Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  This need to cut loose for a time ran strongly in Ida. ‘Matching Green seems a grave now, but I live in hope of a resurrection.’158 Eventually she put the question to Gus. Should she go to Paris? He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. He didn’t say that he thought she had gone slightly mad. So she pressed him as to what he would truly prefer, and he said stay, ‘& so I could not come, could I?’ Ida explained to Gwen.

  There were reasons for staying. She was seven-and-a-half months pregnant; one of the children was sick; and there was a portrait of her that Augustus promised urgently to finish. He had not tried to forbid her going. It seemed to him ‘the only course to take’, and she reluctantly agreed. But ‘I know I shall regret not coming many times unless I get very strong,’159 Ida confided to Gwen.

  What Augustus recognized was that he and Dorelia must be specially attentive to Ida during these final weeks of her pregnancy. To ‘preserve her mental equilibrium’, they took her for ‘frequent diversions’ up to London and ‘it is nicer here now,’ she admitted to Gwen. ‘…We stay in Gus’s new studio… Dorelia & Gus are very kind & when I do not think it is compassion I am happy enough.’ Back at Matching Green she reflected that she would probably manage to get through this period of instability ‘if I always remember he does want me here – it is only when I think he doesn’t it becomes unbearable.’160

  And it was true he did want her there. After the baby was born, he assured her, she could buzz off to Paris, though really she doubted if ‘I shall be well able to leave it’. Meanwhile he went on treating her to ‘little journeys to London’ where she could help Dorelia make curtains for his studio, and taking her back to their gypsy garden at Matching Green where the hens continued ‘moving among medicine bottles, and broken pots and pans, crockery, meat cans, old boots and ancient dirt and indescribable debris – the uncatalogued tales of a human abode’.161

  So this first crisis evaporated. Augustus looked, and saw that all was good. ‘Never have the beauties of the outer world moved me as of late,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘…I have worked at my women painfully, laboriously, with alternations of achievement and failure, impotence and power – you know the grinding see-saw – under a studio light, cold, informal, meaningless – a studio – what is it? a habitation – no – not even a cowshed – ’tis a box wherein miserable painters hide themselves and shut the door on nature. I have imprisoned myself in my particular dungeon all day to-day for example – on my sitters’ faces naught but the shifting light of reminiscence and that narrowed and distorted...’162

  This, until too late, was to be Gwen’s route rather than his own: the shutting away of her impatience, the search for strange form, the ‘narrow talent, sharpened as a pencil’,163 as Sylvia Townsend Warner described it. ‘What I don’t like is to see people and much light,’164 Gwen was to tell Ursula Tyrwhitt. Augustus needed people and light. ‘This evening at sundown I escaped at last to the open, to the free air of space, where things have their proportion and place and are articulate,’ he continued his letter to Will Rothenstein, ‘ – so by the roadside I came upon my women and my barking dog seated on the dark grass in the dusk, and sitting with them I was aware of spirits present – old spirits, ancient, memorable, familiar spirits, consulted in boyhood – insulted in manhood – bright, good, clear, beneficent spirits, ever-loving and loved spirits of Beauty and Truth and Mystery. And so we are going for a picnic tomorrow – and I will make sketches, God-willing. I wish we might never come back to dust-heap-making again. The call of the road is on me. Why do we load ourselves with the chains of commodities when the trees live rent free, and the river pays no toll?’

  So with ominous foreboding, he signs his letter: ‘Yours with the Unrest of Ahasuerus in his bones, “John”.’

  *1 See Appendix Two, ‘John’s Pictures at the New English Art Club’.

  *2 Later on at Liverpool Augustus wore only one earring, having, so the story goes, gallantly presented the other one to a lady who admired their design.

  *3 They are written partly in the inflected Romany, like the so-called ‘Welsh Romany’ which is really an older form of English Romany, partly in the broken English Romany, and partly in English. The versions quoted here were done into English by the gypsy scholar Ferdinand G. Hugh who wrote that ‘I have made the translation as near as possible to the actual Romany words’.

  *4 See Appendix Three.

  *5 She did.

  FOUR

  Men Must Play and Women Weep

  1

  KEEPING UP THE GAME

  ‘A little restraint would not be a bad thing in my friends I’m thinking.’

  Augustus John to Michel Salaman (n.d. [1905])

  ‘My baby is getting so heavy I do not know how I shall bear him (or them) by October,’ Ida had written to Alice Rothenstein (August 1904). ‘The two outside are splendid and well,’ she added, but ‘I am such a size I think I am going to have a litter instead of the usual.’

  The usual (‘much to our bewilderment’), another boy of heroic proportions – he weighed 9 pounds at birth – eventually called Robin (or Robyn) or even for a short time ‘Paganini, the great future musician’, was born at Elm House on 23 October. He was so punctual that everyone was taken by surprise. ‘I had to race across the green for the wise woman,’ Augustus told Margaret Sampson. ‘The doctor, with truly professional promptitude, arrived in his express 16 horse motor car immediately after the event was successfully accomplished.’ Despite these emergencies ‘there was less fuss than usually accompanies the advent of an ordinary hen’s egg,’ he assured the Rani. ‘…Of course it’s staggering to be confronted with a boy after all our prayers for a girl. Ida started the life of Frederick the Great last night which I think must have determined the sex of the infant. It was very rash… Ida has just remarked “Tell her she can have it if she likes.”’

  The unconventionality of her married life distanced Ida from her family and cut her off from a number of her friends. She felt held down by her ‘blundering career’, like ‘a bird sitting on its eggs’.

  ‘I have arrived at the point of eating toasted cheese and stout for supper,’ she darkly confessed to the Rani. ‘It is a horrible thing to do, but shows to what a pitch animal spirits can arrive in this country.’ It was not especially for love, she explained, that ‘I am hungry and thirsty, but for ethics and life and rainbows and colours – butterflies and shimmering seas and human intercourse’. She prized her friends, even when they did not approve of her Matching Green ménage. ‘As you know,’ she wrote to Will Rothenstein, ‘the communicable part of my life is very narrow, and I have nothing to tell you about it. As to the other, you must understand that without telling or you would never count me one of your “dearest of friends” – a privilege of which I am only worthy in my most silent moments.’

  Ida did take some pleasure in her children. Robin was ‘most beautiful [and] sleeps for hours’, she wrote to Winifred. ‘He is no trouble. If David had been like that how happy we should have been. But there, poor Davy was the first – & I did not know anything.’ Now that she knew more and had ‘such a good little nurse for them’, she could enjoy watching David and Caspar scrambling in and out of the pram ‘pretending to be bears or monkeys’. They were both ‘much entertained’ by the mysterious new baby. ‘I am nursing him & hope to keep on,’ Ida told Winifred. ‘He is thriving...’1

  The new baby delighted them all. ‘He has Gus’s eyes,’ Ida reported, ‘…a large long nose turned down at the end… my mouth & upper lip [and] he is decidedly pretty.’ Whenever the nurse was away, Dorelia would come and help, shining the furniture with beeswax and turpentine, wheeling the boys out in their overcrowded pram, clearing the debris after a gas explosion. ‘Dorelia is here & so angelic,’ Ida wrote to Gwen in the first week of November, ‘…she does so much… It is a glorious day & the dogs are barking & the rooks cawing. I shall be getting up about Saturday I think. I feel very well… How domestic we all are, oh Lord.’2

 
All the domestic news she felt able to communicate to her family was packed into a letter Ida wrote in the spring of 1905 to her aunt, Margaret Hinton:

  ‘Robin is quite a man! He crawls about and eats bread and butter, and this evening he sat on the grass in the front garden and interviewed several boys who stopped on their way from school to talk to him. He makes so many noises, and laughs and wags his head about. You say you wonder what we do all day. About 6.30 Robin wakes and crawls about the floor, and grunts and says ah and eh and daddle and silly things like that. About 7 D[avid] and C[aspar] wake and say more silly things, and get dressed, and have a baked apple, or a pear or something, and play about with toys and run up and down. Breakfast about 8.30. Go out in the garden, Robin washed and put to bed about 9.30. D and C go out for a walk, or to the shop, and to post. Bring in letters at 11. We have dinner about 1, and they wake up about 2., have dinner, go out, and so on and so on till 7 when they’re all in bed, sometimes dancing about and shouting, sometimes going to sleep. Robin now joins in the fray and shouts too.’3

  It was an Allen and Hanbury world. Ida’s letters reveal her increasing need to break free from this round of cooking-and-children and create a life with other adults, especially women. There must be ‘something that is behind the ordinary aspect of things’, she wrote. ‘I think it is reality.’ The trivialities she could document; the reality which lay barricaded behind them was receding. What worried her was the question of whether she could come to terms with the facts of her life as they now existed. ‘Some days the curtain seems to lift a little for me,’ she told her aunt, ‘and they are days of inspiration and clearer knowledge. Those days I seem to walk on a little way. The other days I simply fight to keep where I am… I can understand the saints and martyrs and great men suffering everything for their idea of truth. It is more difficult, once you have given it some life – to go back on your idea than to stick to it. It torments you and worries you and tears you to pieces if you do not live up to it… it must sound mad to you, especially talking of fighting. It’s wonderful what a different life one leads inside, to outside – at least how unknown the inside one is.’

  It was impossible, in England in 1905, for people to understand, or to admit they understood, her inside life – as yet she hardly comprehended it herself. By admitting her husband’s mistress into the home had she made the supreme sacrifice for love, or acted with inexcusable weakness? On the whole, in England in 1905, people would believe the latter, and blame the women. Even in Paris, men and women were hardly so brazen! Her unknown life, therefore, had to stay unknown – especially to the Nettleships. In defiance of the social conventions, Ida believed – was determined to believe – that she lived a natural life: natural for her. But, as her reference to saints and martyrs implies, it was not easy and she embraced with some readiness the notion of self-sacrifice. Unfortunately, triviality filled up each day. She rushed from crises over the children’s tadpoles to crises about the canaries’ eggs. ‘What with babies, toothache and a visitation of fleas (where from we do not know) I am fast losing my reason,’ she exclaimed to Alice.

  Alice had grown curious again, but was dismayed when Ida in a dignified, faintly exasperated letter, went some way to satisfying her curiosity. ‘Gus and Dorelia are up in town,’ she wrote this winter, ‘from which you may draw your own conclusions, and not bother me any more to know “where Dorelia sleeps” – You know we are not a conventional family, you have heard Dorelia is beautiful and most charming, and you must learn that my only happiness is for him to be happy and complete, and that far from diminishing our love it appears to augment it. I have my bad times it is only honest to admit. She is so remarkably charming. But those times are the devil and not the truth of light. You are large minded enough to conceive the amazement [? arrangement] as beautiful and possible – and would not think more of it than you would of any other madness which is really sanity. You will not gossip I know as that implies something brought to light which one wants hidden. All this we do not wish to hide, though there is no need to publish it, as after all it is a private matter. This letter is intended to be most discreet. It really expresses the actual state of affairs and you need not consider there is any bitterness or heartache behind, as, though there is occasionally, it is a weakness not to be tolerated and which is gradually growing less and will cease when my understanding is quite cleared of its many weeds...’

  The response from Alice was an unprecedented silence. ‘Alice Rothenstein has at last shut up,’ Ida reported triumphantly to Augustus. To Alice herself she wrote: ‘You and Will both ignore my letter but I suppose you don’t know what to say – and really there is nothing. I hope you showed it to Will… Write again and tell me about someone – anyone – and all the horrid gossip you can think of.’

  But the only gossip Alice could think of was Ida’s. She could think of nothing else. What Ida really needed from her friends were stories about their own lives, or other people’s, so irresistible that they would draw her out of the shell of her own existence. She wanted her friends’ letters to be like chapters from a serialized novel, so absorbing, so full of detail and suspense, that they supplied a complete new fabric in which to wrap herself. What she got from the red-haired Rani was only a sweet exuberant amusement, eccentrically mistyped (‘diving room’ for dining-room), proclaiming Ida’s situation as far too interesting to leave for a second. This was some comfort – ‘only one is apt to drown the interest in tears’, Ida confided to her – ‘how natural and how foolish this is you will know’. The Rani’s letters from Liverpool read as if the two of them were spectators at a Matching Green theatre. But Ida could not see it that way. If only she could be a spectator instead of taking everything with such ‘pudding-like gravity’. Yet the Rani was the best of her friends: ‘Your letters make green places in my life,’ she told her. It was only in moments of crisis that she fell beyond their reach ‘like a stone falling down a well’.

  From Alice she received advice: cautionary advice, reproachful advice, advice that ran contrary to everything she had already done. All Alice’s advice was seasoned with a flavour of inquisitiveness. ‘She [Alice] is so – oh I don’t know – she wants to know why and how – as if Chinese Ladies had answers to their riddles,’ Ida complained to the Rani. ‘The only nuisance about a riddle is its answer. Riddles are most fascinating by themselves.’ Yet although she was always unsettled by Alice – as Alice was by her – somehow they maintained a ‘tremendous admiration of each other’ so that, worse than all Alice’s reproaches, were no letters. Alice’s silence seemed to deafen Ida with her own doings. ‘Your silence is chilling,’ she wrote to her. ‘I do not think, if it is caused by displeasure, that it is fair… Please to write at once, and tell me you adore me and everything I do is right… Oh Alice Alice Alice why don’t you write and tell me all your Nurse’s faults and all about Johnnie – and how you hope I am well and are longing to see me – Darling don’t be cross – I can’t help it. My heart is a well of deep happiness and this makes me malicious.’ Did she mean ‘unhappiness’? Here was another riddle.

  What bewildered Alice was Ida’s attitude. Otherwise everything was melodramatically clear. Ida was the victim, noble but misguided; Dorelia the culprit who, if she had any decency, would take herself off; and Augustus was the man, a stereotypical artist whom Ida must control as Alice controlled poor Will. She knew the cast well enough. Will, however, disagreed and blamed Augustus. ‘Ida is simply an angel,’ he wrote to Alice (19 October 1905), ‘ – I think you are most unjust to Dorelia, who is looking after the children all the time and helping everything on, – Heaven knows she gets little for doing so.’

  The friendship between the Johns and the Rothensteins was by the beginning of 1905 developing symptoms of burlesque. Ida, being especially fond of Will, was besieged by Alice; Augustus, attracted to the ‘mortal pretty’ Alice, was fêted by Will. It was as if each Rothenstein sought to protect the other from these explosive Johns. Ida’s correspondence to ‘darling
Will’ contains what are almost love letters and these would be dutifully answered – by Alice. But when Alice sat to Augustus, Will objected to her expression – the head flung back, the eyes closed – and would turn up at Augustus’s studio to escort his wife home so punctually that sometimes Alice had not yet arrived there.

  ‘You are a dear good friend to Gus,’ Ida had written to Will. But Augustus, though he could not disagree, sometimes wished it were otherwise. He could not feel what he knew he was expected to feel. He could not pretend. He knew very well that he should feel grateful – Will needed to be kept well oiled with gratitude – but so often it was irritation that swarmed through him. His fate was to be helped, with extreme magnanimity, at many twists and crises of his career, by someone whose personality he increasingly disliked. Wherever he turned he seemed unable to avoid the rigours of Rothenstein’s generosity, and his reaction, as he was well aware, appeared mean. A number of times he tried to end their relationship. ‘I have broken with Rothenstein by the bye which of course is base ingratitude,’ he later told Lady Ottoline Morrell (8 February 1909), ‘ – in extenuation I must say the sensation so far has been quite tolerable’. But breaking with Rothenstein was no easy matter. He was like a boxer for ever turning the other cheek to his assailant, yet never to be knocked out: a nightmare figure.

  ‘It is more difficult to receive than to give,’ Augustus wrote.4 This was the lesson many of Rothenstein’s beneficiaries had to learn. Epstein, for example, who once assured him: ‘Your help so freely given me has been of the greatest service to me,’ was also to write (20 June 1911):