Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Lamb was not slow to respond to this message. He elected Augustus as a new master among the illustrious living. Confidence swelled within Augustus – confidence, but not conceit. If people believed in him, he believed in himself. He needed other people’s faith to fortify his own will. ‘Your letter thrills me somewhat,’ he replied to Lamb (5 November 1906). ‘I am not quite a Master – yet. I keep forgetting myself often. But I am learning loyalty. We must have no rivals – and no fickleness. I feel ashamed to go to sleep sometimes. I am learning to value my own loves and fancies and thought above all others. But Life has an infernal narcotic side to it – and one is caught napping and philandering – – – alas! alas! if one had some demon to whip one! I hardly believe you had faith in my possibilities – in my will. I am so glad.’

  No friendship yet had begun in such promising style – none would lead to such complications or remain so long an embarrassment to both artists.

  In London Augustus had found work and a few people to inspire him; in Paris entertainment and the promise of inspiration to come. Something of the awe and wonder that possessed him when he first went to the Slade now re-entered his life. Paris was ‘a queen of cities’ and ‘so beautiful – London can’t possibly be so nice’.55 No atmosphere, surely, was ever more favourable to the artist. On the terraces of the Nouvelle Athènes or the Rat Mort it was not difficult to conjure up the spectres of Manet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, Degas – figures from the last enchanted epoch, laughing and arguing across the marble tables. But the real heart of Paris lay further back; it belonged to the Middle Ages. Malodorous, loud with bells, its architecture full of passion, of the cruelty and splendour of ancient superstition, Paris seemed more dangerous than London. It was closer to Nature, to the earth itself, to man and woman’s strange evolution from that earth. The murmur of the boulevards, deep and vibrant; the view of the city seen at dusk from Sacré-Coeur as the light receded to a pinpoint between the smoking of a thousand chimneys; the landscape of the Île de France with its opulent green as if depicted through medieval windows: such beauty seized him with a kind of anguish, confronted him with unanswerable questions: ‘What will become of us? What could all this mean?’

  For hours he would sit in the rue de la Gaieté, watching, talking, drinking, listening to the infernal din of a mechanical orchestra, and never wishing to go home – never going home. There was more dreaming of painting than pictures painted.

  ‘They are playing in this café just now – so I expect I shall get rhetorical presently,’ he wrote to Alick Schepeler. ‘Yes, I shall paint yet: it is more like fighting than anything else for me now – it will be triumphant though… Civilization getting in my way and making a dreary hash of things – and wasting time. I’d like to be kept by a prince. It’s not safe to let me loose about the place in this way – and then send me bills to pay.’

  The cosmopolitan world of Montparnasse was a literary world. The talk was of Flaubert and Baudelaire, of Turgenev and Nietzsche, the excellent heathen entertainment of Huysmans and the newest Dostoevsky in French. Almost the only painter, living or dead, who is mentioned in his correspondence is Puvis de Chavannes. Augustus’s Parisian friends were mostly writers, in particular the circle that gathered round the monocled, top-hatted figure of Jean Moréas at the Closerie des Lilas and which included Guillaume Apollinaire, Colette, Paul Fort, the wandering poet who, with his brother Robert, ran the journal Vers et Prose, and André Salmon, the literary spokesman of ‘Les Jeunes’.

  Of all this group his most valued friend was Maurice Cremnitz. Late at night, after the group had dispersed from the Closerie des Lilas, Cremnitz would lead Augustus off to louche areas of Paris and leave him with a Swedish lady famous for her exercises. At other times they would explore the old quarters of the city, ‘visiting the wine shops where the vin blanc was good – and cheap’;56 and they would go to the little Place du Tertre, to the Moulin de la Galette and the Bal Tabarin, where such delightful songs as ‘Petite Miette’ and ‘Viens pou-poule’ were all the rage and where Cremnitz would sing, in amazing cockney English, ‘Last Night Down our Alley Came a Toff’ ‘I observed the true gaieté française last night,’ Augustus wrote after their first expedition, ‘a little femme de mauvaise vie had a new song she kept singing and teaching everybody else – no one could have been more innocently happy – and the song – !!’57

  Innocent, too, at least in name, was an obscure subterranean bouge, the Caveau des Innocents, near les Halles, into which they descended one night, ‘and, I must admit, drank great quantities of white wine. A drunken poet joined us there and declaimed Verlaine and his own verses at great length. As he had the impudence to take exception to my style of Beauty I said “Voulez vous venez battre avec moi, Monsieur l’Antichrist?” He got up and, having put himself into a pugnacious attitude, sat down again. Afterwards he was very affectionate, informing me that he and I had fought side by side in the Crimea – frères d’armes!’ This robust shadow-boxing was marvellously congenial to Augustus. Paris seemed to unite those two aspects of his personality that could, in his work and friendships, so easily diminish each other: romanticism and wry humour.

  So, for a season, Paris diverted him. ‘I’ve been damnably lazy this summer,’ he admitted to Will Rothenstein (19 September 1906), ‘but am happily unrepentant. I fancy idleness ends by bearing [more] rare fruit than industry. I started by being industrious and lost all self-respect – but by now have recovered some dignity and comfort by dint of listening to the most private intimations of the Soul and contemning all busy-body thoughts that come buzzing and fussing and messing in one’s brain.’

  *

  All his life Augustus lived under the influence of an impossible ideal. What he sought in men – inspiration and entertainment – he also looked for in women, though in a different form. Many of his finest male portraits are of writers and artists: Thomas Hardy, Wyndham Lewis, William Nicholson, Bernard Shaw, Matthew Smith, Dylan Thomas, Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats. Other men – Trelawney Dayrell Reed, John Hope-Johnstone, Chaloner Dowdall – brought him alive by virtue of their eccentricities. The inspiration of women sprang from his belief that they were closer to Nature and to the mystery of birth: and this he celebrated most lyrically in small glowing panels showing young mothers and children as part of a natural landscape. But women also entertained him simply and obviously by their sexuality; for sex, which had so worried him while he was an adolescent, had become ‘the greatest joke in the world’:58 and Augustus loved a joke.

  As symbols of the miracle of life, women must guard their secret well. Yet the miracle of life, of which they were the custodians, depended upon the joke of sex. Inspiration and entertainment were therefore oddly harnessed, sometimes pulling in divergent ways.

  No one, perhaps, catches this oddity and divergence so well as a woman he had recently come across in London. Her name was Alick Schepeler and, next to Dorelia herself, she became for a few years his supreme model. She was almost a parody of Augustus’s romantic ideal. No one, it seemed, knew who she was. ‘Are you a Pole?’ he demanded – but in reply she would only smile. In Chiaroscuro he refers to her – ‘Alick Schepeler, to whose strange charm I had bowed’ – only once, and declares her to have been ‘of Slavonic origin’, adding that she ‘illustrated in herself the paradox of Polish pride united to Russian abandon’. By naturalization she was in fact British, her mother, Sarah Briggs, being Irish and her father, John Daniel Schepeler, German. The facts of her life were unusual, though not extraordinary. Her real name was Alexandra, she was an only child and had been born on 10 March 1882 at Skrygalof, near Minsk in Russia, where John Schepeler worked as an industrialist. Her father died when she was five and she was taken by her mother to live in Poland. Here Sarah Schepeler found employment with a Polish family as ‘English’ governess, while Alexandra was boarded near by with a Mrs Bloch and her daughter Frieda. Some ten years later Sarah Schepeler died, and not long afterwards Alexandra, who had by now become part of the Bloch fa
mily, travelled to London with Frieda. The two girls, who were about the same age and had become great friends, lived together at 29 Stanley Gardens in Chelsea. Frieda went to the Slade but Alexandra, who appeared to have no special talent, took a course in typing and went to work as a secretary for the Illustrated London News. In her letters to Augustus she hints at leaving this paper and taking on grander work. In fact she never left. Her unsettled upbringing seemed to have implanted within her a fear of change, even change for the better. She lived in Chelsea and typed at the Illustrated London News for more than fifty years.

  In the extent of her ordinariness lay her single extraordinary quality. She had nothing to hide, but from the presence of this nothing arose a mystery none could solve. Her talk was of her cat, her clothes, her office. She was unbelievably uninteresting – and no man could quite believe it. Augustus, in his pure wish to avoid intellectual passion, could not have chosen anyone better.

  Yet she lived for passion. Love – physical and romantic love – was her escape from dullness. She had avoided the hockey-and-inhibition of a British education, and unlike many young girls in Edwardian London she was eager for love affairs. So her life became a fairy-tale. By night she was a coquette, abandoning herself anxiously to party-going pleasures. Day came, and she was translated once more into a pale contented secretary.

  It is easy to understand why Augustus found her so interesting. Five feet five inches tall, she had sumptuous brown hair and pensive blue eyes. She was highly strung, easily pleased, equally easily offended. But her most bewitching quality was her gurgling voice, rich and soupy and full of flattering inflections.

  It was through Frieda Bloch and her Slade friends that Alick, as everyone called her, got to know Augustus and subsequently many other writers and artists, from Wyndham Lewis to W. B. Yeats. Some of them treated her unkindly, though she never complained, never explained. When questioned about Yeats, she simply gurgled, her voice like hot air bubbling through lemonade: ‘Ah Yeats – he was a won-derful man!’ And Lewis? ‘Yes – won-derful!’ As for Augustus, he was ‘won-derful!’

  For such artists and poets her admiration was unfettered. While Ida and Dorelia were tucked up together in Paris, Augustus and Alick began to see a good deal of each other in London. Augustus was most surely himself when his hesitations were swept aside by a new passion. There was no hesitation over Alick Schepeler.

  ‘You are one of the people who inhabit my world,’ he wrote to her, ‘ – a denizen of my country, a daughter of my tribe – one of those on whom I must depend – for life and beyond life. I am subjected to you – be loyal to your subject.’ Since Augustus had to spend much of his time in Paris, his infatuation for this ‘jeune fille mystérieuse et gaie’ intensified. Their relationship developed through a correspondence that was voluminous, purple, and of astonishing tedium. Augustus owned that he had to have a supply of brandy in order ‘to continue this correspondence which bores me so much’. Boredom was an essential part of their intimacy. They were experts in the subject, connoisseurs; indeed they were competitors. In almost every letter he asks her urgently: ‘Let me know if you are badly bored?’ And in almost every answer she is able to boast of some new territory conquered by ennui. This ennui was an object of fascination to Augustus, who measures it wonderingly against his own until, reaching pathos, it becomes the essence of their love affair. ‘Do you know I long to see you again,’ he writes from France. ‘You are such a love – your smile is so wonderful and nobody cries so beautifully as you. How bored are you Alick? I get quite desperate at times – really yesterday I caught myself in the act of beating my brow! All alone and quite theatrically – I tell you I was angry!’ To paper up these areas of boredom, he begs her to ‘cover six sheets with an embroidery of pretty thoughts and interesting information’, and send them to him at once. ‘Wrap yourself in the sheets, so to say, and leave the imprint of your adorable self behind for me.’ But such an accomplishment is beyond Alick; she has nothing to say. He calls her ‘Undine’, after the female water-sprites or elemental spirits of the water in Paracelsus’s system. To help him escape from himself, and assume another role in the theatre of their romance, he begs her: ‘Do re-christen me!’ But this feat too is beyond her; she can think of no names, her head is empty – and so, to his disappointment, Augustus remains inescapably Augustus. Nevertheless, by a fraction, she was more bored than he, if only because he wrote more letters than she did. ‘Ah, Alick – writing so often as I do how can one avoid being a bore?’ he demanded.

  ‘I know what risks I run but still persist – it means talking to you vaguely, unsatisfactorily and blindly, but still some attenuated converse with you. I can’t see the expression on your face nor hear the sound of your voice – it is worse than the telephone – and more open to misunderstandings. It is a kind of muffled dumbshow with hands tied.

  How is it you mean so much to me – you are like a woman found on an island by one happily shipwrecked, who shows him the cave where she sleeps and the berries she eats and the pool in which she bathes herself – and in kissing her his soul flies to the moon henceforth his God as it is hers.’

  Boredom was only to be outwitted by the most extreme romantics. As hypochondriacs of the soul, they searched for a magic paradox, the profundity of the superficial, adding from time to time some nouveau frisson to their medicine chest. ‘I can tell you how to procure a new sensation,’ Augustus prescribed in one of his letters. ‘First of all get hot – undo your waistband – indeed it is better to remove your outer dress, then, seated on your bed, pour white wine very slowly down your neck, breathing regularly the while. But you must be at the proper temperature to commence with. If this doesn’t please you I will tell you another method.’

  Alick’s letters almost always disappointed Augustus; but the posts that brought no letters from her stirred him marvellously. ‘Alick – why don’t I hear from you – won’t you write even if you don’t love me? Do not wait till you love me – it might take days to come on. What else can I say – nothing till I hear from you, my moon, my tender dove, rose of my soul. – John.’

  Their correspondence was secret, and this secrecy gave excitement to the masquerade. Augustus never kept letters, he merely failed to lose them. Alick, who sensed this, is always rousing him to the point of destruction. ‘Yes I burn your letters,’ he prevaricated. ‘Even the last, than which nothing less compromising could have been written, I took away to a lonely spot and consumed. I hope you dispose of mine with equal thoroughness. In case you are still without a cigarette I send you one – to be smoked with this letter.’ But still Alick was not satisfied. She seemed to detect a bantering tone in this assurance, and on at least one occasion asked him to return her letters through the post.

  ‘Here are your letters – you see I have destroyed many. My habit (an evil one of course) is to put them in my pocket where they remain safely till it gets too crowded – when I weed out a few… There is nobody here who would read your letters or understand them… Yes – you may trust to my honour to burn all letters I get from you in future instantly and if you like I will eat all the ashes as a further precaution. You don’t realise what depths of discretion I am capable of, and I am improving in this respect – under your tuition.’

  Alick distrusted flippancy. If Augustus had a fault, it was this disconcerting humour of his. She wished he were more straightforward, like herself. She told him plainly that she put every item of his correspondence to the flames. They may now be read in the Department of Manuscripts at the Huntington, California.

  In his strangely muted world, isolated, swept by melancholia, Augustus welcomed Alick Schepeler as a fellow creature. His instinct was not wrong. She lessened his loneliness by being so inexplicably lonely herself. They were, he told her, both ‘Keltic’. They seemed cut off from their childhoods, still curiously shy on occasions, reading widely as a refuge from solitude, taking their mental colouring from their friends. They shared an obsession with clothes. When Alick commanded
Augustus to write and tell her all he was doing in France, he replied: ‘I would rather talk about you and your beautiful underclothing.’ At other times he would question her: ‘Tell me, Undine, how are your shoes wearing? It seems so fitting, that you – a soulless, naked, immortal creature, come straight out of the water, should take to shoes with such passion!’ She would fill the page with descriptions of her dresses, and he would ponder over which had demoralized him the most, the blue, the pink or the black-and-white.

  There was something other than sexual excitement in these exchanges. ‘I have bought a new hat and an alpaca coat,’ Augustus announced, ‘to give me confidence.’ His clothes were like those in an actor’s wardrobe. It was said that he modelled his appearance on Courbet, but in fact he had no single model in mind, for many transitory moods and influences claimed him. Parental disapproval was always a strong recommendation. One morning about this time old Edwin John read in a newspaper a description of his son’s appearance as being ‘not at all that of a Welshman, but rather a Hungarian or a Gypsy’, and at once sent a letter of reproof which Augustus had no difficulty in treating as Alick Schepeler was always imploring him to treat hers. But the reproof did not go unheeded and, to caricature his father’s wishes, he secured a complete Welsh outfit with which to flabbergast Montparnasse. Edwin John’s wish was for gentlemanly inconspicuousness, and this perhaps was the starting point for his son’s dramatic regalia. In these early days, Augustus’s clothes, like his handwriting and the style of his pictures, were always changing as if in search of self-knowledge, or the avoidance of it. ‘I am so mercurial,’ he confessed. ‘Really I must cultivate a pose. It is so necessary so often.’ It was necessary for self-protection, and perhaps for finding direction in his rudderless progress.