Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Suddenly Augustus could stand it no more. ‘Why the devil don’t I hear from you, you bad fat girl?’ he reprimanded Dorelia.

  ‘You sit in the nude for those devilish foreign people, but you do not want to sit for me when I asked you, wicked little bloody harlot [‘lũbni’] that you are. You exhibit your naked fat body for money, not for love. So much for you! How much do you show them for a franc? I am sorry that I never offered to give you a shilling or two for a look at your minj [middle part]. That was all you were waiting for. The devil knows I might have bought the minj and love together. I am sorry that I was so foolish to love you. Well if you are not a whore, truly tell me why not. Gustavus.’

  Dorelia’s reply, when it arrived, was little more than a scribble. In the heat of the moment, Augustus had forgotten to enclose his usual word-list, so much of his Romany invective had gone astray. Certain phrases in his letter puzzled Dorelia. What, for example, did lũbni mean? But Augustus already felt rather ashamed of his outburst and refused to answer. All this letter-writing was getting him nowhere. He needed to see Dorelia. It was eight months since he had seen her. What was he to do? It was Ida who decided. ‘Paris is quite near,’ she reminded him. She would have liked to go herself, but it was better that he go – he could see the show of Primitives there at the same time. The idea was very appealing. ‘Do you see any Géricaults?’ he asked Gwen. ‘He was a very wonderful man and liked to use plenty of paint. Courbet also is a man that flies to my head when I think of France. I suppose there are no wonderful young painters in Paris… I want to see you and the Primitiffs… you and that pretty slut Dorelia, she who is too lazy to answer my frequent gracious and affectionate letters.’115

  As soon as Ida had spoken, Augustus reacted. He was like a dynamo – one that needed someone else to turn the switch before it burst into life. A week before he came to Paris, Gwen had written to Alice Rothenstein: ‘We are getting homesick I think, we are always talking of beautiful places we know of beyond the suburbs of London and Fitzroy St and Howland St seem to me more than ever charming and interesting.’ They would soon, she added, be coming home.

  This was their intention shortly before Augustus turned up in Paris in the second week of May. But afterwards they did something different. That another man might take his place in Dorelia’s life had not seriously occurred to Augustus. But this was what was happening in Paris while he lay lugubriously playing the concertina at Matching Green. His rival seems to have been a young artist – half artist and half farmer – possibly the man she and Gwen had met at La Réole. His name was Leonard, and from Dorelia’s point of view he had some advantages over Augustus: he was not married; and life with him, while not contradicting her sense of destiny, might involve a farming background, which appealed to her.

  Augustus arrived in Paris and a few days later Dorelia left boulevard Edgar-Quinet – not with Augustus back to England, but to Belgium with Leonard. She fled with him secretly, telling no one, leaving no address. She had gone, they discovered, to Bruges, was living with Leonard and for the time being could only be reached through a poste restante. She would stay with him three months – or a lifetime: it depended how things worked out. It was, she afterwards remarked, ‘one of my two discreditable episodes’.116

  Exasperated, agitated, almost beside himself, Gus hung on in Paris, seeing Gwen, doing nothing. He was reduced once more to writing letters – not in prose this time, but page after page of poems, ballads and sonnets, odd rhymes running in his head which he stored up and subsequently sent Dorelia.

  But for the woman I hold in my heart,

  Whose body is a flame, whose soul a flower,

  Whose smile beguiled me in the wood, the smart

  Of kisses of her red lips every hour

  Branding me lover anew, is she to be,

  Being my Mistress, my Fatality?

  In the stream of his passion there are already odd pebbles of pedantry. At one point, he interrupts an anguished appeal to instruct Dorelia that ‘the word “ardent” in the first sonnet I sent you should be changed to “nodding”. Kindly make that correction.’*5

  So numerous were these poems that there seems to have been one left over for Ida who, he now learnt, was pregnant again. Possibly on Gwen’s advice, he appears to have written little but verse to Dorelia at her poste restante. But to Ida he explained all that was happening, and so did Gwen. ‘Darling Gwen’, Ida answered, ‘Your letter was such a comfort and made things so much simpler. I get brooding here. I am inclined to agree that D[orelia] will turn up one day & oh how happy we might be.’117

  Augustus’s letters revealed how Gwen herself was suffering over Dorelia’s disappearance. ‘Gussie tells me you do not eat,’ Ida wrote. ‘Little girl what is the matter? Poor little thing, it is really hardest on you that she went. It was a shame. Did you over-drive her? I know you are a beauty once you start. But you are worth devoting yourself to, & she should not have given up.’118

  Upon Ida’s reaction the whole course of their collective future hung. She found herself longing for Dorelia to come back. The last weeks at Matching Green had been miserable. She felt that she had even lost the ability of sitting to Augustus, and with it her last connection with art. Perhaps it was a temporary incapacity due to her new pregnancy but, she told Gwen, ‘I would rather lose a child than the power of sitting.’ For it was a power, this gift of inspiring painting, and Ida felt critical of Dorelia for abandoning it voluntarily, however difficult Gus and Gwen might be.

  Ida herself had no intention of giving up. If Dorelia was added to their household, and Gwen herself returned, they could control these Johns, even in overdrive. Her confidence reaching a state of exaltation, she sent Gus and Gwen two letters that were dramatically to alter the course of events.

  It was Gwen who put herself in charge of these events with a letter to Dorelia. ‘Dorelia, something has happened which takes my breath away so beautiful it is,’ she began. ‘Ida wants you to go to Gussy – not only wants it but desires it passionately. She has written to him and to me. She says “She [Dorelia] is ours and she knows it. By God I will haunt her till she comes back.”

  ‘She also said to Gussy, “I have discovered I love you and what you want I want passionately. She, Dorelia, shall have pleasure with you eh?” She said much more but you understand what she means.

  Gus loves you in a much more noble way than you may think – he will not ask you now because he says perhaps you are happy with your artist and because of your worldly welfare – but he only says that last – because he knows you – we know you too and we do ask.

  You are necessary for his development and for Ida’s, and he is necessary for yours – I have known that a long time – but I did not know how much. Dorelia you know I love you, you do not know how much. I should think it the greatest crime to take with intention anyone’s happiness away even for a little time – it is to me the only thing that would matter.

  …I know of course from one point of view you will have to be brave and unselfish – but I have faith in you. Ida’s example makes me feel that some day I shall be unselfish too.

  I would not write this if I knew you have no affection for Gussy. You are his aren’t you?

  You might say I write this because I love you all – if you were strangers to me, I would try to write in the same way so much I feel in my heart that it [is] right what I say, and good.

  I am sorry for Leonard, but he has had his happiness for a time what more can he expect? We do not expect more. And all the future is yours to do what you like. Do not think these are my thoughts only – they are my instincts and inspired by whatever we have in us divine. I know what I write is for the best, more than I have ever known anything. If you are perplexed, trust me.… Gussy is going home to-night. Come by the first train to me. I shall be at the gare to meet you. When you are here you will know what to do...

  Do not put it off a minute simply because I shall then think you have not understood this letter – that it has not con
veyed the truth to you. I fear that, because I know how weak words are sometimes – and yet it would be strange if the truth is not apparent here in every line.

  You will get this to-morrow morning perhaps – I shall be in the evening at the gare du nord. I would not say goodbye to Leonard. Your Gwen.’119

  It was not simply that Gwen wanted Dorelia to return to Gus, but that she believed Dorelia belonged to the John tribe and that by running away she had contradicted her nature. Her letter, and the others she wrote over this period, are remarkable for their fundamentalist attitude to Dorelia’s future. Hers was no ordinary religion, it was the religion of love for art’s sake. Were not art and religious experience much the same thing? Was not Dorelia an idol in the Temple of Art, a rare femme inspiratrice?

  But it is Gwen’s tone of didactic certainty that is so remarkable. The other side of this moral conviction was a callousness that shows itself in her attitude to Leonard – ‘what more can he expect?’

  Gwen took over and organized everything. Augustus’s absence from the battlefield of negotiations avoided any hint of a sexual tug-of-war, of a man-versus-man contest. Nor was Gwen acting for herself. Was she not surrendering Dorelia to Gus and Ida?

  If Dorelia was subject to anyone’s will, it must have been Gwen’s, whose hard queer intimate company she had kept over the last eight months, and who, alone of all the John tribe, knew Leonard. The timing of her first letter, too, was good: no appeal until Ida’s sanction had been obtained. Finally, Gwen called upon the one strain stronger than any other in Dorelia’s character, one that Gwen understood well: her sense of destiny. There was only one weakness in Gwen’s position, and that was inevitable: while she could only send ‘weak words’ on pieces of paper, Leonard was actually with Dorelia. It was to be her words against his presence. But what she could do to offset this disadvantage she did, recommending Dorelia to tell Leonard nothing, to leave him in the same secret way as she had left Paris. For this too was in Dorelia’s character, and to have a weakness recommended as one’s duty can be irresistible.

  When Gwen went to the Gare du Nord the following evening to meet her, Dorelia was not there. But she had sent a letter. To go back, she wrote, would be to curtail her freedom. With Leonard she was free of the overwhelming passions of Gus and Gwen, who together so excited and exhausted her. ‘God, I’m tired of being weak, of depending on people, of being dragged this way & that by my feelings, of listening to everybody but myself. I must be free – I will be. I wonder if you will understand… I am afraid you will not understand. Gussie will perhaps, he knows me, how I am.’120

  Like the other Gwen, Gwen Salmond, who was soon to liberate Matthew Smith from nervous paralysis and fill him with confidence in his artistic talent, Dorelia believed in her possession of a vicarious ability that was the special gift of some women, perhaps even some men. She had served Gwen John, but her relationship with Augustus entangled her in Ida’s peculiar destiny. Besides, she did not want to be a slave to this gift, and sensed the danger of her love for Gus and Gwen – that it would devour and damage others. ‘You must know that I love you all – I cannot say how much,’ she replied to Gwen. ‘You say I must be unselfish and brave. I must, but not in the way you mean...

  ‘Whatever I do there must be something false; let me choose the least false, the most natural, let me? If I loved Gussie & you & Ida twenty times more – though I cannot love you more than I do – I would not come back… I see how wonderful it would be – it cannot be.’

  All this, Dorelia felt, ‘must sound horrible to you but I must write it’. It was essential that she resist the potent spell of these Johns. Gwen had written her letter in ‘an ecstasy’: it was not reasonable; it was not practicable. Whatever happened, she concluded, Gwen must not seek her out in Bruges: ‘it would be useless.’121

  If Gwen had not won as easily as she appears to have expected, she already sensed victory. Dorelia had asked for her permission, and she refused to give it. In her answer she brushed aside all these objections. She understood Dorelia’s position, Dorelia did not understand hers. She returned to the attack, reiterating and elaborating her previous arguments. ‘I must speak plainly for you to know everything before you choose. Leonard cannot help you, he would have to know Gussie for that and Ida and you a long, long time, he never could understand unless he was our brother or a great genius.

  Strength and weakness, selfishness and unselfishness are only words – our work in life was to develop ourselves and so fulfil our destiny. And when we do this we are of use in the world, then only can we help our friends and develop them. I know that Gussie and Ida are more parts of you than Leonard is for ever. When you leave him you will perhaps make a great character of him – if he has faith in you that you are acting according to your truest self – and what good could you do him if he had no faith in you – by being always with him? But faith or no faith he would know some day the truth – and that is the highest good that can happen to us. To ‘wholly develop’ a man is nonsense – all events help to do that. I know as certainly as the day follows the night that you would develop him and all your friends as far as one human being can another by being yourself. That is what you have to think of, Dorelia. To do this is hard – that is what I meant by saying you must be brave and strong. I am sorry for people who suffer but that is how we learn all we know nearly – and that is the great happiness – knowledge of the truth!

  You know you are Gussy’s as well as I do. Did you do wisely in going away like that without telling him? Do you dare spend a week with him or a day, or a few hours? Forgive me for speaking like this darling Dorelia – I only want to help you to know yourself. I love you so much that if I never saw you again and knew you were happy I should be happy too… It makes it simple to know all we have to do is to be true to the feelings that have been ours longest and most consistently.’122

  While Gwen was writing this to Dorelia, Leonard had posted an answer to her first letter which, disobeying Gwen’s instructions, Dorelia had shown him. ‘Leonard has written to you too,’ Dorelia informed Gwen, ‘ – do not think he has influenced me.’ Written in halting English, by now partly indecipherable, it is couched as a rebuke yet struggles to maintain a sense of fairness in grappling with Gwen’s philosophy:

  ‘Dear Miss John,

  Dorelia got your letter to-day and showed it to me. Your letter forces me to explain to you several things you forgot, as well as I can do.

  Of course you don’t know me neither do you know my sentiments to Dor; but this is the other side of the facts, at which you did not like to look, anyway it exists and it is as true as your words, if I allow myself to talk a little bit of myself.

  You say L. has had his happiness for a time, what more can he expect? Do you really think… that Dorelia’s feelings are small enough to love a man like this? People like me don’t love often and a woman like Dorelia will not pass my way again; you would better understand, if you would know my life.

  Your letter is full of love, the love of a woman for another one, now imagine mine if you can. I am no ordinary man as you may think, who loves a girl because she is beautiful or whatever. I tell you and you are Dory’s friend so you must understand it, I am an artist and cannot live without her and I will not live without her – I think this is clear. Very right if you say “it is the greatest crime to take with intention anyone’s happiness”. You might say as you did I had my hapiness. Do you think hapiness is a thing that you take like café after dinner, a thing that you enjoy a few times and something you can get sick of? Not my hapiness by God; I suffered enough before and I don’t let escape something from me that I created myself with all my love and all my strength. Well, all those words are only an answer to yours, but something else that you forgot.

  We cannot force the fate to go our ways, fate forces us...

  That’s all I have to tell you, compare now my fate with that of John and his family perhaps you will see where it is heavier. My words seem hard to you, but they are
the expression of my feelings as well as I can say it. I think it is not necessary to talk about Dorelias feelings and thoughts. I did not tell her what to do, I told her she might do what she thinks right and naturel, but remember your words of the crime and think that there are greater crimes which are against the rules of nature.

  If you want wright to me your thoughts about everything and dont get mad against me, you must see that there is no world that [is] absolutely right.’123

  Wisely Gwen did not accept this invitation to write to Leonard. She was not interested in a discussion of ‘thoughts about everything’, but in outcomes; not in fairness, but rightness. Leonard’s letter arrived in Paris before Gwen had posted her second letter to Dorelia, so she slipped into the envelope an extra pitiless page deflecting his arguments to her own ends. What he had written disappointed her, she claimed, and made her ‘more certain if certainty can be more certain of everything I have told you’. Leonard’s love was, after all, nothing better than possessiveness. She had supposed it to have been finer – perhaps he’d climb to better things in time, given the adversity. He loved her of course, no one denied that. But his love was selfish, like that of the Pebble of the brook in Blake’s The Clod and the Pebble, while Augustus’s, ‘much more noble’, resembled the little Clod of Clay’s.124 For, whatever his faults, Augustus was an artist; while Leonard was still a part of the bourgeoisie.