As Ida’s friend, Edna felt ill at ease with Dorelia. ‘She never spoke very much to me,’ she remembered, ‘…and she never called me Edna.’ Nevertheless Edna was pleased to be posing for Gus. She seemed a perfect model for him. Something about her beauty in this summer landscape, to which she had so briefly come from the emotional aridity of her home, stirred him. Later, when he showed her the oil painting of his ‘Girl on the Cliff’, her face turned to the sky with the eyes closed, it seemed to her ‘to have in it the spirit of myself – he has put the figure on a cliff with bright green grass full of wild flowers and the sea is blue but dark and the sky almost gloomy.’68
A number of Augustus’s preliminary sketches had been done indoors, the only free area being his bedroom. But the children would keep dashing in and out, excited and uncontrollable, and so he was obliged to lock the door. ‘He showed me two or three rather nice drawings he had done of me,’ she recalled, ‘and then he kissed me in the most enchanting way. There was something very lovely about it. But I drew back – because just then I was in rather a disturbed emotional condition – I had so little of what I needed [and] wanted so much that I wouldn’t let anyone touch me.’69 But when Edna drew back after their kiss he suddenly began to cry, explaining that he had kissed her because the poses she was taking for him were so beautiful.
During the next days, he seemed to be struggling to keep his feelings on that ‘spiritual plane’ he had appealed to when guarding himself against Ottoline’s advances. But Ottoline was ‘rather awful to examine closely’,70 while Edna’s ‘disturbed emotional condition’ seemed to add to her attractiveness.
A few days later, Edna joined Gus and Dorelia for a walk along the cliff top to the next village where Henry Lamb had arrived. Then the four of them went off to an inn where Gus began drinking and, perhaps provoked by Lamb’s company, concentrating all his attention on Edna, his eyes fixed upon her face. Finally, in his deep voice, he began serenading her.
Suddenly Dorelia stretched out her arms in a curious protecting gesture towards Edna, took her hand and hurried her outside. They ran, stumbling along the dark cliff top, back to Diélette, Augustus careering after them, Lamb left by himself. Next day, and during the remainder of the holiday, no one mentioned this episode, and Augustus, smiling and sympathetic, was back at work painting the children and Dorelia.
‘Girl on the Cliff’ was shown at the New English Art Club exhibition at the end of 1909. ‘I am longing for it,’ Edna wrote. But it was bought for £40 and ‘I hadn’t got £40.’71 The buyer was Ottoline, who re-titled the picture ‘Nirvana’, the state of beatitude where all passions are dissolved.72
*
Though he had not liked the idea of taking seaside rooms again (‘It would be cheaper and infinitely better to have a few houses about the place to go to’), Augustus profited by his season at Diélette. ‘I have got, it seems to me, much further,’ he told Ottoline. But the prospect of a London studio and dingy London streets was not alluring. ‘I wanted to get to the Pyrenees or further instead of lingering in the chilly north, but I lack the necessary millions. So back again to the horrors of a Cockney winter. Are there no millionaires of spirit?’ he asked Will Rothenstein.
He returned to London early in October, and within a month he had found a house ‘in Chelsea with a big studio’.73 This was 153 Church Street, off the King’s Road – ‘a good house’, Dorelia decided.74 They took a two-and-a-half-year lease and moved in shortly before Christmas. ‘There is plenty of room and a piano,’ Augustus invited Lamb (23 December 1908). ‘…I hope you will come at once. You’ll have a room to yourself.’
It was also a jolly good place for the boys because of the patch of waste ground, littered with bricks and bushes, that ran beside the King’s Road and was ideal for games. Round the corner, in Beaufort Street, was Epstein’s studio where they would help themselves to clay from the metal tins, roll the pieces into pellets and expertly flick them at one another. They were still sometimes farmed out to friends: to Ottoline (or ‘Ottofat’ as they called her), and to Edna Clarke Hall, who thought they looked somewhat forlorn. But it was a useful arrangement for Augustus who could paint their guardians whenever he came to fetch or deposit them.
London that winter of 1908 was ‘very hostile and the English sillier than usual’.75 Jobless men roamed the towns in their thousands, and Members of Parliament warned one another that blood would soon be flowing in the streets. ‘I hope blood will flow as nothing good can happen without,’ Augustus declared.76 Meanwhile, despite his mood of anarchy, he settled into the shell of his new home as if for protection against storms to come. ‘Perhaps the Epsteins may come to dinner to-day,’ he wrote to Ottoline (26 December 1908), ‘ – now that we are bourgeois folk with carpets and front doors and dining-rooms.’
Wanderers, you have sunrise and the stars;
And we, beneath our comfortable roofs,
Lamplight and daily fires upon the hearth,
And four walls of a prison, and sure food.
But God has given you freedom, wanderers!77
A broken collarbone partly accounts for Augustus having ceased wandering and turned bourgeois that winter. But, with the coming of spring, mended and eager, he resolved to abandon his carpets and comfortable roof. For three months, he had chafed within his prison walls, finding some relief in reading Dostoevsky’s Les Possédés, ‘a wonderful book’, and submitting himself to be ‘overhauled’ by a new doctor, ‘a celestial emissary in disguise’, recommended by Ottoline. ‘I am tired of nerves and glooms,’ he confided to her (13 January 1909), ‘and one could certainly surmount them, unhandicapped physically.’ By February he was already feeling ‘dangerously healthy’, the proper condition in which to take the open road.
During this interval, while dreaming of the freedom which would soon overtake him, he threw off a wonderfully dandified and belligerent portrait of the painter William Nicholson. ‘I have started Nicholson,’ he wrote to Ottoline on 8 January 1909, ‘ – as a set off to his rare beauty I am putting in a huge nude girl at his side. This will add to his interest, I feel… ’ Eventually, as one of several cross-references between the two artists, he put in one of his own paintings – a girl, fully clothed, against a mountainous landscape at the lower right-hand corner of the composition, where his signature would have been.
The bold composition, with its low-key palette and associations with the royal pictures of Velázquez, was a style much favoured by Nicholson himself, who seems to stare from the canvas in alarm. There are also ironic references to William Orpen, who specialized in this genre of grand-manner portraiture, and had painted Augustus in a similar pose in 1900 as well as the Nicholson family in 1908. ‘William, overcoated, yellow-gloved, the picture of a Georgian buck, glares from the corner of an overdark eye at the beholder,’ wrote Marguerite Steen: ‘a superb piece of coloratura painting… one of the finest of John’s portraits, though not quite convincing as a likeness of the sitter. Still, perhaps in those days William did look like a gentleman pugilist, or perhaps this aspect of his personality was called out by their mutual fondness for the ring.’ For several years Augustus himself believed this to be his best portrait which, in the words of Andrew Wilton, ‘set the standards of his career as portrait painter: ambitious, slightly scandalous yet old masterly, respectful of mind and character rather than social rank, and not too serious’.78 He had recognized in Nicholson an excellent subject, but unless commissioned he could not afford to paint him. So Nicholson himself provided the canvas and commissioned the painting for a hundred pounds (equivalent to £4,700 in 1996), which he nevertheless forgot to pay and for which Augustus forgot to ask. It was a gentleman’s agreement, and when, some years later, the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge bought the portrait for a thousand pounds, the two painters happily pocketed five hundred each.
Even before this portrait was finished, there came over him the absolute necessity to travel. Ever since the birth of Pyramus, the caravan which Augustus was buying from
Salaman had lain gently disintegrating on Dartmoor. But recently he had moved it up and anchored it strategically at Wantage, where it was given a lick of fresh paint. A brilliant blue, it stood ready for adventurings. On his first expedition, he took along John Fothergill, architect and innkeeper, as companion. They trundled off on 1 April. ‘I called on [Roger] Fry at Guildford and found him in a state of great anxiety about his wife who had just had another attack,’79 Augustus reported to Ottoline (8 April 1909).
‘He sent off his children that day. I was sorry as I wanted to take them on the road a little. Fry came down and we sat in the caravan awhile. Next day I hired a big horse and proceeded on through Dorking and up to a divine Region called Ranmore Common… I called at the big house to ask for permission to stop on the common and was treated with scant courtesy by the menials who told me their man was out. So on again through miles of wild country to Effingham where, after several attempts to overcome the suspicion attaching to a traveller with long hair and a van, I got a farmer to let me draw into one of his fields. At this time the horse was done up and my money at its last.’
So he left his van in the field, along with the sleeping horse and the sleeping Fothergill, and caught the milk train up to London. He had covered eighty miles on the road and it had been highly satisfactory. But this was a mere beginning, a mere flexing of muscles. The summer must be passed with all his family away from front doors and dining-rooms; with the wind in the night outside and the stars in the wind; with the sun and the rain on his cheek.
Ever since the market days at Haverfordwest, since his first visits to the circus and his sight, on the wasteland outside Tenby, of the gypsy encampment with its wagons and wild children, its population of hard high-cheekboned men and women with faces dark as earth, he had felt attracted to travellers and show people. Destiny had drawn him closer to them after meeting that ‘old maniac’ John Sampson when he had begun to pick up their language. Since leaving the art sheds at Liverpool, he had revisited Cabbage Hall on ‘affairs of Egypt’. Elsewhere, encounters with such people as W. B. Yeats, with his addiction to tinkers as well as countesses, and Lady Gregory, with her studies of local myth and dialect, had helped to widen his knowledge. But it was not until the summer of 1908 that he had begun to dream of living as one of them. Two happenings that summer had nourished this idea. While in Paris he had met the gypsy guitarist Fabian de Castro in the luxurious apartment of Royall Tyler. The two of them entered into a deal where Augustus taught the guitarist to paint, while de Castro passed on to Augustus some of the songs from his voluminous repertoire. During these reciprocal classes, de Castro told Augustus something of his background. Now forty, he had been born at Linares in the Province of Andalusia. While still very young he was seized with the Wanderlust, forsaking his respectable family to take up with gâjos and others in the roving line. His conviction that he was of noble descent from the Pharaohs grew fierce and unalterable. He had travelled alone and in strange company, by foot and on the carpet of his imagination, through many lands plying many trades and practising many arts, to which he now intended to add the art of painting. Augustus was enchanted by his stories told with that serious self-mocking gypsy humour which found fun in the most unexpected places. After a day spent in talk, song, paint and laughter, towards evening they would be joined by other dreamers and jokers and exorbitant cronies, ‘Dummer’ Howard, Tudor Castle, Horace de Vere Cole, and together they would set off to see La Macarona and El Faico, the flamenco artists. This was Augustus’s introduction to the flamenco tradition of music and dancing. The intricate rhythms stirred undercurrents of anguish and regret that astonished him. The harsh outcry of the singers, rising convulsively and merging with the insistent humming of strings into an extraordinary ululation, sounded like the lamentations of beings thrust out of Heaven and debarred from all tenderness and hope. Yet the dancers themselves illustrated, with superb precision, the pride and glory of the human body.
After a week was up, Fabian de Castro left for Toledo where, having painted after Augustus’s prescription a huge and unorthodox Crucifixion, he was rewarded with imprisonment for committing an act of blasphemy. Augustus took something of a vicarious pride in his pupil’s accomplishment, though imprisonment in Spain, he admitted, like lunching in England, was a thing that might happen to anyone.
By this time Augustus, reaching Cherbourg, had fallen in with a raucous band of coppersmiths from Baku. ‘I was thrilled this morning – and my hand still trembles – by the spectacle of a company of Russian Gypsies coming down the street,’ he had illegibly informed Will Rothenstein. ‘We spoke together in their language – wonderful people with everyone’s hand against them – like artists in a world of petits bourgeois.’ At once he set about compiling word-lists of their vocabulary, and noting down their songs. This parcel of scholarship he dispatched to Liverpool. ‘It was a difficult job getting the songs down,’ he reported to Scott Macfie (11 August 1908), ‘ – everybody shouting them out, with numerous variations – but they showed the greatest satisfaction on my reading them out… I don’t like extracting words by force from Gypsies – it is too much like dentistry. I prefer to pick them up tout doucement.’
Back at Liverpool, a deep plot had been discovered to expel the gypsies from Europe. This hideous news, reaching Augustus, lodged in his imagination. He followed these children of nature because it seemed to him they had true freedom. ‘In no part of the world are they found engaged in the cultivation of the earth, or in the service of a regular master; but in all lands they are jockeys, or thieves or cheats,’ wrote George Borrow, who inspired a generation of late Victorians and Edwardians to leave their studies for the sunrise and the stars. These gypsies were the supreme anti-capitalists whose belongings were always burnt at death. Augustus’s urge to be closer to them stemmed from his preoccupation with the primitive world from which we all derive. In taking to the road he was not following an isolated whim. He was reacting, as others were beginning to, against the advance of industrialized society, with its inevitable shrinking of personal liberty, its frontiers barbed-wired by a rigmarole of passports and identity cards, by indecipherable rules, reparations, indemnities, by the paraphernalia of permits and censuses. Living in a gypsy community, mastering their ancient tongues, penetrating behind the false glamour to join them round their camp fires in the night, Augustus was searching for a way of holding in equilibrium contradictory impulses in his temperament. His love of travelling people recalls the passion of Jacques Callot, but it was also finding a parallel in contemporary literature, from Arthur Ransome’s Bohemia in London (1907) to the pastoralism of the Georgian poets, the chunky anthologies in paperboards produced by the Poetry Society,80 and in the recovery of folk songs by Percy Grainger, who played a number of them to Augustus on his phonograph (‘he says that England is richer than the continent in folk music’). No wonder the chief ornament of the Georgians, Eddie Marsh, lost sleep wondering whether he could afford a second Augustus John for his collection; and Rupert Brooke, seeing an Augustus John picture at the New English Art Club (1909), felt ‘quite sick and faint with passion’.81 To such poets and impresarios, no less than to art students, Augustus, ‘with his long red beard, ear-rings, jersey, check-suit and standing six feet high, so that a cabman was once too nervous to drive him’, as Edward Thomas reported82 to Gordon Bottomley, seemed a natural leader. Their movement, which was to be shattered by the Great War, sought as if by some spell to freeze the tread of industry across the country. But the best they could hope to win was a little extra time:
Time, you old gipsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?83
‘They’re not Gypsies until they start moving.’ But already, with his comings and goings, Augustus had grown ‘so damned Gypsy like’, in the words of Scott Macfie, ‘that unless one writes at once one runs the risk of missing you’. On his return to London in the autumn of 1908, harried by gendarmes, an event occurred wh
ich persuaded him that he had penetrated to the body of the gypsy world.
‘This morning I find a parcel which opened – lo! the ear of a man with a ring in it and hair sprouting around lying in a box of throat pastilles,’ he wrote to Wyndham Lewis, ‘ – nothing to indicate its provenance but a scrawl in a mixture of thieves’ cant and bad Romany saying how it is the ear of a man murdered on the highroad and inviting me to take care of my Kâri=penis, but to beware of the dangers that lurk beneath a petticoat. So you see even in England, I cannot feel secure and in France the Police are waiting for me, not to speak of armed civilians of my acquaintance.’
His broken collarbone that winter and removal to Church Street had enabled him to pursue his gypsy studies at a more bookish level. The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, first born in 1888 and soon issuing songs transcribed by John Sampson ‘on the highroad between Knotty Ash and Prescot’, had died only three years later. But now, like some sleeping beauty, it was being reawakened by the kiss of scholarship and, what it had lacked before, the oxygen of money. They were, as the Devil is said to have remarked when he glanced down the Ten Commandments, ‘a rum lot’, these Edwardian gentlemen: a cosmopolitan band of madcaps and idealists led by the portly and pontificating Sampson and assisted by various willing girls indispensable, in Sampson’s view, to serious gypsy studies. Folklorists and philologists, Celtic lexicographers, Scottish phoneticians and bibliographers from the United States drew together to investigate the gypsy question. The tentacles of the society stretched out to reach anthropologists in Switzerland and linguists in India, embracing on the way such odd bards as Arthur Symons, expounder of French symbolism to the English, and (still at No. 2 The Pines) Theodore Watts-Dunton, author of the sultry bestseller Aylwin, now, in his middle seventies, about to be released from tending the sexually blighted Swinburne and – a final brilliant touch – married to a girl of thirty. Most prominent among them was an intimidating vegetarian ‘Old Mother’ Winstedt, the finest scientific authority on gypsies’ poisons John Myers, and, from Lincolnshire, the Very Reverend George Hall, expert poacher and approver of plural marriages, whose sport was collecting pedigrees. Sampson had hoped that the presence of a parson might give a collar of respectability, so far absent, to the gang’s Borrovian escapades – instead of which, his tattered clerical coat, huge bandage over one eye and habit of smoking a short pipe while drinking beer, produced quite the reverse effect.
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