Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  After Hope’s disappearance the children’s education stumbled into slightly more conventional lines. ‘The boys go to a beastly school now and seem to like it,’ John complained to their ex-tutor (20 November 1912). Dane Court had been founded at Hunstanton in Norfolk in 1867 by a vicar, with the novelist-to-be Henry Rider Haggard as his solitary pupil. It had moved to Parkstone at the turn of the century and recently been taken over by a newly married couple, Hugh and Michaela Pooley. Hugh Pooley, a hearty player of the piccolo with a rich baritone voice, took music classes. ‘He lectured us in the dormitory on the dangers of masturbation I now realize,’ recalled Romilly, ‘though I was puzzled at the time.’53 If Hugh was the symbol of a headmaster, his wife, a devotee of bicycling with a weakness for astonishing hats, was the ‘progressive’ force in the school and taught French. It was disconcerting for her to find that the Johns already spoke the language. She was a Dane,*6 the daughter of Pietro Köbke Krohn, an artist and director of the Künstmuseum in Copenhagen. On the strength of her parentage she would bicycle up uninvited to Alderney with her husband and a tin of sardines to supplement the rations, and seemed deaf to the loud groans which greeted her arrival. While Hugh sang in his baritone for supper, Michaela would swivel her attentions upon John himself. The retired colonels and civil servants with which Hampshire and Dorset seemed filled were little to her taste, whereas John was an ‘attractive man, who made one feel 100% woman – a quality I missed in most Englishmen at that period’.

  Dane Court had eleven pupils and, since its future depended upon swelling this number, the Pooleys had been delighted to receive one morning a letter of inquiry from Alderney Manor – a property, they saw from the map, on Lord Wimborne’s estate. An interview was arranged, and the Pooleys prepared themselves to meet some grand people. ‘From our stand by the window we saw a green Governess cart drawn by a pony approaching up the drive,’ Michaela remembered.

  ‘A queer square cart – later named “The Marmalade Box” by the boys in the school – and out stepped a lady in a cloak with a large hat and hair cut short… After her a couple of boys tumbled out, their hair cut likewise and they wore coloured tunics. For a moment we thought they were girls… It was soon fixed that the three boys aged 8, 9, 10 should come as day boys. When Mrs John was going, she turned at the door and said: “I think there are two more at home, who might as well come.”’54

  That was the beginning and it was not easy for them, knowing only the Latin gender rules, French, and part of the Book of Job. But they were quick to learn, being, the Pooleys judged, ‘a fine lot… intelligent and sturdy, good at work and good at games’. With their long page-style hair and belted pinafores (brightly coloured at first, then khaki to match the brown Norfolk suits the other boys wore) they felt shamefully conspicuous. Yet since they numbered almost half Dane Court and stood shoulder to shoulder against any attack, their entrance into school life was not so painful as it might have been. They formed a community of their own, a family circle with doors that could be opened only from inside. But gradually they edged these doors ajar, Eton collars giving way, under Michaela’s reforming spirit, to allow corduroy suits and earthenware bowls to become the order of the day.

  ‘David and Caspar now are expert cyclists,’ John reported to Mrs Nettleship after their first term (8 January 1913). ‘…Mr Pooley wants them to be weekly boarders, he thinks they’d get on much faster – and I think it’s no bad idea.’ First the three eldest, then the others, boarded. Because of their strange ways, they became known as ‘the Persians’. ‘But we shone on the playing fields and won many games of cricket and football for the school’, Caspar remembered. ‘…Augustus once scored a goal – palpably offside – playing for the parents and Old Boys. Unhappily I was the goalkeeper… ,’55

  On visiting days, they grew self-conscious, more vulnerable to parent-embarrassment and so far as was possible they tried to keep the parts of their lives – the Nettleship part too – within separate compartments. Details of their home life were guarded from their friends, while about Dane Court they were seldom pestered for information by John and Dorelia.

  ‘I was especially afraid that one of my brothers would let out some frightful detail of our life at Alderney, and thus ruin us for ever,’ wrote Romilly; ‘a needless alarm, as they were all older and warier than I. I contracted a habit of inserting secretly after the Lord’s Prayer a little clause to the effect that Dorelia might be brought by divine intervention to wear proper clothes; I used also to pray that she and John might not be tempted, by the invitation sent to all parents, to appear at the school sports.’56

  During the holidays, Ida’s children often went to stay with Grannie Nettleship. She would see that they had their hair cut and were indistinguishably fitted into regular boys’ uniforms. With their aunts, Ethel and Ursula, they travelled to seaside resorts, spending their days breathing fresh air on long walks, their evenings playing Racing Demon and Up Jenkins – then early to bed.

  The boys did pretty well at school; especially David, who was head boy for two years. As the eldest he felt himself to be at least as much a Nettleship as a John and was more successful when away from Alderney. But it was Caspar, Ida’s second son, who cut loose. At the beginning of the Great War he was given a copy of Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships and, looking through the lists of warships, two-thirds of them British, decided that this ‘new and orderly society… was the world for me’.57 All the boys were talking of the army, the navy and the Royal Flying Corps. With Hugh Pooley’s encouragement, Caspar eventually approached his father with the notion of making the navy his career. It was a difficult interview. John felt bewildered. He could remember himself having decided at this age to trap beaver on the Arkansas River. David, who had been reading Coral Island and who wanted to go to sea on the chance of getting wrecked on such a charming spot, he could understand. But Caspar seemed unaccountably serious. John plainly thought it stupid to subject oneself to such harsh discipline, and he did not scruple to say so. ‘Think again,’ he advised, and brushed the idea aside. ‘I had no encouragement at home,’ Caspar remembered; ‘I felt a lonely outcast.’ But he persisted, and came against other obstacles – the cadet’s uniform alone cost a hundred and fifty pounds. But once John saw that his son was set on the navy, he paid all bills without objection. It was Dorelia who engineered this change of mind. She had no more interest in the sea than in schooling, but she wanted to get at least one boy off her hands and see him settled. So she organized it all. In September 1916 they harnessed the pony and trap and, she in her long skirts, Caspar in his bright new uniform, they travelled the thirty-five miles to Portsmouth and ‘I was dumped through the dockyard main gate.’58

  Caspar was the only one of John’s children brought up at Alderney who, like Thornton, Gwen and Winifred, left home and made a life elsewhere. The others left too late or too incompletely, as perhaps John himself had done. Although one or two later illegitimate children, raised with their mothers, felt themselves deprived by not living at Alderney or Fryern, Ida’s and Dorelia’s children needed to escape these places – and for many of the same reasons that old Edwin John’s family had fled Tenby. The atmosphere was powerful and, as the boys grew older, it seemed to become less sympathetic. ‘He was extremely strict at table,’ one of John’s children wrote, ‘and we were hardly allowed to say a word – which resulted in one of us getting the giggles, which was fatal, because that infuriated him… Perhaps it was because of his own very strict upbringing with his father.’59

  John loved babies. When they were very small he used to bath them and play with them, and in such a role they preferred him to anyone else. But he found it hard to bear the physical presence of his maturing sons. Overawed, they fell, one by one, into lines of self-preservation. It was the beginning of a long defensive war no one could win. ‘He always liked to have children around, plenty of them, not necessarily his own,’ Caspar remembered. ‘…He enjoyed children to that extent, but he was never a warm-hearted m
an, really, to us; he was a tremendously difficult sort of fellow to understand for a kid. I don’t think he ever understood himself, come to that.’60

  Dorelia, too, was not good at demonstrating her love. She was not unfair, but only her own children seemed able to sense her fondness for them. John himself was inhibited from expressions of tenderness. ‘He intensely disliked seeing parents fondling their children and this may partly have accounted for my mother’s inhibitions in respect of us children,’ remembered his daughter Vivien. ‘In fact we never embraced our mother until the ages of 12 and 15, when [my sister] Poppet and I made a pact to break this “spell” in order to be like other families.’61 But this was later, and for the time being the regime, for all its Bohemian tone, was almost Victorian in its rules of reticence.

  Dorelia’s pregnancy, in the autumn of 1911, being against her doctor’s advice, was a time of anxiety. In the event everyone except Dorelia felt ill.62 By the end of February 1912, John was already confessing to ‘feeling so sick… Dorelia is expecting a baby momentarily… Pyramus mysteriously ill.’ In the following week this illness came to be diagnosed. ‘Little Pyramus is fearfully ill – meningitis, and I can’t believe he can recover, though I do hope still,’ John wrote to Ottoline Morrell (5 March 1912). ‘Last night I thought he was about to die but he kept on. Dorelia behaves most wonderfully – though she is expecting her baby at any moment. It will be terrible to lose Pyra...’ In desperation John had tried to get ‘the best specialist in London, perhaps in Europe’, but the man was in Europe, not London – and besides what was there he could do? ‘There is no treatment for the disease.’63 In a wobbly handwriting John wrote to his old crony John Sampson to tell him what was happening. ‘We are in a sad way here. Pyramus is frightfully ill… Dorelia about to have a baby. The doctor tells me he thinks she has postponed the event for 2 or 3 weeks so as to look after Pyramus – he says this has been known to happen.’64

  On 8 March Dorelia’s labour pains began and she ‘had to take leave of Pyramus and go and have her baby’ which ‘turned out a big nice girl’. They told Dorelia that Pyramus was dead, but for four more days the child lay on his bed quite close to her, still just alive. ‘Pyra is still breathing feebly but happily has been unconscious for the last 2 or 3 days,’ John told Ottoline on 10 March. ‘I do not think he will outlive to-day. He was indeed a celestial child and that is why the Gods take him… The mind refuses to contemplate… such an awful fact.’ While Dorelia grew stronger, John continued to sit by their son, waiting for the end. ‘It was a terrible event,’ he wrote afterwards (9 May 1912) to Quinn. ‘…I must say the Missus behaved throughout as I think few women would – with amazing good sense and a splendid determination not to give way to the luxury of the expression of grief.’ It was this code of silence they shared. ‘I can’t talk about Pyra,’ Dorelia told Ottoline a year later (10 March 1913): and John wrote to Albert Rutherston: ‘It is indeed a terrible thing to have lost darling little Pyramus – the most adorable of children. Of course I can’t find words to say what I feel.’ Dorelia’s silence was natural and eloquent, and her grief was private. John recognized this. But when he spoke of feeling, as from time to time he was tempted to do, he always regretted it for the words seemed to let him down, making the reality something acted. When unhappiness threatened, he feared giving way to it because he knew the depths of depression to which his nature was susceptible. No one could reach it, though ‘your wire was so welcome’, he told Sampson. ‘These things are stupefying.’65 So he concentrated on the birth of his daughter: ‘le roi est mort, vive la reine.’66 They called her Elizabeth Ann or Lizzie – at least that was their intention. But somehow these names never stuck. Then, one day, after contemplating her sometime, her half-brother Caspar chanced to remark: ‘What a little poppet it is!’: after which she was always known as Poppet.

  Pyramus was cremated at Woking. Returning by train with the ashes – ‘one more urn for my collection’67 – John placed the receptacle carefully on the rack above his seat, and then forgot it. It was found further along the line and sent to Alderney.

  4

  CHRONIC POTENTIAL

  ‘People were getting too silly’.

  Augustus John to Gwen John (24 October 1914)

  ‘All are well at home,’ John reported philosophically, ‘ – the baby-girl a god-send. My missus keeps fit. We have disturbances of the atmosphere occasionally but have so far managed to recover every time.’68 He seldom remained long at Alderney, preferring to visit rather than to stay there. ‘It is pleasant enough down here,’ he remarked to Ottoline Morrell (25 July 1913), ‘but a little uninspiring.’

  Inspiration lay further off, waiting to be taken unawares. In the summer of 1912 he had set off with his family to Wales – then, abandoning them in the desolate valley round Nant-ddu, hurried on to Ireland. ‘Like a lion’ he entered Dublin, remembered Oliver St John Gogarty;69 ‘or some sea king’...

  ‘Or a Viking who has steered,

  All blue eyes and yellow beard.’70

  This was John’s first meeting with stately, plump buck Gogarty, the quickwitted and long-talking professional Irishman of many parts – poet and busybody, surgeon, litigant and aviator, wearer of a primrose waistcoat and owner of the first butter-coloured Rolls-Royce. John had sought him out in the Bailey Restaurant, Dublin’s equivalent of the Café Royal, on the advice of Orpen and, despite Gogarty’s ‘ceaseless outpour of wit and wisdom’, confessed to being ‘immensely entertained’.71 ‘All agog with good humour’, Gogarty fell headlong under John’s spell, describing him as ‘a man of deep shadows and dazzling light… I noticed that he had a magnificent body… He was tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped. His limbs were not heavy, his hands and feet were long.’72 ‘The aura of the man! The mental amplitude!’ Even so, Gogarty could not fail to notice that he was ‘a moody man’. There was always the problem of what to do with him.

  An ear-nose-and-throat specialist, Gogarty examined John’s ears and pronounced them to be the very Seat of his Melancholy: in which case, John felt, he had much to answer for. Gogarty was a hectic monopolizer of all conversation. If he did not have enough words of his own, he borrowed other people’s, and so was never at a loss. Only once did John arrest him – by ‘flinging in his face a bowl of nuts’.73 He ‘is a brick but such a mad hatter’, John confided to Dorelia. He was also ‘rather awful sometimes’, and ‘dreams of the days when gentlemen addressed their wives as “Madam” and all was dignity and calm’. Not surprisingly it was difficult to make such a man ‘see one’s problems’.74 But often his problems sailed out of sight as he accepted Gogarty’s invitation to ‘float his intellect’ while in Dublin, and drink huge tumblers of whisky until the chatter retreated to a distant murmur. Bottles of John Jameson were what Gogarty was ‘inspired to give’ with almost sinister generosity. ‘It was very pleasant, this bathing in the glory of Augustus,’ Gogarty remembered75 – adding, to John’s chagrin: ‘I felt myself growing so witty that I was able to laugh at my own jokes.’

  But still there was the problem of what to do with John. Gogarty put him up in lodgings next to the Royal Hotel, Dalkey, overlooking Shanagolden Bay. His presence there, at the window, was a constant invitation to take the day off. ‘We would pick up Joe Hone, who lived at Killiney, and go to Glendalough, the Glen of the Lakes, in Wicklow,’ Gogarty wrote. ‘…On through the lovely country we went. Augustus, who was sitting in the back, could not be distracted by scenery, for beside him sat Vera Hone.

  ‘…We bowled along the Rocky Valley. Suddenly I heard the word “Stop”. As it evidently was not meant for me, I didn’t stop. Joe Hone did not turn his head, so why should I?’76

  This was the beginning of a lifelong infuriating friendship commemorated by John with two portraits77 of Gogarty, and by Gogarty with two of his ‘Odes and Addresses’. In a fragile verse at the end of his poem ‘To Augustus John’, Gogarty recorded how much, despite all its difficulties, this friendship meant to him: