She died, without regaining consciousness, at half-past three that afternoon. ‘Ah well, she has gone very far away now, I think,’ Augustus wrote to Margaret Sampson. ‘She has rejoined that spiritual lover who was my most serious rival in the old days. Or perhaps she is having a good rest before resuming her activities.’
*
The relief was extraordinary. As he ran out of the hospital on to the boulevard Arago, Augustus was seized with uncontrollable elation. ‘I could have embraced any passer-by,’ he confessed.84 He had had enough of despair. It was a beautiful spring day, the sun was shining, the Seine looking ‘unbelievable – fantastic – like a Chinese painting’.85 He wanted to strip off the immediate past, wash away the domination of death; he wanted to paint again, but first he wanted to get drunk. ‘Strange after leaving her poor body dead and beaten I had nothing but a kind of bank holiday feeling and had to hold myself in,’ he told the Rani.
Many of his friends were mystified and shocked. ‘John has been drunk for the last three days, so I can’t tell you if he’s glad or sorry,’ Wyndham Lewis reported to his mother. ‘I think he’s sorry, though.’86 Not everyone was so charitable. They blamed Ida’s death on Augustus, hinted at suicide, and attributed his ‘Roman programme’ to justifiable guilt. Guilt there must often be with death – guilt, grief and aggression. Augustus’s drinking was a desperate bid to recover optimism. When his friend, John Fothergill, wrote to express sympathy, adding that one had only to scratch life and underneath there was sorrow, Augustus replied: ‘Just one correction – it is Beauty that is underneath – not misery, which is only circumstantial.’ This he had to believe; it was his lifebelt. What confused him about Ida’s death, adding to his natural grief, was that it had come through childbirth, and that his children had been deprived of a mother as he had been. It seemed, then, that he was no better than his own father. He struggled against the tide of melancholia. But as the days passed he drank more.
Ida was cremated87 on the Saturday following her death, 16 March 1907, at the crematorium of Père Lachaise. Almost no one was there – certainly not Augustus. A number of people had written from England offering to come, but Augustus, who disliked formal exhibitions of sentiment, refused them all. ‘People keep sending me silly sentimental lamentations,’ he complained to the Rani. ‘I really begin to long to outrage everybody.’ The worst offender was poor Will Rothenstein who ‘never forgave’88 himself for not having gone out to Paris, and wrote long ‘Uriah Heep-like’ letters which Augustus found ‘unintelligible’.89
One man defied Augustus’s instructions and arrived in Paris on the morning of the cremation. This was Ambrose McEvoy, who ‘had the delicacy to keep drunk all the time and was perfectly charming’.90 He had come for the day, intending to go back to London the same night, but became incapable of going anywhere for a week. ‘He will lose his return ticket if he doesn’t pull himself up within a day or so,’ Wyndham Lewis predicted.91
Henry Lamb, who had taken Ida to a music hall the night before she entered hospital, did go to the cremation. When the coffin and the body were consumed, and the skeleton drawn out on a slab through the open doors of the furnace, Lamb and McEvoy were still able to recognize the strong bone structure of the girl they had known. An attendant tapped the slab with a crowbar, and the skeleton crumbled into ashes. The ashes were then placed in a box and taken round to Augustus. Later an informal memorial was held in Lamb’s rooms.92
One of the few people who understood Gus’s feelings after Ida’s death was Gwen. Like him, she had no time for the mere politeness of things, and wrote to Rodin telling him not to bother with condolences to her brother but remember to save himself for their next lovemaking. Then she went round to look after Gus for a few days at his new studio in the cour de Rohan. ‘She was one of those who knew Ida,’ Augustus explained to Margaret Sampson; one who knew that ‘Ida was the most utterly truthful soul in the world.’
Gwen also knew that Ida never had serious regrets, even if, as she had once admitted: ‘Our marriage was, on the whole, not a success.’93
*1 One of the guests at a dinner in honour of Will Rothenstein remarked: ‘We ought really to have been at a dinner composed of his enemies.’ To which his companion replied: ‘They’d be precisely the same people.’
*2 Ida crossed out the word ‘your’ and substituted ‘the’.
*3 He moved from No. 4 to No. 9 Garden Studios in Manresa Road, Chelsea, during the spring of 1905.
*4 She did, and so did Ethel.
FIVE
Buffeted by Fate
1
THE BATTLE OF THE BABIES
‘I have worked strenuously when I should have worked calmly – I have fought when I should have lain down – I have relied on my individuality instead of my reason – I have shouted and raged when I should have been listening attentively… Failing to paint beautifully we find something else and insist that it is just as good – and what unhappiness follows that lie!’
Augustus John to William Orpen
Ida was dead: but in many ways her influence lived on. ‘Ida keeps teaching me things,’ Augustus told Alice Rothenstein. It seemed to him that she was teaching him at last who he was, solving the everlasting problem of his identity. ‘I don’t know that I feel really wiser through my sorrows, perhaps, yes: but at any rate I feel more “knowing” – I also feel curiously more myself,’ he wrote to Alick Schepeler. ‘…I also feel still greater admiration for my view of things as an artist… ’
If his artistic aims had not altered, he saw them more clearly and was to pursue them with more determination. ‘I still feel extremely confident that given the right woman in the right corner I shall acquit myself honourably,’ he assured Will Rothenstein. ‘…I went to see Puvis’s drawings in Paris. He seems to be the finest modern – while I admire immensely Rodin’s later drawings – full of Greek lightness. Longings devour me to decorate a vast space with nudes and – and trees and waters. I am getting clearer about colour tho’ still very ignorant, with a little more knowledge I shall at least begin...’
It was as if he could make sense of Ida’s death only in his work. Many of his finest paintings, visionary moments of suspended time, matters of volume and reflected light – the liquidity of light spilling from one surface to another – were done in the following eight years. ‘It is so difficult to realize that Ida has gone so far away,’ he told Mrs Netttleship. ‘…If she could only just come and sit for me sometimes. I’ve never painted her – I thought I had so much time, and began by getting at sidelights of her only, counting on doing the real thing in the end – she was such a big subject.’
It was this sense of time lost that reanimated his need to paint, to seize every opportunity of doing so, to simplify life in order to do so. But with seven children to support, almost as many studios, and perhaps Dorelia (at least while she was still pregnant), how was he to start? His predicament was complicated by a new belief in his children. While Ida was alive, he had tended to look at them as interruptions to his work. But because of what they had lost, and what he had lost too, and the identification he felt for them through loss, he began to see them as the very subject-matter of his work. In order to paint them he must have them around him; but to have them around him he needed money; and to get money he would have to paint some commissioned portraits, which was a very hit-or-miss business. However this conundrum was to be worked out, he recognized the direction his painting must take. ‘I must tell you how happy thoughts fill me just now,’ he confided to Alice Rothenstein. ‘I begin to see how it is all going to come about – all the children and mothers and me. In my former impatience and unwisdom I used to think of them sometimes as accidental or perhaps a little in the way of my art, what a mistake – now it dawns on me they are, must be the real material and soul of it.’
The sort of gossip from which Ida had partly shielded him now began to encircle him. He heard it everywhere – ill-informed, excited, curious, full of half-truths and sentimental plati
tudes.
‘Lady M.F. Prothero to Alice Rothenstein:
I have been so much grieved to hear of Ida John’s death. It sounds terribly sad, – and all those babies left behind! I hear that Mrs Nettleship was with Ida, so I feel she must have had care in her illness. But I wonder if she had been worn out lately in one way or another. The thought of her quite haunts me, – and her heroic conduct all through – I should so much have liked to hear something about her from you, and what is likely to become of those infants. – I suppose John is quite irresponsible and it will fall to Mrs Nettleship to mother them. She, poor soul, has already had a hard struggle, and this responsibility is a heavy one for her to bear...’
It was nevertheless a responsibility Mrs Nettleship resolved to shoulder. The fight between her and Augustus opened up as soon as Ida died. On the following day (15 March 1907) she reported the outcome to her daughter Ursula: ‘Gus is quite willing for me to take them [the children] for the present but we have not made any plans for the future. I think he wants to get away to the country. I want to get a Swiss nurse for the children… They are very pleased to be coming with us.’1
Three days later, having arranged for a notice of Ida’s death to be put in The Times and ordered mourning clothes for the family, she returned to Wigmore Street, carrying off the three eldest children. She was warm with plans for them – what they should precisely wear, what they must eat. The two babies, Edwin and Henry, she left in Paris, on the misunderstanding that they were to be looked after not by Dorelia but Delphine, who ‘is a very good nurse: I don’t mind leaving two babies with her.’
Augustus had not been ‘quite willing’ for his mother-in-law to take the children even on this temporary basis. But he had no alternative. ‘I am nearly bankrupt at the moment,’ he confessed to Will Rothenstein. It was out of the question to saddle Dorelia with more squatters just as her own, Pyramus and Romilly, were ‘beginning to get wise’; and so he grudgingly conceded the first round in this contest. ‘Mrs Nettleship and Ethel N. took David and Caspar and Robin back to London,’ he announced to Margaret Sampson, ‘ – leaving us the incapables.’
He was determined to ‘get them away again’.2 To the Rani he confided: ‘I have tried to make it clear that I shall kidnap them some day.’ His plans were legion. His friends, none of whom lived so bourgeois an existence as his mother-in-law, could each take a child or two and Augustus would then rent a small studio or flat in their houses and travel round the country visiting them. It was not ideal, perhaps; but as a temporary solution it was, he flattered himself, pretty good. ‘It is a pity to scatter them so,’ he agreed with his outraged mother-in-law, ‘ – one will know what to do a little later.’
He could spot one difficulty. ‘Everybody is asking for a baby and really there aren’t enough,’ he regretted, ‘ – but I should like Mrs Chowne to have a little one if I can find one… I wonder if Mrs Chowne can make Allenbury’s and whether she understands the gravity of dill-water.’
The Chownes chiefly recommended themselves as prospective foster parents – probably for Ida’s Henry – because Mrs Chowne was good-looking and her husband, besides being ‘a nice chap’, had ‘painted some charming flower pieces’.3 They had no children, lived in Liverpool where Augustus would enjoy seeing the Dowdalls and Sampsons; and they had known Ida, if only slightly. It was a pilot scheme for the whole exercise of adoption. But it failed, and for the most inconsequential of reasons. Both the Chownes welcomed the idea – but never both at the same time. As an example of diplomacy it was expert. ‘I should hate to disappoint Mrs Chowne,’ Augustus admitted to the Rani, who was acting as a broker in the arrangements. An unending stream of goodwill flowed between them without interruption or consequence, at the end of which there was no more talk of adoption.
The other practical matter that entangled Augustus was the future of the Chelsea Art School. The negotiations had been prolonged and for the most part unintelligible. This had been due to Knewstub’s business methods, which involved muddling the school’s money with that of the Chenil Gallery in such a way that his cheques from both school and gallery were returned to him. ‘It is a great pity that Knewstub is such a tactless idiot,’ Augustus had acknowledged to Trevor Haddon (4 February 1907). The reason why he was ‘nearly bankrupt’ was that Knewstub, who managed the shop at the Chenil Gallery, had lost some hundreds of pounds he had collected from the sale of John’s pictures. ‘I have always been anxious to avoid injuring the business or making things difficult,’ Augustus assured Haddon, who had taken control of the gallery and from whom Augustus agreed to accept repayment at the rate of twenty-five pounds a month (equivalent to £1,215 in 1996). ‘…Believe me I shall not cease to regret the mistakes we made over the school and I wish above all things to avoid causing you embarrassment.’4
It was essential, nevertheless, to end this story of the school happily. He proposed giving it the use, for advertisement purposes, of his name and, if it provided him with a studio, he guaranteed to be on the spot – from time to time. As his understudy, elevated with the name of Principal, he recommended Will Rothenstein. The goodwill of the school had apparently been purchased for two hundred pounds by Mrs Flower, who intended removing it to Hampstead Heath and paying Augustus one guinea for each of his appearances there – provided his understudy turned up when he did not. The trouble was that Will would ask such damned pedagogic questions: What was the exact constitution of the school? Could he have more details of his status there? Was it ‘honourable’, of the first rank, and established on a proper economic footing? Augustus would meet such inquiries at a more personal level: Mrs Flower was ‘a very nice woman – rather remarkable. I think one of those naked souls, full of faith and fortitude’; she therefore merited Will’s collaboration. ‘Knowing her pretty well,’ Augustus added, ‘I have not thought it necessary to treat her too formally – she would be perfectly ready to fall in with any views you or I held… she would give no trouble and understand she takes financial responsibility.’ This responsibility embraced a fine new studio on the Heath ‘she will erect for me, which will be an immense boon’; plus another, in a neighbouring pine grove, where the young pupils could pursue their studies under him. He would invite his friends, Lamb, Epstein, McEvoy, even Lewis, ‘to roost among my trees’. Mrs Flower, he concluded, ‘should consider herself lucky’.
Yet it was not to be. ‘The school we might make of it is too good to let slip too hastily,’ he urged Will Rothenstein (23 July 1907) as their plans for it began to fade. But truthfully he was no longer interested in teaching; only painting.
Without money from this school he had to rely more than ever on ‘the asphyxiating atmosphere of the New English Art Club… Its corrupting amenities – its traitorous esprit de corps – its mediocre excellencies even – !’ he complained. ‘I always want to slough my skin after the biannual celebrations and go into the wilderness to bewail my virginity for another reason than that which prompted Jephthah’s daughter.’
Over the next years there would seldom be a time when his work was not being exhibited in London: at the Carfax and the Chenil, the Goupil and Society of Twelve shows, at groups, academies, clubs. Any new movement or gathering – the Camden Town, the Allied Artists – any mixed show of modern work, automatically invited him, however foreign its aesthetic programme might be. He was untouched by these movements and counter-movements – their interest for him was financial. But he was not hostile to them and they welcomed his co-operation. Fry and Tonks, Will Rothenstein and Frank Rutter – these and other painter-critic-politicians wooed him. He bowed to their solicitations to exhibit, to sit on hanging committees, to become president of societies: but he was above art politics, or at least to one side of them. They were simply a means to an end when other means failed. ‘I am longing to borrow money so as to work till my show5 comes, undisturbed by Clubs and Societies,’ he hinted to Will (22 June 1907). It was the uncertainty of his life that forced him to rely so much on these institutions:
‘Pendulous Fate sounds many a varied note on my poor tympanum – my darkness and lights succeed one another with almost as much regularity as if the sun and the Planetary system controlled them; and the hours of moonless nights are long dismal unhallowed hours. My life is completely unsettled; I mean to say the circumstances of my existence are problematic; but my art, I believe I can say, does not cease to develop… I shall set about a composition soon – with a motive of action in it, controlling all – as in a Greek play.’6
Nothing could have been easier for Augustus, with his dexterity, than to follow with trivial variations the Post-Impressionists in Paris. But he already had enough influences to assimilate, and was not sure how to assimilate more. ‘I want to start something fresh and new,’ he told Will Rothenstein (April 1907). ‘I feel inclined to paint a nude in cadmium and indigo and orange. The “Indépendants” is effroyable – and yet one feels sometimes these chaps have blundered on something alive without being able to master it.’
From the way in which he writes of pictures, Gauguin alone among near-contemporary French painters appears to inspire him.
‘I should like to work for a few years entirely “out of my head”, perhaps for ever. To paint women till their faces become enlarged to an idiotic inanimity – till they stand impassively, unquestionably, terrifyingly fecund – fetiches of brass with Polynesian eyes and dry imperative teeth and fitful craving of bowels that surge and smoke for sacrifice – of flesh and flowers. How delightful that sounds! Can you [Will Rothenstein] imagine the viridian vistas, can you hear the chanting in the flushing palm tree groves and the thumping of the great flat feet of ecstatic multitudes shining with the sacred oil. The “Ah Ah Ah” of the wild infant world?’
Augustus John Page 37
