Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Under the flamboyant exterior there was much uncertainty. He invented a part, complete with theatrical costume, that acted as an eye-catching form of concealment. Unsure of so much, he was dynamic in one thing: the pursuit of beauty, in particular beautiful women. Round him there gathered, wrote Lord David Cecil, a following of ‘magnificent goddesses who, with kerchiefed heads and flowing, high-waisted dresses, stand gazing into the distance in reverie or look down pensively at the children who run and leap and wrestle round their feet. Wild and regal, at once lover, mother and priestess, woman dominates Mr John’s scene.’

  Like his maternal grandfather Thomas Smith, Augustus was a man ‘of full habit of body’. But his view of women was idealistic rather than sensual, and had been formed by the early death of his mother. Back in Tenby, he had been drawn towards full-bosomed mature women, admiring from afar and usually while in church their rich proportions that seemed to offer the warmth and consolation he desired. Typical of these women had been the headmaster’s wife at his unsympathetic school near Bristol, on whose generous bosom, he remembered, ‘in great distress, I once laid my head and wept’.60

  With adolescence his world had become invaded by disturbing forces. Whether upon the beach or in the streets of Tenby, it seemed his fate to encounter at every turn the mocking glance of some girl. His awkwardness was painful and the old-fashioned clothes his father made him wear an unspeakable constraint. He would have felt less sensitive if, while wandering alone on the marshes, he had come across some faerie’s child lingering disconsolately amid the sedge. For she, like him, would have been silent, would not have laughed, but taken him into her embrace. Such phantoms peopled his imagination. Prevented by his timidity from making contact with actual girls, he kept company with imaginary creatures who had travelled from the reveries of Burne-Jones and Rossetti.

  The conflict between reality and his fastidiously romantic dreamland gradually intensified. On Sunday afternoons in the early 1890s Geraldine de Burgh, her elder sister and a friend of theirs used to walk from Tenby over the sand dunes and rough grass tracks of the Burrows towards Penally and Giltar. And almost every Sunday they were secretly met by ‘Gussie’, Thornton and their friend Robert Prust. Geraldine was partnered by Gussie – the routine was invariable – though she would have preferred Robert Prust. Gussie, she thought, was terribly backward: they did not even hold hands. But as the youngest, it was not hers to choose. Over sixty-five years later, Augustus wrote to her: ‘You are one of the big landmarks of my early puberty. I was intensely shy then, besides you generally had your brother with you to add to my confusion. Perhaps your noble name intimidated me too. But I was always afraid of girls then – girls and policemen...’

  By this time Augustus had experienced what he called ‘the dawn of manhood’. The mysteries of reproduction were explained to him with much raucous humour by the other boys in Tenby. He was horrified. It was impossible to imagine his father involving himself with his mother in this way. Gloom, terror and bewilderment mounted in him. To such improbable coupling did he owe his very existence! It seemed as if he would never be free from the burden of his origins. It was with this knowledge that he tortured Gwen.

  But gradually the guilt and disgust receded. ‘Further investigations both in Art and Nature,’ he wrote, ‘completing the process of enlightenment thus begun, brought me down from cloud cuckooland to the equally treacherous bed-rock of Mother Earth.’61

  To Augustus, all women were mothers, with himself either as child or God-the-Father. Not long content to figure in the public eye as doubtful or baffled, he presented himself as robustly pagan with a creed that personified Nature as a mother. She was an object of desire, but also a goddess of fertility, a symbolic yet physical being capable of answering all needs: a woman to be celebrated and enjoyed. This he was to express most lyrically in the small figure-in-landscape panels – usually not more than twenty inches by fifteen inches – that he painted in the years before the First World War. Here women and children, like trees or hills, appear as an integral part of the Mother Earth – a connection he specifically and sexually makes in some of his letters. ‘This landscape,’ he wrote to Wyndham Lewis (October 1946) from Provence, ‘like some women I have heard of, takes a deal of getting into. I am making the usual awkward approaches – and soon hope to dispense with these manoeuvres and get down to bed-rock, but the preliminaries are tiresome.’

  These preliminaries grew increasingly tiresome after his third year at the Slade. An occasional glass of wine or whisky or, when in France, of absinthe or calvados or even, at the Café Royal, hock-and-seltzer or crème de menthe frappé, helped him to accelerate past this awful shyness. His first serious girlfriend was the bird-like Ursula Tyrwhitt who, responding to his letters of entreaty, allowed him to walk her home after school. When they were together they drew and painted each other’s portraits; and wrote love-letters to each other when they were apart. ‘How is it pray, that your letters have the scent of violets? Violets that make my heart beat,’ Augustus asked her. ‘…Write again sans blague Ursula Ursula Ursula.’ She was six years older than he was and she dazzled him. He wrote praising her ‘glorious roseate luminescence’. But their affair ended when, in panic, her clergyman father sent her off to Paris. In one of his last letters to her, while they were both still students, Augustus enclosed a charming self-portrait, pen and brush in black ink, inscribed ‘Au Revoir, Gus’.

  Before leaving the Slade, Augustus had taken up with another student, Ida Nettleship, one of Ursula’s best friends. Ida, with her ‘beautiful warm face’, was a sexually attractive girl, with slanted eyes, a sensuous mouth, curly hair and a dark complexion. There seemed an incandescent quality about her, yet for the time being the fires flickered dreamily. She was very quiet – ‘tongueless’ she calls herself – and when she did speak it was with a soft, cultured voice. She had been brought up in a Pre-Raphaelite atmosphere and, at the age of four, was snatched from the nursery floor to be kissed by Robert Browning – an experience she was told never to forget. By her mother, who made clothes for ladies connected with the theatre, including Ellen Terry and Oscar Wilde’s wife Constance, Ida was worshipped and perhaps a little spoilt. Her father, Jack Nettleship, once the creator of imaginative Blake-like designs, had by now turned painter of melodramatic zoo-animals, leopards and polar bears, hyenas and stallions, all lavishly reproduced in Boy’s Own Paper. ‘Father is painting a girl and a lion,’ Ida wrote to Gus. He had preferred painting to a career as a writer62 and became one of a group known as ‘the Brotherhood’ which included John Butler Yeats, Edwin Ellis and George Wilson. ‘George Wilson was our born painter,’ Yeats used to say, ‘but Nettleship our genius.’ But as the Pre-Raphaelite spirit ebbed out of British art, Jack Nettleship had lost confidence and painted only what Rossetti called ‘his pot-boilers’.

  He sent Ida to the Slade in 1892; in 1895 she won a three-year scholarship and remained there altogether six years. From most of the students she held aloof, cultivating a small circle of friends – Gwen Salmond, Edna Waugh and the Salaman family. They were known collectively as ‘the nursery’ because they were, or behaved as if they were, younger than the other students. Kipling’s two Jungle Books had come out in the mid-1890s and were immensely popular with these children of the Empire. Ida, having grown up surrounded by her father’s pictures of animals, named each of her special friends after one of Kipling’s jungle creatures, she herself being Mowgli, the man cub. Her early letters seem exaggeratedly fey. She is frequently exchanging with ‘Baloo’ the big brown bear (Dorothy Salaman) tokens of ‘friendship for always’ which take the form of rosaries made from eucalyptus, pin cushions, ivy leaves and lavender and all manner of flowers and plants ‘rich in purple bells, a joy to the eyes’. She ends these letters on a high note of jungle euphoria: ‘Bless you with jungle joy, Your bad little man cub, Mistress Mowgli Nettleship’. When ‘Bagheera’, the pantheress (Bessie Salaman) marries, Ida writes: ‘I think you are a charmer – but oh you are marri
ed – never girl Bessie again. Do you know you are different?… Mowgli will be so lonely in the jungle without the queen panthress. Oh you’re worth a kiss sweet, tho’ you are grown into a wife.’

  Ida herself carefully avoided growing into a wife. All her intimate friends were girls. They lived in a golden world with the timeless prospect of being girls eternal. Their mood was that of Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale:

  We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ the sun,

  And bleat the one at the other: what we chang’d

  Was innocence for innocence; we knew not

  The doctrines of ill-doing, no, nor dream’d

  That any did.

  Men had no place in this sentimental paradise. The only creature to be apportioned some degree of masculinity was Ida herself, the man cub. At the Slade she had many admirers, but she shrugged them all off – all except one. This was Clement Salaman, elder brother of Augustus’s friend Michel Salaman, who had got to know her through his sisters. It was not long before he fell in love and, for a short time, they were rather unrealistically engaged to be married. Ida seems to have consented to this partly for his sister’s sake. Since she was not in love with him, she could not really believe he was in love with her. Naturally she would always want to be his friend, as she was Baloo’s and Bagheera’s friend. But he was not part of her jungle life. She created more trouble by discussing it all with Edna Waugh. This displeased Edna’s fiancé William Clarke Hall, who accused Ida of ‘falseness and fickleness’ and of causing him to lose his faith in women. But Ida believed she must ‘go through life aiming for the highest’. When Clement’s sister Bessie became engaged, Ida had exhorted her not to ‘fall from what is possible for you… don’t slip – strive high for others’. But was Clement the highest? Was she herself not falling from what was possible?

  In February 1897 she formally broke off the engagement, explaining in a letter to the pantheress Bagheera that this was ‘a good and pleasant thing for both’. ‘Don’t you think a great friendship could come out of it?’ she queried. ‘The soft side surely can be conquered – indeed I think he has conquered it. It would be a life joy, a friendship between us. Think how splendid. No thought of marriage or softness to spoil.’

  Shortly before the end of this engagement, Ida’s sister Ethel ‘happened to go into the room where they were spooning and I roared with laughter’, she recalled, ‘and afterwards Ida said to me: “You mustn’t laugh at that, it’s holy.”’63 From both parents she had imbibed religion. Jack Nettleship had once confessed: ‘My mother cannot endure the God of the Old Testament, but likes Jesus Christ; whereas I like the God of the Old Testament, and cannot endure Jesus Christ; and we have got into the way of quarrelling about it at lunch.’64 Ida herself was very High Church when young. In vermilion and black inks she prepared a manual for use at Mass and Benediction, ‘The Little Garden of the Soul’, seventy-five pages long and done with scrupulous care: ‘Ida Nettleship her book’. In everyday matters she was not above sermonizing to her friends. Girls still at school were warned to beware of ‘affections’, advised to walk a lot and play plenty of lawn tennis. She herself had taken to practising the fiddle as a means of avoiding temptation. ‘Keep a brave true heart and be brave and kind to all other people,’ she instructed Bessie Salaman, ‘ – And think of making happiness and not taking it.’

  In March 1897, following the break-up of her engagement, Ida left England for Florence, moving among various pensioni and reassuring her ‘dear sweet mother’ that she must not ‘let the proprieties worry you – I do assure you there’s nothing to fear’. Superficially there did seem cause for anxiety since here, as at the Slade, Ida quickly attracted a swarm of young admirers, poets and Americans, who brought her almond blossom, purple anemones and full-blown roses; and a red-haired student, less romantic and with a funny face, ‘who began talking smart to me – and ended by being melancholy and thirsty’. Most persistent of all was a peevish musician called Knight, ‘very friendly and bothersome’, who, she explained to her sister Ethel, ‘plays the piano, and reads Keats and cribs other people’s ideas on art. He looks desperately miserable… His complaints and sorrows weary my ears so continually – and “oh, he is so constant and so kind”. They all are.’ But her virtue vanquished them all.

  Ida’s letters from Italy65 show that, on the whole, the girls in the pensione took her fancy more than the men – one very beautiful ‘like a Botticelli with great grey eyes’; and a pretty American one, ‘dark eyed and languid in appearance’, who sat next to her at meals and ‘says sharp things in a subdued trickle of a voice’; even ‘the little chambermaid here with little curls hanging about her face and great dark eyes’ who ‘takes a great interest in me’. Almost the only woman she did not find sympathetic was the fidgety little Signorina who gave her lessons in Italian and self-control, and who ‘says eh? in a harsh tone between every sentence – I pinch myself black and blue to keep from dancing round the table in an agony of exasperation’.

  When she was not learning Italian she was drawing and painting – ‘dashing my head against an impenetrable picture I am attempting to reproduce in the Pitti’, as she described it. ‘…I am so bold and unafraid in the way I work that all the keepers and all the visitors and all the copyists come and gape… they think I am either a fool or a genius.’ Every day she worked six or seven hours, copying Old Masters or sketching out of doors. But, she warned her mother, ‘don’t expect great things – it’s fatal… it’s no easier to do in Italy than in England’.

  Yet Italy enchanted her: bells on the mules passing below her window; chatter of carts and of people that carried along the stone streets on the evening air; sight of a dazzling green hill under olive trees; the river careering down by the pensione, swollen and yellow with rain – all these sights and sounds stirred longings in her, she scarcely knew for what. ‘I simply gasp things in now, in my effort to live as much as possible these last weeks,’ she wrote towards the end of her time there. ‘I can’t believe I shall ever be here again in this life – anyway it’s not to be counted on. And it’s like madness to think how soon I shall be away, and it going on just the same… I suppose Italy must have some intoxication for people – some remarkable fascination. She certainly has converted me to be one of her lovers.’

  After her return to England, Ida felt flat. Her drawing and painting left her dissatisfied. ‘We have a model like a glorious southern sleek beauty, so hard it is to do anything but look,’ she wrote to Bessie Salaman. ‘To put her in harsh black and white – ugh, it’s dreadful.’ Tonks had become rather discouraging. She grew uncertain in a way she never had been. ‘Some days I look and wonder and say “Why paint?”’ she admitted to Dorothy Salaman. ‘There are such beautiful things, are they not enough? It seems like fools’ madness to ever desire to put them down.’

  Always before she had been swept upwards by gushes of enthusiasm. Now she felt herself being suffocated by an ‘eternal ennui’ which seemed to come between her and the life her vigorous nature needed. There must be more to living than copying Old Masters and exchanging flowers. Her boredom – ‘a giant who is difficult to cope with’ – overshadowed everything.

  It was about this time that she started to become involved with Augustus. His personality was like a light that flooded into her life, banishing this gloomy giant. He was made for open spaces. He strode capaciously through the streets, taking her arm with a sudden thrust of initiative, as one who might say: ‘Come on now, we’ll show them what we can do!’ Never had she known such an exhilarating companion. He was unlike any of the rather starched and stiff young men who had admired her – and so funny she sometimes cried with laughter. He did not treat her as a child, was never superior, but seemed to have a penetrating need of her to which she could not help opening up. ‘When she is passionate,’ her friend Edna Waugh told the disapproving William Clarke Hall, ‘she is wonderful. She rises like a wild spirit.’ Many people felt overwhelmed by her: but Augustus was not overwhel
med. The stale familiarity of London vanished when they were together and sudden energy flooded through her. He was, she thought, a wonderfully romantic creature with just that trace of feminine delicacy which made him so sympathetic. It was as if they were discovering life together as no one else had done. Without him, existence grew doubly tedious. She was also beginning to recognize certain frontiers that she must cross. ‘There are myriads of things one can give oneself to,’ she told Dorothy Salaman, ‘ – one can make oneself a friend of the universe – but talking is no good. A want is a want – and when one is hungry it’s no good – or not much – to hear someone singing a fine song.’ Only Augustus, it seemed, could assuage her hunger. Once, when she was playing with her sisters the game of ‘What-do-you-like-doing-best-in-the-World’, Ida gave her choice in a low whisper: ‘Going to a picture gallery with Gus John.’

  Augustus was the first and only man Ida loved. They did not become engaged. Their situation was awkward, for the Nettleships would have much preferred their daughter to remain engaged to Clement Salaman who came from a wealthy family and, like William Clarke Hall, had qualified as a barrister. Augustus’s introduction into their Victorian household had been a disaster. It was Ada Nettleship,66 Ida’s mother, who chiefly objected to him; and her objections were not easily to be overcome. Since her husband’s lions and tigers did not sell, she had become the ‘business person’ in the family. Her dressmaking trade took up almost the whole of their house – a barrack-like building at No. 58 Wigmore Street. Her husband and daughters were confined to the fourth floor, ill lit by gas-jets, and her domestic life was likewise thinly sandwiched in between her business pursuits.

  Ada Nettleship was fat and soft and looked older than her age. For many years she had been careful to take no exercise and moved, when obliged to do so, with extreme slowness. She appeared a formidable dumpling of a woman, with short grey hair, a round face, retroussé nose and plump capable hands. She dressed in a uniform of heavy black brocade made in one piece from neck to hem, with a little jabot of lace and a collar of net drawn up and tied under her chin with a narrow black velvet ribbon. Her voice was high-pitched but rather flat; her expression serious; her temper not at all good – except towards her family for whose welfare she was responsible. She worked her staff of skirt-girls, pin-girls and the embroideresses whom she had imported from the Continent very hard and, before their hours were altered by Act of Parliament, very long. But though feared, she was respected by these girls for she was an imaginative dressmaker and competent businesswoman, her one weakness being a liking for society people with titles who often postponed paying their bills.