Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  As the day wore on his mood lightened. Often he would suggest taking out the pony trap and driving through the country lanes to the White Hart or King’s Arms, small favourite pubs with sawdust on the floors and the reek of shag and cool ale, where he would drink beer and play shove-ha’penny (‘I play myself. Play alone’). The two eldest boys, David and Caspar, who were in charge of the stabling and grooming, would ‘harness the ponies into their traps, ready to drive up to the front door where Augustus and Dodo would be waiting, he for a round of the nearer pubs, she for a round of the shops’, Caspar wrote. ‘We two would sit on the rail boards, ready to feed and water the ponies at each stop, most of which they knew without being reined.’17

  But it was in the evening, seated at the head of the refectory table, that Augustus came into his own. A central passage in the house, with bedrooms on both sides, led down some steps to a large living-room where everyone dined. It had a wide open fireplace, its burning logs lying on soft grey ash. Within this arena of hospitality, melancholy would thaw, allowing his good humour to come out. Sometimes he would permit the children to stay up on these gorgeous occasions and wait at table. ‘The table seemed to groan under the weight of innumerable dishes,’ Romilly remembered, ‘and be lighted by a hundred glittering candles in their shining candlesticks of brass. Dorelia and John appeared, for the first time in the day, in their true characters and proportions; they were like Jove and Juno presiding over the Olympian feast.’18 Sometimes, too, there were terrific parties with bonfires and dancing, and John, rolling his lustrous eyes like marbles, an enigmatic smile on his face, would in his growling voice sing songs between long puffs of pipe smoke.

  In Jury town I was bred and bornn

  In Newgate gaol I’ll die in scornn.

  He delivered these highwayman’s songs with intense concentration; but it was a strange thing, one of his listeners noticed: ‘as he sang his body seemed to grow small. It was as if it all went into his voice. He dwindled.’19

  At seventeen I took a wife

  I loved her as I loved my life.

  It was often a point of honour that these parties continue till early morning, and so many people came that huge wigwams had to be constructed from branches and brown blankets, like the tents in Prince Igor, to accommodate everyone in the garden. On hot nights they would make up a communal bed in the orchard, nine wide and full of bracken that crackled when anyone moved. Then, first thing in the morning, John would be towering over them, and, while others were still lying where they had fallen, lead off some child to his studio.

  The children played a natural part in this community. There were signs of them everywhere, such as the uncertainly chalked notice in the lavatory: PLEASE PULL THE CHAIN JENTLY. But most often they were out of doors, immersed in their secret games. From the dark undergrowth they would suddenly shin up the trees in bare feet, run with a pack of red setters, plunge into the frog-laden pond and, to the distress of the parson, dash naked round the garden getting dry. Sometimes they played hide-and-seek on the horses, or harnessed a tin bath to one of the pigs which towed them across the grass. One favourite place was the brickyard over the road with its great claypit and little trolleys pulled along miniature railway lines; and another, a large sandpit enclosed by pine trees. The many-shaded sand-cliffs could be tunnelled into and carved out in paths and bear-holes. At the top where the sand joined silver-grey and black earth, and the smell of heath and dank sand had a peculiar quality, they would set up shop with different-coloured sands and play an absorbing game. Then the lunch bell, erected at the top of a high post at the back of the house, echoed across the fields, and they would pelt back through the orchard. On windless days this bell could be heard all over the estate, alerting whole troops of poachers and stealers of wood, who were chased off between courses.

  After lunch, they were off again, fighting a fire on the heath or, more mysteriously, entering their private world of rites and humours, games of their own invention such as ‘Bottom First’ and cults that embraced strange moaning choruses, ‘Give us our seaweed!’, accompanied by side-splitting yells of laughter.

  They were not pampered, these children, but increasingly as time went on put to work sawing logs, digging, grooming the horses, collecting hens’ eggs, tarring fences, minding the farm and doing all the chores of the house. It was an unorthodox upbringing, permissive yet sometimes oppressive. But this first summer, while the house was still empty and they slept in tents and every day the sun shone, Alderney was idyllic.

  2

  THE SECOND MRS STRINDBERG

  ‘Am I a Don Juan? How sad!’

  Augustus to Dorelia (1911)

  Keeping his studio at the Chenil Gallery, John stayed for much of the week in London; then, at weekends, or in moments of revulsion from town life, he would show up at Alderney to go on with his work inside the converted coach house. It suited him in many ways, this dual existence, giving a constructive pattern to his restlessness. Alderney was a harbour, and Dorelia his anchor.

  ‘He behaves very well,’ Dorelia admitted to Charles Tennyson, ‘ – if I keep my eye on him.’ The eye she kept on him was tolerantly fierce. Over the early years at Alderney a pattern of existence developed between them that became roughly acceptable to both. He carried on two lives; and so, eventually, did she. In London he enjoyed affairs and flirtations with models, actresses, dancers – anyone new. These amatory exercises seemed almost obligatory. ‘The dirty little girl I meet in the lane’, he declared, ‘has a secret for me – communicable in no language, estimable at no price, momentous beyond knowledge, though it concern but her and me.’20 It was of some concern to Dorelia, nevertheless, when these girls appeared at Alderney. For she would surrender easily to nothing, knowing that were she to do so John, like a child, would seek to push things further. ‘I want to live with you when I come down,’ John wrote from London, ‘but I don’t like imposing myself on you.’ From Dorelia’s point of view this seemed a promising start. Her most useful card was Henry Lamb. Whenever Lamb wanted to see her, she would ask John, almost formally, whether he minded. Surprised, he would disclaim any objection to ‘the poor agneau’ coming to Alderney – provided, of course, Dorelia didn’t mind. But when he inflicted his girls on her, or too inconsiderately hared off in pursuit of them, he would find at moments particularly inconvenient to himself Lamb happily installed there again, playing Bach duets with her. He hadn’t imagined Lamb’s company was so ‘indispensable’, he sarcastically remarked.

  Many of John’s romances were short;*1 others, drifting into the mellower waters of affection, lasted years. ‘You may be sure I want you a great deal more than any other damsels,’ he assured Dorelia: but he wanted them as well. In all his painting, whether landscapes or portraits, he depended upon some instinctive relationship that would take hold of him and guide his paintbrush. In the case of women, this miracle was difficult to achieve if his concentration was constantly fretted by unsatisfied desire. Under such conditions, his shyness stood like a barrier between him and his sitter. It was to this argument that Dorelia listened with most attention. No worthwhile man, she told Amaryllis Fleming, was easy. By such a definition John was extremely worthwhile. There were those who wondered how, stoical and accepting of life as she was, Dorelia could put up with as much as she did. She did not do so without a struggle. In their long tug-of-war, the rope between them almost snapped. She endured what she did less for love than from belief. She believed him to be a good, perhaps a great artist; and she scorned conventional indignation, expressed on her behalf, about his ‘goings-on’. But if he were not to prove a good or great artist, she told Helen Anrep, then her life had been wasted.

  She saw her job as lifting some of the responsibilities, irrelevant to painting, from John’s shoulders. She would untie the cords and give him back part of his freedom. When he had illegitimate children she did not leave him, but sometimes helped to look after them, as she looked after Ida’s legitimate children. He could go where he wanted, do
what he wanted, but must come to heel when she called.

  It seemed, at times, as if Dorelia had entered the plant world more completely than the world of human beings, as if flowers meant more to her than people: perhaps, eventually, they did. There were terrifying fights with John: but over such issues as whether or not, on some half-forgotten occasion, Ida’s Caspar had suffered from toothache. Dorelia examined small things under a microscope, but appeared to look at the large events of life through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars so that they never came too close. This protective strategy is well caught by a conversation she later had with the novelist Richard Hughes. One afternoon, when the two of them were walking in the garden with a boy of about four believed to be John’s youngest illegitimate son, Dorelia suddenly came out with: ‘There’s one thing about John I’ve never got used to, not after all these years.’ Richard Hughes glanced apprehensively at the child, and braced himself. Then she continued: ‘I don’t know what to do about it. Time after time, he’s late for lunch.’

  The girls John brought down to Alderney were accepted coolly by Dorelia and were not helped much by John himself. It was as if they knew a different John, while, in the words of the poet Iris Tree, ‘she guarded his higher ghost’. Some she frightened away, being known by them as ‘the yellow peril’; others, through their exceptional qualities, she came to see as allies. But there were limits. Her censure usually fell hardest on the girls themselves rather than on John, for it was not justice that interested her but what was practical. A friend who lived near by remembers one incident that shows her methods of dealing with anything unacceptable:

  ‘One afternoon I had gone up to Alderney Manor to learn from Dorelia how to “turn a heel”, so I would be able to knit socks for my two boys. We were having tea when a vehicle came to the front door. Dorelia went to see who it was, some luggage was dumped in the passage, a girl was brought in, introduced, and politely asked to have some tea. The conversation dragged, neither Dorelia nor I were any good at “chatting”. Soon I got up to go, but Dorelia asked me to stay on… Dorelia then turned to the girl. “What train are you catching?” she said. The girl looked surprised. “There is a good train to Waterloo you can get if you go now, the next one is much later. I will see that you are driven to the station.” Before Dorelia had reached the door, the girl blurted out in an offended voice: “Augustus asked me to stay.” “But Augustus is not here,” answered Dorelia calmly, and went out… She politely and firmly got the girl and luggage out of the house without raising her voice, without losing her temper, without even looking upset, so it all seemed a most ordinary affair. “I am not going to have Augustus’s girls here when he is not present” – and that was all she ever said about that interlude.’21

  *

  It was this version of a welcome (emphasized when one of the children shot an adhesive dart at her) which was extended to the second Mrs Strindberg, who, rising vigorously from her deathbed in the Savoy Hotel (upon which, she boasted, John had deposited her), called on Dorelia one Christmas Eve. She arrived, wearing a nightdress in the snow. Her visit was brief, and represented the latest in ‘a long series of grotesque and unedifying adventures’22 to which this tiger-woman from Vienna was, John claimed, subjecting him. For two years, in Paris, Liverpool and London, she had dogged his heels, buying up pictures that were not for sale and presenting large cheques that baffled Knewstub at the Chenil, infuriated Quinn in New York, and eventually found their way, via her maid, back into her own pocket.

  By all accounts Frida Strindberg was a remarkable woman. After ten years in a convent ‘among the brides of Christ’, she had been let out to serve, for a further two years, as ‘the beautiful jail keeper’ of Sweden’s chief dramatist. Their marriage had been an exhausting comedy of love, the tone of which was set at the wedding when the parson, addressing his question to Strindberg rather than to Frida, demanded: ‘Will you swear that you do not carry another man’s child under your heart?’ While Strindberg nervously denied being pregnant, Frida interrupted with a volley of hysterical laughter.

  A determined admirer of the hero in man, Frida had sharpened up a ravenous appetite, given somewhat to indigestion, for men of genius. On catching sight of a specimen she would burrow ruthlessly under his spell, and there was little he might do to extricate himself from the rigours of her devotion. As she grew older she gathered force until she arrived in London an Amazon. She had become aware within herself of brilliant gifts as a journalist and now conducted her life as if it were the daily material for front-page headlines. In 1910, while on the track of the fleeing Wyndham Lewis, she had called at Church Street and, expecting to corner him there, found herself in bed with John. ‘I then dismissed the incident from my mind,’ he recorded,23 ‘but it turned out to be the prelude to a long and by no means idyllic tale of misdirected energy, mad incomprehension, absurdity and even squalor.’24

  What happened over the next two years has been summarized by Strindberg’s biographer John Stewart Collis:

  ‘If, without telling a soul where he was going, he sought refuge in some obscure cafe in Paris or London, Frida would know and appear on the scene. If he boarded a train for the country, there she would be on the platform to bid him good-bye or to follow him. And it was advisable for him to watch his step in his treatment of her even when dining with her in company, for if he were discovered paying too much attention to another female member of the party she would pay a man to take up a concealed position and aim a champagne bottle at his head; and on one occasion, in Paris, when he imagined that he had been successful in eluding her by a series of swift changes of scene, he was informed through an anonymous and illiterate note that he would again be beaten up if his behaviour towards a certain lady did not improve – for evidently someone had been mistaken for John and had innocently suffered the attack.’25

  Mrs Strindberg saw herself as John’s benefactress. In her late thirties, she was still a very cordial woman, her face wreathed in dangerous smiles and, we are told, with ‘eyes of that shade of dark and lively brown which so often prove irresistible to men’.26 John felt intimidated. ‘I admit’, he conceded, ‘that the sight of Mme Strindberg bearing down on me in an open taxi-cab, a glad smile of greeting on her face, shaded with a hat turned up behind and bearing a luxuriant outcrop of sweetpeas – this sight, I confess, unnerved me.’27 He held his ground – then ran; but whichever way he goes, there she is with arms outstretched to welcome him. ‘I am worn out!’ she cries. ‘I am suffering more than I have strength to bear!!’ But he too is suffering: ‘Can you seriously think I enjoy this business,’ he demands, ‘that I glory in it???’ Their reproaches and punctuation marks multiply. She speaks of love and death, and swears that he does not understand her. He hears the voice of power, and objects: ‘It is this constant misunderstanding of my character which is the fatal element in the whole affair.’ Their accusations turn towards the thickets of legality. ‘They are serving you a subpoena or will try to do so to-day,’ she promises him. ‘I want to attack you by the Law!!!’ he bursts out.

  What has survived of their correspondence reveals the secret of Frida’s ubiquity. When unable to accompany John on his wild flittings to and fro, she would arrange for him to be shadowed by a private detective, and it is round the competence of this man’s reports that many of their arguments revolve.

  Each claimed that the other was making a public exhibition of them both. ‘If all Chelsea is aware of your existence it is simply because you have a genius for advertising it,’ John blandly concluded. Frida’s chief complaints centred on the company he kept other than her own. ‘You write love letters to all the girls in London, which they all read aloud,’ she objected. One girl, in a leopard skin, had recited nine pages to music; and another, unaccompanied, had danced a dance of jealousy. Was it any wonder, then, that Frida ‘felt like murder yesterday – I was mad, mad, mad’. It was untrue, she added, that Edith Ashley (‘a silly Kensington girl from a penny novel’) had ‘been bribed by me not to
see you, that I had twice tried to murder her, once by poison, once by pushing her from a cliff’.

  John refused to disbelieve her. ‘You are determined to be melodramatic to the last!’ He felt imperilled by her threats of love, recognizing ‘an audacious attempt at intimidation’. For she had sensed his fear of publicity and was constantly playing on it. ‘I was born as the only woman of one man,’ she was to write in her autobiography.28 That man was temporarily John. She therefore promised to ‘unmask’ his other women. ‘I have shunned it until now for your sake,’ she added, ‘…for your wife and children’s sake.’

  John feared that she would, by means of the courts and press, try to disrupt his life at Alderney. To forestall this he had already made Frida a figure of fun. She has ‘gone off her head again,’ he told Dorelia. ‘…The waiters in the Café Royal look at me with discreet sympathy.’29 She had one very potent weapon: death. It happened that she was strong on suicide, swallowing down regular doses of Veronal mixed with Bovril, then dispatching her abominably pretty maid to John with the news that she had tossed down this fatal cocktail and was about to die. But when, in terror of some farewell message for the coroner and press, he hurried to her bedside, there would always ensue an intolerable interview; and on one occasion, having seized his hat and bolted down the hotel corridor, he was overtaken by the dying woman in the lift.

  In Chiaroscuro John makes well-rehearsed comedy out of such episodes, though it appears from contemporary documents that he was sometimes seriously disturbed by them. To John Quinn, revisiting London at the beginning of September 1911, he unburdened himself. Quinn’s diary entry for 3 September records that John, at the Café Royal, ‘sober but normal looking’, told him that, in response to four or five pleading letters from Frida, he had just gone to see her at the Capitol Hotel. He advised her that she had made ‘a damnable nuisance of herself, and that their relationship must end. She ‘clutched and raved’, but though he felt sorry for her, he steeled himself not to surrender. Later that night, in his studio at the Chenil, he learnt that she had again killed herself and was not feeling well. She is ‘pegging out in earnest this time’, he warns Dorelia. Next morning Quinn called round: ‘Awful tale about Madame Strindberg all right,’ he confirmed in his diary. ‘…Mme S. had taken poison and the doctor said she would not last the night. John shaken but game & determined not to give in. I felt sorry for him and did my best to brace him up. I don’t think he had slept very much. This damned Austrian woman has wasted John’s time – upset his nerves – played hell with his work.’ The two men walked to the Queen’s restaurant near Sloane Square and ‘I advised John if Mme S. did die to “beat it” – clear out of the country,’ Quinn continued. ‘…John is really a combination of boy and man – but a man of the highest principle.’