynamo of his overcharged personality. It was not difficult for Symons to identify himself with Augustus. ‘I knew that he, like myself, was a Vagabond, and that he knew the gypsies and their language better than anyone else,’ Symons wrote. And then, as he told John Quinn (30 January 1914), ‘I was born at Milford Haven in Wales – oddly nine miles along the coast from where Augustus was born.’ Were they not blessed then, or afflicted, with the same Celtic blood? Had they not endured similar upbringings? In his diary Symons noted:
‘John’s fascination is almost infamous; the man, so full of lust and life and animality, so exorbitant in his desires and in his vision that rises in his eyes.
His mother, who died young, was artistic, did some lovely paintings his father still keeps in Tenby. There he got some of his gift – as I did from mine. I for verse, he for painting. Our fathers never really understood us… John’s father hated art and artists; the mother, imaginative. So was mine: both imaginative: one derives enormously from one’s mother.’
Augustus lived vividly in Symons’s imagination. ‘Arthur Symons has sent me a poem he had dedicated to me – all about bones and muscles and blatant nakedness,’ Augustus wrote to Alick Schepeler. ‘I ask myself what I have done to merit this?’ The poem, ‘Prologue for a Modern Painter: to A. E. John’ is a hymn to vitality, a declaration of his faith in the kind of life he could never make his own, except through someone else:
Hear the hymn of the body of man:
This is how the world began;
In these tangles of mighty flesh
The stuff of the earth is moulded afresh...
Here nature is, alive and untamed,
Unafraid and unashamed;
Here man knows woman with the greed
Of Adam’s wonder, the primal need.
The spirit cries out and hymns
In all the muscles of these limbs;
And the holy spirit of appetite
Wakes the browsing body with morning light.111
But what had Augustus done to merit such a rhapsody? For one of the paradoxes of their friendship was that where Augustus dreamed, Symons, in his tireless search for ‘impressions’, often acted. He had breathed in the fantastical air of Dieppe deeper than Augustus, stopping impatiently for a night while in pursuit of some prehistoric fishwomen, could ever have done. And he had actually gone to many of the places, especially in Italy, that Augustus had merely read about. Yet because Symons dreaded action ‘more than anything in the world’,112 he was determined to see Augustus as a great man of action. What mesmerized him was the apparent lack of that guilt which so weighed down his own actions wherever he went.
The flow of poems was for some years their main line of communication. It formed, for Symons, a kind of umbilical cord attaching him to a creative source of life. ‘Dear Symons,’ Augustus replied from Church Street, ‘Today I’ve just come back to find another beautiful poem for me! I would have written columns of gratitude for the others you sent, only the words, not the will, failed me.’*4
Then, in 1908, disaster had overtaken Symons: he had gone mad in Italy. From Venice, urged on by exasperation, he fled to a hotel in Bologna where his wife Rhoda, dressed like a dragonfly, hurried to his side. She found him racked by terrible phantoms, but her concern seemed only to sharpen his torment. For repeatedly she would demand: ‘Do you really love me, Arthur?’ One night he disappeared: he had given his answer. ‘So it has come at last!’ she soliloquized. ‘He no longer loves me!’ Next morning, however, Symons returned and created some dismay by failing to recognize his wife, and then, with foul curses filling his mouth, rushing off chased by horrible shapes and shadows. The hotel manager then explained to Rhoda: ‘Madam, your husband is mad. He has bought three daggers.’ In hysterics she raced back to England, to be arraigned by a herd of Bowsers for having deserted her husband. Symons, meanwhile, had lost himself, drifting day after day in ever-increasing fatigue from one ominous spot to another. ‘I walked and walked and walked – always in the wrong direction.’ At last he was arrested in Ferrara, manacled hand and foot, and thrown into a medieval gaol. It was only with great difficulty that his friends and family got him released and dispatched back to England where, in November 1908, he was confined to Brooke House, a private mental home.
The doctors were confident they could not cure him. They had diagnosed ‘general paralysis of the insane’, which could proceed, they confirmed, through hopeless idiocy to death. They spoke matter-of-factly, were kind, but firm: all hopes, they promised, were ignorant and vain. Symons (who lived thirty-seven more years in perfect sanity) had, they declared, a life expectancy of between two months and two years – it could not be more. His manner of life at Brooke House, though described by the specialists as ‘quiet’, was in some ways unusually active. He took off his clothes and assumed the title of Duke of Cornwall. He frequently dined with the King and kept forty pianofortes upstairs on which he composed a prodigious quantity of music. He rose each morning at 4 a.m., and worked hard on a map of the world divided into small sections; he also wrote plays, devoted endless time to the uplifting of the gypsy, and, when not occupied as Pope of Rome, involved himself in speculations worth many thousands of pounds. But his main duty as a lunatic was to arrange for Swinburne’s reception in Paradise, and when Swinburne died in 1909 the pressure of these delusions began to ease. ‘Had it not been for [Augustus] John,’ he wrote later, ‘whose formidable genius is combined with a warmth of heart, an ardent passion and will, at times deep, almost profound affection, which is one of those rare gifts of a genius such as his, I doubt if I could have survived these tortures that had been inflicted upon me.’
Already by the summer of 1909, Symons was being allowed out from Brooke House in convoy, followed by Miss Agnes Tobin, a West Coast American lady bitten with a passion for meeting real artists, and, at some further distance, a hated ‘keeper’ from the asylum. This procession would make its serpentine way to the home of Augustus who, after losing the keeper ‘without compunction or difficulty’, would set them high-stepping to the Café Royal, where he prescribed for Symons medicines more potent than any administered at Brooke House. ‘At the Café Royal, between five and eight, we each drank seven absinthes, with cigarettes and conversation,’ Symons wrote excitedly.113 There were many of these splendid occasions: visits to the Alhambra Theatre and to the Russian ballets; glorious luncheons at the Carlton and sumptuous suppers with young models in Soho; all for the sake of what Symons called ‘la débauche et l’intoxication’.
Augustus was good to Symons. ‘Although I like him,’ he later explained to his sister Gwen, ‘I find it difficult to support his company for more than 5 minutes.’114 Nevertheless, under the impression that the poor man was shortly to die, he set out to make his last few weeks enjoyable. ‘I have seen Symons a good deal,’ he informed Quinn (25 October 1909) ‘ – he keeps apparently well but one can see all the same that he is far from being so. The doctors give him 2 or 3 more months… he reads out his latest poems – which are all hell, damnation and lust.’
Augustus had not calculated that, a dozen years later, he would still be entertaining Symons ‘a good deal’, and that Symons would still be counting on him to be (14 April 1921) ‘as wonderful as ever’.
What he did for Symons was to blow into his life and keep blowing, ventilating it with humour, filling it with people, elbowing out Symons’s morbid introspection. The delusions melted into nothing before the heat of actual events. But part of Symons’s recovery was due, Augustus maintained, ‘to the kindness and devotion of Miss Tobin’.115 She was forty-five with the light behind her, hailed from San Francisco, had translated Petrarch, and now lived at the Curzon Hotel in Mayfair. She was observed to be ‘a little bit flighty’.116 Conrad (who dedicated Under Western Eyes to her) called her Inez; Francis Meynell, however, called her Lily ‘because of the golden and austere delicacy of her head and neck’; and she called Augustus ‘my poor butterfly’. He stood up to it well. ‘I’ve been seeing Symons and Miss Tobin,’ he told John Quinn (18 December 1909). Symons, he added, ‘keeps pouring out verses’.
The three of them had been brought together (while Augustus was briefly in London following his escape from Liverpool’s Lord Mayor) by John Quinn, the New York lawyer reckoned to be ‘the twentieth century’s most important patron of living literature and art’.117 Quinn arrived in England that summer to buy some pictures by Charles Shannon, Nathaniel Hone and ‘Augustus John, the artist who is much discussed in London now’.118 He had heard tell of both Symons and Augustus from W. B. Yeats and, not content to meet them separately, had arranged for them to see one another too. There appeared to be advantages in this for everyone. Miss Tobin, who was coming into contact with more artists and authors than she could have dreamed possible, made the suggestion that Quinn acquire manuscripts by Symons and her friend Conrad. ‘Your bringing A.S. and Mr John together was a miraculous success and will, I think, be an immense solace to A.S.,’ she assured Quinn (16 September 1909). ‘Mr John told me he would keep up the friendship – and wants A.S. to sit for him.’ Augustus’s portrait of Symons, one of his subtlest interpretations of writers, was delayed until the autumn of 1917 when, though described by Frank Harris119 as showing ‘a terrible face – ravaged like a battlefield’, it was warmly praised by the Symons family. ‘John has done a fine portrait of A[rthur],’ Rhoda confided to Quinn (29 October 1917). ‘…What an odd fish he is; but he has great personal qualities. He has been true to A[rthur] all thro’ these years, and it’s few who have… he’s a great artist, isn’t he?… A[rthur]’s portrait is very El Grecoish!’
Of Quinn Augustus did a number of drawings (one of them described by a friend as ‘the portrait of a hanging judge’) and a large formal portrait in oils – all during a single week in August 1909. On the fifth and final sitting, as Augustus was about to take up his brushes, Miss Tobin stepped forward and exclaimed that the canvas was perfect – ‘at the razor’s edge’. Augustus at once laid down his brushes and began drinking – so the picture was perforce finished.120
Although Quinn affected to think well of his portrait – ‘I liked the portrait John made of me,’ he wrote calmly to Lady Gregory (21 December 1909). ‘And I liked John himself immensely’ – it was not an encouraging likeness. When it was exhibited that autumn at the NEAC under the title ‘The Man from New York’, the critic of the English Review (January 1910) wrote: ‘The peculiar note of hardness which Mr. A. E. John has could not have found a better subject than “The Man from New York”. It shows exactly that hardness which we look for and find in this type of American.’
Quinn insisted that, on reading this, ‘I howled out loud with glee’.121 There are few more doleful sounds than the laughter of a man without humour. Quinn’s lack of humour was a very positive quality and he enjoyed drawing attention to it by cracking jokes.122 His response to Augustus’s portrait was indeed partly the result of its being a very funny picture. It presents him at three-quarters length, seated with his left hand on his hip and his right hand extended, resting on a cane. The shape of his figure is that of a tent and upon a face of tiny proportions at the apex of this design there sits an expression of the sternest vacancy, the mouth of the ‘garrulous Irish American’ for once firmly sealed. Quinn, his biographer B. L. Reid tells us, ‘felt baffled and unhappy about it’,123 though Symons, Pissarro and others considered it ‘extremely good’.124 Bravely, he hung it over his mantelpiece for as long as he lived, but would indignantly protest that Augustus ‘painted me as though I were a referee or umpire at a baseball game or the president of a street railway company with a head as round and unexpressive and under-developed as a billiard ball. Thirty or forty years of life in school, college, university and the world has I hope put a little intelligence into my face. Intelligence is not predominant in the John painting of me, but force, self-assertion and a seeming lack of sensitiveness which is not mine!’125
Quinn’s interpretation of the portrait was right. ‘Do not expect any subtle intelligence from him [Quinn] or any other Yankee,’ Augustus warned Will Rothenstein (20 September 1911). ‘…Money has literally taken the place of brains and character, and the American mind is a metallic jungle of platitude and bluff.’
In an earlier letter to Rothenstein Augustus had lamented the dearth of ‘millionaires of spirit’. In Quinn he had found a millionaire of the purse. He would have liked to like him. ‘We became very friendly,’ he wrote after their first meeting.126 But they valued each other for qualities other than friendship. ‘He’s a treasure,’ Augustus told Dorelia (August 1909). ‘He’s offered me £250 [equivalent to £11,800 in 1996] a year for life and I can send him what I like. He’s a daisy and will do much more than that.’ It seemed to Augustus that so liberal a patron, and one tactful enough not to inconvenience him by living in the same country, presented an ideal solution to his problems. This extra money would release him from a lot of commissioned work and allow him to paint imaginative pictures. ‘I can tell you honestly you did me a lot of good that week in London,’ he wrote in his first letter to Quinn (September 1909), ‘and that quite apart from pecuniary considerations. You will help me to keep up to the scratch.’127
The figure of Quinn, hopelessly beckoning, stood at the end of a long road lavishly paved with good intentions. When, for example, he asks for a complete set of etchings, Augustus willingly consents, adding (4 January 1910): ‘I mean to methodize my work more and put aside say one or two months every year to etching – it can’t be done every day or any day.’ In another letter (25 October 1909) he tells Quinn: ‘I am extremely anxious to study Italian frescos as I am fired with the desire to revive that art… I am quite ready to say goodbye to oil painting after seeing the infinitely finer qualities of fresco and tempera.’ But when Quinn replies with dismay, Augustus hurriedly gives way (18 December 1909):
‘What you say about my remarks on fresco and oil-painting are words of wisdom – I wrote under the enthusiasm of the moment. But I have had time to realise that oil-painting has its own virtues and have given up despising my own past – a thing one is too apt to do, when struck with a fresh idea. I suffer from being unduly impressionable – and often forget the essential continuity of my own life: the result being I am as often put back on my beam’s ends rather foolishly. What you say is true that one is apt to despise one’s own facility – whereas one should recognise it as the road to mastery itself. I shall keep your letter and read it over whenever I feel off the track – my own track. It will be medicine for me who am occasionally afflicted with intellectual vapours.’
One of the contradictions of Quinn’s character was that, while being financially generous, he was a triumphantly mean man. His letters to Augustus and other artists and writers are always business letters, and almost always interchangeable – what has been the main body of one is quoted in another. Essentially this correspondence is a form of memoranda for his files; it is pitted with headings and sub-headings, listings and recapitulations of earlier correspondence. He is not afraid of recounting events out of which he comes extremely favourably and everyone else greatly to their disadvantage. He confesses being partial to ‘juicy girls’, but at the same time he is a sexual puritan much given to amatory philosophizing, for which Augustus seemed an obvious target.
Quinn perfected the art of boredom. Dullness by itself was not enough. He ensnared his victims in the web of his money and inflicted on them his terrible jokes, appalling lectures, his deathly political harangues. Many of his ‘friendships’ disintegrated under this treatment, invariably, on Quinn’s part, with a sense of moral relish. He fed greedily on gossip, extracting confidences and, ‘in confidence’, passing them on. It continually amazed him how extraordinarily stupid people were, and sometimes he wrote to tell them so – though he preferred telling their friends.
But in Miss Tobin, Quinn had met his match. Before long she was seeking to employ him for legal advice about her nightmares. ‘I had a frightful dream which told me efforts were being made to make me out mentally unbalanced at some time or other,’ she informed him (24 July 1911). ‘This is a dreadful stigma. But… the only side of it that is of importance is the legal side. Can you find out for me if I have been found “incapable” at any time for any cause – that is the legal term (“incapable”) isn’t it? Irresponsible, I mean.’ This was a subject upon which Quinn found some difficulty in taking instructions. Miss Tobin was sympathetic. She would cross the Atlantic and call at his office. She would travel with an English nanny who would be seasick. So would he please ‘have a man sent out on a pilot- boat’. There is real pathos when Quinn suddenly cries out: ‘I am a dreadfully driven man!’ But in his legal opinion to Miss Tobin can be detected the seeds of his own lunacy: ‘My conviction [is] that the origin of most dreams is in the stomach or intestines.’
Quinn had rapidly diagnosed Symons’s complaint as venereal disease. Symons might ‘fool them all yet’, he guessed, but Quinn himself would not be fooled. His duty was clear: CABLED FIFTY POUNDS PLEASE WARN FRIEND AGAINST DANGER VENEREAL INFECTION ITALY.
Such cables, which were intended for Augustus and no ‘friend’, reached him wherever he travelled. However far he went, however fast or uncertainly, by van or train or erratically on foot, the venomous torrent of Quinn’s goodwill, choked with the massive boulders of punning and unintentional double entendres, overtook him. At Arles, for instance, Augustus read (February 1910):
‘For God’s sake look out and protect yourself against venereal disease in Italy. Remember the Italians aren’t white people. They are a rotten race. They are especially rotten with syphilis. They don’t take care of themselves. They are unclean. They are filthy. Whatever their art may have been in the past, to-day they are a degenerate, filthy, diseased race. They are professional counterfeiters, professional forgers, habitual perjurers, blackmailers, black-handers, high-binders, hired assassins, and depraved and degenerate in every way. I know two men who got syphilis in Naples… I know another man who got syphilis in Rome. Therefore for God’s sake take no chances. Better import a white concubine than take chances with an Italian. The white woman would be cheaper in the end… Your future is in your own hands, my dear friend. I am convinced you have the intellect to keep the rudder true.’128
In time, Quinn’s medical lunacy took a deeper hold on him, spreading from venereal disease to diseases of the feet and teeth. He became a specialist in sciatica (‘sciatica is a term of ignorance and a disease arising from ignorance’); in lumbago (‘lumbago is a term of ignorance and a disease arising from ignorance’); and in the relationship between fornication and eye strain. The cure for such distempers was soup, eight glasses of water a day and plenty of X-rays. In dentistry, a new American science ‘like chiropody’, lay the secret of ‘healthful’ life. To all writers and artists he was generous with his expertise. Whether they had bad eyesight or bad feet, he would urge them to visit their dentist. ‘I think I wrote to you two years ago I told [James] Joyce that the trouble with his eyes was due to his teeth,’ he reminded Symons (15 November 1923). ‘I could see it.’
What was common to both Symons’s and Quinn’s relationship with Augustus was a form of vicarious living. In Symons this vicariousness is plain: ‘What I am certain of is that John – of all living men – has lived his life almost entirely as he wanted to live it,’ he wrote to Quinn (21 October 1915). ‘So – he is the most enviable creature on earth.’
The vicarious quality in Quinn is more complicated. He led two lives. In the present he worked hard as a lawyer and amassed a considerable fortune; and with this fortune he bought his paintings for the future. He had a good eye for pictures, but he neither enjoyed them much aesthetically nor treated them primarily as financial investments. He collected them so as to shore up his immortality. ‘All my life, or rather for twenty years, it seems to me I have been doing things for others,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein (25 March 1912). The thought gave him no pleasure.
Augustus was one of those for whom, Quinn later came to believe, he had done too much. He initially cast Augustus as an angel on whose back he would ride heavenwards – only to discover that this was not necessarily Augustus’s destination. By 1910 Quinn had arranged to pay him three hundred pounds a year (equivalent to £14,100 in 1996) for the pick of his own work, and a further two hundred pounds to select, on his behalf, work by other British artists. In short, Augustus was to act as his patron’s agent. Quinn’s delusion, almost as fundamental as Symons’s, was that a man who, by his own admission, was inconsistent, temperamental and had different tastes from his own, would be a good choice as his British representative. Nevertheless the plan worked reasonably well for a few years, and it was the eccentricities of Augustus that killed it.
Augustus’s eccentricity was compounded of several ingredients. Between his promise and the fulfilment of that promise fell an almost endless pause. His incompetence over small matters tuned Quinn up to a marvellous pitch of exasperation. What should have been simple was made complicated with radiant ingenuity: paintings were sold twice, or painted over, set fire to, sunk, never begun, or lost for ever. But there was another ingredient – a motive, for all this purposeless perversity. Augustus hated these patron-and-artist dealings: they reminded him of father-and-son arrangements, and he felt an increasing itch to behave badly. He attracted hero-worship – then punished it.
‘We were rather afraid he’d go mad again,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia about ‘poor Arthur’. He was certainly ‘very gaga’ sometimes. But, from among the four of them – Augustus, Quinn, Symons and Miss Tobin – it seems that Symons, protected by an official certificate, was suffering less grievously from ‘intellectual vapours’ than his friends.
‘What’s the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?’
Wyndham Lewis to Augustus John (1910)
‘I am overwhelmed with work just now,’ Augustus wrote to Alick Schepeler, ‘and have to scorn delights (or pretend to) and live laborious days.’ He had it in mind during the autumn of 1910 to prepare a catalogue of his etchings, and to make a book about the gypsies of Europe; he would exhibit some paintings at the NEAC and drawings at the Chenil; and then he would paint all his children, separately and together. He had already started a large new portrait of Dorelia – ‘it ought to be one of the best portraits of a woman in the world,’ he told Quinn (4 January 1910), ‘ – the woman at any rate is one of the best.’ Newest and best of all were two other big enterprises. ‘There’s a millionairess from Johannesburg [Mrs Lionel Phillips] who proposes sending me abroad to study and do some decorations for a gallery at Johannesburg which she is founding,’ he wrote to Quinn (25 October 1909). ‘If she is sufficiently impressed by what I will show her all will be well.’ This opportunity had almost certainly come through Sir Hugh Lane, who was then forming the collection at the Johannesburg Municipal Gallery. Augustus had started work this autumn decorating Lindsay House, Lane’s home in Cheyne Walk – ‘exciting work’, he told Ottoline Morrell (1 October 1909). Wyndham Lewis wrote to encourage him: ‘Let it be an authentic earthquake.’129
Suddenly, at the beginning of December, he was attacked by the most dreadful melancholia. ‘I have been working at little Lane’s walls,’ he explained to Ottoline (4 December 1909). ‘It is an absolutely futile thing to undertake that kind of work in a hurry. I should like to have years to do it in – and then it might last years. Lane himself is a silly creature and moreover an unmitigated snob. It seems my fate to be hasty but I have serious thoughts of quitting this island and going somewhere where life is more stable and beautiful and primitive and where one is not bound to be in a hurry. I want absolutely to grasp things plastically and not merely glance at their charms, and for that one needs time. – As for these commissions such as Lane’s or Phillips’, they are misleading entirely – one is not even asked to do one’s best – merely one’s quickest and convenientest.’
He went on being misled by this ‘house job’ for another two weeks of deepening gloom: then came the earthquake. ‘I have made a drastic move as regards Lane’s decorations,’ he confided to Quinn (18 December 1909). ‘I found doing them in his hall impossible, subjected to constant interruption and inconsequent criticism as I was. Lane himself proved too exasperating in his constant state of nervous agitation… So I exploded one day and told him I’ld take the canvases away to finish – which I have done.’
In a letter Dorelia sent to Ursula Slade at about this time, she reveals that Augustus had spotted ‘a lovely gypsy girl and asked her to sit for him’. This sitting took place next day at Lane’s house, where the two of them were soon joined by ‘a whole band of ruffians’ who made merry in every room and ‘nearly frightened Lane out of his wits’. When the danger had passed and they were gone, Lane ‘was very angry and said it wasn’t at all the thing to do’. It was after Lane’s protest that Augustus erupted against ‘this island’ and carried off his canvases; while Lane himself, in high dudgeon, descended into Monte Carlo.
Dissatisfaction was everywhere. There seemed no light in England, no space in Church Street. ‘Il me faut de l’air, de l’air,’ de l’air,’ Augustus cried out to Wyndham Lewis. By Christmas, his son Robin had fallen ill with scarlet fever. He sat quarantined in one corner of the room with Dorelia’s sister Edie, while the rest of them huddled in the opposite corner. When the Rothensteins, with implacable timing, called round bearing the compliments of the season they were shooed from the door. ‘Our house’, Augustus apologized (4 January 1910), ‘was more hospital than hospitable, I fear.’
Even Dorelia’s cheerful detachment faltered. She felt unwell and, to Augustus’s fury, refused to see a doctor. It was as if she cherished her symptoms, like a list of unspoken complaints. In retaliation he developed catarrh: but as an argument it was hardly satisfactory. Dorelia’s lethargy drained all energy from him, as if she were an electric current and he a mere bulb, growing dimmer. ‘The days are leaden as a rule,’ he confided to Quinn (18 December 1909). ‘…I don’t seem to be cut out for family life… The crisis which takes place at least weekly leaves me less and less hopeful as regards this ménage. It is a great pity as I am fond of the missus and she of me.’
Despite all they had come through together, Augustus felt that they must now live separately. He would take a studio; she could remain at Church Street. Of course they must see each other, but not live together. ‘I think it would be fairer on us both to avoid the day to day test,’ he wrote, ‘and I should work with less preoccupation. You would scarcely believe the violence of the emotional storms I go through so often – and worst of all those gloomy periods that precede them.’130
Yet a curious adhesiveness somehow kept them together. The discord was often loud, but always tenderly resolved with a forgiveness merging into forgetfulness. For it was not as though they were against each other: they fought a common enemy seeking to divide them.
‘It was a horrible pity we got into that state,’ he wrote to her after one row. ‘…I don’t know what precisely brought it on. It was a kind of feeling you were tugging in the wrong direction or exhibiting a quite false aspect of your nature – not the real one which never fails to bowl me over, but like the moon suffers an occasional eclipse.
‘By living together too casually our manners deteriorate by degrees, “inspiration” ceases to the natural accompaniment of irritation and dissatisfaction till at last the awful storms are necessary to restore us to dignity and harmony and equilibrium. You know very well that “expression” in you or state of mind I shall always love as the most beautiful thing in the world and hate to see supplanted by something less divine and you know how mercurial I am, veering from Heaven to Hell and torn to pieces by emotion or nerves or thoughts – is it any wonder we can’t always be happy? I acknowledge my grievous shortcomings as I acknowledge your superior vision to which I owe so much (that’s what I meant by “being useful”!). I never liked any “tart” as a “tart” but for some suggestion of beauty – and even some faint delusive charm is a concrete fact to a poor artist (!). I can’t help thinking we can go on better than we have been by using our wits.’131
The explanation for Dorelia’s ‘false aspect’ tugging ‘in the wrong direction’ was another pregnancy. ‘So, you are in for another brat,’ Augustus remarked. He needed all her devotion, faith, energy; he needed her as mother as well as mistress. But during pregnancy it was not possible for her to provide all this. By the end of the year they had come, somewhat hesitantly, to the conclusion that during the second or third month, she must have had a miscarriage. Augustus seemed rather mystified by this pregnancy (‘I can’t imagine what could be the cause of it’), and Henry Lamb, who had ended his affair with Ottoline, appeared as much concerned as he was.
The New Year promised new hope. Quinn, who attributed their matrimonial difficulties to bad dentistry, had nevertheless sent a Christmas cake to Dorelia and, to Augustus, his first cheque – a magic remedy. ‘I feel by no means dreary now,’ he replied (4 January 1910). ‘…Frank Harris has written me from near Naples132 asking me to come out for a spell – I think I may manage a few weeks off profitably.’
By the second week of January they had drawn up a plan. They would part – but only for a month or so. Augustus would plunge south to escape the winter darkness and, putting Quinn’s money to good uses, explore the French and Italian galleries. Dorelia’s sister Edie, whom Lamb was using as a model, would mind the children, and Dorelia herself, who was still not well, would have an eye kept on her by her friend, and Lamb’s ex-girlfriend, Helen Maitland. Then, once she felt better, Dorelia would leave with Helen and some children to join Augustus – while Edie, as a substitute for her sister, went to stay with Lamb. It seemed an obvious solution to all their problems.
*
Augustus set out by train in the middle of January to explore Provence. In bright sunlight he descended at Avignon and ‘as if in answer to the insistent call of far-off Roman trumpets… I found myself, still dreaming, under the ramparts of the city by the swift flowing Rhône.’133 To Dorelia he sent his first impressions of the place with an illustration of himself approaching a castle across a mountainous landscape (10 January 1910): ‘This is a wonderful country and a wonderful town Avignon. I’m beginning to feel better… The people are certainly a handsome lot on the whole. I see beautiful ones now and then… We could camp under the city walls here.’134
Everything delighted him. Across the Rhône the white town of Ville-neuve-lès-Avignon shone like an illumination from some missal; and in the distance, as if snow-covered, Le Ventoux unexpectedly raised its creamy head. Near by, like a noble phalanstery, stood the Popes’ Palace where Augustus went to admire the fragmentary frescoes of Simone Martini. But it was not the works of art that excited him most: it was the country and its people. ‘I get tired of museums,’ he wrote to Dorelia (17 January 1910). ‘The sun of Provence is curing me of all my humours.’ Of wonderful naivety and charm were the gitano children. ‘I never saw such kids – one of them especially broke my heart he was so incredibly charming, so ceaselessly active and boiling over with high spirits. He was about Robin’s age, but a consummate artist. I went down first thing this morning to see them again but I fancy they have disappeared in the night for one of their hooded carts had gone. It’s so like them to vanish just as you think you’ve got at them.’
His travels took in more encampments than galleries. ‘Nothing so fills me with the love of life as the medieval – antique – life of camps,’ he had (2 October 1909) told Scott Macfie, ‘it seems to shame the specious permanence of cities, and tents will outlast pyramids.’ Already he was feeling miraculously restored. ‘I was in the last extremities of depression before getting here,’ he wrote to Arthur Symons (January 1910), ‘and now I begin to feel dangerously robust.’ From Avignon he advanced to Nîmes and then hurried on to Arles, celebrated for the special beauty of its girls, where he was detained longer. ‘The restaurant cafe where I am stopping here would not be a bad place for us to put up,’ he reported to Dorelia. He was missing her. ‘I can’t sleep alone,’ he complained, ‘and when I do I dream of Irish tinkers and Lord Mayors.’ Surely she would come to rescue him soon? ‘What do you think about coming down here with P[yramus] and R[omilly]? I would love it. We would be quite warm in bed here.’
He made Arles his headquarters for the rest of this month. ‘Arles is beautiful – Provence a lovely land,’ he wrote to Ottoline (18 January 1910). ‘…What a foetid plague spot London seems from this point of vantage. It takes only this divine sunlight to disperse the clouds and humours that settle round in England. I never want to stop there again for all the winter.’ But wherever he went in Provence he was tempted to stop – and would write to Dorelia telling her so. At Paradou he noticed ‘an excellent bit of land to stop on, but we must have light wooded carts and tents – no heavy wagons please.’ There were many such places in France. ‘There’s plenty of sand one could camp on all over the Camargue which is as flat as a pancake and mostly barren,’ he reported to Dorelia.135 ‘I’ve been talking to a young man, a cocker, about getting a cart to move about in.’ Meanwhile he walked huge distances – ‘I have bought the largest pair of boots in the world’ – and sometimes, in bourgeois fashion, travelled by train.
One village that enchanted him was Les Baux – ‘an extraordinary place’, he wrote, ‘built among billows of rocks rather like Palestine as far as I remember. The people of Les Baux are pleasant simple folk – a little inclined to apologise for their ridiculous situation. We could have a fine apartment there cheap. There are plenty of precipices for the boys to fall over.’136 It was at Les Baux that he met Alphonse Broule, ‘a superb fellow’ who claimed to be a friend of the great Provençal poet Mistral whose statue, overcoat on arm, reared itself at Arles – ‘a man singularly like Buffalo Bill’. Broule – ‘a poet’, Augustus first hazarded: ‘an absolute madman’, he later concluded – offered to introduce him to the master, and a few days later they met near Maillane.
‘The country I saw on the way made me wild,’ he wrote to Dorelia, ‘ – so beautiful – a chain of rocky hills quite barren except for olives here and there… finally we came to Mistral’s house; by this time my host was getting very nervous. But we found the master on the road, returning home with his wife… and he was so feeble as to receive us into his house. Mrs Mistral was careful to see that we wiped our feet well first. My companion talked a lot and wept before the master, a large snot hanging from his nose. Mistral listened to him with some patience. On leaving I asked him if he would care to sit two seconds for me to draw him when I passed that way again. He refused absolutely and recommended me to go and view his portrait at Marseilles. I… was enchanted with his answer which showed an intellect I was far from being prepared to meet.’137
Mistral later regretted having forbidden Augustus to do his portrait, he told Marie Mauron,138 but their meeting had horrified him. First there was this terrible man Broule; and then there was his forbidding companion. Let a man like this begin to draw you, he reflected, and you would find him living with you for the rest of your life.
‘I don’t see how Italy could be much better than this,’ Augustus wrote from Arles. Nevertheless he decided to push on to Marseilles, ‘and so to Italy and get through some of the galleries studiously’. The first stage of this journey was to yield a marvellous discovery. Leaving Arles for Marseilles, the railway skirts the northern shores of the vast blue Étang de Berre, bordered by far-off amethyst cliffs. As he travelled along this inland sea, through the pine and olive trees, the speckled aromatic hills, he saw from the window, in the distance, the spires of a town appear, built as it seemed upon the incredible waters. The sensation which this sight, now gliding slowly away, produced on him was like that of a vision. He made up his mind to find out what this mysterious city might be.
At Marseilles another surprise: the town was teeming with gypsies. From the terrasse of the Bar Augas he watched groups of Almerian gitanos lounging at the foot of the Porte d’Aix, staves in their hands, their jet-black hair brushed rigidly forward over the ears and there abruptly cut, like nuns from some obscure and brilliant order. One figure specially caught his attention – a tall bulky man of middle age wearing voluminous high boots, baggy trousers decorated at the sides with insertions of green and red, a short braided coat garnished with huge silver pendants and chains, and a hat of less magnificence but greater antiquity upon his shaggy head, puffing at a great German pipe. Recognizing him as a Russian gypsy, Augustus accosted him in Romany. He had just received from Quinn another fifty pounds (equivalent to £2,350 in 1996) and with some of this he proposed celebrating their meeting, in return for which he was invited back to camp. They arrived, with a certain éclat, in a cab, ate supper round an enormous bonfire and ended the evening amid songs and dances in the Russian style. Augustus, who had come for dinner, stayed a week at this camp. ‘I cannot tell you how they affect me,’ he wrote to Ottoline (February 1910). ‘…I have an idea of dyeing myself chocolate pour mieux poser à Gitano.’
‘Last night Milosch and Terka, my hosts, showed me all their wealth – unnumbered gold coins each worth at least 100 francs, jewels, corals, pearls. This morning came 3 young men, while we were still lying a-bed on the floor, bearing news of the death of a Romany. Terka wept and lamented wildly, beating her face and knotting her diklo [scarf] round her neck and calling upon God. At the station we found 20 or 30 Romanichels seated on the floor drinking tea from samovars. Beautiful people – amongst them a fantastic figure – the husband of the deceased – an old bearded man, refusing to be comforted.’139
Augustus did not draw much, feeling he gained more from watching. ‘I tried to draw some of them,’ he told Dorelia, ‘but they never look the same when they’re posing. All the same it’s worthwhile trying.’ What he hoped to do was to make very rapid sketches from which to work later. ‘When people notice they are being drawn,’ he explained to Ottoline, ‘they immediately change expression and look less intelligent.’
He was learning more Romany every hour, and sending copious word-lists and notes on songs in the direction of Liverpool. What he jotted down in a few hours was enough to keep the best gypsy brains there at work for months. Scott Macfie was gratified by the demoralizing effect of Augustus’s researches. ‘This new dialect seems pretty stiff stuff to work out,’ he wrote gleefully, ‘and it is a pleasure to see signs of exasperation in Winstedt’s remarks. He complains that in consequence of the strain his morals, his habits and his manners have become disgusting.’
Augustus too was happy – although Italy seemed as far off as ever. ‘I’m not particularly impatient to do Italy,’ he reminded Dorelia. ‘Already I’ve seen a good many sights, but no pictures it is true, except the Avignon ones.’ It is possible he would never have crossed the border but for the fact that the gypsies had elected to go there themselves.
‘I may get off to-night to Genoa,’ he eventually informed Dorelia, ‘as the Gypsies are going to Milan I shall see them again. They also mean to come to London.*5 They could give a good show in a theatre. Terka, the woman in whose room I am staying, has a baby 10 months old who I think may die to-night. We went to a doctor to-day who seemed anxious to get rid of us. The little creature bucked up a bit to-night but was very cold. I’m going back now with a little brandy, all I can think of… I might take a room in Milan for a few weeks and try and paint some of these folk.’140
He travelled by night to Genoa, his head still full of gypsies, his bearded and bedraggled appearance itself very gypsy-like. ‘Why was I not warned against coming here,’ he immediately complained to Dorelia. ‘…Wonderful things happened at Marseilles the last two days. I haven’t had my clothes off for a week… I’m sick of Italy.’ But it was really Genoa he disliked. Though it had sounded warm, it was a cold place – ‘a place to avoid’.141 The streets crawled with people, like lice, and ‘the pubs are horrid little places mostly art-nouveau’. Of course the country was better, and the Italian working classes had wonderful faces – virile, martial, keen as birds. But the bourgeois were not fit to be mentioned: and they swarmed everywhere. ‘I took a second class ticket – hoping to get along quicker,’ he told Ottoline (11 February 1910), ‘but I couldn’t put up with the second-class people (not to speak of the first). I had to take refuge in the third class – and was happy then. The 3rd class carriages have a hard simplicity about them which was infinitely comfortable.’ He aimed to ‘get through’ Italy as fast as he could – a week, he calculated, should do the job.
‘As to my handkerchiefs I have two with me, simply foul; socks I have given up; you could grow mushrooms in my vest,’ he wrote to Dorelia. All this contributed to his Italian difficulties. His whirlwind flight, pursued everywhere by Quinn’s venereal imprecations, lasted a full fortnight, but had an effect out of all proportion to this time. Though he disliked the big towns which, after the roughness of Marseilles, struck him as ‘overcultivated’, he loved the country. There were hillocks of brown earth on the way to Siena – ‘things one might invent’, he described them to Ottoline, ‘without ever expecting to see’. The Tuscan landscape seemed not to have changed since the fourteenth century. ‘You know those earthen mounds, gutted with the rains,’ he wrote to Arthur Symons, ‘ – and those mountains, like women in bed, under quilts? What a lusty land it is!’ From Siena, where he was greatly attracted by the frescoes of Pietro Lorenzetti, he came to Orvieto – ‘do you know it?’ he asked Symons. ‘Splendid! The frescoes there break your heart – so beautiful, so magnificent.’ He sped on – to Perugia (‘no shape of a place… nothing but some Perugino frescoes, and Perugino… was rather a soft growth’), and then to Florence which, he told Ottoline (11 February 1910) was ‘magnificent and uncomfortable for a vagrant like myself – and too much to see – too many masterpieces to digest at one meal’. All the same, simply because of the rush, he was seeing things with an intensity that would keep these sights vividly before him.
Deciding to postpone Rome, he turned north and travelled between thick gloomy mountains with half-melted snow on them, through a grey mist hiding the sky, to Ravenna. ‘The mosaics here are superb,’ he wrote to Dorelia. ‘Westminster Cathedral ought to be done in the same manner.’142 He had intended only to change trains at Ravenna, but it was difficult to relinquish the Court of Justinian and Theodora, and so he stayed on several days. The Tomb of Theodoric, with its echoes of Gothic heroes, gave a sense of semi-barbaric splendour compared with which the modern world seemed pale. Padua, his next halting place, and the paintings of Giotto also slowed down his progress. He had seen so much he was growing confused. ‘Was it here I saw Piero della Francesca’s majestic Christ rising from the tomb?’ he wondered.143 ‘I think not.’
But what did it matter, the provenance? Italy, he was discovering, represented for him the authentic tradition to which, undismayed by its splendour, he meant to dedicate himself. But it was in Provence that he was to find another home – ‘I love that patch of ground,’ he told Symons – and it was to the Provençal landscape, and to the landscape of North Wales, that he would look for his finest pictures. In such an atmosphere, less charged with the accumulated glory of the past and where there were no masterpieces to overawe him, Augustus would set to work: but enriched by what he had seen during these two brilliant weeks in Italy. For to Giotto of Padua, to Duccio, Masaccio and Raphael, to Piero della Francesca wherever exactly his resurrected Christ might be, and to Botticelli whose ‘Primavera’, lovely beyond compare, was the brightest jewel of Florence, he would ultimately trace his own cultural beginnings.
And so to Milan. A vast assembly of gypsies – twenty tents of pleasure – occupied a field outside the city. Work was in progress when Augustus approached, and the air rang with the din of hammering and the cries of these wild tribes. To his astonishment he found not only his Marseilles friends but also the coppersmiths he had met two years previously in Cherbourg – and there was a grand reunion. That evening a party filled the principal tent. Black-bearded, sharp-eyed, fierce and friendly, the men had dressed themselves in the costumes of stage brigands. They carried long staves, and their white-braided tunics were decorated with silver buttons as large as hens’ eggs. The women were mostly in scarlet, and each had threaded twenty or more huge gold coins in her hair and on her blouse – a total, in sterling, of at least a hundred pounds. As the great celebration proceeded, these young girls were called upon to dance to the accordions, while the men lifted up their voices in melancholy song. The dancers, without shifting their position on the carpet, agitated their hips and breasts in a kind of shivering ecstasy. Cross-legged at a low table, Todor, the elderly chief next to whom Augustus sat, beat time until the bottles leapt, sometimes in sudden frenzy shattering his great German pipe – immediately to be handed another. Solid silver samovars littered the floor, and on the tables stood elaborately chased silver flagons a foot high and filled with wine and rum. Troops of old men were seated round them in a state of Bacchic inspiration, while outside the tent a crowd of gâjos looked on as if in a hypnotic trance. ‘The absolute isolation of the Gypsies seemed to me the rarest and most unattainable thing in the world,’ Augustus wrote to Scott Macfie (14 February 1910). ‘The surge of music, which rose and fell as naturally as the wind makes music in the trees or the waves upon the shore affected one strangely. It was religious – orgiastic. I murmured to my neighbour “Kerela te kamav te rovav” [“It makes one want to cry”].’
Late that night, while the festivities were in full swing, he tore himself away and, returning the next morning to annotate some songs, found the party still going strong – together with the rattle of twenty hammers beating out copper vessels, and the yelling of youths with shining eyes swaying together in a vast embrace. ‘If ever my own life becomes insupportable I know where to turn for another,’ he wrote to Quinn (3 March 1910), ‘and I shall be welcomed in the tents.’
*
Back to Marseilles. ‘In some respect it beats Liverpool even,’ he wrote to Chaloner Dowdall. He relished the roughness of the place. ‘You ought to let me take you round Marseilles one day,’ he offered the Rani. ‘There are things there to raise the hairs on Rothenstein’s back.’ Now he knew the night spots ‘I feel ready to live here,’ he told Dorelia. ‘One sees beautiful Gitano girls about with orange, green and purple clothes… Hundreds of people to paint… One of the women, without being very dark, is as splendid as antiquity and her character is that of the Mother of God.’
But his letters to Dorelia were filled with anxiety. For however urgently he wrote, she did not answer him. When, for example, he asked for a bundle of postal orders and blank cheques to be sent, a registered envelope arrived at the poste restante which, since he still travelled without a passport, could not be released to him. After summoning two stalwart gypsies to swear in strange tongues as to his identity, he was eventually allowed to open the envelope, which was found to contain a dentist’s bill. He began besieging Dorelia with telegrams. ‘As you don’t answer my three telegrams I conclude you have had enough of me.’ What trickle of news did come through worried him. ‘You had better see a doctor about your poor tummy,’ he had written near the start of his journey, ‘ – and so leave nothing undone that might be good for you. Tell him you thought you had a fausse couche the other day. Now do!’ The only information he had received since then was a note telling him she was suffering from mysterious pains in her side. ‘Your belly is very enigmatic,’ he replied. ‘You’d better come this way at the next period and make sure. You’d don’t want to have any more babies just yet. I don’t suppose you’ld better Pyramus and Romilly. Don’t forget to write… Au revoir, my love, I wish you were here.’
Finally she wrote. ‘I was overjoyed to hear from you,’ he answered. ‘I was steeling myself for another disappointment.’ The news itself was bad – and good. She was pregnant again: it had been a ‘false miscarriage’. She would join him in Provence, together with her friend Helen Maitland and a detachment of family. ‘This is splendid news!’ Augustus wrote back cheerfully. ‘I hope it’ll be another boy! Glad your belly has settled down to proper working order. I wonder what part of the babe will be missing. Its kâri perhaps, in which case it may turn out to be a girl after all.’
‘Certainly she deserves a rest & holiday,’ Lamb remarked, but ‘travelling with Augustus is a rather doubtful way of getting it.’ As for Dorelia herself, she seemed neither happy nor unhappy. Pregnancy was no mighty matter. ‘The terrible thing is I am going to have another infant in August (I don’t really mind),’ she wrote to Ottoline (February 1910). ‘…It is sure to be another boy.’
In view of what was to happen, and of the criticism voiced by Henry Lamb that Augustus was endangering Dorelia’s life, as he had done Ida’s, it is important to establish facts. An unusually intimate letter (‘to no one else could I write so intimately’) which Augustus sent Quinn (3 March 1910) reveals an aspect of what happened that seems to have been unknown to Henry Lamb and others. It also reveals a concern over this new pregnancy that Augustus was careful to keep veiled from Dorelia.
‘The infernal fact is that she is in for another baby sometime this summer. God knows I’ve got plenty of kids as it is, and worst of all Dorelia is not in robust health. Her inside bothers her. I tried my best to avoid this – but she hates interfering with nature. All I hope is that she will at least get strong here. She insisted on bringing 3 of the youngest kids here; 3 remain in London and go to school.’
In his fashion he had been faithful to her, and besides she could always bring him to heel. Almost always. ‘I went through Italy without sampling a single Italian female,’ he gravely reassured Quinn. ‘I saw, however, many with whom I slept (with my eyes open) in fancy.’ He was to rejoin Dorelia at Arles. Travelling up there slowly from Marseilles, he wrote to Ottoline:
‘These really barren hills round here enchant me… I visited this evening two bordels here… the ladies were not very beautiful, strictly speaking – but I found them very aimable… There was a mechanical piano which my acquaintance played with the utmost dexterity. I was thoroughly interested and lost more money than if I had been a “client sérieux”.
At Avignon also I introduced myself into a bordel – “une maison très sérieuse”. The ladies of these establishments are absolute slaves. The patron took all this money and the travailleuses are not allowed to quit the house without permission. However they don’t complain – si le patron est gentil et pour vu qu’il y aurait beaucoup de clients. They are excessively simple.’
Two days later, ‘looking incredible with some white veil over her head’,144 Dorelia arrived.
*
She came with Pyramus, Romilly and Edwin; and with Helen Maitland. Helen was now her closest friend. She was a striking girl, with clear grey-blue eyes, a rosy complexion and finely formed features. Rather small, she held herself upright and moved with a slow, purposeful stride. The set of her face expressed a somewhat daunting determination; her tone of voice, flavoured with irony, was sometimes harsh: and she had a hard energy within. But it was her smile that was remarkable, softening her expression, sending out a challenge, an air of complicity. And it was this smile, which she offered like a bouquet of flowers, that made people pour out their troubles to her. For herself, she seldom spoke of her own difficulties. Like Dorelia, she was a listener.
Like Dorelia, too, she saw her life as a vocation to be fulfilled among artists. She was a woman who preferred, in a maternal fashion, to give love than to have the responsibility of receiving it. She was to marry, eight years later, the brilliant and burly Russian artist in mosaic, Boris Anrep – reputed to be the only man in London capable of standing up to Augustus in a fist fight; and in 1926 she was to leave him to live with Roger Fry,145 many of whose ideas on modern art she was said to have ‘invited’ out of his head. But now she was in love with Henry Lamb.
It was galling to Augustus that, even though Helen’s love might not primarily be a thing of the senses, she should prefer the understudy to the star.146 Besides, in her loyalty to Dorelia, she was quick to be critical of him. His sense of the ridiculous often reduced her to tears of laughter, but though she laughed, she was not happy. Her love affair with Lamb was going badly and she blamed this on his erratic moods which, she believed, he had picked up from Augustus. She disapproved of the insensitive treatment of women on the excuse that they were raw material for art. Such masculine self-importance stirred her fighting qualities. Men she treated as children, and children as nonentities. She preferred men who sustained her belief that women were the more practical sex and should manage things. It was a belief shortly to be tested.
They assembled, the six of them, at Arles and caught the same train south which Augustus had taken the previous month along the Étang de Berre. Like a jewel in a chain changing colour and extending between the barren hills, the great lake seemed to mesmerize them all. ‘I have seen this Étang de Berre looking wonderful,’ Helen wrote to Lamb, ‘it has these pale brown hills all around and it’s small enough to get perfectly smooth the moment the wind is down and then the colours are lovely – very brilliant green one evening with a blue sky. All the way from Arles I was ecstatic with delight… simply speechless with astonishment at the curious light blue of one Étang we passed. It was so bright that it made the sky look dull and dark. They had planted cypresses all along the line so we only saw it for a moment or two now and again through a break in them. But I doubt if any mortal could have stood such loveliness much prolonged. On the other side was a vast stony plain, quite limitless and bare except for sage bushes and sheep.’
They were en route for the town whose spires Augustus had briefly seen rising from the waters on his first journey to Marseilles. At Pas des Lanciers they descended, ate their food squatting in a circle on the platform, then changed to a little railway line whose train skirted the Étang, passing close under hills of extraordinary shape, some very thin with jagged edges stacked one behind another and all bare except for grey aromatic herbs in patches – thyme, lavender and sage. At every orchard, at almost every cowshed, the train would stop. But at last they came to Martigues.
*
‘An enchanting spot this, situated in the water at the mouth of an island sea where it joins the Mediterranean,’ Augustus wrote to Ottoline. ‘…I have seen so many powerful women whose essential nudity no clothing can disguise. In the little port at hand are found sea-farers from all the shores of the Mediterranean.’
For several days they stayed at a hotel, then moved into ‘an admirable logement unfurnished and unwallpapered, with a large room in which to paint’. This was the Villa Ste-Anne, a house they were to keep, using it intermittently, for the next eighteen years. On the outskirts of Martigues, along the route to Marseilles, it stood upon a steep yellow bank overlooking the blue waters of the lagoon. From the terrace stretched a plantation of pine trees, and all around were trackless stones, and rocky grey hills interfused with heather and sweet-smelling herbs. To Dorelia’s delight, they had a large wild garden with olives, vines, almonds, figs and ‘weeds all over the ground which is covered in pale coloured stones’.147
For the time being they shared the villa with its proprietor, a hawk-faced Huguenot with a passion for flying named Albert Bazin. Over twenty experimental years he had constructed a squadron of aeroplanes, all of which flapped their wings. From time to time, while Mme Bazin delivered a narrative of proceedings from the shore, he would launch one of them, like some enormous gnat, across the waters where at a desperate rate it would rise fractionally from the waves, sweep through a wide arc, then plunge into the bosom of the lake. Although these machines were always reduced to salads, Bazin himself was miraculously unhurt. With the arrival of Augustus his aviation fantasies soared to their highest altitude. For he recognized in this painter the perfect ‘jockey’ for his machines, and a source of revenue with which to continue his inventive industry. Augustus was delighted with this philosopher of the air and promised to sound out various art patrons on his behalf. Bazin needed, initially, a mere two hundred pounds (equivalent to £9,400 in 1996) to take off and ‘it must be found’, Augustus informed Ottoline (May 1910), since he was the ‘finest man and aviator in France’. But it was Quinn who, through many months, bore the brunt of Augustus’s enthusiasm. In letter after letter he was buried under information about this ‘real savant as regards flying matters’, flooded with journals that contained articles by Bazin proving that he ‘has got ahead theoretically at least of the other men’ such as Blériot. Augustus’s appeals took many forms. Would Quinn like ‘to collaborate with him and his machine No. 8 which ought to be ready in the autumn, if he finds the cash?’ Could some ‘American energy’ be harnessed for ‘my bird-like neighbour’? Perhaps someone from ‘the Land of Enterprise’ might investigate his ‘case’. ‘I wrote to you lately as longwindedly as I could about Albert Bazin,’ Augustus reminded him (23 May 1910). ‘…Do not be bored with Bazin yourself but bore your friends as much as you can.’ Quinn alternated between alarm on Augustus’s behalf – ‘don’t you attempt to go out on Bazin’s machine’ – and alarm on his own: ‘Personally I can’t afford to “take a flyer” now myself.’ Although any appeal to bore his friends was irresistible, he disliked such methods when applied to himself. ‘Say at once if you are not interested in the matter,’ Augustus would beg him like someone stone deaf, ‘and I will cease to bore you.’ ‘I am afraid it is hopeless!’ cried Quinn. But Augustus, approaching the problem from a different angle, urged: ‘He [Bazin]’s got a fine young daughter of 18 summers. The fact might as well be mentioned in view of the collaboration.’ ‘I’d rather collaborate with his daughter than I would with the old man,’ Quinn conceded, adding however that ‘Marseilles seems to be far off. But though the geography might be poor, the biology was strong enough, he insisted: ‘I may tell you that not eating much meat and not drinking lessens the strain on the testicles… I have doubled my efficiency since I quit eating so much and since I stopped drinking. If only I could cut out smoking entirely, I would treble my efficiency.’
The pattern of life at the Villa Ste-Anne, though confused a little by good intentions, was straightforward. ‘I am installed in this little house with a batch of family and hard at work,’ Augustus promised Quinn (2 April 1910). ‘The weather has been glorious and we have been out of doors all day for weeks.’ They bought a boat and spent many days dreamily rowing across the glass-like surface of the lake. ‘From time to time, as with dread I looked down into the bottomless void beneath us,’ Romilly John recalled, ‘an enormous jellyfish of a yellowish grey colour sailed by, trailing in gentle curves long streamers decorated with overlapping purple fringe: it seemed to emphasize the spatial quality of the blue depths.’148
This was a good place for the children. There was a donkey, plenty of berries, the stretch of salt water and ‘a rock we play on’, Caspar explained in a letter to his aunt, Ursula Nettleship. For Caspar especially this was a magical holiday as, naked and starry-eyed, he watched the fanatical birdman skimming over the lagoon in his primitive machine, and dreamed of growing wings himself and flying. It was ‘the tender age of aerial experimentation’ and these pioneers, the Wright brothers ‘hopping like wounded birds among the sand dunes of North Carolina’,149 and Blériot the previous year making the first aeroplane crossing of the English Channel, and Bazin (‘a crank but he was not mad’), dedicating their lives to this dream of flight, were all heroes to Caspar who, during the 1930s, would be the top aviator of the Fleet Air Arm.
While Dorelia took the children off for water-picnics, Augustus would harness the donkey and go on long sketching expeditions. ‘One sees much more by these means,’ he told Quinn (2 April 1910), ‘and one doesn’t go to sleep.’ At night, while Dorelia cooked and the children eventually fell into bed, Augustus would read: gypsy literature from Liverpool, Provençal masters such as Daudet and Mistral, poems from Symons and prose from Wyndham Lewis, the works of Léon Bloy, and old copies of the New Age.
Gypsies would sometimes pass the door, be invited in for a drink and a talk, and stay several days. Somehow there was always enough food for them. ‘We had the house full of gypsies for about a week,’ Dorelia wrote to Ottoline (May 1910). ‘…It was great fun. They would dance and sing at any hour of the day.’
At intervals, when the supply of gypsies grew scarce, Augustus would take himself off to Marseilles and team up with ‘some Gitano pals’ who were teaching him to play the guitar. From here he could keep watch on a piece of waste ground outside the town over which passed a strange procession: bear-leaders from the Balkans; wagon-loads of women; Russians ‘fresh from Russia’; a pantalooned tribe of Turkish wanderers from Stamboul ‘in little brown tents of ragged sacking far from impervious to the rain’, waiting for a boat to Tangier; a band of mumpers from Alsace (‘a low unprofitable company’); Irish tinkers, Dutch nomads, French Romanichels, travellers from southern Spain, Bosnians, Belgians, Bohemians, Bessarabians – ‘the travelling population of France is enormous.’150 If only he could import some into Surrey, and let them breed!
His word-lists grew longer and his calligraphy more fevered. Of everyone he inquired about Sainte Sara and the gypsy pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. ‘This pilgrimage may be the last of the old pilgrim mysteries of the gypsies,’ he assured Scott Macfie (14 May 1910). He ransacked the library at Aix; he reverently inspected the bones of the Egyptian saint at Saintes-Maries. But beyond various stories of miraculous cures he could discover little. It did not matter. For though Sainte Sara was a problem to be solved by the Gypsy Lore Society, to Augustus she remained a symbol, and the annual fête at Saintes-Maries a renewed act of faith. As such, it presented itself to him as a picture by Puvis de Chavannes, and would dominate the last years of his life.
His letters to Scott Macfie intersperse gypsy scholarship with exploits among the ‘inveterate whores of Marseilles’151 whom he contemplated introducing into his decorations for Hugh Lane. They were everywhere, like an army of occupation. To run the gauntlet of what he called ‘this fine assortment of Mediterranean whores’,152 he resorted, Wyndham Lewis-style, to the protection of a voluminous cloak – ‘a cloak albeit of stout fabric’ – like a bandit. ‘Why does the employment of a prostitute cause one’s last neglected but unbroken religious chord to vibrate with such terrifying sonority?’ he suddenly demanded (16 March 1910). From Liverpool came little response to these Dostoevsky-like rumblings, and Augustus was left to ponder them alone.
‘As to whores and whoredom, considered from the purely practical point of view (never really pure) as a utility it is an abomination which stinks like anybody else’s shit,’ he volunteered (30 March 1910); ‘considered morally it is a foul blasphemy which must make Christ continually sweat blood: but without either point of view, there is an aspect of beauty to be discovered – which indeed jumps at one’s eye sometimes – whores, especially at 20 sous la pusse, have often something enigmatic, sacerdotal about them. It is as if one entered some temple of some strange God, and the “intimacy” really doesn’t exist except to reveal the untraversable gulfs which can isolate two souls.’
To ‘know’ someone in the biblical sense, and to know her otherwise not at all; to preserve the stranger-element in a physical union; this symbolized, without speech, the loneliness of human beings. No one said anything, and nothing was expected. The relationship was a single act with no descent into tedium, no clash of wills. It was the implications of the act rather than the act itself that lived in the imagination. A number of times this spring and summer Augustus took off for Marseilles, drank whisky, ‘misbehaved’, and returned to Martigues the better for it. But this was, he admitted to Scott Macfie (3 April 1910), ‘a dangerous subject’.
*
Henry Lamb had recently written to Ottoline Morrell suggesting a ménage-à-six. There would be the two of them, and of course her Philip and naturally his Helen Maitland. And then inevitably, for the sake of continuity, there would be Augustus and Dorelia. He illustrated the proposal with a diagram of himself as a bee, flitting round the circle. It was not the sort of joke that much amused Ottoline. Perhaps Henry, in his efforts to free himself of Augustus, was becoming too greatly influenced by Lytton Strachey.
Ever since they had settled into Martigues, Augustus and Dorelia had been inviting Ottoline to visit them in their new villa. But she remembered that damp meadow outside Cambridge. However, she did agree to meet them at Cézanne’s house in Aix-en-Provence.
Augustus and Dorelia travelled all day in their donkey cart. Ottoline found them sitting outside a café, Dorelia very beautiful in a striped cotton skirt, a yellow scarf covering her head; Augustus, his square-cut beard now pointed in the French manner, ‘which made him look like a dissipated Frenchman, as his eyes were bloodshot and yellow from brandy and rum’.153 Together they went to Cézanne’s house on the outskirts of Aix, which still contained a number of his pictures including the murals of the four seasons mysteriously inscribed ‘Ingres’; and the next day they explored the town. Augustus, Ottoline observed, was a bored and weary sightseer.
‘In the afternoon when we returned we found him sitting outside a café drinking happily with the little untidy waiter from the hotel and a drunken box-maker from the street nearby. In his companions he requires only a reflecting glass for himself, and thus he generally chooses them from such inferiors. He seems curiously unaware of the world, too heavily laden and oppressed with boredom to break through and to realize life.’154
Ottoline left Aix with the secret conviction that she, rather than Dorelia, could have guided Augustus ‘into greatness such as Michelangelo, Cézanne or Van Gogh’.
His second expedition that summer could only have confirmed Ottoline in this conviction. It was to Nice – ‘a paradise invaded by bugs (human ones)’155 – and involved what he called ‘some mighty queer days’ with Frank Harris. He had first met Harris in Wellington Square, Chelsea, with Max Beerbohm, Conder, Will Rothenstein and others. With his booming voice and baleful eye, Harris imposed himself upon the company by sheer force of bad character – or so it appeared to Augustus, whose attention was taken up with the stately figure of Constance Collier, the flamboyant actress somewhat improbably engaged to Max Beerbohm. While Harris was holding the floor, Augustus suggested to this ‘large and handsome lady’ that she sit for him, adding, perhaps tactlessly, that he would have to find a bigger studio. ‘Why not take the Crystal Palace then?’ boomed Harris, suddenly exploding into their conversation: and everyone laughed. He was, Augustus rather sourly observed, very much the pièce de résistance of the party, a position Augustus preferred to occupy himself. Like Augustus, Harris presented a bold front to the world. ‘Stocky in build, his broad chest was protected by a formidable waistcoat heavily studded with brass knobs,’ Augustus wrote. ‘With his basilisk eyes and his rich booming voice he dominated the room. Hair of a suspicious blackness rose steeply from his moderate brow, and a luxuriant though well-trained moustache of the same coloration added a suggestion of Mephistopheles to the ensemble.’156
Harris took an apparently flattering interest in Augustus, claiming in return that ‘he praised my stories beyond measure’ – the sort of high-flown approval he regretted being just unable to accord Augustus’s paintings. This was a preliminary exercise in psychological outmanoeuvring. In fact Augustus had not greatly admired Harris’s fiction, but praised The Man Shakespeare as ‘a wonderful book’, in what Harris called a ‘most astonishing letter’ which he would put with his ‘collection of letters from Browning, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Coventry Patmore, Huxley, Swinburne and Wilde’. To this literary judgement Harris also responded with a burst of artistic criticism: ‘The quality of his [John’s] painting is poor – gloomy and harsh – reflecting, I think, a certain disdainful bitterness of character which does not go with the highest genius.’ Then, describing Augustus as ‘a draughtsman of the first rank, to be compared with Ingres, Dürer and Degas, one of the great masters’, he bought a drawing, persuaded Augustus fulsomely to inscribe it to him, then sold it for a nice profit to a dealer where, to his irritation, Augustus later stumbled across it.
In an unfair world, where it was always necessary to turn the tables on those who were over-gifted, Harris saw Augustus as a potentially superior version of himself – a deep lover of women, a lusty drinker, a creature of fantasy and talent, a rebel Celtic artist who disdained the social successes that Harris had coveted. Lunching at the Café Royal at the time The Man Shakespeare was published (autumn 1909), Harris was struck by Augustus’s height, beauty and ‘great manner’ which, he wrote, ‘swept aside argument and infected all his hearers. Everyone felt in the imperious manner, flaming eyes and eloquent cadenced voice the outward and visible signs of that demonic spiritual endowment we call genius.’157
Harris was then considering himself in the role of prosperous gallery owner. His blandishments, mixed in with pious references to Jesus Christ, continued to arrive by post that winter, first from Ravello, then from Nice. He believed Augustus might do worse than illustrate his story ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’, and urged him: ‘Don’t be afraid of telling me of any faults you may see’ in his books, however difficult this might be. Eventually in the spring of 1910 Augustus agreed to visit him. He arrived at Nice station dressed in corduroys and with his painting materials in a small handbag. On the platform he was met by Harris decked out in full evening dress, apparently disconcerted by his guest’s lack of chic, yet determined to carry him off to the Opera House where he had a box lent to him by the Princess of Monaco. Here his wife Nellie awaited them ‘attired for the occasion in somewhat faded and second-hand splendour’. The composer of ‘the infernal din’ to which they were subjected soon joined them and, taking a dislike to Augustus on sight, restricted his compliments to Harris. Augustus gathered that ‘I was assisting at a meeting between “the modern Wagner” and “the greatest intellect in Europe”.’158
What happened later that night and on subsequent nights back at Harris’s home was peculiar. ‘I was shown my room which, as Frank was careful to point out, adjoined Nelly’s, his own being at a certain distance, round the corner… Before many hours passed in the Villa, I decided I was either mad or living in a mad-house. What I found most sinister was the behaviour of Nelly and the female secretary. These two, possessed as it seemed by a mixture of fright and merriment, clung together at my approach, while giggling hysterically as if some desperate mischief was afoot.’ Ten years later Nellie Harris hinted to the biographer Hesketh Pearson that she had repulsed Augustus’s advances during this visit.159 Whatever the facts, Augustus came to an opposite conclusion, sensing a deeply laid Harris plot.
What is so strange in testing for the truth of this episode is that Harris was extremely possessive of Nellie; while Augustus, though he often gets details wrong (such as Harris’s house at Nice) and embroiders facts, had little gift for invention. He had come to suspect that, by taking advantage of Nellie’s night-time propinquity, he would lay himself open to Harris’s ‘requests’ for money. That Harris was keen on raising funds is undeniable, yet Augustus’s interpretation of what was in his mind was probably wrong. Harris was, in the view of the artist J. D. Fergusson, a Robin Hood robbing the rich in order one day to reimburse the poor. His vendetta was carried on against the socially successful for the ostensible benefit of the writer and artist. That he himself was poor and a writer enabled him to begin and end many of these charitable exercises at home. Although Augustus could congratulate himself on having ‘failed’ Harris, it seems more likely that he played up perfectly. From Carlyle onwards, Harris sought to humiliate, usually in some sexual context, those he admired. Such men pointed the way to all that Harris prized – power and the love of women – but at their own risk, for Harris’s route was paved with their exposed lives. He resented that his own notoriety as a biographer should depend upon the fame of other men. Shakespeare was beyond his reach, if only in time; but his books on Shaw and Wilde, and his series of ‘Contemporary Portraits’, ring loud with this rival-complaint. His novels and short stories reveal Harris’s hopes of self-greatness. In Undream’d of Shores, for example, there is an account of a great Mogul ruler, curiously similar to Harris, who tells the girl he loves that there are many men handsomer and stronger than he. But she denies this, asserting that he is the most splendid man in the Court, for ‘although he was only a little taller than the average’ there was, she reminds him, his ‘black eyes and hair and his loud deep voice’. Harris set up situations which allowed him to score off those who were publicly acknowledged to be handsome, talented, tall and romantic. Harris’s Contemporary Portrait of Augustus reveals his attraction and resentment unashamedly.
‘It was Montaigne who said that height was the only beauty of man, and indeed height is the only thing that gives presence to a man. A miniature of Venus may be more attractive than her taller sisters, but a man must have height to be imposing in appearance, or indeed impressive.’
Harris then goes on to portray Augustus as a perfect example of the male species.
‘Over six feet in height,*6 spare and square shouldered, a good walker who always keeps himself fit and carries himself with an air, John would draw the eye in any ground. He is splendidly handsome with excellent features, great violet eyes and long lashes… he is physically, perhaps, the handsomest specimen of the genus homo that I have ever met.’
Yet this was the man who, three nights in succession, had been rejected by Nellie; who had failed precisely where Harris was successful. His pitfall, Harris insists, ‘is not drink’. Jesus drank. No: if he fails ‘it will be because he has been too heavily handicapped by his extraordinary physical advantages. His fine presence and handsome face brought him notoriety very speedily, and that’s not good for a man. Women and girls have made up to him and he has spent himself in living instead of doing his work.’
By the third night at Harris’s villa Augustus had had enough and, shouldering his belongings, stole out at dawn and made his way down the hill to Nice harbour, where he laid up in a sailors’ café. ‘Ah! the exquisite relief! To be alone again and out of that infected atmosphere, that madhouse!’160 It was an instance of that ‘certain abruptness of manner’ without which, Harris gleefully noted, ‘he would be almost too good-looking’.
In his amusing descriptions of Harris thirty years later, Augustus attempts to get something of his own back by taking it out of him visually. Harris, he observes, ‘was looking his ugliest’ by the third day; while Nellie (then in her thirties and not unattractive) is converted into a middle-aged matron. But when, in 1929, Augustus first read Harris’s Contemporary Portrait of him, he was not amused. In a letter to Harris’s biographer Elmer Gertz (25 May 1929), he explains that he had left Harris’s villa ‘because I found the moral atmosphere of the place unbearable… I could not consent to stay as the guest of a cad and bully posing as a man of genius.’ Besides, his host’s habit of dragging the name of Jesus Christ into any conversation was obnoxious ‘coming from a man of Harris’s moral standards’.161 Here, unmistakably, is the pomposity of Edwin John, his father. His fear of blackmail marks the first hereditary pull towards that inflated caution with which, in later years, he sought to protect himself. ‘It seems hopeless for me ever to attempt to conceal even the secrets of the water-closet from the outside world,’ he complained to Wyndham Lewis (July 1910). ‘There will still be an industrious person with a rake stationed at the other end of the sewer. It is true that I don’t put myself out for secrecy… ’ But the superficial film of secrecy had already begun to grow.
*
The effects of his visit to Nice lingered with Augustus like a bad hangover. ‘I expect he would be less gloomy with just his Family,’ Helen Maitland confided to Lamb. Soon afterwards she left Martigues to join Lamb, having assured herself that Dorelia ‘seems better. She doesn’t get a pain in her side anymore.’
A few weeks later, in the early morning of Monday 1 May, Dorelia gave birth prematurely to a dead child at the Villa Ste-Anne. Throughout that day her life hung agonizingly in the balance. ‘She nearly died afterwards of loss of blood and was really saved by having sea-water injected into her body,’ Augustus wrote to Quinn (5 May 1910). ‘…The child, which was a girl, would have been welcome 3 months hence. It had got displaced somehow.’ Pale and weak, Dorelia kept to her bed for a month. ‘Happily she has more common sense than would be needed to fit out a dozen normal people and doesn’t worry herself at all, now that she is comfortable.’
Augustus was less calm. The hideous threat of puerperal fever which had killed Ida terrified him – ‘I know that demon already too well.’ He was seized with a panic of guilt and helplessness. Now that his family was so scattered – three children in France, three in London, and one, Henry, in Hampshire – he needed more than ever a strong centre to his life. If Dorelia died, everything fell apart. Being ‘totally without help except for the neighbours’, he wired Helen Maitland, who returned bringing with her Henry Lamb. ‘We made an amnesty for these peculiar conditions,’ Lamb explained to Ottoline. With Dorelia and Helen in the house, Lamb assumed a very John-like role, and it was difficult for Augustus to object, though he feared, in Lamb’s wake, tremors of gossip.162 Only when it was clear that Dorelia was ‘on the high road to recovery’ did Lamb leave, after which Helen kept him informed by letter. ‘Her lips are dreadfully pale but I think she’s getting better really’ (19 May 1910). In another letter she observed: ‘Dorelia, you know, doesn’t care for herself and if she thinks she does for other people I am sure it’s a mistake and it’s something else that she minds.’
Though she had brought a packet of tea with which to combat the crisis, Helen was handicapped by being unused to children and cooking.163 Her meals may well have helped to subdue the boys, and they began to tell even on Augustus’s constitution. ‘He is very saintly the way he eats the strange food put before him and even finds ways of pretending to like it,’ she wrote to Lamb.
By 25 May, Augustus reported that Dorelia ‘is getting strong. She is gay to ravishing point.’164 They had emerged at last from their ‘awful adventure’ but, anxious to avoid any possibility of a relapse, Augustus planned to import ‘a sturdy wench’ into the house to do the work as soon as Helen left. ‘We have an abominably pretty housemaid,’ he was able to complain a little later that summer.165
Dorelia’s illness overshadowed the rest of that summer at Martigues. For a time Augustus took a studio in Marseilles – ‘an astonishing town’, he assured Quinn (28 May 1910), ‘probably the dirtiest in Europe’. But he grew ill with a series of stomach disorders cheerfully diagnosed by Dorelia as appendicitis, cancer and ulcers. Personally he blamed the climate, which was too hot, too dry and too windy. By July the other four children arrived – something Augustus strongly welcomed in theory – and their complaints were added in chorus to his own. ‘I have my whole family over here now, and it’s a good deal,’ he conceded.166 Regular cheques from Quinn and Hugh Lane arrived; but he was more resistant to this medicine now. He found himself a martyr, suddenly, to homesickness. ‘There are no green fields here,’ he noticed (5 August 1910), ‘scratch the ground and you come to the rock… a green meadow smells sweet to me… This place doesn’t succeed in making me feel well – but I have intervals of well being.’167 A curious longing for the west of Ireland swept over him, and for the people of Ireland with their wry ramshackle ways, so much more appealing than the complacent natives of Provence. ‘These people are too bavard [talkative],’ he told Ottoline (5 August 1910), ‘too concrete – too academic even. They all look as if they’ve solved the riddle of the universe and lost their souls in the process.’
In this mood he decided to return to London before the end of September and, though he at once regretted this decision, it gave a zest to his last month there. He was working once more against time, and this suited him. Although little finished work had been possible – or so he believed – he had lightened his palette and made many brilliant little studies that would, he calculated, be useful for his Hugh Lane decorations. He felt that he had begun something new ‘with all the lust and keenness of a convalescent’.168
‘What I have been about here is rapid sketching in paint,’ he told Quinn (25 August 1910), ‘and I can say (with some excitement) that it’s only during the last week or two that I have made an absolute technical step… I want to live long!’
That November the fruits of Augustus’s nine months abroad were shown at the Chenil Gallery in a one-man show entitled ‘Provençal Studies and Other Works’. At the same time, a mile away, another exhibition had just opened: Roger Fry’s ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’.
*1 ‘The portrait was painted in 1907 at Coole by Augustus John,’ Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespeare on 13 November 1933, the year after Lady Gregory died. ‘I am using it as a frontispiece for my collected volume of lyrics which you will get in a day or two.’ When the etching was rejected, Yeats had written privately to his publisher A. H. Bullen (March 1908): ‘The Augustus John is a wonderful etching but fanciful as a portrait. But remember that all fine artistic work is received with an outcry, with hatred even. Suspect all work that is not.’
*2 ‘I have recently taken it upon myself (with what share of justification I know not) to confer the title Rai upon a friend of mine – one Percy Wyndham Lewis – whose qualifications – rather historical or anthropological than linguistic viz. – the having coupled and lived in a state of copulation with a wandering Spanish romi in Brittany – seemed to me upon reflection to merit the honourable and distinctive title of our confraternity,’ Augustus informed Scott Macfie (6 November 1908). ‘…I may add that my friend appears fully to appreciate the value of his new dignity. He remarks: “Henceforth, my brother, my seed is implicated with that of Egypt”.’
*3 The words ‘one of them’ have been crossed out, and ‘they’ more accurately substituted.
*4 Yet the words, so failing in gratitude, were more forthcoming in parody. John wrote a number of verses in the Symons style. See Appendix Four.
*5 They turned up in the summer of 1911 at Liverpool and were infiltrated by several members of the Gypsy Lore Society in costume.
*6 Augustus was actually just under six feet, but walked tall.