Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Augustus had a quick ear for languages and under Sampson’s tutelage he soon picked up the English dialect of Romany and later something of the deep inflected Welsh dialect. When he arrived in Liverpool he had been reading the novels of Turgenev in the recent translations by Constance Garnett, and Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Now he turned to Kriegspiel, the unique gypsy novel by Francis Hindes Groome, and to the picaresque romances of George Borrow, ‘the prince among vagabonds’, who could make his readers hear ‘the music of the wind on the heath’. Like Augustus, Borrow had suffered from ‘the Horrors’; and like Sampson he found relief in ‘a dream partly of study, partly of adventure’. For both Augustus and Sampson, united by a longing for poetic escapades, Borrow became an inspiration, replacing bourgeois with bohemian life, promising nothing, beckoning his followers away from the ethics of nineteenth-century empire-building and the commercial practices of twentieth-century industrialism.

  As a learned guide to the ways of the road, ‘Beloved Sampson’ became a new kind of hero for Augustus. Their friendship was to be interrupted by glaring quarrels and rivalries, but it lasted a lifetime. They exchanged passwords and countersigns and indelicate verses in Romany. ‘You must hate my jargon compounded of all the dialects in Europe,’22 Augustus acknowledged. It was not really a letter-writing relationship. ‘Many a time have I started writing to you and in many places,’ Augustus assured him the following year, ‘ – but my pockets are always full of unfinished letters.’23 Sampson seldom got so far as beginning letters. ‘You will never write to me I suppose,’ Augustus lamented; ‘all I can do is to write to you and assure you of the sweet pleasure it would always be for me to hear from you, a pleasure which might well come at a time when blank glooms shut out the beauty of the world – one cannot always keep the horizon clear. It is as well to have a pal a long way off when those at hand and in sight are… rather spectral and unconvincing shapes!’24

  And yet, because there would be long wandering intervals between their meetings, and distance was always precious to them and separation a necessity, the letters they did eventually send each other over thirty years possessed a special value. ‘What’s the point of seeing Gypsies if I can’t talk to you about them?’25 Augustus demanded. So, with long meditative silences, they did talk a little, partly in Romany, partly in English, through their correspondence. Sampson’s letters, with their reminiscences of sunlight and tobacco smoke, green leaves and wayside pubs, were a magical pick-me-up for Augustus, like an old perfume invading his mind. ‘I shall count the hours till I hear from you,’ he implored, ‘…don’t keep me in suspense.’ It was important to him that Sampson ‘remember your brother of the Predilection’ and send him news of ‘little Egypt’. From time to time he would fire back ‘a pack of Romani stuff’ from his travels through Europe, and Sampson would examine it through his pince-nez and surround it all with his illuminating annotations.

  Augustus venerated Sampson’s eclectic scholarship, ranging from the Lyrical Poems of William Blake which he was preparing when they met, to his subversive Poachers’ Calendar and collection of ‘songs for singing at encampments’. Augustus put him on to W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land (‘a beautiful book’) and Sampson introduced him to Hardy’s poems (‘wonderful things’, Augustus discovered). On good days they felt each was the other’s kindred spirit in art and letters, two names that should be coupled down the long ages. ‘Now partner, you must play straight, no publishing songs without my collaboration – that is the bond,’26 Augustus exhorted Sampson. He provided lyrical or bawdy frontispieces for several of Sampson’s books: his Romany version of Omar Khayyám, his volume of poems Romane Gilia, and gypsy anthology The Wind on the Heath which, Sampson assured Augustus, was a ‘strictly amoral’ book, and therefore ‘an excellent one to give to chyes [children]’.27

  But what Augustus chiefly prized was Sampson’s massive masterpiece-to-be, The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, tracing the connections between Romany, Sanskrit, Persian and the languages of Europe. ‘It will be a masterpiece old pal,’ Augustus confidently assured his friend, ‘and will probably make Romani in future an indispensable adjunct of a gentleman’s education – like Greek used to be.’28 Augustus was all impatience to see the book – ‘how is the great book going on? Surely you are near Z by now’ – but impatience was inappropriate. In Sampson’s opinion ‘no time or trouble should be grudged to make the book a perfect specimen of its kind.’29 It was a good corrective to Augustus’s hasty spirit. Early in 1924 Sampson wrote: ‘My vocab. has now reached p. 368, beginning of letter T. I send you a proof of an earlier sheet – R being rather an interesting letter – to show you what it’s like. References to “o Janos” [John] wind through the pages “like a golden thread”.’30

  ‘How delighted I was to receive the specimen sheets!’ Augustus replied. ‘…It’s always a joy to me to read a word of the old tongue and now soon we shall have the big book at last… It’s a fine thing to have accomplished so complete a thing in one’s life.’ The implication was that Augustus’s life had become scattered with too many unaccomplished, or at least unfinished, things.

  Augustus was Sampson’s most eclectic disciple. When, falling one day in later life into despair after a gypsy informed him that he was getting bald at the top of his head, Sampson turned and asked Augustus: ‘What should I do?’ he was sternly instructed, ‘Return to your innocence’ – by which Augustus meant ‘sin openly and scandalize the world.’31 But Sampson could not do this: his flirtations were furtive and he led a secret life. Augustus seemed to him exorbitantly favoured by the gods. It was almost impossible not to sentimentalize over him. Sampson described him as ‘strong, handsome, a genius, beloved by many men and women with a calling which is also his chief pleasure and allows him the most entire freedom, successful beyond his dreams or needs and assured of immortality as long as art lasts’. This was the legendary being Sampson was to celebrate in his poem ‘The Apotheosis of Augustus John’. ‘It is almost more than one mortal deserves,’ Sampson wrote to his son Michael, ‘but somehow it seems all right in his case.’32

  Augustus needed to put himself in the service of some master. And if the service was intermittent and Sampson a master in the wrong artistic medium, nevertheless the older man’s influence was strong in those early Liverpool days. By the gypsies themselves, Sampson was already admitted as one of their own. Augustus had been attracted to gypsies since childhood, but always from a distance. Now, as the Rai’s friend, he was welcomed by these ‘outlandish and despised people’ as a fellow vagrant. He could not keep away Sampson would take him to Cabbage Hall, a strip of wasteland beyond Liverpool where there was no hall and no cabbages, only the tents and caravans of the gypsy tribes which congregated there throughout the winter; and their visits were rich in speculation and adventure.

  There was something strangely satisfying in this life of singing and dancing and odd journeys. The tents, the wagons, the gaily painted carts and great shining flanks of the horses, the sight of the women with their children, stirred Augustus in a way he could not explain. They were so fine-looking, these weathered people, as they crowded round, their language flying everywhere, their beauty intensified by a proud and enigmatic bearing. ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’ – the possibilities seemed endless. Noah, Kenza, Eros and Bohemia; Sinfai, Athaliah, Counseletta and Tihanna – their extraordinary names, and the mystery and antiquity of their origins conjured up a world, remote yet sympathetic, to which he should have belonged.

  When he left them to return to the university and to Ida, he would try to reason out why he felt these tremors of fascination and what the true significance of it might be. They seemed to have much in common with him; they were natural exhibitionists, yet deeply secretive; they were quick-witted, courteous, yet temperamental and with a dark suspicion of strangers; they were essentially honest, almost naïve, yet prevaricating; they loved children, yet without sentimentality. All this he knew, and yet it still left unexp
lained that painful hammering of his heart whenever he approached their camps. His excitement came from desires damped down in childhood now magically rekindled. In the sun and wind, like the trees and fields around them, these travellers seemed truly alive. There was nothing confined, nothing claustrophobic here: they did what they wanted, went where they wished – over the next hill, far away – and they were answerable to nobody.

  He was exhilarated.

  *

  At 4 St James’s Road life had begun to follow a steady pattern. ‘We have callers pretty often,’ Ida informed Alice Rothenstein, ‘University men and their wives. Our room is always in disorder when they come as Gus is generally painting – but they survive it.’ Generally he was painting Ida, but she also found time to continue with her painting and ‘have an old man model, who goes to lectures on Dante, and takes part in play-readings. He sits like a rock, occasionally wiping his old eyes when they get moist.’

  Augustus’s father came to see them, and so did Ida’s mother. The Nettleships had not come round to Ida’s marriage. Very little was said, but Mrs Nettleship’s work-girls felt her disapproval and whispered among themselves that it was ‘a shame’, that Augustus was ‘not half good enough’ for Ida and had taken her to live in a slum. Ida’s sister Ursula was still disappointed that there had been no smart wedding; but her other sister Ethel33 bravely came to stay for a week and observed Augustus working hard. It was an uneventful time, but not unhappy. ‘I am afraid I haven’t started a baby yet,’ Ida apologized to Alice. ‘I want one.’

  The first variations in this routine came that summer. Ida ‘looks suspiciously pregnant’, Augustus suddenly remarked to Will Rothenstein. The doctor soon confirmed her pregnancy, but in these early months there was a rumour of complications and, so this doctor warned her, the risk of a miscarriage. For this reason she passed the summer months quietly, first at Wigmore Street, then with Edwin and Winifred John in Tenby.

  Liberated from domesticity on doctor’s orders, Augustus felt he had been let out from a narrow place. He could go where he wanted, be what he liked. One morning he set out intending to go for a short walk ‘but instead went to Bruges and stood amazed before the works of Van Eyck and Memling’, he explained to Will Rothenstein. ‘The Belgians are as shoddy as they were formerly magnificent. Maeterlinck needs all his second sight.’

  His truancy over, he joined Ida in Tenby ‘feeling rather metagrabolized’, and carried her off for a month’s rest-and-painting to New Quay. ‘Now the child has quickened, I suppose there is very small fear of a miscarriage,’ Ida reassured her mother that September. ‘…I have been very well here – no indigestion and very regular bowels. The baby moves from time to time – and I am growing very big and hard.’ Every morning Augustus would go bathing and, during the afternoons ‘have models in a disused school room’. Ida sat at home, letting out her skirts and creating new clothes for the baby, and these she would take up to the schoolroom at tea time, when the painting had to stop.

  In the last week of September they returned to Liverpool – but not to St James’s Road, since Ida could no longer manage the stairs there. For two weeks they put up with John and Margaret Sampson – ‘delightful people’, Ida promised her mother – at 146 Chatham Street, a semi-slum. Then they moved off to rather grander accommodation, 66 Canning Street, a three-storeyed, red-brick house, complete with art nouveau metalwork on the doors and railings, and a black projecting portico with Doric cornices.

  So much, this autumn, augured well for Augustus. Ida’s pregnancy inflamed him with excitement – a sense of power, tenderness, and some curious feeling of fulfilment, almost as if it were he who was being born again. They had been fortunate in finding Canning Street, and Augustus himself had at last discovered a good studio34 and was making it habitable.

  The university, too, had ‘raised my dole by a smug £200 and a day less in the week than last term’.35 This increase reflected the excellent work he was doing at the Art Sheds. His predecessor, Herbert Jackson, had been an uninspiring teacher. He would slump down by a student’s drawing board, sketch an ear or a foot, examine it, then remark: ‘It’s not much good, I suppose, but it’ll do.’ Augustus’s methods marked a great improvement. ‘Alas, how many brilliant drawings have I done on the boards of my pupils!’ he commented. It was as though he was learning from his own instruction. Above all he stressed the importance of observation. ‘When you draw,’ he told his class, ‘don’t look at the model for one second and five minutes at your drawing, but five minutes at the model and one second at your drawing.’ He was immensely pleased when his pupils did well, and he was responsible for several gifted young artists later leaving the School of Art and throwing in their lot with the Sandon Studios Society.36

  Despite the incursion which teaching made into his time, his own work was also going well. Liverpool stimulated him, made him more keenly responsive to the visible world. ‘For my part a fine morning fills me with unspeakable joy,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein, ‘ – a tender sky tethers me to childhood, a joyous countenance is an obstacle on the road to old age.’

  His letters during this first year at Liverpool are congested with happiness. ‘It has seemed to me of late I’ve been passing through a transition stage,’ he confided to Rothenstein (4 May 1901),

  ‘taking my leave lingeringly and spasmodically, and with many runs backward, of old traditions… Something stirs within me which makes me think so long and passionate company with so many loves as I have kept has not left me barren. Hitherto I have been Art’s most devoted concubine, but now at length the seed takes root. I am, O Will, about to become a mother – the question of paternity must be left to the future. I suspect at least 4 old masters.’

  Between the winter exhibitions of 1900 and 1902, greatly to Brown’s disappointment, Augustus sent in nothing to the New English. Instead he relied on the Carfax Gallery and in particular on Rothenstein. To him Augustus would dispatch what he called his ‘parcels of fancies’ and ‘pastels of sluts’ – beggar girls, ballet girls and all manner of remarkable-looking models he had collided with in the streets of Liverpool. His purpose was to record as directly as possible the natural beauty he saw around him, without any message or moral, any attitude or intervening glaze of intellectuality. Yet it is ‘a strange, troubled feeling for beauty’ these pictures reveal, with ‘undefined hungers and raptures hinted at’, Laurence Binyon was to write.37

  With these pastels Rothenstein was most successful, especially in selling them to other artists – Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, Brown and Tonks. ‘Such power, combined with a marvellous subtlety, such drawing, astonished me more than ever,’ Rothenstein recorded; ‘no one living had his range of sensuous, lofty and grotesque imagination.’ But the contrast he regularly showed between crabbed age and youth struck the Royal Academician landscape artist Sir George Clausen as ‘deplorable’. His pastels were not pornographic – they were not even pretty (in the manner of Russell Flint’s watercolours). ‘His work antagonised people; it was deemed deliberately ugly,’ Rothenstein recorded. ‘Were people altogether blind to beauty?’38 he wondered, looking at these lyrical nudes. Augustus’s gratitude, both to Rothenstein and to his models, swelled to its most rhapsodic vein:

  ‘Beloved Will,

  You know nothing delights my soul more than your laudation! you have made me tickle and thrill, and gulp tears to eye and water to lip. And have my poor girls served me so well! Blessing on you Maggie and Ellen Jones!39 Daughters of Cardigan I thank ye! And you Queen of the Brook whose lewd leer captured me in my dreams, may your lusty honest blood be never denied the embrace it tingles for!

  …I pant to do a superb decoration.’

  The most important development in Augustus’s art during this Liverpool period was his work as an etcher. He had taken up etching at the suggestion of his friend Benjamin Evans, one of his first plates being a portrait of Evans.40 He grew immensely enthusiastic over this new medium. ‘I have been etching a good deal,’ he told
Will Rothenstein. It was Rembrandt’s example41 that Evans had extolled and that now fired off this activity. Like Rembrandt, Augustus’s first experiments included a number of portrait studies of himself in various poses and costumes – fur caps and wide-brimmed hats, bare-headed and in a black gown. But there were also several portraits of Ida, very plump and maternal, in a fur-tipped cape or with a special necklace, or simply as ‘a brown study’: and the macabre or eccentric figures of drapers, chandlers, old haberdashers, young serving-maids, ragamuffin children and all the cosmopolitan population of Liverpool whom he saw on the wasteground of Cabbage Hall, or wandering through the university, or at the working-men’s dining-rooms and doss houses along Scotland Road – gypsies and mulattos, the frock-coated bourgeois, the black women, muffin men, charwomen and old people with fierce hopeless expressions.

  Augustus had made so close a study of Rembrandt’s method, and assimilated it to such an extent, that many of his etchings look like imitations. Yet however derivative his technique, these etchings do reveal a great deal about his work. In a perceptive introduction to the Catalogue of Augustus’s etchings, Campbell Dodgson wrote: