Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘Dear Rothenstein –

  I want no more of your damned insincere invitations.

  This pretence of friendship has gone on far enough.

  Yours etc Jacob Epstein.

  It is the comic element in your attitude that has prevented me writing the above before this. I did not believe till now you could have gone on with it.’

  Augustus’s reaction was similar to Epstein’s. ‘How I wish someone would record the diverting history of Rothenstein’s career – it would be the most ludicrous, abject and scurrilous psychological document ever penned,’ Augustus assured Ottoline Morrell (23 March 1909). ‘He is I think… Le Sale Juif par excellence de notre siècle. There is I think one man only who could write adequately about him and that’s [Wyndham] Lewis...’

  According to his son, John Rothenstein, ‘no-one among his contemporaries had shown such perceptive generosity towards his brother artists of succeeding generations from Augustus John and Epstein to Henry Moore and Ceri Richards’. This is true, yet in the opinion of Max Beerbohm he had no friends at all.*1 What, then, was the secret of this gift for unpopularity? He was a figure somewhat similar to that, in the literary world, of Hugh Walpole, increasingly the patron rather than the creative artist, fixing his personal ambitions on the performance of his protégés. It was as if he sought to ride to immortality on their backs. Will Rothenstein’s two prize rebellious steeds were Augustus John and Stanley Spencer, whom he entered against the rival stables of Roger Fry. But of all his string, Augustus was the greatest disappointment to him, winning in brilliant fashion so many of the minor races, running under false colours, starting favourite for the classics but seldom running to form.

  During 1905, disillusionment had begun to set in. ‘I am sorry John has no success,’ Will wrote to Alice (19 October 1905). ‘I slid some advice in on the subject before the Puvis [de Chavannes] decoration at the Sorbonne, and I still think he may do great work – at any rate he feels it, and can do it.’

  Will’s advice, like Alice’s, was a formidable commodity. A Max Beerbohm multiple caricature shows him advising poets how to write poetry, playwrights how to stage their plays, painters how to paint, and himself (looking into a mirror) on modesty. Augustus, unfortunately, was not susceptible to advice. He preferred to use Rothenstein for money. ‘I had a letter from John – not one I cared for much, for there was a hint of further pecuniary needs,’ Will complained to his brother Albert (10 September 1908). What Will traded in, what he purchased, was gratitude. But this was not a quality with which Augustus was richly endowed. ‘I have not found him [Augustus] the most grateful of men in the days of his splendour,’ Will sorrowfully confided to the Rani years later (19 August 1933). But then, who was properly grateful? Gwen John, he thought, was the exception. ‘No shadow, I thank Heaven, has ever come between us,’ he wrote to her in 1926. ‘The years have gone by, but our hearts remain the same, and people like you, in whom no mean thought can ever find a resting place, become ever more precious.’5 In fact it was people like the Rothensteins who made Gwen feel happy she had left England. She had ‘a contempt’, she told Augustus, for Will’s brother Albert; and as for Alice Rothenstein, ‘I hope she is not coming over here or if she does, I shall not have to see her.’6

  Rothenstein was always being short-changed because, he felt, he lacked the mysterious spirit of charm. ‘The Gods who made me energetic & gave me a little passion & a little faith did me an ill turn when they made me ugly & charmless,’ he confessed (28 July 1915) to Rabindranath Tagore.7 The gratitude he squeezed out of people was a substitute for the love he felt he could never attract. He had been brought up in the Whistlerian tradition where the slightest whisper of criticism was intolerable. To this sensitivity was added an exceptional sanctimoniousness. He seemed to view everything through a mist of high-mindedness. In the racialist climate of Edwardian England, though he was not a practising Jew, he started off with disadvantages, and built them into a positive handicap.

  For Augustus there was also the embarrassing problem of Rothenstein’s praise. He needed praise. But he was not so susceptible as to think more highly of those who provided it. He imbibed Rothenstein’s praise for a time: then suddenly it sickened him.8

  It was partly because Will had made such an aesthetic investment in Augustus’s future that he welcomed the presence of Dorelia. The inspiration which Augustus originally found in Ida had begun to fail; but, in ‘the matchless Dorelia’, Rothenstein later rhapsodized, ‘in her dazzling beauty, now lyrical, now dramatic, John found constant inspiration. Who, indeed, could approach John in the interpretation of a woman’s sensuous charm? No wonder fair ladies besieged his studio, and his person, too; for John had other magic than that of his brush; no one so irresistible as he, or with such looks, such brains, such romantic and reckless daring and indifference to public opinion.’9

  The Winter Show of the New English Art Club at the end of 1904 included two paintings of Dorelia. ‘This year for the first time Mr John gives promise of becoming a painter,’ Roger Fry wrote in the Athenaeum. ‘…At last he has seen where the logic of his views as a draughtsman should lead him… he has already arrived at a control of his medium which astonishes one by comparison with the work of a year or two back… One must go back to Alfred Stevens or Etty or the youthful Watts to find its like… People will no doubt… complain of his love of low life, just as they complain of Rubens’s fat blondes; but in the one case as in the other they will have to bow to the mastery of power… In modern life a thousand accidents may intervene to defraud an artist’s talents of fruition, but if only fate and his temperament are not adverse, we hardly dare confess how high are the hopes of Mr John’s future which his paintings this year have led us to form...’10

  With supporters like Fry and Sickert, ‘an amusing and curious character’,11 who came down to Matching Green to look at his drawings; with his small additional income from the Chelsea Art School and from exhibitions at the Carfax Gallery, he could surely afford to dispense with Rothenstein’s favours. He had further strengthened his position when, late in 1904, he was elected as one of the original members of the Society of Twelve, a group of British draughtsmen, etchers, wood-engravers and lithographers. The secretary of this group was Muirhead Bone, who organized its exhibitions at Obachs in New Bond Street. For Augustus this was another valuable outlet for his work; for Rothenstein, who was also an original member, it was a new arena in which to display, like an inverted Iago, his apparently motiveless generosity. His methods of alienating everyone were particularly adroit. To the Society of Twelve he proposed electing a thirteenth member, Lucien Pissarro, who, not being British, was ineligible for membership. It was a master-stroke. Inevitably, when Pissarro failed to gain the necessary vote, Will resigned. Augustus, who hated being dragged into these affairs, was persuaded to use his influence to bring him back, and this, somewhat improbably, he achieved. But no sooner was Will re-elected than he was at it again, returning undaunted and unavailing for three years in succession to the same charge, resigning again, and throwing the whole group into confusion. ‘I was tenacious,’ he later owned, ‘and many letters passed between Bone and myself, until Pissarro was admitted.’ By which time the society was so shaken with squabbles it did not long survive Will’s quixotic triumph.

  Five years after Rothenstein died, Augustus wrote an appreciation of him in the Catalogue to the Tate Gallery Memorial Exhibition.12 In this he paid tribute to him as a man ‘always intransigent and sometimes truculent’, subject to a rare disease, ‘madness of self-sacrifice’, and bound therefore to make enemies. He also described him as ‘a generous, candid and perspicacious soul’. While walking round the exhibition the day before it opened, his eyes filled with tears and he admitted that he had sometimes been unjust to his old friend. Yet if Will had come tripping through the door just then, Augustus would soon have struggled out, infuriated by his admirer. For one of the persistent features of Augustus’s character, arising from his difficulties with Edwin Jo
hn, was a dislike of anyone who assumed the role of father-figure. Rothenstein, who came from an authoritarian family, was enraptured with the father-figure, feeling a need both to promote others in that part, and to assume it himself. Augustus would neither play the parent, nor swallow the well-meaning reprimands. They were incompatible; and yet each felt he needed the other.

  A new strain had been placed on Augustus’s financial resources by the birth of Robin that autumn. By the New Year, despite his success in the galleries, he was even more dependent on Rothenstein for help. For Dorelia was now pregnant.

  2

  AT THE CROSSROADS

  ‘It is more difficult at first to be wise, but it is infinitely harder afterwards not to be.’

  Ida John to Margaret Sampson (May 1905)

  The baby must have been conceived in early August 1904, when Dorelia and Gus left Bruges – and for almost five months Dorelia seems to have kept her pregnancy a secret. ‘I did not know you are making un petit, how could I?’ Gwen wrote to her early in 1905. ‘Are you glad?… When we continue our walk to Rome we will carry it by turns on our backs in a shawl… ’13

  Though she may have been glad for herself, Dorelia was apprehensive over the complications it might stir up, and the effect it could have on Ida. Already, by the end of 1904, violent scenes had broken out between them. Shortly after Robin’s birth, Ida had made one of her ‘little journeys’ up to London for a few days, avoiding her friends, feeling strangely hysterical. ‘I simply drifted – from one omnibus to another – without aim or intention,’ she admitted to Alice (December 1904). Yet the sudden flow of freedom, the release from duty, appeared to have ‘done me worlds of good’. She returned to Matching Green shortly before Christmas, to find that a double portrait Augustus was painting of her and Dorelia had gone wrong. In her absence, Augustus had altered the design and there was no room on the canvas for Ida at all. Instantly, and beyond anything this incident seemed to warrant, she was plunged into misery and anger. She had a demonic temper; she could not contain it and ‘there was a black storm’. After the storm was over and, rather to their surprise, they were still all afloat, Ida felt easier and ‘there was a fair amount of sunlight’. But over the rest of this winter quarrels erupted. One morning Augustus and Ida would take sides against Dorelia, and Augustus would volunteer that she could leave whenever she liked; but the following morning it was Ida who was invited to leave – ‘pack up your luggage and take your brats with you!’ Next day Augustus would suddenly announce that he was leaving for ‘the Blue Danube’; after which it was once more the turn of Ida (who threatened to leave for Amsterdam); then again Dorelia. Finally: ‘We are all thinking of going to the tropics.’

  But no one left. Augustus went roaring from room to room driving the children before him, like cattle. ‘Never had so wretched a time, even over the festive season,’ he notified Sampson, ‘ – now its over & all right again.’14

  But for Ida it was not all right. She was in a dilemma. She had invited Dorelia to Matching Green, because the two of them had a better hold on Augustus than Ida by herself would have had. But then she was consumed by jealousy. For Augustus made no attempt to conceal his infatuation for Dorelia; while to Ida he seemed for long periods blind. ‘Have I lost my beauty altogether?’ she asked Dorelia. Sometimes she appeared ill with depression, going down with a succession of minor ailments that conspired to make her feel more ugly still. ‘I have an eye,’ she wrote to the Rani. ‘Dr says due to general weakness! It has a white sort of spot in it and runs green matter in the evening – which during the night effectually gums down the eyelids so that they have to be melted open! Isn’t it too loathesome?’ The eye was followed by a throat – ‘dear me what next? Varicose veins probably.’

  Jealousy infected everything. Since Dorelia had come Maggie, who had helped with the cooking and children, took herself off, disapproving of their immoral ways. It was natural that, to some extent, Dorelia should take her place. But Ida could not let her do too much in the house, partly, it seems, because Augustus thought she was treating Dorelia like a servant. Nor could she bring herself to speak about Dorelia’s unborn baby; and she began to hate herself for this meanness of spirit. Obscure moods of attraction and revulsion mingled with her envy of Dorelia. Doubt and self-hatred, frustration and exhaustion so assailed her during these dark months that she emerged from the winter a changed person, her love for Augustus impaired, her attitude to herself and to Dorelia transformed.

  It was to the Rani she confessed most. ‘I feel simply desperate,’ one of her letters begins; and another: ‘My depression is so great as to be almost exhilaration.’ As the days went by this depression deepened. ‘I feel utterly – like this □ – square as a box and mad as a lemon squeezer. What is the remedy?’ she asked her friend. ‘…Do you know what it is to sit down and be bounced up again by what you sat on, and for that to happen continuously so that you can’t sit anywhere? Of course you do – I am now taking phenacetin to keep the furniture still.’ Up till then she had used humour to preserve her detachment and energy. But the effect of her phenacetin tablets appears to have reduced this detachment. For the first time she contemplated suicide. The Rani sometimes knew more of what was happening than Augustus and Dorelia, from whom Ida camouflaged her emotions. She did not complain, but told the Rani: ‘I live the life of a lady slavey. But I wouldn’t change – because of Augustus – c’est un homme pour qui mourir – and literally sometimes I am inclined to kill myself – I don’t seem exactly necessary.’ She still admired him – but was no longer so intimate with him. Also he was ‘impossible’, and so life itself had become impossible. ‘I long for an understanding face,’ she wrote to the Rani. ‘I am surrounded by cows and vulgarity here. Isn’t it awful when even the desire to live forsakes one? I cannot just now, see any reason why I should. Yet I feel if I tide over this bad time, I shall be glad later on. What do you think?’

  Believing that Ida must not be left alone, the Rani wired Augustus, who was then in London with Dorelia, to return home at once. She also wrote to Ida urging her to shake off ill thoughts of death. ‘As to suicide,’ Ida replied,

  ‘why not? What a fuss about one life which is really not valuable!… Am I not a fool to make such a fuss about a thing I accepted, nay invited, but I have lost all my sense of reason or right. All that seems far over the sea and I can only hear sounds which don’t seem to matter. It’s so funny not to want to be good. I never remember to have felt it before. It is such a nice free feeling – animals must be like that.’

  Augustus rushed back, the crisis lifted, and Ida confessed to the Rani:

  ‘You know I was very near the laudanum bottle – somehow it seemed the next thing. Like when you’re tired you see an armchair and sit down in it. Now you “know all” I feel a sort of support – it is funny. Others know, but no one has given me support in the right place as you have. One held up an arm, another a leg, one told me I wasn’t tired and there was nothing the matter… With you I have something to sit on!’

  Dorelia too was not happy. She felt responsible for the bickering, the guilt, the dissatisfaction that pervaded the house. There were times, she knew, when Ida must have wished her at the bottom of the sea. She began to think it had been a mistake leaving Bruges, coming to Matching Green. Then, early in 1905, while Gus was painting her portrait, she told him categorically that once this picture was finished she must leave. There was nothing to stop her; she had no wish to stay.

  Augustus could hardly believe it. Their life together, of which he had had such splendid dreams, was failing. It should have been so natural. He felt wretched.

  Shortly before Dorelia’s baby was due, Ida went to stay with the Salamans at Oxford. But her imagination still stalked the rooms of Elm House, remembering so many sights and sounds she had never wanted to witness, imprisoning the details in her mind. No matter what her intelligence told her, she seemed affected biologically. In a remarkable letter she now sent privately to Dorelia, very long, but writ
ten hurriedly in pencil, she set down her conclusions.

  ‘…I tried not to be horrid – I know I am – I never hardly feel generous now like I did at first – I suppose you feel this through everything – I tried to be jolly – it is easy to be superficially jolly – I hate to think I made you miserable but I know I have – Gus blames me entirely for everything now – I daresay he’s right – but when I think of some things I feel I suffered too much – it was like physical suffering it was so intense – like being burnt or something – I can’t feel I am entirely responsible for this horrid ending – it was nature that was the enemy to our scheme. I have often wondered you have not gone away before – it has always been open to you to go, and if you have been as unhappy as Gus says you should have told me. I do not think it likely Gus and I can live together after this – I want to separate – I feel sick at heart. At present I hate you generally but I don’t know if I really do. It is all impossible now and we are simply living in a convention you know – a way of talking to each other which has no depth or heart. I should like to know if it gives you a feeling of relief and flying away to freedom to think of going… I don’t care what Gus thinks of me now, of course he’d be wild at this letter. He seems centuries away. He puts himself away. I think he’s a mean and childish creature besides being the fine old chap he is.

  I came here in order to have the rest cure, and I am, but it makes things seem worse than if one is occupied – but of course it will all come all right in the end. I know you and Gus think I ought to think of you as the sufferer, but I can’t. You are free – the man you love at present, loves you – you don’t care for convention or what people think – of course your future is perilous, but you love it. You are a wanderer – you would hate safety and cages – why are you to be pitied? It is only the ones who are bound who are to be pitied – the slaves. It seems to me utterly misjudging the case to pity you. You are living your life – you chose it – you did it because you wanted to – didn’t you? Do you regret it? I thought you were a wild free bird who loved life in its glorious hardships. If I am to think of you as a sad female who needs protection I must indeed change my ideas… It was for your freedom and all you represented I envied you so. Because you meant to Gus all that lay outside the dull home, the unspeakable fireside, the gruesome dinner table – that I became so hopeless – I was the chain – you were the key to unlock it. This is what I have been made to feel ever since you came. Gus will deny it but he denies many facts which are daily occurrences – apparently denies them because they are true and he wants to pretend they aren’t. One feels what is, doesn’t one? Nothing can change this fact – that you are the one outside who calls a man to apparent freedom and wild rocks and wind and air – and I am the one inside who says come to dinner, and who to live with is apparent slavery. Neither Gus nor I are strong enough to find freedom in domesticity – though I know it is there.