‘I saw in Augustus and Dorelia two of that rare sort of people, suggestive of ancient or primitive themes, whose point lay rather in what they were than in what they said or did. I felt that they would have been more at home drinking wine under an olive tree or sitting in a smoky mountain cave than planted in this tepid English scene. But at least they were bohemians and kept up with style and lavish hospitality the old tradition of artistic life that had come down from William Morris or Rossetti. This I thought was important… ’
Gerald Brenan, A Life of One’s Own
That summer of 1911 was oppressively hot. The heathlands of the Wimborne Estate were turning brown, and from time to time fires would break out sending columns of smoke far up into the blue skies.
The carts and wagons, with their wildly singing children, rattled past in the sun. Then, swerving off the narrow road, they entered a drive lined, like a green tunnel, with rhododendrons tall as trees. They turned left; and there, before them, lay a curious low pink building, a bungalow with Gothic windows and a fantastic castellated parapet: Alderney Manor.
It looked like a cardboard castle in some Hans Andersen story – a fragile fortress, square, strangely misplaced, from which an army of toy soldiers might suddenly emerge, or a puff of wind might knock flat. The smooth stucco surface, once a proud red, had faded leaving patches here and there of the cardboard colour. With its single row of windows pointing loftily nowhere, the house seemed embarrassed by its own absurdity. ‘But its poetry even outdid its absurdity… There was something fantastic and stunning about it.’1
Alderney was to be the Johns’ home for the next sixteen years. Like Fryern Court, into which they moved afterwards, it became Dorelia’s creation and an eloquent expression of her personality. The rich colours – yellows, browns and mauves – the arrangements of flowers everywhere lighting up the rooms, the delicious meals – huge soups, stews and casseroles with rough red wine, fish with saffron and Provençal salads with plenty of garlic, tomatoes and olive oil – the wood fires filling the air with their fragrance, contributed to its happy disorder. For they were not tidy places, these houses. Lord David Cecil remembers leaving his hat on the floor one evening, and returning six weeks later to find it undisturbed. Nor were the manners formal: guests were seldom introduced to one another and might be confronted on arrival by an animal silence from the whole John pack. Sometimes visitors would find no one in the house at all, though all doors and windows lay open as if everyone had suddenly vanished through them. When the Spencer brothers, Gilbert and Stanley, came to stay
‘we found the children frightening. At bed time everyone seemed to fade away but no one attempted to “show us to our bedrooms” until we decided that you slept as you fell but took the precaution of falling on odd pieces of furniture which made things easier… Requiring a lavatory I decided to seek one unaided. Having no luck I opened the front door very quietly and crept out into the darkness. Dorelia went into another room and noticing a bowl of dead flowers, opened a window and flung them out smack into my lap.’2
Yet there was a quality to the house. ‘It was like a royal household in the heroic age,’ wrote Romilly John, ‘at once grand and simple.’3 For many it became a place to run away to, a place where someone, calling for tea, might hang on a week, a month, even a year. These visitors perpetually filled Alderney, overflowing into the blue-and-yellow caravans and the ‘cottage’ – a red-brick building, actually larger than the ‘Manor’, standing invisible a hundred yards off behind a range of rhododendrons. ‘This intervening vegetation made comings and goings difficult on wintry nights,’ Romilly recalled: ‘those unfamiliar with the route would bid a cheerful good night to the house-dwellers, launch out into the dark, and presently find themselves struggling amid a wilderness of snaky boughs.’
Alderney had eight rooms. At one end was the dining-room with its long oak table and benches, and a row of windows through which, at mealtimes, the horses would poke their heads, and doze. At the other end, looking on to beech trees, towards the orchard and the walk to the sandpit, was the kitchen. In between lay the bedrooms, and below them capacious cellars.
The kitchen, noisy with helpers, was ruled over by Dorelia’s sister Edie. She was small, with black-brown hair and large brooding eyes, their upper lids curiously straight giving them a strange rectangular shape. Her mouth was rather prominent, curving downwards, and her expression sardonic yet vulnerable – an index of her life to come. Into her care were given the youngest children and some of the cooking until a local woman, Mrs Cake, was engaged.
By helping to run things inside the house, Edie enabled Dorelia to give more time to the gardens. Her first venture was, appropriately, with an Alderney cow which provided colossal quantities of cream so rich it had the taste of caramel. This cow was soon followed by ‘a large black beast called Gipsy, an adept in the art of opening gates and leading off the increasing herd to unimagined spots in the remote distance’,4 where a team of children would be sent off to shepherd them home. The children were also trained to help Dorelia milk the herd, to skim the milk and make butter. ‘We’d skim the cream out of shallow metal vats,’ Caspar remembered. ‘…Then we poured the cream into an eccentric hand-rotated churn… We then took the lump [of solidified cream] into the kitchen and squeezed out all the buttermilk with rolling pins and patted the butter into rounds or cubes.’5
To the cows, at one time or another, were added, less successfully, a dovecote of pigeons (which all flew away); and, briefly, a ‘biteful’ monkey; then an entire breeding herd of pedigree saddleback pigs; various donkeys, New Forest ponies and carthorses, all with names; miscellaneous dogs, including a fat dachshund called Sonny which looked like a sack of potatoes on wheels; and, among the teacups, endless cats – Siamese, white, tabby and black – which bore unheard-of relationships to one another. Finally came twelve hives of dangerous bees that stung everyone abominably.
‘People who were staying at Alderney would come and watch the operations from a distance, whereupon a detachment of bees made a bee-line for them, alighting on their noses and cheeks and in their hair, which would cause them to rush round and round the field beating their heads like madmen. The next day everybody would present an extraordinary and uncharacteristic appearance. People who had usually long solemn faces would appear with perfectly round ones, and a perpetual clownish smile. Eyes would vanish altogether, and once or twice the victims retired to bed with swollen tongues, convinced… they would be choked to death… At last we resorted to a couple of old tennis racquets… Anybody at a little distance might have imagined that we were playing some very intricate kind of tennis, with special rules and invisible balls.’6
In all things Dorelia seemed to rely on instinct rather than planning. She invented as she went along, ignoring the occasional disasters. ‘With an air of complete ease and leisure, without hurrying or raising her voice, her long Pre-Raphaelite robes trailing behind her as she moved, she ran this lively house, cooked for this large family and their visitors, yet always appeared to have time on her hands,’ wrote Gerald Brenan. ‘…I remember her best as she sat at the head of the long dining-table, resting her large, expressive eyes with their clear whites on the children and visitors and bringing an order and beauty into the scene.’7 Through these surroundings she moved with an effortlessness compared with which others appeared bustling and vociferous. The windows at Alderney stood open, and into the house flowed the produce of Dorelia’s ‘home farm’ – piles of fresh vegetables from the kitchen gardens; blue and brown jugs of milk and cream; jars of home-made mead tasting like a light white wine; the honey and the butter; lavender in the coarse linen – and everywhere a profusion of flowers.
Almost every kind of tree and shrub flourished at Alderney: ilex and pine, apple and cherry and chestnut, pink and white clematis. The circular walled-in garden, with its crescent-shaped flowerbeds over which simmered the bees and butterflies, became an enchanted place. ‘The peculiar charm of that garden was its half-wild appearance,’ wrote Romilly John.
‘…great masses of lavender and other smelling plants sprawled outwards from the concentric beds, until in some places the pathways were almost concealed. Tangled masses of rose and clematis heaved up into the air, or hung droopingly from the wall… [which] was overtopped most of the way by a thick hedge formed by the laurels that grew outside, and a eucalyptus, which had escaped the frosts of several winters, lifted high into the air its graceful and silvery spire.’8
Dorelia’s influence extended far beyond the walls of this garden. For three decades her taste in clothes was followed by students. She ignored the manners and fashions of London and Paris, and the brash styles that succeeded them. Her style was peculiar to herself. ‘She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,’ wrote the children’s author Kathleen Hale.
‘…I remember one Christmas at Alderney, when all the decorations were fixed and everything set for the fun and sing-song, the last to arrive was Dorelia. She appeared on the top step of the room in a white woollen gown, her dark hair looped and braided as always, but so different to the arty hair-do’s of the artistic set. Her warm brown skin glowed in the whiteness of her softly gathered white bodice. Translucent green earrings dangled from her ears – they may have been only of glass but no emerald could have been more beautiful. They were the only colour she wore. She stood quietly surveying us, unaware of the impact she made.’
From cotton velveteen or shantung in bright dyes and shimmering surfaces; from unusual prints, often Indian or Mediterranean in origin, she evolved clothes that followed the movement of the body, like classic draperies. Her flowing dresses that reached the ground, with their high waistline and long sleeves topped by a broad-brimmed straw hat, its sweeping line like those of the French peasants, became a uniform adopted by many girls at art colleges, and a symbol, in their metropolitan surroundings, of an unsevered connection with the country. In the mythology of the young, Dorelia and Augustus were seen as representing the principle of living through your ideas, not merely conveying them to canvas or on paper.
For the boys Dorelia invented a costume which, with its long-belted smock over corduroy trousers, together with their bobbed hair, gave them the appearance of fierce dolls. ‘Our hair was long and golden,’ Romilly remembered, ‘with a fringe in front that came down to our eyebrows; we had little pink pinafores reaching to just below the waist, and leaving our necks bare; brown corduroy knickers, red socks and black boots completed the effect.’9 Later on, Dorelia dressed her daughters in buff-coloured woollen dresses, rather draughty, with thin crisscross lines, saffron-yellow ankle socks and square-toed black slippers. Their hair, also bobbed, was shoulder length, and their frocks, which they learnt to manipulate with dexterity when climbing off floors or clambering into chairs, reached almost down to their feet. It was as if Augustus’s pictures had come alive. Here, in a coach house converted to a studio, he painted ‘Washing Day’,10 ‘The Blue Pool’,11 and made innumerable drawings and panels of the children alone or in groups, portraits of the many visitors from Francis Macnamara12 to Roy Campbell,13 and studies for the figures in his large decorative groups ‘Forza e Amore’,14 ‘The Mumpers’15 and ‘Lyric Fantasy’.16
Augustus kept himself in the background. His presence, like that of a volcano, was often silent and sometimes menacing. A swiftly moving, dark bearded figure, with a wide-brimmed hat, tweeds and a pipe, he patrolled Alderney, watching everyone, disconcerting them with his stare, his sudden eruptions. No longer was he the wild youth ‘Gus John’; he had flowered into the full magnificence of ‘Augustus John’, soon to be truncated to the moody monosyllabic ‘John’. In the mornings he was morose, merely issuing a rumbling summons ‘Come and sit!’ He would collect some guest, or a bunch of children, take them off and in a couple of hours produce a panel of one of the boys with a bow and arrow, or Dorelia leaning against a fir tree, or a series of drawings.
As the day wore on his mood lightened. Often he would suggest taking out the pony trap and driving through the country lanes to the White Hart or King’s Arms, small favourite pubs with sawdust on the floors and the reek of shag and cool ale, where he would drink beer and play shove-ha’penny (‘I play myself. Play alone’). The two eldest boys, David and Caspar, who were in charge of the stabling and grooming, would ‘harness the ponies into their traps, ready to drive up to the front door where Augustus and Dodo would be waiting, he for a round of the nearer pubs, she for a round of the shops’, Caspar wrote. ‘We two would sit on the rail boards, ready to feed and water the ponies at each stop, most of which they knew without being reined.’17
But it was in the evening, seated at the head of the refectory table, that Augustus came into his own. A central passage in the house, with bedrooms on both sides, led down some steps to a large living-room where everyone dined. It had a wide open fireplace, its burning logs lying on soft grey ash. Within this arena of hospitality, melancholy would thaw, allowing his good humour to come out. Sometimes he would permit the children to stay up on these gorgeous occasions and wait at table. ‘The table seemed to groan under the weight of innumerable dishes,’ Romilly remembered, ‘and be lighted by a hundred glittering candles in their shining candlesticks of brass. Dorelia and John appeared, for the first time in the day, in their true characters and proportions; they were like Jove and Juno presiding over the Olympian feast.’18 Sometimes, too, there were terrific parties with bonfires and dancing, and John, rolling his lustrous eyes like marbles, an enigmatic smile on his face, would in his growling voice sing songs between long puffs of pipe smoke.
In Jury town I was bred and bornn
In Newgate gaol I’ll die in scornn.
He delivered these highwayman’s songs with intense concentration; but it was a strange thing, one of his listeners noticed: ‘as he sang his body seemed to grow small. It was as if it all went into his voice. He dwindled.’19
At seventeen I took a wife
I loved her as I loved my life.
It was often a point of honour that these parties continue till early morning, and so many people came that huge wigwams had to be constructed from branches and brown blankets, like the tents in Prince Igor, to accommodate everyone in the garden. On hot nights they would make up a communal bed in the orchard, nine wide and full of bracken that crackled when anyone moved. Then, first thing in the morning, John would be towering over them, and, while others were still lying where they had fallen, lead off some child to his studio.
The children played a natural part in this community. There were signs of them everywhere, such as the uncertainly chalked notice in the lavatory: PLEASE PULL THE CHAIN JENTLY. But most often they were out of doors, immersed in their secret games. From the dark undergrowth they would suddenly shin up the trees in bare feet, run with a pack of red setters, plunge into the frog-laden pond and, to the distress of the parson, dash naked round the garden getting dry. Sometimes they played hide-and-seek on the horses, or harnessed a tin bath to one of the pigs which towed them across the grass. One favourite place was the brickyard over the road with its great claypit and little trolleys pulled along miniature railway lines; and another, a large sandpit enclosed by pine trees. The many-shaded sand-cliffs could be tunnelled into and carved out in paths and bear-holes. At the top where the sand joined silver-grey and black earth, and the smell of heath and dank sand had a peculiar quality, they would set up shop with different-coloured sands and play an absorbing game. Then the lunch bell, erected at the top of a high post at the back of the house, echoed across the fields, and they would pelt back through the orchard. On windless days this bell could be heard all over the estate, alerting whole troops of poachers and stealers of wood, who were chased off between courses.
After lunch, they were off again, fighting a fire on the heath or, more mysteriously, entering their private world of rites and humours, games of their own invention such as ‘Bottom First’ and cults that embraced strange moaning choruses, ‘Give us our seaweed!’, accompanied by side-splitting yells of laughter.
They were not pampered, these children, but increasingly as time went on put to work sawing logs, digging, grooming the horses, collecting hens’ eggs, tarring fences, minding the farm and doing all the chores of the house. It was an unorthodox upbringing, permissive yet sometimes oppressive. But this first summer, while the house was still empty and they slept in tents and every day the sun shone, Alderney was idyllic.
Augustus to Dorelia (1911)
Keeping his studio at the Chenil Gallery, John stayed for much of the week in London; then, at weekends, or in moments of revulsion from town life, he would show up at Alderney to go on with his work inside the converted coach house. It suited him in many ways, this dual existence, giving a constructive pattern to his restlessness. Alderney was a harbour, and Dorelia his anchor.
‘He behaves very well,’ Dorelia admitted to Charles Tennyson, ‘ – if I keep my eye on him.’ The eye she kept on him was tolerantly fierce. Over the early years at Alderney a pattern of existence developed between them that became roughly acceptable to both. He carried on two lives; and so, eventually, did she. In London he enjoyed affairs and flirtations with models, actresses, dancers – anyone new. These amatory exercises seemed almost obligatory. ‘The dirty little girl I meet in the lane’, he declared, ‘has a secret for me – communicable in no language, estimable at no price, momentous beyond knowledge, though it concern but her and me.’20 It was of some concern to Dorelia, nevertheless, when these girls appeared at Alderney. For she would surrender easily to nothing, knowing that were she to do so John, like a child, would seek to push things further. ‘I want to live with you when I come down,’ John wrote from London, ‘but I don’t like imposing myself on you.’ From Dorelia’s point of view this seemed a promising start. Her most useful card was Henry Lamb. Whenever Lamb wanted to see her, she would ask John, almost formally, whether he minded. Surprised, he would disclaim any objection to ‘the poor agneau’ coming to Alderney – provided, of course, Dorelia didn’t mind. But when he inflicted his girls on her, or too inconsiderately hared off in pursuit of them, he would find at moments particularly inconvenient to himself Lamb happily installed there again, playing Bach duets with her. He hadn’t imagined Lamb’s company was so ‘indispensable’, he sarcastically remarked.
Many of John’s romances were short;*1 others, drifting into the mellower waters of affection, lasted years. ‘You may be sure I want you a great deal more than any other damsels,’ he assured Dorelia: but he wanted them as well. In all his painting, whether landscapes or portraits, he depended upon some instinctive relationship that would take hold of him and guide his paintbrush. In the case of women, this miracle was difficult to achieve if his concentration was constantly fretted by unsatisfied desire. Under such conditions, his shyness stood like a barrier between him and his sitter. It was to this argument that Dorelia listened with most attention. No worthwhile man, she told Amaryllis Fleming, was easy. By such a definition John was extremely worthwhile. There were those who wondered how, stoical and accepting of life as she was, Dorelia could put up with as much as she did. She did not do so without a struggle. In their long tug-of-war, the rope between them almost snapped. She endured what she did less for love than from belief. She believed him to be a good, perhaps a great artist; and she scorned conventional indignation, expressed on her behalf, about his ‘goings-on’. But if he were not to prove a good or great artist, she told Helen Anrep, then her life had been wasted.
She saw her job as lifting some of the responsibilities, irrelevant to painting, from John’s shoulders. She would untie the cords and give him back part of his freedom. When he had illegitimate children she did not leave him, but sometimes helped to look after them, as she looked after Ida’s legitimate children. He could go where he wanted, do what he wanted, but must come to heel when she called.
It seemed, at times, as if Dorelia had entered the plant world more completely than the world of human beings, as if flowers meant more to her than people: perhaps, eventually, they did. There were terrifying fights with John: but over such issues as whether or not, on some half-forgotten occasion, Ida’s Caspar had suffered from toothache. Dorelia examined small things under a microscope, but appeared to look at the large events of life through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars so that they never came too close. This protective strategy is well caught by a conversation she later had with the novelist Richard Hughes. One afternoon, when the two of them were walking in the garden with a boy of about four believed to be John’s youngest illegitimate son, Dorelia suddenly came out with: ‘There’s one thing about John I’ve never got used to, not after all these years.’ Richard Hughes glanced apprehensively at the child, and braced himself. Then she continued: ‘I don’t know what to do about it. Time after time, he’s late for lunch.’
The girls John brought down to Alderney were accepted coolly by Dorelia and were not helped much by John himself. It was as if they knew a different John, while, in the words of the poet Iris Tree, ‘she guarded his higher ghost’. Some she frightened away, being known by them as ‘the yellow peril’; others, through their exceptional qualities, she came to see as allies. But there were limits. Her censure usually fell hardest on the girls themselves rather than on John, for it was not justice that interested her but what was practical. A friend who lived near by remembers one incident that shows her methods of dealing with anything unacceptable:
‘One afternoon I had gone up to Alderney Manor to learn from Dorelia how to “turn a heel”, so I would be able to knit socks for my two boys. We were having tea when a vehicle came to the front door. Dorelia went to see who it was, some luggage was dumped in the passage, a girl was brought in, introduced, and politely asked to have some tea. The conversation dragged, neither Dorelia nor I were any good at “chatting”. Soon I got up to go, but Dorelia asked me to stay on… Dorelia then turned to the girl. “What train are you catching?” she said. The girl looked surprised. “There is a good train to Waterloo you can get if you go now, the next one is much later. I will see that you are driven to the station.” Before Dorelia had reached the door, the girl blurted out in an offended voice: “Augustus asked me to stay.” “But Augustus is not here,” answered Dorelia calmly, and went out… She politely and firmly got the girl and luggage out of the house without raising her voice, without losing her temper, without even looking upset, so it all seemed a most ordinary affair. “I am not going to have Augustus’s girls here when he is not present” – and that was all she ever said about that interlude.’21
*
It was this version of a welcome (emphasized when one of the children shot an adhesive dart at her) which was extended to the second Mrs Strindberg, who, rising vigorously from her deathbed in the Savoy Hotel (upon which, she boasted, John had deposited her), called on Dorelia one Christmas Eve. She arrived, wearing a nightdress in the snow. Her visit was brief, and represented the latest in ‘a long series of grotesque and unedifying adventures’22 to which this tiger-woman from Vienna was, John claimed, subjecting him. For two years, in Paris, Liverpool and London, she had dogged his heels, buying up pictures that were not for sale and presenting large cheques that baffled Knewstub at the Chenil, infuriated Quinn in New York, and eventually found their way, via her maid, back into her own pocket.
By all accounts Frida Strindberg was a remarkable woman. After ten years in a convent ‘among the brides of Christ’, she had been let out to serve, for a further two years, as ‘the beautiful jail keeper’ of Sweden’s chief dramatist. Their marriage had been an exhausting comedy of love, the tone of which was set at the wedding when the parson, addressing his question to Strindberg rather than to Frida, demanded: ‘Will you swear that you do not carry another man’s child under your heart?’ While Strindberg nervously denied being pregnant, Frida interrupted with a volley of hysterical laughter.
A determined admirer of the hero in man, Frida had sharpened up a ravenous appetite, given somewhat to indigestion, for men of genius. On catching sight of a specimen she would burrow ruthlessly under his spell, and there was little he might do to extricate himself from the rigours of her devotion. As she grew older she gathered force until she arrived in London an Amazon. She had become aware within herself of brilliant gifts as a journalist and now conducted her life as if it were the daily material for front-page headlines. In 1910, while on the track of the fleeing Wyndham Lewis, she had called at Church Street and, expecting to corner him there, found herself in bed with John. ‘I then dismissed the incident from my mind,’ he recorded,23 ‘but it turned out to be the prelude to a long and by no means idyllic tale of misdirected energy, mad incomprehension, absurdity and even squalor.’24
What happened over the next two years has been summarized by Strindberg’s biographer John Stewart Collis:
‘If, without telling a soul where he was going, he sought refuge in some obscure cafe in Paris or London, Frida would know and appear on the scene. If he boarded a train for the country, there she would be on the platform to bid him good-bye or to follow him. And it was advisable for him to watch his step in his treatment of her even when dining with her in company, for if he were discovered paying too much attention to another female member of the party she would pay a man to take up a concealed position and aim a champagne bottle at his head; and on one occasion, in Paris, when he imagined that he had been successful in eluding her by a series of swift changes of scene, he was informed through an anonymous and illiterate note that he would again be beaten up if his behaviour towards a certain lady did not improve – for evidently someone had been mistaken for John and had innocently suffered the attack.’25
Mrs Strindberg saw herself as John’s benefactress. In her late thirties, she was still a very cordial woman, her face wreathed in dangerous smiles and, we are told, with ‘eyes of that shade of dark and lively brown which so often prove irresistible to men’.26 John felt intimidated. ‘I admit’, he conceded, ‘that the sight of Mme Strindberg bearing down on me in an open taxi-cab, a glad smile of greeting on her face, shaded with a hat turned up behind and bearing a luxuriant outcrop of sweetpeas – this sight, I confess, unnerved me.’27 He held his ground – then ran; but whichever way he goes, there she is with arms outstretched to welcome him. ‘I am worn out!’ she cries. ‘I am suffering more than I have strength to bear!!’ But he too is suffering: ‘Can you seriously think I enjoy this business,’ he demands, ‘that I glory in it???’ Their reproaches and punctuation marks multiply. She speaks of love and death, and swears that he does not understand her. He hears the voice of power, and objects: ‘It is this constant misunderstanding of my character which is the fatal element in the whole affair.’ Their accusations turn towards the thickets of legality. ‘They are serving you a subpoena or will try to do so to-day,’ she promises him. ‘I want to attack you by the Law!!!’ he bursts out.
What has survived of their correspondence reveals the secret of Frida’s ubiquity. When unable to accompany John on his wild flittings to and fro, she would arrange for him to be shadowed by a private detective, and it is round the competence of this man’s reports that many of their arguments revolve.
Each claimed that the other was making a public exhibition of them both. ‘If all Chelsea is aware of your existence it is simply because you have a genius for advertising it,’ John blandly concluded. Frida’s chief complaints centred on the company he kept other than her own. ‘You write love letters to all the girls in London, which they all read aloud,’ she objected. One girl, in a leopard skin, had recited nine pages to music; and another, unaccompanied, had danced a dance of jealousy. Was it any wonder, then, that Frida ‘felt like murder yesterday – I was mad, mad, mad’. It was untrue, she added, that Edith Ashley (‘a silly Kensington girl from a penny novel’) had ‘been bribed by me not to see you, that I had twice tried to murder her, once by poison, once by pushing her from a cliff’.
John refused to disbelieve her. ‘You are determined to be melodramatic to the last!’ He felt imperilled by her threats of love, recognizing ‘an audacious attempt at intimidation’. For she had sensed his fear of publicity and was constantly playing on it. ‘I was born as the only woman of one man,’ she was to write in her autobiography.28 That man was temporarily John. She therefore promised to ‘unmask’ his other women. ‘I have shunned it until now for your sake,’ she added, ‘…for your wife and children’s sake.’
John feared that she would, by means of the courts and press, try to disrupt his life at Alderney. To forestall this he had already made Frida a figure of fun. She has ‘gone off her head again,’ he told Dorelia. ‘…The waiters in the Café Royal look at me with discreet sympathy.’29 She had one very potent weapon: death. It happened that she was strong on suicide, swallowing down regular doses of Veronal mixed with Bovril, then dispatching her abominably pretty maid to John with the news that she had tossed down this fatal cocktail and was about to die. But when, in terror of some farewell message for the coroner and press, he hurried to her bedside, there would always ensue an intolerable interview; and on one occasion, having seized his hat and bolted down the hotel corridor, he was overtaken by the dying woman in the lift.
In Chiaroscuro John makes well-rehearsed comedy out of such episodes, though it appears from contemporary documents that he was sometimes seriously disturbed by them. To John Quinn, revisiting London at the beginning of September 1911, he unburdened himself. Quinn’s diary entry for 3 September records that John, at the Café Royal, ‘sober but normal looking’, told him that, in response to four or five pleading letters from Frida, he had just gone to see her at the Capitol Hotel. He advised her that she had made ‘a damnable nuisance of herself, and that their relationship must end. She ‘clutched and raved’, but though he felt sorry for her, he steeled himself not to surrender. Later that night, in his studio at the Chenil, he learnt that she had again killed herself and was not feeling well. She is ‘pegging out in earnest this time’, he warns Dorelia. Next morning Quinn called round: ‘Awful tale about Madame Strindberg all right,’ he confirmed in his diary. ‘…Mme S. had taken poison and the doctor said she would not last the night. John shaken but game & determined not to give in. I felt sorry for him and did my best to brace him up. I don’t think he had slept very much. This damned Austrian woman has wasted John’s time – upset his nerves – played hell with his work.’ The two men walked to the Queen’s restaurant near Sloane Square and ‘I advised John if Mme S. did die to “beat it” – clear out of the country,’ Quinn continued. ‘…John is really a combination of boy and man – but a man of the highest principle.’
As a result of their discussion, John made up his mind, whatever happened, to accompany Quinn to France. ‘Would you come over too?’ he asked Dorelia. ‘…We could persuade Quinn to eat in modest restaurants.’ But Dorelia was involved in her vegetable garden and could not join them. Disappointed, John met Quinn at the Café Royal next evening to call the journey off, but changed his mind on hearing reports of Frida Strindberg’s worsening condition. In place of Dorelia, he arranged for the two of them to be accompanied by Euphemia Lamb and another model, Lillian Shelley, ‘a beautiful thing… red lips and hair as black as a Turk’s, stunning figure, great sense of humour’.30 Exhilaration and exhaustion struggled for possession of Quinn. At midnight, he allowed himself to be guided by Lillian and Euphemia to John’s studio. ‘All drunk,’ he rejoiced, ‘and John sang and acted wonderfully. Two divans full – L[illian] the best natured.’ After breakfast Quinn ordered four tickets, and John bought ‘a swell automobile coat & cap’.31
John was looking forward to ‘a few days’ peace’; Quinn, more apprehensively, hoped that ‘the trip will be pleasant’. The two of them arrived punctually at Charing Cross station, but the girls did not. Instead, upon the platform stood Frida Strindberg, her only luggage a revolver. Quinn’s notes at this stage become shaky, though the word ‘carnage’ is deceptively clear. ‘Only by appealing to the guard,’ John wrote, ‘and the use of a little physical force were we able to preserve our privacy’*232 Undeterred she followed them on to the boat at Dover. John locked himself into his cabin, but Quinn, relishing this contact with Bohemian life, bravely offered the huntress a cup of tea. John was appalled when he heard of this errand: ‘She spoke to Quinn on the boat and tried to get him into partnership with her to run me!!’ he protested in a letter to Dorelia. To this purpose she had made an appointment to see Quinn the following day in Paris. But in the interval, Quinn lost his nerve and instead of keeping his appointment he took John to the Hotel Bristol to meet an American copper king, Thomas Fortune Ryan; a tall elderly Southerner who talked wearily in immense sums of money and pessimistically chewed upon an unlit cigar. That evening they went to the Bal Tabarin and were joined by a young Kabyle woman. ‘This dusky girl’s whole person exhaled a delicious odour of musk or sandalwood. A childlike candour illuminated her smouldering eyes.’33 At two o’clock that morning they returned to their hotel: ‘finally to P1. Pantheon,’ Quinn noted wearily, ‘& John went with the girl.’
By now Madame Strindberg had reached their hotel and ‘committed suicide’. There was not a moment to lose. ‘We shall throw her off the scent by means of the car,’ John assured Dorelia.34 Hurriedly borrowing Ryan’s seventy-five-horsepower Mercedes manned by ‘the best chauffeur in Europe’,35 a German, Quinn and John set off and ‘careered over France ruthlessly’.36
The prospect of a week with Quinn in such delightful country depressed John, and he proposed reviving their earlier scheme by fetching over Lillian and Euphemia. Quinn was game, but Dorelia, to whom John suggested this by letter, was not: and the plan was reluctantly abandoned. For much of the time John was sullen and aggressive. ‘O these Americans!!!’ he burst out. ‘I don’t think I can stand that accent much longer… their naivete, their innocence, their banality, their crass stupidity is unimaginable.’37 Yet Quinn stayed doggedly optimistic. ‘John and I had a great time in France,’ he loyally declared.38
What they achieved in this breathless ellipse to and back from the Mediterranean was a forerunner of the modern package tour.39 ‘It was like a nightmare.’ At the start they fuelled themselves with prodigious quantities of champagne. ‘The first day out we started on champagne at lunch,’ Quinn told James G. Huneker (15 November 1911):
‘That night at dinner, feeling sure that I would be knocked out the next day, I might as well go the limit and so we had champagne at dinner. I slept like a top, woke up feeling like a prince, and did a hundred and fifty miles next day, and from then on and every day till we returned to Paris we had two and sometimes three quarts of champagne a day – champagne for lunch, champagne for dinner, liqueurs of all kinds, cassis and marc, vermouth, absinthe and the devil knows what else.’
For John, who had counted on Quinn retiring to bed most days with a hangover, such resilience was disappointing. But there were many hair-raising misadventures to enliven the excursion. Their progress was punctuated by several burst tyres and encounters with chickens and dogs. At one place they knocked down a young boy on a bicycle and themselves leapt wildly down a steep place into a ploughed field. ‘We landed after about three terrific jumps,’ Quinn reported, ‘…just missed bumping into a tree which would have smashed the machine… the kid’s thick skull that got him into trouble saved him when he fell.’40 Having deposited the child with a doctor, they raced on expecting at every town to be arrested. ‘Quinn’s French efforts are amazing,’ John wrote in a letter to Dorelia. ‘Imagine the language we have to talk to the chauffeur. Desperando!’ Descending a tortuous mountain road, Quinn had inquired the German for ‘slow’. ‘Schnell,’ John replied. ‘Schnell!’ Quinn shouted at their burly driver, who obediently accelerated. ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ Quinn repeatedly cried. They hurtled down the mountain at breakneck speed and arrived at their hotel ‘in good time for dinner’ – though on this occasion Quinn immediately retired to bed.
In a letter to Conrad41 Quinn recalled ‘feeling like a fighting man’ during this journey. But the points were massing up against him. At night he was haunted by ‘horrible shapes – stone houses, fences, trees, hay stacks, stone walls, stone piles, dirt walls, chasms and precipices advancing towards us out of the fog all to fade away into grey mist again’. On one occasion, John recounts in Chiaroscuro, ‘when the car was creeping at a snail’s pace on an unknown road through a dense fog in the Cévennes, the attorney [Quinn] suddenly gave vent to a despairing cry, and in one masterly leap precipitated himself clean through the open window, to land harmlessly on the grass by the road-side! He felt sure we were going over a precipice.’42
Quinn secretly, and John openly, were much relieved when their tour came to an end. ‘We were not quite a success as travelling companions,’ John conceded.43 The motor car, he concluded, ‘is a damnable invention’. Travelling on foot or by caravan was the proper progress for a painter. ‘Motoring is a fearfully wrong way of seeing the country but an awfully nice way of doing without railway trains,’ he instructed Dorelia. ‘It makes one very sleepy.’ Nevertheless, it had been impossible to overlook everything, the countryside, the cathedrals at Bourges and Chartres ‘veritably miraculous and power-communicating. The Ancients’, he told Will Rothenstein, ‘did nothing like this.’
Another success had been their final shaking-off of Mrs Strindberg. Two days after their return, Quinn embarked for New York; and John, having heard that Frida was again becoming ‘very active in London’, slipped quietly off to Wales. ‘It has been impossible to do any work travelling this way,’ he had complained to Dorelia from a brothel in Marseilles, ‘but one can think all the same.’ Now, in the peace of Wales, he could transfer these thoughts to paint.
‘Non Scholae sed vitae.’
Dane Court School motto44
One of the earliest visitors to Alderney was John’s father. He was a model of patience. For hours he would sit motionless and then move quietly about the garden, hoping to be photographed. Every day he put on the same costume he wore for promenading the beach at Tenby: a sober suit, leather gloves, dark hat, wing collar and spats. He too had recently moved, a distance of several hundred yards, to 5 Lexden Terrace, overlooking the sea. In this desirable residence he was to linger a little uncertainly some thirty years, with the weather, a few illnesses and his ‘specimens of self-photography’ as companions. Occasionally he was looked in on by his grandchildren, and more occasionally by Augustus himself. It was a life spent patiently waiting, filling the long intervals with letters to Winifred to say he was writing to Gwen, and to Augustus saying he was writing to Thornton: and variations on this pattern.
From Dorelia’s family there came, among others, her mother – a very straight-backed old woman with shiny white hair and a comforting round face. She spent her days quilt-making, and in the evenings would take a hot brick from the fireplace, wrapping it in cloth to warm her bed.
From 1912 onwards the guests, many of them subjects for portraits and testifying to the rich variety of the human species, began to assemble at Alderney. Not everyone was immediately welcome. Wyndham Lewis ‘had an inner door slammed in my face’ by Dorelia who was nevertheless the object of his ‘most sympathetic admiration’. But this was because of his ‘empty abuse of Lamb’ which she had perhaps mistaken for ‘strenuous plotting’.45 And then, ‘Did you turn away Lord Howard de Walden & his wife one day at the door?’46 John mildly inquired. Perhaps she had, but if so it was because this valuable patron and important sitter (who was pregnant) looked like obvious troublemakers.
But many people found a home from home at Alderney. There was Iris Tree, with her freckles and blue shadows, gliding between the trees in a poetic trance; Lytton Strachey, who amazed the children by claiming he felt so weak before breakfast that he found it impossible to lift a match; Fanny Fletcher, a poor art student later revered for her wallpapers, who arrived for a few weeks, knitted herself into the household with her cardigans and gained the reputation for being a rather inefficient witch whose salad dressings were said to contain spells; there was also a Polish doctor of music, Jan Sliwinski, who became expert at tarring fences, mending walls and cataloguing books; the Chilean painter Alvaro Guevara with tales of terrific boxing matches in Valparaiso, where he had been a champion; and an ‘unknown quantity’, Haraldar Thorskinsson, called ‘the Icelander’, a speechless, hard-drinking Icelandic poet with bright carmine cheeks and stark black hair, who had written a play in which angels somehow figured and who was now heavily involved in defeating the law of gravity. Very often Henry Lamb (or ‘Arry Lamb’ as John called him) would ride over on a pony cart to play duets with Dorelia at the upright piano. Sounds of Mozart and of Bach fugues would float out of the open windows into the garden, sometimes followed by heated words as to who had played the wrong note and, more implausibly, whether or not there was a deity – for Dorelia was an agnostic and Lamb an atheist, and the two of them often argued over what neither of them believed. Horace de Vere Cole, the country’s most eminent practical joker and inventor of turned-up trousers, who claimed descent from Old King Cole, would invite himself over, ‘such a hopeless child’, but always bringing a ‘Grand New Hoax’.
More cavalier still was the farmer, archaeologist*3 and anti-aircraft pioneer, Trelawney Dayrell Reed, who dropped in for a cup of tea one afternoon, hung on a few years, then bought a farm near by into which he settled with his grim mother, unmarried sister and some eighteenth-century furniture. Black-bearded and fanatic, he looked like a prince in the manner of El Greco, and was much admired for the violence of his Oxford stammer, his loud check tweeds, and socks of revolutionary red. An occasional poet, he also took to painting, executing in his farmhouse a series of vigorous and explicit frescoes. He was attended by two spaniels and his ‘man’, a wide-eyed factotum named Ernest. His air of refinement infuriated John. ‘Huntin’ does give one the opportunity of dressin’ like a gentleman,’ he would drawl. ‘But I’ve always thought the real test was how to undress like a gentleman.’ When asked whether he had pigs on his farm, he had replied: ‘No. The boys have the pigs. I have the boys.’ He liked to sing ballads of extreme bawdiness, accompanying his tuneless voice with free-flowing gestures. A great hero to the children, he was master of many accomplishments from darts to the deepest dialect of Dorset. He was also a landscape and market gardener with a special knowledge of hollyhocks and roses – his chief love. It was in defence of these blooms, his dogs, pigs and an apple tree that he later served his finest hour. Every afternoon he would go to bed, and every afternoon he was woken by aeroplanes which had selected his cottage as a turning point in their local races. He wrote letters, he remonstrated, he complained by every lawful means: but the flying monsters still howled about the chimney pots, creating havoc among his cattle and female relatives. Then, one afternoon, awakened by a deafening racket, he sprang from his bed and let fly with a double-barrelled shotgun, winging one of the brutes. Although no vital damage was done, Trelawney was arrested and tried at Dorchester Assizes on a charge of attempted murder. In opposition to the judge, a man much loved for his severity, the jury (being composed mostly of farmers like himself) acquitted him. It was a triumph for the individual, amateur and eccentric against the ascent of technology; and there was a grand celebration.
To be brought up amid such people constituted an education in itself. John, however, pressed matters to extremes: he hired a tutor. As long ago as May 1910 he had been persuaded that ‘the immediate necessity seems to be an able tutor and major-domo for my family.’47 If the search had been long and hesitant, this was because he needed someone exceptional. On 16 August 1911 he reported to Quinn that ‘I have just secured a young tutor who really seems a jewel’; and a month later48 he was telling Ottoline Morrell that ‘our tutor is an excellent and charming youth.’
His name was John Hope-Johnstone. He was then in his late twenties, a man of many attainments and no profession, an adventurous past and a waxed moustache. He had been educated between Bradfield, Hanover and Trinity College, Cambridge, which he had been obliged to leave prematurely when his mother abandoned her second fortune to the roulette wheel. From this time onwards he lived by his wits. But, as Romilly John observed, ‘he was very fortunate in combining, at that time, extreme poverty with the most epicurean tastes I have ever known.’49 He had a hunger for knowledge that ranged from the intricacies of Arabic to the address of the only place in Britain where a certain toothpaste might be bought. It was part of a programme of self-perfection to which he had dedicated himself pending the death of eleven persons which, he calculated, would bring him into a fortune with a title. Undeterred by a lack of ‘ear’, he mastered the penny whistle and then, by sheer perseverance, the flute.*4 He was a confirmed wanderer. Before taking up his post as a tutor, he had spent some years pushing a pram charged with grammars and metaphysical works through Asia, reputedly in pursuit of a village where chickens were said to cost a penny each.
He never found it, but arrived instead at Alderney into which, for a time, he fitted very well. Slim and well built, with finely cut features, dark hair and pale skin, he wore heavy hornrimmed spectacles, an innovation at the time. It was not long before he conceived an immense admiration for John and Dorelia and the romantic life they led around their battlemented bungalow, with their entourage of gypsy caravans and ponies and naked children. As a mark of admiration he took to wearing a medley of Bohemian clothes – buff corduroy suits cut by a grand tailor in Savile Row after the style of a dress suit, with swallow tails behind, a coloured handkerchief or ‘diklo’ round his neck and, to complete the bizarre effect, a black felt hat of the kind later made fashionable by Anthony Eden when Prime Minister, though with a broad rim. To John’s eyes he was every inch a tutor.
It is doubtful if his pupils benefited as much as John and Dorelia did from his encyclopedic tutelage. ‘For Hope the argument – long, persistent, remorseless, carried back to first logical principles – was an almost indispensable element in the day’s hygiene,’ his friend the ‘bright young intellectual’ Gerald Brenan recorded.50 The day began at first light. He would sit over the breakfast table dilating upon Symbolic Logic or Four Dimensional Geometry while the children fled on to the heath. Then Dorelia, who in any case did not believe in education, would murmur: ‘Never mind. Leave them for to-day,’ and the tutor would be free to retreat into the cottage kitchen, which he had converted, with retorts and bottles of coloured fluid, into a laboratory for malodorous experiments. At other moments, possibly when it was raining, he would lead the older boys off and propound to them Latin gender rhymes and the names of the Hebrew kings. They learnt to write Gothic script with calligraphic pens and black ink. He also made a speciality of the Book of Job, parts of which he encouraged them to learn by heart to train their ears for sonorous language, give them a sense of the remote past, and instil patience.*5 He was not entirely popular, however, with the children, chiefly because of his greed. At table, when the cream jug was passed round, he would ‘accidentally’ spill most of it over his own plate, leaving nothing for them.
To Dorelia, with whom he was a little in love, he made himself more helpful. He was a scholar of ancient herbs and jellies, and she made use of his book-knowledge in the kitchen and when laying out her garden. To John also he tried to make himself useful by persuading him to buy an expensive camera with which to photograph his paintings. But Hope’s technique of photography – ‘losing bits of his machine & tripping over the trypod continually’51 – led to a gradual fading away of all the prints into invisibility. It was an accurate record at Alderney of his waning popularity. John had warmed to him at first as an authentic dilettante – someone magnificently irrelevant to the commerce of modern life. He had been impressed by his mathematics and had liked the way he dived into their rigorously easygoing way of life, accompanying, unshaven, the barefoot boys through the Cotswolds to North Wales with pony and cart. Then John began to tire of him, as he did of everyone whom he saw regularly. He had encouraged Hope as an entertainer, and within a year his repertoire of tricks and stories had run out. ‘He’s a garrulous creature and extremely irritating sometimes,’ John admitted to Dorelia. ‘The way he makes smoke rings with a cluck.’52 John was never one for encores. The tutor’s capacity for absorbing knowledge, which appeared so limitless, was replenished by his growing library and by John’s depleted one. As a future editor of the Burlington Magazine, it was necessary that he should study art, but not perhaps by the method of absconding with John’s own pictures, of which he amassed a good private collection. His passion for argument pierced through the growing barrier of John’s deafness, especially when it developed into vast literary quarrels with Trelawney or with Edie, whose reading was confined to the Daily Mirror and romantic novels from the lending library at Parkstone station. So it was with some relief on all sides that in the last week of August 1912, with his entire capital of sixteen pounds, camel-hair sleeping bag and a good many grammars, he wheeled his perambulator off once more in the direction of China. Although he had been tutor for little more than a year, he was regularly to re-enter the lives of the Johns, in Spain, in Italy, at the corner of Oxford Street. Gerald Brenan, with whom he set out for the borders of Outer Mongolia, gives as Hope’s reason for this sudden journey the rainy weather – though it was also rumoured that John had hit on a plan to marry him off to one of his models who was soon to give birth to a child.
After Hope’s disappearance the children’s education stumbled into slightly more conventional lines. ‘The boys go to a beastly school now and seem to like it,’ John complained to their ex-tutor (20 November 1912). Dane Court had been founded at Hunstanton in Norfolk in 1867 by a vicar, with the novelist-to-be Henry Rider Haggard as his solitary pupil. It had moved to Parkstone at the turn of the century and recently been taken over by a newly married couple, Hugh and Michaela Pooley. Hugh Pooley, a hearty player of the piccolo with a rich baritone voice, took music classes. ‘He lectured us in the dormitory on the dangers of masturbation I now realize,’ recalled Romilly, ‘though I was puzzled at the time.’53 If Hugh was the symbol of a headmaster, his wife, a devotee of bicycling with a weakness for astonishing hats, was the ‘progressive’ force in the school and taught French. It was disconcerting for her to find that the Johns already spoke the language. She was a Dane,*6 the daughter of Pietro Köbke Krohn, an artist and director of the Künstmuseum in Copenhagen. On the strength of her parentage she would bicycle up uninvited to Alderney with her husband and a tin of sardines to supplement the rations, and seemed deaf to the loud groans which greeted her arrival. While Hugh sang in his baritone for supper, Michaela would swivel her attentions upon John himself. The retired colonels and civil servants with which Hampshire and Dorset seemed filled were little to her taste, whereas John was an ‘attractive man, who made one feel 100% woman – a quality I missed in most Englishmen at that period’.
Dane Court had eleven pupils and, since its future depended upon swelling this number, the Pooleys had been delighted to receive one morning a letter of inquiry from Alderney Manor – a property, they saw from the map, on Lord Wimborne’s estate. An interview was arranged, and the Pooleys prepared themselves to meet some grand people. ‘From our stand by the window we saw a green Governess cart drawn by a pony approaching up the drive,’ Michaela remembered.
‘A queer square cart – later named “The Marmalade Box” by the boys in the school – and out stepped a lady in a cloak with a large hat and hair cut short… After her a couple of boys tumbled out, their hair cut likewise and they wore coloured tunics. For a moment we thought they were girls… It was soon fixed that the three boys aged 8, 9, 10 should come as day boys. When Mrs John was going, she turned at the door and said: “I think there are two more at home, who might as well come.”’54
That was the beginning and it was not easy for them, knowing only the Latin gender rules, French, and part of the Book of Job. But they were quick to learn, being, the Pooleys judged, ‘a fine lot… intelligent and sturdy, good at work and good at games’. With their long page-style hair and belted pinafores (brightly coloured at first, then khaki to match the brown Norfolk suits the other boys wore) they felt shamefully conspicuous. Yet since they numbered almost half Dane Court and stood shoulder to shoulder against any attack, their entrance into school life was not so painful as it might have been. They formed a community of their own, a family circle with doors that could be opened only from inside. But gradually they edged these doors ajar, Eton collars giving way, under Michaela’s reforming spirit, to allow corduroy suits and earthenware bowls to become the order of the day.
‘David and Caspar now are expert cyclists,’ John reported to Mrs Nettleship after their first term (8 January 1913). ‘…Mr Pooley wants them to be weekly boarders, he thinks they’d get on much faster – and I think it’s no bad idea.’ First the three eldest, then the others, boarded. Because of their strange ways, they became known as ‘the Persians’. ‘But we shone on the playing fields and won many games of cricket and football for the school’, Caspar remembered. ‘…Augustus once scored a goal – palpably offside – playing for the parents and Old Boys. Unhappily I was the goalkeeper… ,’55
On visiting days, they grew self-conscious, more vulnerable to parent-embarrassment and so far as was possible they tried to keep the parts of their lives – the Nettleship part too – within separate compartments. Details of their home life were guarded from their friends, while about Dane Court they were seldom pestered for information by John and Dorelia.
‘I was especially afraid that one of my brothers would let out some frightful detail of our life at Alderney, and thus ruin us for ever,’ wrote Romilly; ‘a needless alarm, as they were all older and warier than I. I contracted a habit of inserting secretly after the Lord’s Prayer a little clause to the effect that Dorelia might be brought by divine intervention to wear proper clothes; I used also to pray that she and John might not be tempted, by the invitation sent to all parents, to appear at the school sports.’56
During the holidays, Ida’s children often went to stay with Grannie Nettleship. She would see that they had their hair cut and were indistinguishably fitted into regular boys’ uniforms. With their aunts, Ethel and Ursula, they travelled to seaside resorts, spending their days breathing fresh air on long walks, their evenings playing Racing Demon and Up Jenkins – then early to bed.
The boys did pretty well at school; especially David, who was head boy for two years. As the eldest he felt himself to be at least as much a Nettleship as a John and was more successful when away from Alderney. But it was Caspar, Ida’s second son, who cut loose. At the beginning of the Great War he was given a copy of Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships and, looking through the lists of warships, two-thirds of them British, decided that this ‘new and orderly society… was the world for me’.57 All the boys were talking of the army, the navy and the Royal Flying Corps. With Hugh Pooley’s encouragement, Caspar eventually approached his father with the notion of making the navy his career. It was a difficult interview. John felt bewildered. He could remember himself having decided at this age to trap beaver on the Arkansas River. David, who had been reading Coral Island and who wanted to go to sea on the chance of getting wrecked on such a charming spot, he could understand. But Caspar seemed unaccountably serious. John plainly thought it stupid to subject oneself to such harsh discipline, and he did not scruple to say so. ‘Think again,’ he advised, and brushed the idea aside. ‘I had no encouragement at home,’ Caspar remembered; ‘I felt a lonely outcast.’ But he persisted, and came against other obstacles – the cadet’s uniform alone cost a hundred and fifty pounds. But once John saw that his son was set on the navy, he paid all bills without objection. It was Dorelia who engineered this change of mind. She had no more interest in the sea than in schooling, but she wanted to get at least one boy off her hands and see him settled. So she organized it all. In September 1916 they harnessed the pony and trap and, she in her long skirts, Caspar in his bright new uniform, they travelled the thirty-five miles to Portsmouth and ‘I was dumped through the dockyard main gate.’58
Caspar was the only one of John’s children brought up at Alderney who, like Thornton, Gwen and Winifred, left home and made a life elsewhere. The others left too late or too incompletely, as perhaps John himself had done. Although one or two later illegitimate children, raised with their mothers, felt themselves deprived by not living at Alderney or Fryern, Ida’s and Dorelia’s children needed to escape these places – and for many of the same reasons that old Edwin John’s family had fled Tenby. The atmosphere was powerful and, as the boys grew older, it seemed to become less sympathetic. ‘He was extremely strict at table,’ one of John’s children wrote, ‘and we were hardly allowed to say a word – which resulted in one of us getting the giggles, which was fatal, because that infuriated him… Perhaps it was because of his own very strict upbringing with his father.’59
John loved babies. When they were very small he used to bath them and play with them, and in such a role they preferred him to anyone else. But he found it hard to bear the physical presence of his maturing sons. Overawed, they fell, one by one, into lines of self-preservation. It was the beginning of a long defensive war no one could win. ‘He always liked to have children around, plenty of them, not necessarily his own,’ Caspar remembered. ‘…He enjoyed children to that extent, but he was never a warm-hearted man, really, to us; he was a tremendously difficult sort of fellow to understand for a kid. I don’t think he ever understood himself, come to that.’60
Dorelia, too, was not good at demonstrating her love. She was not unfair, but only her own children seemed able to sense her fondness for them. John himself was inhibited from expressions of tenderness. ‘He intensely disliked seeing parents fondling their children and this may partly have accounted for my mother’s inhibitions in respect of us children,’ remembered his daughter Vivien. ‘In fact we never embraced our mother until the ages of 12 and 15, when [my sister] Poppet and I made a pact to break this “spell” in order to be like other families.’61 But this was later, and for the time being the regime, for all its Bohemian tone, was almost Victorian in its rules of reticence.
Dorelia’s pregnancy, in the autumn of 1911, being against her doctor’s advice, was a time of anxiety. In the event everyone except Dorelia felt ill.62 By the end of February 1912, John was already confessing to ‘feeling so sick… Dorelia is expecting a baby momentarily… Pyramus mysteriously ill.’ In the following week this illness came to be diagnosed. ‘Little Pyramus is fearfully ill – meningitis, and I can’t believe he can recover, though I do hope still,’ John wrote to Ottoline Morrell (5 March 1912). ‘Last night I thought he was about to die but he kept on. Dorelia behaves most wonderfully – though she is expecting her baby at any moment. It will be terrible to lose Pyra...’ In desperation John had tried to get ‘the best specialist in London, perhaps in Europe’, but the man was in Europe, not London – and besides what was there he could do? ‘There is no treatment for the disease.’63 In a wobbly handwriting John wrote to his old crony John Sampson to tell him what was happening. ‘We are in a sad way here. Pyramus is frightfully ill… Dorelia about to have a baby. The doctor tells me he thinks she has postponed the event for 2 or 3 weeks so as to look after Pyramus – he says this has been known to happen.’64
On 8 March Dorelia’s labour pains began and she ‘had to take leave of Pyramus and go and have her baby’ which ‘turned out a big nice girl’. They told Dorelia that Pyramus was dead, but for four more days the child lay on his bed quite close to her, still just alive. ‘Pyra is still breathing feebly but happily has been unconscious for the last 2 or 3 days,’ John told Ottoline on 10 March. ‘I do not think he will outlive to-day. He was indeed a celestial child and that is why the Gods take him… The mind refuses to contemplate… such an awful fact.’ While Dorelia grew stronger, John continued to sit by their son, waiting for the end. ‘It was a terrible event,’ he wrote afterwards (9 May 1912) to Quinn. ‘…I must say the Missus behaved throughout as I think few women would – with amazing good sense and a splendid determination not to give way to the luxury of the expression of grief.’ It was this code of silence they shared. ‘I can’t talk about Pyra,’ Dorelia told Ottoline a year later (10 March 1913): and John wrote to Albert Rutherston: ‘It is indeed a terrible thing to have lost darling little Pyramus – the most adorable of children. Of course I can’t find words to say what I feel.’ Dorelia’s silence was natural and eloquent, and her grief was private. John recognized this. But when he spoke of feeling, as from time to time he was tempted to do, he always regretted it for the words seemed to let him down, making the reality something acted. When unhappiness threatened, he feared giving way to it because he knew the depths of depression to which his nature was susceptible. No one could reach it, though ‘your wire was so welcome’, he told Sampson. ‘These things are stupefying.’65 So he concentrated on the birth of his daughter: ‘le roi est mort, vive la reine.’66 They called her Elizabeth Ann or Lizzie – at least that was their intention. But somehow these names never stuck. Then, one day, after contemplating her sometime, her half-brother Caspar chanced to remark: ‘What a little poppet it is!’: after which she was always known as Poppet.
Pyramus was cremated at Woking. Returning by train with the ashes – ‘one more urn for my collection’67 – John placed the receptacle carefully on the rack above his seat, and then forgot it. It was found further along the line and sent to Alderney.
‘People were getting too silly’.
Augustus John to Gwen John (24 October 1914)
‘All are well at home,’ John reported philosophically, ‘ – the baby-girl a god-send. My missus keeps fit. We have disturbances of the atmosphere occasionally but have so far managed to recover every time.’68 He seldom remained long at Alderney, preferring to visit rather than to stay there. ‘It is pleasant enough down here,’ he remarked to Ottoline Morrell (25 July 1913), ‘but a little uninspiring.’
Inspiration lay further off, waiting to be taken unawares. In the summer of 1912 he had set off with his family to Wales – then, abandoning them in the desolate valley round Nant-ddu, hurried on to Ireland. ‘Like a lion’ he entered Dublin, remembered Oliver St John Gogarty;69 ‘or some sea king’...
‘Or a Viking who has steered,
All blue eyes and yellow beard.’70
This was John’s first meeting with stately, plump buck Gogarty, the quickwitted and long-talking professional Irishman of many parts – poet and busybody, surgeon, litigant and aviator, wearer of a primrose waistcoat and owner of the first butter-coloured Rolls-Royce. John had sought him out in the Bailey Restaurant, Dublin’s equivalent of the Café Royal, on the advice of Orpen and, despite Gogarty’s ‘ceaseless outpour of wit and wisdom’, confessed to being ‘immensely entertained’.71 ‘All agog with good humour’, Gogarty fell headlong under John’s spell, describing him as ‘a man of deep shadows and dazzling light… I noticed that he had a magnificent body… He was tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped. His limbs were not heavy, his hands and feet were long.’72 ‘The aura of the man! The mental amplitude!’ Even so, Gogarty could not fail to notice that he was ‘a moody man’. There was always the problem of what to do with him.
An ear-nose-and-throat specialist, Gogarty examined John’s ears and pronounced them to be the very Seat of his Melancholy: in which case, John felt, he had much to answer for. Gogarty was a hectic monopolizer of all conversation. If he did not have enough words of his own, he borrowed other people’s, and so was never at a loss. Only once did John arrest him – by ‘flinging in his face a bowl of nuts’.73 He ‘is a brick but such a mad hatter’, John confided to Dorelia. He was also ‘rather awful sometimes’, and ‘dreams of the days when gentlemen addressed their wives as “Madam” and all was dignity and calm’. Not surprisingly it was difficult to make such a man ‘see one’s problems’.74 But often his problems sailed out of sight as he accepted Gogarty’s invitation to ‘float his intellect’ while in Dublin, and drink huge tumblers of whisky until the chatter retreated to a distant murmur. Bottles of John Jameson were what Gogarty was ‘inspired to give’ with almost sinister generosity. ‘It was very pleasant, this bathing in the glory of Augustus,’ Gogarty remembered75 – adding, to John’s chagrin: ‘I felt myself growing so witty that I was able to laugh at my own jokes.’
But still there was the problem of what to do with John. Gogarty put him up in lodgings next to the Royal Hotel, Dalkey, overlooking Shanagolden Bay. His presence there, at the window, was a constant invitation to take the day off. ‘We would pick up Joe Hone, who lived at Killiney, and go to Glendalough, the Glen of the Lakes, in Wicklow,’ Gogarty wrote. ‘…On through the lovely country we went. Augustus, who was sitting in the back, could not be distracted by scenery, for beside him sat Vera Hone.
‘…We bowled along the Rocky Valley. Suddenly I heard the word “Stop”. As it evidently was not meant for me, I didn’t stop. Joe Hone did not turn his head, so why should I?’76
This was the beginning of a lifelong infuriating friendship commemorated by John with two portraits77 of Gogarty, and by Gogarty with two of his ‘Odes and Addresses’. In a fragile verse at the end of his poem ‘To Augustus John’, Gogarty recorded how much, despite all its difficulties, this friendship meant to him:
With little talk in her,
Trembling, about to flee,
And Father Falconer
Touches her off for me,
And I am gone –
All shall forgotten be
Save for you, John!
Meanwhile there was the problem of what to do. John had been offered the freedom of Ireland by another bizarre new friend, Francis Macnamara, ‘poet, philosopher and financial expert’,78 and though payment for such freedom could be heavy, he willingly accepted it. Macnamara was an extra ‘bright gem’ for John to add to his adornment of friends: at times simply ‘a queer fish, not like a man at all’;79 and then, when John recovered his admiration, a ‘warrior poet’. From a career in the law, from Magdalen College, Oxford, from his father the High Sheriff of County Clare, Francis Macnamara had turned to a career of literary and philosophical speculation. Over six feet tall, golden-haired and with blue-bright eyes, he carried himself (as John’s portrait of him eloquently reveals) ‘like a conqueror’.80 Famous for his wild deeds, he subsisted on theories embracing many subjects from Bishop Butler to tar water, admitted to having poetry as a vocation and claimed, by way of trade, to teach the stuff. ‘He has shown me a manuscript which seems to me most remarkable,’ John confided to Quinn (6 August 1912), whom he hoped might buy his friend’s jottings. ‘He has put soliloquies into the mouths of personages from the Irish legends and he has made them talk quite modern language albeit in free verse – the result is amazingly vivid and vital. The people live again!’
It was Francis’s pride, his daughter Nicolette later wrote, ‘to introduce Augustus to Ireland, to County Clare, Galway and Connemara; the land the Macnamaras had roamed since history began’.81 Though living in London, he owned a house in Doolin, a small fishing village in County Clare ‘seven Irish miles away from Ennistymon’, and it was here that John arrived at the end of July.
It was a lonely place, and wild. The troughs and furrows of the land, ‘like an immobilized rough sea’,82 were crested with outcrops of grey rock and ridden by a net of stone walls. Except for an obstinate few trees, stunted and windswept like masted wrecks, and sudden calm surges of lush green grass, it was a barren landscape, frozen from times of primitive survival: the very place for painting. Macnamara would harness his horse and ride off with John for days on end. Several times, either by steamship or, more recklessly, by native currach, they crossed over to the Aran Islands. The great Atlantic waves that thundered in from Newfoundland and Greenland and charged against the granite boulders of the coast had protected the islanders from invasion. They lived among the same rocks and wind and weather that had long enveloped their families and seemed, as John sometimes felt himself to be, throwbacks to an earlier century. Grave dignified people, speaking English when unavoidable with a rich Elizabethan vocabulary, they wove their own garments and supported themselves without interference from the mainland. ‘The smoke of burning kelp rose from the shores,’ John wrote. ‘Women and girls in black shawls and red or saffron skirts stood or moved in groups with a kind of nun-like uniformity and decorum. Upon the precipitous Atlantic verge some forgotten people had disputed a last foothold upon the ramparts of more than one astounding fortress… who on earth were they?’83
It was a mystery which the bleakness of their lives made beautiful to him. They represented an ideal, a dream without a dream’s surreal exactness, never disappearing but growing dimmer as his actual life became more episodic and confusing.
It had been a reconnaissance. To these islands, to Doolin House, County Clare, as the guest of Macnamara, to Renvyle House, County Galway, where Gogarty lived, and the speckled hills of Connemara John was soon feeling impatient to return. He would get a studio and paint a big dramatization of the landscape, he told Quinn, and ‘some of the women’ who belonged to it.84
*
But in order to return he had first to leave. Innes, who was staying with Lady Gregory, had suddenly appeared – ‘God knows how’85 – and together the two painters crossed back into Wales. John had been invited by Lord Howard de Walden, despite his having been turned away from Alderney, to stay at Chirk Castle and paint his wife. Having separated from Innes and returned his family, safe and disgruntled, to Alderney, he rushed back to Wales again to find Lady Howard de Walden powerfully pregnant and unable to stand. No foreigner to this condition, he took up his brushes and started work on her, full length. But she was horrified, protesting that the picture was cruel, while he endeavoured to explain that ‘lots of husbands want it like that, you know’.86 In the saga of this picture, and John’s many visits to Chirk in order to complete it, lies much of the pattern his life would follow. After this first visit he wrote to Quinn (11 October 1912): ‘I enjoyed my stay at the medieval Castle of Chirk. I found deer stalking with bows and arrows exciting. Lord Howard goes in for falconry also and now and then dons a suit of steel armour...’ In such an atmosphere there was room for ideas to expand. ‘Howard de W ought to be taken in hand,’ he was soon telling Dorelia. His host had allowed second-rate people to ‘impose themselves on him’. By way of a new regime he suggested substituting himself in their place as artist-in-residence. He would decorate the Music Room at Chirk: it was a grand scheme. But first there was the problem of her ladyship’s portrait. It was, he told Quinn, extremely promising. He waited patiently till after the birth of her twins, started again, exhibited it half-finished, recommenced, changed her black hair to pink and threatened to ‘alter everything’. Years went by: war came. Her ladyship’s nose, John complained, was an enigma, and he temporarily turned to her athletic antiquarian husband, his portrait giving ‘his lordship the severest shock he has experienced since the War began’.87 The Music Room was never begun. But he was not idle at Chirk; he painted all the time – small brilliant panels of the Welsh landscape which he conceived to be preliminary studies for his Music Room decorations but which were his real achievement.
‘I would much rather just do the things I want to do and leave people to buy if they want… I am not likely to make a success of fashionable people even if I tried to,’ John later wrote to Quinn (29 September 1913). But Chirk Castle witnessed John’s beginning as an erratic portrait painter of fashionable sitters, and his last phase as a brilliant symbolist painter. ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ he asked Lady Howard de Walden. This was Derwent Lees. Recently John’s opinion of Lees had risen. He had been active at the Chenil Gallery where Orpen had apparently aimed a gun at Knewstub and shot a hole through one of his own pictures. Then Lees, despite his wooden leg, had climbed up the outside of the gallery and entered into combat with Knewstub: it was impossible to think badly of such a man even when, to everyone’s surprise, he suddenly got himself married to a model. ‘I too was astonished by the Lees marriage,’ Innes admitted to John (4 August 1913). ‘…I think I felt rather jealous of him. Well they looked very happy and so good luck to them.’ A year later Lees looked lost and white when John brought him to Chirk during a smart weekend party. He was under the impression he had arrived at a chic lunatic asylum. At night he would stand rigid in the corridors, a helplessly pyjama’d figure, whispering: ‘Frightened. Can’t sleep.’ He had developed a shorthand method of speaking, like a child. ‘Want to go for walk,’ he would say. But when Lady Howard de Walden offered to accompany him, Lees objected: ‘Can’t. No gloves.’ He did not feel safe without gloves. His illness put an end to his career as a painter, and eventually to his life.
For his security John needed plans; but he also needed to avoid the implications of these plans unless they were to become prisons for the future. He had not grasped the trick of saying no. He was impelled to say yes even when no one had asked him anything. He said yes now to the prospect of Lord Howard de Walden becoming a new patron. The difficulties that might follow with Quinn or even with Hugh Lane, whom he had similarly elected, were of little account. He would need a new house – somewhere close to Chirk. On his first visit he had been introduced to the composer Joseph Holbrooke, ‘an extraordinary chap… funniest creature I’ve ever met’.88 With Holbrooke’s friend, the illustrator and editor of The Idler Sidney Sime, they had set off on a number of wild motor rides around Wales, knocking up Sampson at Bala, descending on Lees at Ffestiniog, resting a little with Innes at Nant-ddu ‘where I always keep a few bottles of chianti’; then scaling the park gates at Chirk at three o’clock in the morning. ‘The country round Ffestiniog was staggering,’ he reported to Dorelia (September 1912), ‘…I have my eye on a cottage or two… I feel full of work.’
Having exhausted the possibilities at Nant-ddu, John decided to throw in his lot with Holbrooke and Sime, and the three of them took Llwynythyl, a ‘delightful’ corrugated-iron shanty with a large kitchen and ‘great fireplace’, living-room and four small cabins containing bunks, the upper ones reached by wooden ladders. Dorelia had disliked Nant-ddu and would not visit Chirk Castle; but Llwynythyl, John told her, was ‘not half a bad place’. On the inside it was lined with tongued-and-grooved pinewood planking, lightly varnished but otherwise left its natural colour. Into this bungalow above the Vale of Ffestiniog Holbrooke, who was collaborating with Lord Howard de Walden on an operatic trilogy, imported a piano with all the bass notes out of tune, and John imported Lily Ireland, a model of classic proportions who had never before strayed beyond London. The bungalow, which was reached by a steep climb from Tan-y-grisiau up an old trolley shaft with a broken cable-winch at the top, stood on a plateau looking across the valley to the range of mountains above which the endless drama of the sky unfolded itself.
The place was almost ready, and John prepared himself for a long stint of painting. In December he set off: for France. The weather was so gloomy he had suddenly veered off south ‘with the intention of working out of doors’.89 At the New Year, Epstein reported him passing through Paris ‘in good spirits’.90 He planned to link up with Innes and Lees in Marseilles. From the Hôtel du Nord there he wrote to Dorelia:
‘Innes came yesterday morning. He looks rather dejected. Lees doesn’t appear to be well yet. He is going back to London. We have been wandering about Marseilles all day. When you come we might get another cart and donkey. I have advised Innes to go to Paris and get a girl as he is pretty well lost alone and must have a model… I don’t know who you might bring over. Nellie Furr, that girl you said one day might be a bore although she has a good figure and seems amiable enough. It could of course make a lot of difference to have several people to pose.’91
Marching off each day into the country to ‘look about’, John would return late at night to Marseilles – and to Innes who, though invariably talking of his departure, would not leave. ‘He is insupportable – appears to be going off his head and stutters dreadfully,’ John complained.
It was now Dorelia’s turn to come south, bringing with her money, underclothing, handkerchiefs, a paintbox, some hairwash – but no model: and the three of them moved, in some dejection, to the Hôtel Basio at St-Chamas. ‘It is a beautiful place,’ John reassured Mrs Nettleship, ‘on the same lake as Martigues but on the north side.’ No sooner had they settled in than Innes fell seriously ill. ‘He had had a very dissipated time at Perpignan and was quite run down,’ John explained to Quinn (2 February 1913). ‘Finally at St Chamas… he was laid up for about a week after which we took him back to Paris and sent him off to London to see a doctor… The company of a sick man gets on one’s nerves in the end.’
Though he spent part of August in Paris in the company of Epstein, J. C. Squire and Modigliani (from whom he bought two prodigiously long and narrow stone heads which ‘affected me deeply’),92 John did use his new Welsh cottage during the summer of 1913, passing all July there and all September. The paintings he completed in these two months were exhibited during November in a show at the Goupil Gallery. He was working in tempera, a technique of painting that put him in closer contact with the fifteenth-century Italians from whom he sought inspiration, and his own recipe for which he passed on to younger British artists such as Mark Gertler.93 ‘I have been painting in tempera to my infinite delight,’ he told Michel Salaman early in 1912. This quick-drying, hard-setting medium made possible the building up of a picture in superimposed masses. He was also attempting to work on a larger scale than before. At the end of 1911 his adventurous ‘Forza e Amore’ had been hung at the New English Art Club to the bewilderment of almost everyone. At the end of 1912 he showed his first major essay in tempera, the controversial ‘Mumpers’. ‘The N.E.A.C. has just been hung,’ he wrote to John Hope-Johnstone (20 November 1912). ‘I suddenly took and painted my cartoon of Mumpers – in Tempera, finished it in 4½ days, and sent it in.94 In spite of the hasty workmanship, it doesn’t look so bad on the whole. I have also an immense [charcoal] drawing of the Caucasian Gypsies [‘Calderari’].’ Again, in the late New English show of 1913, he exhibited another huge cartoon, ‘The Flute of Pan’, with three female figures, four male and a boy, all life size. ‘Some say it is the best thing I’ve done,’ he told Quinn (26 January 1914), ‘and some the worst.’ All these years, too, he had been struggling with Hugh Lane’s big picture, subsequently called ‘Lyric Fantasy’. On 28 October 1913 he was writing to Ottoline Morrell: ‘I am overwhelmed with the problems of finishing Lane’s picture.’ He had hoped to show it at the next New English. On 29 December he confided to Quinn that it ‘will soon be done’; and again on 16 March 1914 he is ‘actually getting Lane’s big picture done at last’. So it went on until, in May 1915, Lane was drowned on board the Lusitania when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat, at which opportunity John ceased work on ‘Lyric Fantasy’. Had it been Quinn who died, there seems every likelihood that his big picture ‘Forza e Amore’ would not have been painted into oblivion.95
In these years before the war, John was producing his best work. This was often achieved as preliminary studies for larger decorations, panels knocked off while on holiday, or pictures done as designs for Dorelia’s embroidery. He held shows almost every year at the Chenil, sometimes covered whole walls at the New English, struggled on with his private commissions, and regularly sent work in to the Society of Twelve and the National Portrait Society of which, in February 1914, he was elected President. What caused the muddle in his life was also a stimulus for his best work – a sense of urgency, often assisted by financial pressure. John made a habit of externalizing his problems. But what he grappled with was some phantom rather than the problem itself. Whenever he felt dull or ill he fixed the blame on people and places, and would demand a change. These changes often brought with them an immediate lifting of his spirits, but would rapidly lead on to still worse complications.
For a short time early in 1913 he populated a bewildering number of houses acquired through this process of change. There was Alderney, which he shared with Dorelia and his family; Nant-ddu, which he shared with Innes; Llwynythyl, which he shared with Holbrooke and Sime; the Villa Ste-Anne at Martigues which he shared with the birdman Bazin; and 181A King’s Road, Chelsea, which he shared with Knewstub. Yet somehow he felt unaccommodated. Entering a public house in Chelsea, he demanded to know whether there was an architect present, and then commissioned a Dutchman who happened to be drinking at the bar to design a new house and studio for him in London. The simple part of the business was now over.
The house was to be built in Mallord Street, a new road which had recently been created parallel to and north of the King’s Road, over the waste ground where the John children used to play cowboys and Indians when they lived at Church Street. Van-t-Hoff, as this architect was called, ‘takes the studio very seriously’, John promised Dorelia. ‘…He is going back to Holland to think hard.’96 After an interval of slumbering thought, John was obliged to summon him back by cable. By 13 May 1913 he confidently reported to Quinn: ‘My Dutch architect has done his designs for my new studio with living rooms – and it will be a charming place. They will start building at once and it’ll be done in 6 months. How glad I shall be to be able to live more quietly – a thing almost impossible in this studio. My lawyer strongly urges me to try and find the money for the building straight away instead of saddling myself with a mortgage. The building will cost £2,200 [equivalent to £98,000 in 1996].’ John would have liked to offer the responsibilities for this property to others – looking in occasionally to pass, over the rising pile, his critical eye. But lawyers, estate agents, builders and decorators were constantly importuning him. ‘I can’t be rushing all over London and paint too, not having the brain of a Pierpont Morgan,’ he complained to Dorelia. Nor was it just his time for which these people were so greedy. ‘I shall want all my money and a good deal of other people’s,’ he explained to John Hope-Johnstone (8 September 1913). His letters to Quinn are congested with money proposals, the nicest of which is a scheme to save costs by building two houses, the second (at some considerable distance from the first) for his patron. ‘The materials will be of the best,’ he assures him, ‘and I think it will be a great success.’ His own house continued to rise, his funds to sink and his spirits to oscillate between optimism and despair. By late summer he had decided that Van-t-Hoff’s house was ‘very good and amusing’. But was the amusement at his expense? He had decided to move in during the autumn, but when autumn came the house still had no roof. ‘It’ll be ready in January,’ he declared: adding with some desperation, ‘I feel rather inclined to try another planet.’97 By early January it was ‘getting on well’; by late January it was ‘rising perceptively [sic]’. By February 1914 he had not retreated an inch, or advanced. It ‘will be done in three weeks Van-t-Hoff thinks’, he informed the silent Dorelia.98 By the middle of March it was still ‘nearly done’ and even being ‘much admired’. By April John is again ready to move – but to Dieppe where he aims to hold out until the house is equipped to receive him. After what turns out to be a fortnight round Cardiganshire and, in June, one week at Boulogne he returns to Chelsea and, though the house is certainly incomplete, decides to occupy it and hold a party ‘to baptize my new studio’.99 This party, a magnificent affair in fancy dress, lasts from the first into the second week of July.
‘The company was very charming and sympathetic, I thought,’ wrote one of the guests, Lytton Strachey,’ – so easy-going and taking everything for granted… John was a superb figure. There was dancing – two-steps and such things – so much nicer than waltzes – and at last I danced with him [John] – it seemed an opportunity not to be missed. (I forget to say I was dressed as a pirate). Nini [Euphemia] Lamb was there, and made effréné love to me. We came out in broad daylight.’100
It was like a dolls’ house. Steep steps led up to the front door, behind which the rooms were poky and, in spite of the sun streaming in from the south over the market gardens, rather dark. The windows were long and thin and well proportioned; yet when children appeared behind them, they looked like iron-barred cages. The best feature was the staircase, which was copied from Rembrandt’s house. In the drawing-room Boris Anrep designed a superb mosaic, a pyramid of wives and children with John at its apex, glowing a dull green as if from the depths of the sea. At the back lay the great studio. With its sloping ceiling, deep alcove, and two fires burning at opposite corners, ‘The studio looks fine,’ John told Quinn on 24 June 1914. But even in these early days he recognized the prison-like atmosphere of the place. ‘It is quite a success I think. It has nearly ruined me,’ he wrote to John Hope-Johnstone. ‘…It certainly is rather Dutch but has a solidity and tautness unmatched in London – a little stronghold. I hope I shall find the studio practical.’ The studio was perhaps the most practical area – an excellent place for parties.
One of John’s motives for commissioning this house had been to please Dorelia. Their correspondence in these years before the war shows her reluctance to go on accompanying him on his jaunts to windswept areas of Wales or Ireland, or join him roaming after gitanos and mumpers anywhere between Battersea and Merseyside. He had to be on the move; but she needed to settle herself and the children at Alderney: and this was putting their relationship under new strain. ‘I think you are anything but morbid. I get that way far too often I fear,’ he assures her in the summer of 1912. He was painting her less frequently. But ‘…I’m sure I could paint a good picture of you if you wouldn’t mind letting me try.’101 He sends her loving letters – ‘I wish to God you were here,’ he writes from Galway. ‘…wish I was going to sleep with you’102 – and his tone is sensitive, even at times humble. But she is less available now, having so much work of her own to do at Alderney. Since she will not travel with him he must take other models – Nora or Lillian, Nelly or ‘Katie with Songs’ from the bar at the New Docks in Galway City, though whenever Dorelia objects, John quickly comes to heel again.
But sometimes Dorelia did not object soon enough. Surely then she would be better placed to do so if they shared a house in London as well as in the country? There would be advantages too for him, comforts such as Dorelia’s cooking. The housekeeper she had engaged at Mallord Street intimidated him. ‘Her puddings with froth on the top make me rather self-conscious,’103 he complained. He was sure that one or two bouts of illness he suffered had never been due to alcohol, as malicious people alleged, but to the fact that this housekeeper ‘doesn’t think things are ready to eat till they begin to decompose’.104 But Dorelia remained unmoved by his pleas.
As a means of bringing them closer together and the symbol of a conventional union, the house in Mallord Street*7 was a failure. Within two years the ‘little stronghold’ had become ‘this damned Dutch shanty’.105 John attributed his dissatisfaction to the Dutch architect’s ‘passion for rectangles’.106 Dorelia blamed the roof garden, which faced north.
Mercifully John had begun shedding his Welsh cottages before occupying Mallord Street. Nant-ddu went first. Between February 1913 and August 1914 he did not see Innes who, attempting to regain his health, had gone to Tenerife with Trelawney Dayrell Reed. Llwynythyl was given up with its debris of painting materials in 1914.107 The place had gone sour on him. He tracked down the source of the trouble to the noise that Joseph Holbrooke made at meals. ‘I don’t think I can stand him and will probably leave at the end of the week… I could get on with Sime but Holbrooke is too horrible.’ Holbrooke dedicated his piano ballad ‘Tan-y-grisiau’ to John. ‘Most of your Welsh titles of your things are misspelt,’ John told him. Besides, he had the disadvantage of ‘a tune constantly playing in his left ear’. But the ‘man Sime’ was one of Nature’s gentlemen – strongly built, with a cliff-like forehead, eyes of superlative greyish-blue and a look (which grew fixed at Llwynythyl) of heroic patience.108
In place of Wales, John had hit upon ‘the only warm place north of the Pyramids’109 during winter: Lamorna Cove, near Penzance in Cornwall, where he met ‘a number of excellent people down in the little village… all painters of sorts’110 – John Birch, Harold and Laura Knight, and Alfred Munnings111 – ‘and we had numerous beanos’. John was later said to have indecisively remembered a party that began in Haverfordwest one Thursday and ended the following Tuesday somewhere in Hungary. A number of his Cornish ‘beanos’ were also pretty terrifying affairs. ‘We feared’, Dame Laura Knight recalled, ‘to shorten our lives.’112 John would perform amazing tricks – tenderly opening bottles of wine without a corkscrew; flicking, from great distances, pats of butter into other people’s mouths; dancing, on point in his handmade shoes, upon the rickety table, and other astonishing feats. Then, while the others collapsed into exhausted sleep, out he would go in search of Dorelia, and do little studies of her in various poses on the rocks: ‘He never did anything better.’113 John was delighted with the place. ‘I found Cornwall a most sympathetic country,’ he wrote to Quinn on his arrival back at Alderney (19 February 1914). ‘…There are some extraordinarily nice people there among the artists and some very attractive young girls among the people.’
‘It seems your appearance at the Café Royal caused a great sensation,’ John had told Dorelia after one of her rare appearances in London. He himself was in the Café Royal on 4 August 1914, the night war was declared. ‘I remember our excitement over it.’114 One of their friends carried the news among the waiters, and John, suddenly perturbed, turned to Bomberg: ‘This is going to be bad for art.’
Much of that month he spent with Innes who was to die of his tuberculosis on 22 August. ‘He cannot be said to have fulfilled himself completely,’ John was to write in his first draft for an Innes Memorial Exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in 1923; ‘he died too young for his powers to have reached their full maturity – and for that matter does not everyone?
‘But by the intensity of his vision and his passionately romantic outlook, his work will live when that of many happier and healthier men will have grown, with the passing years, cold and dull and lifeless… the cruel fate so soon to overtake him spurred him into frenzied activity which used up all those hours so often with others devoted to dreams or talk or recreation.’
*
One of the first things Augustus did after the declaration of war was to send a letter to his sister Gwen. ‘I wonder if you are going to remain in Paris during the war,’ he wrote on 4 August. ‘I hope not. You will have to suffer great hardships I fear if you do and it is not too late to come back here… food will be awfully dear and most likely communication will be stopped and in any case sending money over will be difficult if not impossible… Let me know what you decide and if I can help in any way. With love, Gus.’115
But he already knew what she would decide. At the Guildhall that autumn, Winston Churchill, newly appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, declared the maxim of the British people to be ‘business as usual’. In their own curiously detached yet conventional ways, it was to be business as usual for both Gwen and Gus. She insisted that she would be safer in France; and besides, she could not leave Rodin. Yet if it became impossible for her to receive her mother’s quarterly allowance from Britain, or to send her pictures to Quinn in the United States, how would she subsist? There was little Gus could do. He sent her train times and offered to fetch her over to stay at Alderney, ‘but of course she won’t’, he told Dorelia.116
*1 The painter Jean Varda remembered a characteristic affair with the extravagant dancer Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson – reputedly ‘the worst dancer in the world but one of the most remarkable athletes’, as described by Aldous Huxley, ‘whose strength is as the strength of ten’. Their liaison began in 1914 and ‘for being unrequited lasted longer than his [John’s] periodic infatuations. At Lady Constance’s studio (in her performance of the sword dance) he took a violent dislike to me and in fits of prodigious eloquence cursed me with a wealth of abuse and vituperation, the like of which I never encountered in my life… It was a great treat to hear these gorgeous syllables delivered with the grandiose emphasis of a Mounet Sully of the Comédie Française.’ Varda at that time was Lady Constance’s perspiring partner in the dance. A few years later a calm seems to have descended and at Evan Morgan’s birthday party in July 1917 Aldous Huxley records: ‘in one corner of the room Lady Constance supported John on her bosom.’ She was, he adds, ‘profoundly exhausting company’.
*2 In Chiaroscuro, John was careful to write of ‘passive yet firm resistance’ at the railway station. But in a letter to Dorelia he is more direct: ‘I shoved her out.’
*3 He was the author of The Battle of Britain in the Fifth Century; an Essay in Dark Age History.
*4 He was drawn by Wyndham Lewis playing the flute. Later, with Compton Mackenzie, he became joint editor of the Gramophone, in which he reviewed the latest records under the pseudonym ‘James Caskett’. In Octave 5 of My Life and Times, Compton Mackenzie recounts that he first met Hope-Johnstone in Greece in 1916. ‘John Hope-Johnstone had arrived by now from Corfu with a kitbag containing a few clothes, one top-boot, several works on higher mathematics and two volumes of Doughty’s Arabia Deserla, a pair of bright yellow Moorish slippers, a camera and a flute… He enlisted at the beginning of the war, somehow cheating the military authorities over his eyesight; then his myopia was discovered by his having saluted a drum he had mistaken for the regimental sergeant-major.’
*5 ‘Hope-Johnstone used to try and explain relativity to me when I was about 10,’ Romilly John recalled. ‘I still remember the horror of his subsequent discovery that I had not wholly mastered vulgar fractions.’
*6 ‘We considered her rather a witch-like figure, though I daresay she was quite handsome in a Danish way,’ Romilly John wrote. ‘…On parents’ day Mrs P. invariably gave the same speech, in which she told, with considerable emotion, how she was enlightened as to the meaning of the word “gentleman”, presumably there being no equivalent in Denmark either of the word or the thing. One day she had seen from an upstairs window one of the 12 older boys {not a. John) stealing gooseberries. This boy had subsequently owned up to the theft, an instance of gentlemanliness the like of which Denmark could afford no equal. It was this boy who at a later date was employed as tutor to Edwin and me.’ Romilly to the author, 15 November 1972.
*7 It was originally No. 5, but the numbering was changed in 1914 and it became No. 28.