‘There are certain features in his work which make it unlike that of his contemporaries. His choice of figure subjects in preference to the landscape or architectural motives which are so much in vogue to-day is one of them. His consistency in restricting the size of his plates to small, or even tiny, dimensions is another. Both are significant traits which link his work to the great tradition of the painter-etchers of four centuries… But a fault common to many of them is a fault that runs through Mr John’s paintings and drawings as well, lack of concentration and acquiescence in an apparent finish, a facile substitute for true perfection. Or if we consider the subjects themselves, rather than the manner in which he treats them, is there not something unsatisfying, superficial, betraying lack of “fundamental brainwork” in most of the compositions containing two or more figures? There is no apparent motive for bringing them together, and Mr John, with all his intense interest in single types, and his power, unequalled among etchers of to-day, of expressing individual character, lacks the imaginative, constructive, or dramatic gift of showing several characters in action.’
The fruit-sellers, street-philosophers, tramps and coster-girls who figure in so many of Augustus’s visual lyrics were in fact poor subjects – elusive, self-conscious, shy of being stared at. He had taught his students the value of observation but this lesson was difficult to put into practice. He could catch them all right, these reluctant sitters, but well before the five minutes were up they were off. He was therefore thrown back on memory and imagination, and to some extent these failed him. Everything made its impact at once, and seemed to last only so long as it remained in front of him. Some of these studies of gypsies or fisher folk lack atmosphere. The oxygen has gone out of their world, and they wilt. This seepage of vitality is particularly noticeable in his etchings because the medium was so slow. To fill the emptiness, he overworked them with a turmoil of feathery cross-hatching.42 He could not decide on the right moment to stop. ‘It is only that I feel ever inclined to add a few scratches on the plate that I husband them in this way,’ he told Will Rothenstein.
Campbell Dodgson’s other criticism Augustus would have refuted. It was not his desire artifically to inject action or drama into these studies; it was not his wish to apply sophisticated ‘brainwork’ to simple people. What action or drama or brainwork is there in a tree, the corner of a field, a standing woman? What intellectual ‘purpose’ may be divined in such everyday shapes and ordinary sights? Augustus did not plot his pictures. His groups are deliberately motiveless. He etches them because they’re there – and because he loves them being there. In a sense, the superficiality of which Campbell Dodgson accuses him is exactly what he sets out to achieve. His theme is the profundity of the superficial. He makes the aesthetic statement that passing sights of no special significance have the power to move us beyond explanation or understanding. So far as the artist is concerned, Augustus believed, the ‘meaning’ of his studies should be left to the unconscious. His intention was to fix the passing moment and make it timeless, and in that timeless moment discover ‘a romantic world composed in the image of his desire’.43 But when the magic of timelessness fails and the passing moment will not pose for him, time hangs heavy, and we feel betrayed by the pointlessness of this empty life.
*
So much this autumn promised well; so much seemed to trail its shadow of disappointment: and as the autumn changed to winter, these shadows began to stretch out.
The turning point came in October. It was in the second week of this month that Augustus sustained a bang on the head, reminiscent of his bathing accident at Tenby. Ida, in a letter to her mother (16 October 1901), explained what happened:
‘Gus has broken his nose and put his finger out of joint by falling from a ladder in the studio. The doctor came – a splendid big red-brown man – and sewed up the cut on his nose in two exquisite stitches. Poor Gus was very white, and bloody in parts. He is now a lovely sight, very much swollen and one red eye. His profile is like a lion. They say the scar will not show, and he will be well in a fortnight. The bone was a little damaged but it won’t make any difference – we think his nose may be straighter after!’
After the first shock had passed, Augustus resolved not to be pinned down by his injury. ‘My dear!’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein, ‘a bang on the head has never and will never down me. Au contraire I feel double the übermensch with a great patch on my nose! I have paraded it before my students with great effect. At the Sketch Club the other night it must have been grand to see me point a dislocated finger of scorn and turn up a broken nose at these purblind gropings in pictorial darkness.’
Such was the devastating effect of this patch and bandage, he claimed, that students hurried over to see it from other art schools, and his class overflowed. But what is evident from his letters is that this fall had brought back memories of his accident at Tenby, and that he was theatrically overreacting to it. He wore his misfortune, humorously enough, like some sartorial accomplishment. But an extra wildness entered into his behaviour, as if he were pushing frantically against a door he feared might close on him.
Up till now he had seemed to share the biological adventure of Ida’s pregnancy, but suddenly it threatened him with confinement. The whole process was too long – a nine-days’ wonder was what he would have liked. He felt hemmed in. ‘I really must come to town and see what my contemporaries are about,’ he wrote that October to Will Rothenstein. But the following month he was writing: ‘I fear I cannot come to London before our baby has squeezed its way through the narrow portals of life.’
London, now that he could not reach it, was marvellously desirable to him; while over Liverpool, so fresh and enthralling only that spring, a cloud had begun to settle. London bought his pictures – sometimes the very pictures which Liverpool rejected. The Liverpool Academy refused him membership. He felt himself among Philistines. ‘I come now shattered from a visit to the Walker Art Gallery,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘It contains the Ox Bovril of the R.A. shambles.’44
Because of Liverpool’s hostility to his work and because of his own spendthrift ways, he was often pressed for money and, on one occasion, obliged to settle a huge milk bill by handing over to the disgruntled milkman a number of masterpieces. ‘I would paint any man a nice big picture for £50, if he paid down 25 first,’ he complained to Rothenstein this winter. ‘That’s to say a good big nude.’ But no one wanted his nudes. They were big, certainly; but they were not good, Liverpool decided.
He began to feel that his teaching was holding up the work he really wanted to do. ‘What output can be expected of one who works at a school for 3 days!’ he expostulated.45 Mackay’s lofty ideas now seemed peculiarly misleading. ‘Mackay talks grandiosely of a great art school with 300 a year for me and studio and my own to follow – But I trust him not,’ he confided to Will Rothenstein (16 April 1902). Against Mackay’s vision of a university palace with towers raised above the clouds and a studio at the top of them for every face of the day stood Augustus’s actual curriculum – a treadmill that grew more irksome to him each week. ‘The three days I prostitute to foul faced commodity weigh on my soul terribly,’ he confessed. ‘My conscience is awakening and I see the evil of my ways.’46 By the early spring of 1902 his university career had reached a point of crisis. ‘I am now expected to examine all the work done by every student (50–60) during the past Session and choose an example of each to send to the National Competition S. Kensington,’ he complained to Rothenstein (9 March 1902). ‘You can imagine the brilliant result of such a rummage. I draw the line at that.’ But if he drew the line too firmly he would be out of a job. He was trapped.
The most respectable, and therefore most despicable, elements of university life had begun to infiltrate their home. The wives of professors made it their duty to call regularly on Ida carrying with them useful pieces of black net, warm flannel nightgowns and wool socks; also disused blankets, nondescript fragments of lace, second-hand pin-cushions, half
the veil of a deceased nun (rumoured to have special properties), and a miniature stove for preparing baby’s food. Whenever Augustus returned from his studio, there they were, these clusters of affable vague women, tousled, dusty and bespectacled, parading their offerings and chattering about Ida’s baby – when would it arrive? Would it be a boy? Would it be born before, after, or at the same time as the other University College baby that winter, Mrs Boyce’s? Under this pressure Ida began to have fantastic nightmares about her baby. ‘I dreamt last night that the baby came – an immense girl, the size of a 1 year old child – with thick lips, the under one hanging – little black eyes near together and a big fine nose,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘Altogether very like a savage – and most astonishing to us.’47
Avoiding these Liverpool ladies, Augustus spent more time with his gypsies. That autumn there was a fair on Cabbage Hall. The place was filled up with carts and wagons, booths and cheap-jacks; and everywhere the animal – both horse and human – was magnificently exhibited. How tawdry the tea-party wives who filled his home seemed when contrasted with those pictures of sin and supernatural knowledge, the gypsy fortune-tellers, with their stately bearing and unreadable eyes like black coals burning with concentrated hate – terrible to behold! Augustus would linger there till the fields and hills grew dark, a heavy mist enshrouded the tents, and the fiddlers one by one stopped their playing.
Like a gypsy himself, Augustus was growing ever more elusive. Ida seldom knew where he was. It was not only Cabbage Hall that he preferred to his own home, but other people’s homes – the Rani’s at 28 Alexandra Drive which, according to Albert Rutherston, ‘is good for the moral tone of us all’; and the defunct Gothic school near Rodney Street where lived the ‘Doonie’, the artist Albert Lipczinski’s generous blue-eyed wife to whom, in order to avoid trouble, Augustus wrote his letters in Romany. ‘The hospitality of Liverpool is truly wonderful,’ Albert Rutherston told Max Beerbohm, ‘the women more so.’
Ida took it all calmly, though her dreams grew still more fantastic. She dreamt of a tiny man, ‘the size of the 1st joint of a finger’, immensely charming, who drank milk out of a miniature saucer, like a cat, and who had a little boat in which he sailed off alone. He was very plucky, but eventually got lost and exhausted, frightened by the prickly larch trees, until he came across a tent in which lived Jack Nettleship, who took him up and carried him home, quite naked. ‘Do you think the baby will be a lunatic, having such a mother?’ she asked her father.48 The baby was born, weighing 6 pounds exactly, on 6 January 1902. ‘My wife gave birth to a little boy yesterday,’ Augustus wrote to Albert Rutherston (7 January 1902), ‘and seems none the worse.’ But his casual tone concealed real excitement.
The birth of Ida’s son affected the Nettleships’ attitude to Ida’s marriage. Even Mrs Nettleship was prepared to bury her doubts and put the best face on it as she arrived in Liverpool with a special nurse. While Ida rested in bed, Augustus sat downstairs listening to his mother-in-law strumming cheerful tunes on the piano. They reminded him of his father. After a fortnight Ida was allowed up. ‘It was lovely,’ she wrote to her sister Ursula. ‘But I felt as if I were too light to keep down on the floor.’ Her letters over the next few weeks were full of baby-news in which Augustus took as keen an interest as she did, approving each grunt, each ounce. ‘I cannot realise I have a little boy yet,’ she told Ursula (21 January 1902). ‘I cannot believe I am his mother. I love him very much. He has an intelligent little face – but looks, nearly always, perplexed, or contemplative. I do not think he has smiled yet. He is a wonderful mixture of Nettleship-John.’
What exercised Augustus’s mind more than anything else was the choice of a name. It was another sign of his own lack of identity that, with all his children, this choice should be such a perplexing matter. By the time the child’s birth came to be registered, one name alone had been settled upon – and that was compulsory: Nettleship. As a preliminary name, Augustus had given a good deal of consideration to Lewis. But no sooner had he decided upon this than the baby would physiognomically alter so as to resemble an Anthony or a Peter. Then a new conviction would seize him; he would fix upon his son a good Welsh name – Llewelyn or maybe Owen or even Evan… But which? Perhaps, since the child would after all be only one-quarter Welsh, this too was wrong. Whichever way he looked at it, the problem appeared insoluble – yet it had to be solved. He read books, he strode off for long contemplative walks and on his return he tried out names in the proximity of the baby as it slept. By March, Honoré was in the lead and seemed almost certain to win. But by May, Ida was writing to Alice Rothenstein: ‘Really I cannot tell you the baby’s name, as we can’t decide. Gus has said Pharaoh for the last few days. But it changes every week. I don’t mind what it is.’ To meet the pressure of such inquiries, Augustus was eventually hurried into accepting David by the end of the year. But for much of his childhood David was called Tony, then reverted to David – with the occasional variant of Dafydd, being one-quarter Welsh.
At the beginning of March 1902, Augustus, Ida and ‘Llewelyn de Wet Ravachol John’ (temporarily named after an uncaptured Boer leader and an anarchist bomber) left Canning Street and moved to 138 Chatham Street very near the Sampsons. Here, for five months, they went through the rigours of family life. ‘I wish you would tell me something about your baby,’ Ida asked Alice Rothenstein. ‘Does he often cry? Ours howls. He is howling now. I have done all I can for him, and I know he is not hungry. I suppose the poor soul is simply unhappy.’ Augustus too was not happy. The birth of his son, with all its novelty and curiosity, had turned his attention back into their home, but now the noise began to drive him out again. Ida sometimes felt that she had more to do than she could manage. There was no opportunity for painting. ‘Baby takes so much time – and the rooms we are in are not kept very clean, so I am always dusting and brushing. Also we have a puppy, who adds to the difficulties,’ she told Alice. But, she went on: ‘I think I enjoy working hard really.’
Augustus’s pictures of Ida often show her with children. But she was far from being a conventional mother-figure. In a sense she was more of a mother to Augustus than to his sons. She did not feel about her first-born, she told the Rothensteins, as they did about theirs. ‘I have not had any ecstasies over him,’ she confessed. ‘He is a comic little fellow, but he grumbles such a fearful lot. I think he would very much rather not have been created.’ She never experienced the physical, possessive love of her children that the Rothensteins appeared to enjoy. ‘How wonderful it seems to me how you and others love their children,’ she wrote again to Alice about three years later. ‘Somehow I don’t, like you do. I love only my husband and the children as being a curious – most curious – result of part of that love.’
Augustus was one of those fathers who, while his children were very small with little developed character of their own, felt towards them a primitive and protective love. Whereas Ida could not believe she was their mother, Augustus in certain moods almost seemed to believe it was he who had given birth to them and at the start he was more physically close than she was. ‘Honoré is becoming a surprising bantling with muscles like an amorillo,’ he wrote proudly to Will Rothenstein that spring. His new role as parent fortified his self-confidence. ‘The arrival of Honoré gives me to see I cannot dally and temporize with Fate.’
One consideration prevented him from severing his connection with the University Art School. ‘I am wondering,’ he confided to Rothenstein, ‘which is the best way to get out of this school, whether to be chucked out or resign… the former I think would look best in the end.’ He had made a number of friends in Liverpool, but they were all rebels in the university or individualists outside it. The very qualities that provoked hero-worship also created aversion in people such as Charles Allen, who taught sculpture at the university, and F. M. Simpson who held the Chair of Architecture. ‘I become more rebellious in Liverpool,’ he was to tell Alice Rothenstein – and it was true. He did dreadful things there,
such as failing to rise to his feet when the King’s health was drunk – ‘it took some doing’. His name was a trigger for all sorts of scandalous gossip. ‘Mr [Wyndham] Lewis has been spreading very bad reports about everybody in London,’ Orpen wrote a little later this year to Albert Rutherston, ‘…his last was that John had been kicked out of Liverpool and that he was going to leave his wife.’
But Augustus was unrepentant. ‘The school may go to hell,’ he announced – and suddenly he felt much better. Even his work improved. ‘I have started some startling pictures,’ he claimed. ‘Ah! if they would emerge triumphantly from the ordeal of completion.’
To make up for the loss of his salary, he was arranging to paint a series of portraits. ‘I have some jobs on hand now, enfin, mon cher!’ he told Rothenstein in May, ‘les pommes de terre enterrées si longtemps commencent à pousser.’ He had also made some rapid decisions on the art of portrait painting to fit in with these new commissions. ‘Nowadays, I fancy, portraits should be painted in an hour or two,’ he decided (16 April 1902). ‘The brush cannot linger over shabby and ephemeral garments.’ Of the intermittent series of Liverpool portraits he now began, three were to be outstanding – those of Mackay, completed in June this year, and of Kuno Meyer and Chaloner Dowdall done several years later. Some of the other portraits49 give a feeling that he had made a brief effort to become interested in his subject, and failed. Soon, however, they were ‘bubbling with sovereigns and cheques’, Ida wrote to Michel Salaman, ‘caused by the disturbance Gus’s work has created in the rich Liverpool waters’.50
But he was no longer painting Ida. ‘I have not sat to Gus for ages,’ she wrote to Alice. Although matters were far from being so bad as Wyndham Lewis reported, Ida felt acutely the need of sympathetic companionship. ‘I long for Gwen [John],’ she had written the previous summer. Winifred had stayed that autumn, making two flannel nightgowns and some woollen socks for the baby; and ‘Gwen will be up here soon,’ Gus assured Michel Salaman. Now, at long last she arrived by steamer from New Quay. Her life, too, had not been easy. During the summer of 1901 she had still shared an address – 39 Southampton Street – with Ambrose McEvoy; but two months after their tearful holiday at Le Puy, at the end of 1900, McEvoy became engaged to Mary Edwards, a damp-looking woman, nine years older than himself, who lived near the Thames. ‘We were quite surprised,’ Everett noted with relish in his journal, ‘as he’d been running round before with Gwen John.’ It had been Augustus who introduced them to each other. Mary Edwards had declared her love for McEvoy at 21 Fitzroy Street, where Gus and Gwen were sharing rooms. But they did not marry immediately, and an awkward period ensued with Gwen living at 41 Colville Terrace, the McEvoy family home in Bayswater, where, as if in mourning, the shutters were always closed to avoid paying the rates. It was from here that she had come to Chatham Street; and it was from Chatham Street that she wrote to Michel Salaman a letter that indicates the direction in which her life was to move.
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