Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘If a wife, she has (that is, her position implies) perfect confidence in her husband and peace of mind – not being concerned about any other woman in relation to her husband. But she has ties and responsibilities and is, more or less, a fixture – and not free. If a mistress she has no right to expect faithfulness, and must allow a man to come and go as he will without question – and must in consequence, if she loves him jealously, suffer doubt and not have peace of mind – but she has her own freedom too. Well here are you and I – we have neither the peace of mind of the wife nor the freedom (at least I haven’t) of the mistress. We have the evils of both states for the one good, which belongs to both – a man’s company. Is it worth it? Isn’t it paying twice over for our boon?

  Our only remedy is to both become mistresses, and so at any rate have the privileges of the mistress.

  Of course I have the children and perhaps, being able to avail myself of the name of wife, I ought to do so, and live with G[us]. But I shall never consider myself as a wife – it is a mockery.’26

  The need to free herself from being Augustus’s wife ran very strong in Ida. She relinquished for a time the name Ida, calling herself Anne (or Ann), the third of her Christian names; and then, to escape further from her past self, signed some letters Susan.27 Her mounting attraction to Dorelia in a curious way drew her closer to Augustus again. Like Gwen (whom she had also wanted to call Anne), she grew fascinated by Dorelia. ‘I know it makes you mad to hear me rave on about her,’ she teased Alice Rothenstein. ‘Dear old darling pure English Alice – I can’t help loving these fantastics however abnormally their bosoms stick out… as Gus says, she has the gift of beauty.’

  Alone with Dorelia, Ida was as happy as she had been for a long time. Envy and jealousy melted into love: she disliked their being apart even for a few days. ‘Darling D,’ she wrote while on a short visit to her mother, ‘Love from Anna to the prettiest little bitch in the world… I was bitter cold last night without your burning hot, not to say scalding, body next me – …Yours jealously enviously and adoringly Ida Margaret Ann JOHN.’

  To establish their new regime Ida now came out with the proposal that she and Dorelia, the two mistresses, should leave England and, with their children, live together in Paris. The lease of Elm House was up that autumn so that in any case they must move from Matching Green. She had loved Paris while living there with the two Gwens, and the Parisian atmosphere, she felt convinced, was capable of sustaining their ménage better than anywhere in England. What a brave new start it would be! They would find an inexpensive studio for Augustus who could make little journeys between London and Paris. They would all continue seeing one another – preferably not too much of one another. Money would certainly be a difficulty, but Ida would practise the severest economies and earn money from modelling again. She was determined to take Dorelia with her and had already written a letter to Gus, telling him she wanted to live apart – not because she didn’t love him but because living together on a day-after-day basis was impossible. And he, still ‘a sweet mild creature’, who would bring her anything she asked for – ‘a dictionary, an atlas and a toothpick’ – had not sought to excuse himself, but blamed his ‘nervous aberrations’ for their troubles. For although he did not say so, he wanted much the same as she did. ‘Dearest of Gs,’ she had replied to him:

  ‘With people one loves one does not suffer from “nervous aberrations”. And peace with Dorelia would never bring stagnation, as you know well. For a time that spiritual fountain, at which I have drunk and which has kept me hopeful and faithful so many years, seems dried up – I think lately I have taxed it. I think it would be a good thing, when it can be arranged, for us all to live quite apart, anyway for a time. You will not mind that – you know we never did intend to live together. I shall have to sit – there’s no other means of making money – mais tout cela s’arrangera.

  Yes, there is in those letters [to Dorelia] something you never did and never will write for me – I think it is because I love you that I see it. And I think if I had known it before I should not have wanted us all to live together. It has been a straining of the materials for you and I ever to live together – it is nature for you and her.

  I am quite sure you will visit me and I will receive you, oh my love… By rights Dorelia is the wife and I the mistress. Is it not so? Arranged thus there would be no distress… Tu me comprends comme toujours parce que tu es bon et doux. Aurevoir – we will see later on what can be arranged –

  Ever yours Sue.’28

  What Ida now arranged was a variation of this ‘two mistresses’ scheme. They would not calculate things precisely, but simply find out how the details best sorted themselves out. ‘Dodo says we can’t trouble about “turns”,’ she told Augustus. Also: ‘you know you will be happy alone.’ The nucleus of this French plan was Ida and Dorelia’s closeness. ‘I do not know rightly whether Ardor [Dorelia] and I love one another,’ Ida explained to Augustus. ‘We seem to be bound together by sterner bonds than those of love. I do not understand our relationship, but I feel it is necessary for us to live [together].’29 Whether or not they loved each other, they both, in their fashion, loved Gus who, at one time or another, sincerely loved one of them or the other. With so much love surging between the three of them surely it must be possible, if only accidentally, to hit upon some way of life that satisfied everyone? ‘We must go,’ Ida announced. And as always her decision, plunging through the ocean of indecision, was conclusive.

  As always, too, they began by trying to make the best of anything new. Dorelia’s silence was enthusiastic; while from the north of England Augustus exuded amiability. Unless some ungovernable mood was on him, he felt nervous of opposing Ida. He had been shocked by her contemplated suicide, and all the more alarmed at having to be told this by the Rani. The news sobered him. ‘My imagination is getting more reasonable and joyous now,’ he wrote, ‘I wish to God it would be one thing or the other and stay! I have longings to sculpt – it’s been coming on for years. Paris!!!… I hope to paint two orange girls if I can get them. Before actual life at any rate moods and vapours vanish. Suppose I came back to the Green soon… I look to you, Ardor, to restrain Ann’s economical fury.’

  But Ida would not allow him back just then. His moods were so strong, so unintentionally destructive, so – as he admitted – unreasonable that the best-laid schemes might be finished off by them. She wanted to fix everything unalterably before accepting such risks. She wrote off to hostels, made travel arrangements, gave the servants notice, contracted to sell all the furniture they could not take with them, and booked two taxis. She also told the Rothensteins. ‘I expect you’ll think we’re mad,’ she invited Alice (July 1905).

  ‘We are going to live all together for a time again – it is pleasanter really and much more economical. We shall only need one servant. We shall do the kids ourselves – meaning Dorelia and me. Her baby is weakly, but a dear little thing – not much trouble. Gus of course will live mostly in London… I feel this living [in] Paris is inevitable, and though there are 10000 reasons in its favour I will not trouble you with them. The reason really is that we’re going.’

  Alice’s reaction, predictably, was one of extreme horror. She wondered whether Ida had taken leave of her senses. Paris! So it had come to that. She knew what Ida should do. Her duty was to return at once to London and take a ‘cheap flat’ there. Anything else would be unfair to Augustus. ‘Alice Rothenstein is simply indescribable,’ Ida wrote to the Rani. ‘…She and I always feel quite opposite things. Lord!… I can’t think of the tight, smiling life which London means to me now. Were I alone it would be different.’

  Will appears to have agreed with Alice. Indeed it may have been his opposition to the Paris scheme that helped to reconcile Augustus to it. ‘It is mostly on your account that they [Will and Alice] are so against Paris,’ Ida told Augustus. ‘Alice says “you do not quite realise what it means to a man!” Does she mean in the nights? Anyway I cannot, dare not, al
low her ideas of comfort etc to influence me at all… if anything would keep me it would be Mother.’

  She was still encumbered by her family. ‘It is selfish,’ she admitted to the Rani, ‘because of my Mother – but I can’t help it.’ Mrs Nettleship’s strong sensible middle-class standards were like chains upon Ida’s freedom, and she had resolved to cut them. For, since they had settled to ‘keep up the game’, nothing could be concealed from Mrs Nettleship any longer – even that Dorelia had a baby of her own. Their departure called for drastic explanations, and as soon as everything was irreversibly arranged Ida broke the news. ‘I have taken rooms at a little hotel where they make it cheaper as we travel with children,’ she wrote. ‘Aren’t they mad?’30

  The attitudes of Alice Rothenstein and Mrs Nettleship, representing those of society and the family, were very similar. It was Ida, they thought, who was mad. But to all Mrs Nettleship’s objections Ida returned one answer: that it was unreasonable to blame her for not placing her mother’s welfare above that of her husband, or, for that matter, above her own. Since her daughter’s marriage Mrs Nettleship had, despite herself, begun rather to like Augustus. He was not so absolutely awful as she had once feared. He amused her, even charmed her. ‘They get on quite well in a queer way,’ Ida had noted with surprise. ‘…What an instinct many – I suppose most – people have for keeping “on good terms”. It necessitates such careful walking – and fighting would be so much more amusing – or perhaps not.’ Now Ida had a real fight on her hands. Mrs Nettleship blamed Augustus. She had always known what he was like, behind the charm and amusement. But she also blamed Ida for giving into him. Then there was the blameworthy figure of Dorelia. In the end she blamed all of them for exposing this wretched state of affairs to the public gaze. Why couldn’t Dorelia live a little way off, if such things must be? Why make themselves a subject for squalid gossip – had Ida given no thought as to how it would affect her sisters? To which Ida replied that this was one of the reasons they were leaving the country. Exasperated, Mrs Nettleship declared that it was against the law to have two wives, and warned her daughter that she intended to institute legal proceedings. But no one took this seriously, and for Augustus (‘my only husband’ as Ida ironically called him) it completed the romantic comedy.

  The Nettleship campaign continued to the end of the year. Mrs Nettleship called on her other two daughters, Ethel and Ursula, who now joined in with their own appeals to Ida. To them Ida was obliged to justify herself all over again. Her letters, injected with small shots of scepticism, are extraordinary for their forbearance. ‘Dearest angel,’ she wrote to Ursula:

  ‘It is quite unnecessary for you to feel miserable about us unless of course your sense of morality is such that this ménage really shocks you. But as you say you know nothing of actual right and wrong in such a case I suppose you feel bad because you think I am unhappy or that Gus does not love me. I think I’ve got over the jealousy from which I suffered at first, and I now take the situation more as it should be taken… I don’t know how they told you, but I suppose from your letter they made it pretty awful. As a matter of fact it is not awful – simply living a little more genuinely than would otherwise be possible – that is to say accepting and trying to digest a fact instead of hiding it away and always having the horrid consciousness of its being there hidden… I know in the end what we are doing will prove to be the best thing to have done. It is not always wisest to see most. Do you understand. Oh do you understand? I think really if you were left to yourself you would understand better than almost anyone – instinctively. If you were to begin to think of the reasons against our arrangement I should be afraid… It is a beautiful life we live now, and I never have been so happy – but that does not prove it is right. It seems right for us – but is it for the outside world? doesn’t charity begin at home? and at most we only make people uncomfortable… do believe I no longer grudge Gus his love for Dorelia – I never did, but he was so much “in love” that no interested woman could have remained calm beholding them. But now that is over, and though he loves her and always must it is different – and we live in common charity, accepting the facts of the case – and she, mind you, is a very wonderful person – a child of nature – calm and beautiful and patient – no littleness – an animal if you will, but as wholesome as one – a lovely forest animal. It is a queer world.’31

  These patient understanding letters called forth no answering sympathy from her sisters, both of whom were under their mother’s control. If their ménage persisted, Ursula wrote, then she would never be able to see Ida again or give herself in marriage. Ida’s immorality was like a blight, she declared, withering her own chances of fruitfulness – and those of Ethel.

  Ida was stunned by this accusation. She could not believe it, did not know even whether Ursula herself believed it. In the past Dorelia had always left the house when any of Ida’s family came to stay, but if they would not continue to come then Ida would simply have to go and visit them. ‘As you can’t accept her [Dorelia], I suppose it would be better,’ she wrote. ‘It is a queer world… As to your prospects of marriage – that is the one unsurmountable and unmeltable object – till you are both happily married! Do write again after thinking about it a bit – I mean the whole affair.’

  Ursula needed no prompting. She wrote again the same week stating that, since Ida was unrepentant, she, Ursula, renounced marriage and resolved to live a spinster all her life.*4 Ida’s reply, the final letter in this exchange, blended irony with tenderness but contained none of the guilt that the Nettleships had sought to implant within her.

  ‘Darling Urla,

  I was very glad to have your letter – I do think it was a little heroic. You have no business to feel so heroic as to be willing to give up marriage or to say “what would it matter”. Of course it might not matter – but dearest I understand you when you say that – it is like my painting – there are some things that seem so important which really don’t matter in the least. It has cost me much pain to give it up – but it doesn’t matter! It is part of the artist’s life to do away with things that don’t matter but, as you say, it is unlikely you would love a man who couldn’t at any rate be made to bear with our ménage. He needn’t know us. You do astonish me with your idea of uncleanliness – I can’t appreciate that – I am differently constructed. It seems to me so natural – and therefore not unclean… To me your thinking it so appears absurd and almost incredible – as if you’ll grow out of it. A bit too “heroic”. As to “doing away with the whole thing” you might as well say you’d like to do away with the sea because of wrecks and drowning.’

  The long struggle seemed almost at an end. But throughout Ida’s difficulties in carrying off Dorelia, persuading Augustus and resisting the Nettleships, there had been one factor which helped to blunt all opposition, and gave impetus to the setting up of a new ménage: she was again pregnant.

  3

  FROM A VIEW TO A BIRTH

  ‘I marshalled my tribe over here [Paris] without mishap beyond a little inconsequent puking in mid-Channel.’

  Augustus John to John Sampson (September 1905)

  ‘Don’t you too sometimes have glimpses so large and beautiful that life becomes immediately a jewel to prize instead of a burden to be borne or got rid of?’ Ida had once asked the Rani. Regularly the darkness was shot through by these lyrical searchlights. Painting had been one source of happiness; marriage, initially, another. ‘What great work is accomplished without a hundred sordid details?’ she asked shortly after David’s birth. ‘To have a large family is now one of my ambitions.’ But by the time Caspar was born, her ambition, still heroically proclaimed, sounded more hesitant. ‘I should say more than I meant if I launched into explanations of why I want a large family,’ she wrote again to the Rani. ‘I know I do, but it may only be because there’s nothing else to do, now that painting is not practicable – and I must create something.’

  Babies, as a substitute for art, had failed even b
efore Robin’s birth. ‘As soon as I am up,’ she wrote to Margaret Sampson, ‘I am going to climb an apple tree – and never have another baby.’ For a time, cooking, gardening, even hens had become surrogates. Yet still the babies kept on coming and her disenchantment deepened: ‘We are all such impostors!’ she exclaimed. Then, in a letter from Paris in April 1906 Ida revealed to the Rani that she had made ‘violent efforts’ to dislodge her fourth child during early pregnancy. Her ambition to have a large family had died and was being replaced by something else.

  They did not have, she and Gus, any skill or habit of contraception. Nor did most people. Almost half a century after his marriage, Augustus was to make a quick sketch of the birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes, whom he portrayed as a beneficent ‘witch’. But before the social revolution in family planning which Marie Stopes began in the 1920s, contraception was not easy for men and almost impossible for women. Neither men nor women were given any sex education and ignorance was equated with innocence. So they relied on the rumours of folklore, odd pieces of sponge and rubber, on periodic infertility and the split-second practice of coitus interruptus. Augustus was no good at this French-farce timing. There was only one time for him: the present. So he was seldom prepared. Condoms were in any case not openly for sale in pharmacies, and for someone prudish over such matters it was devilish awkward ordering these almost unmentionable provisions in a public place. Besides all these difficulties, he and Ida and Dorelia never knew when sexual intercourse would overtake them. They were all young, potent, fertile and, in their inevitable rebellion against the late-nineteenth-century culture of suppression, driven to act spontaneously.