‘What will Mrs Lamb do?’19 Ida had asked before Euphemia arrived in Paris. What she did was to fight with Henry (‘using dinner plates and knives in their battles’), drift uncomfortably apart from Augustus, and fall in to the thankless arms of Duncan Grant. ‘That Lamb family sickens me,’ Grant complained to Lytton Strachey (7 April 1907),
‘and that man John. I’m convinced now he’s a bad lot. His mistress, Dorelia, fell in love with Henry and invited him to copulate and as far as I can make out John encouraged the liaison and arranged or at any rate winked at the arrangements for keeping Nina [Euphemia] out of the way, although Henry didn’t in the least want to have any dealings with Dorelia. However it was apparently all fixed up that they should “go on the roads” together when Nina was (according to her own story) found with a loaded revolver ready to shoot herself (and Henry as far as I could gather). So Henry was left by himself… Dorelia and John seem to be the devils and the others merely absurd...’
This account, which suffers from being overcoloured by Euphemia’s testimony, nevertheless indicated how Augustus remained separated from Fry’s group of Bloomsbury painters. He felt ill-at-ease in their educated presence; and they were disconcerted by his deliberate thoughtlessness and irrationality. There seemed no common ground between his pursuit of ‘meaningless’ beauty, and their imposition of ‘significant form’. To Bloomsbury, Augustus John was a meteor, dazzling and self-destructive, a brilliant phenomenon that was burning itself out. ‘Oh John! Oh… what a “warning”! as the Clergy say,’ Lytton Strachey exclaimed in reply to Duncan Grant (12 April 1907). ‘When I think of him, I often feel that the only thing to do is to chuck up everything and make a dash for some such safe secluded office-stool [the Treasury] as is pressed by dear Maynard’s [Keynes’s] happy bottom. The dangers of freedom are appalling! In the meantime it seems to me that one had better immediately buy up every drawing by him that’s on the market. For surely he’s bound to fizzle out; and then the prices!’
To Bloomsbury eyes, Augustus appeared to live a life based upon the casual whim. They could not know the annihilating force of his solitude, or sense the panic. He seldom defended or explained his way of life. It was based upon a natural law of self-interest. If some desire swept through you, then you gave expression to it with all your being – physically, vocally, at once and until it was exhausted and you were left empty or filled by another desire. Lock antlers, copulate and procreate; work, accept risks and avoid deceits. Those who acted upon their emotions lived longer because they lived by a deeper biological reality than social convention. However admirable your motives for bottling up feelings might be, the contents of the bottle often turned to poison. There was a danger in modern society of the animal in man being neglected, and human history dwindling into devious tributaries. Such pollution of nature and exploitation of human nature revolted John. He preferred the simple life.
Yet it was surprisingly difficult to achieve the simple life. What could be more simple, for example, than to invite Henry Lamb to Equihen? And what, in the society of Mrs Nettleship, could be more amusing? ‘I hope you will come and bathe here,’ had run his innocent invitation. But instead of Henry, Euphemia arrived, dressed rather improbably as a young man and followed by an enthusiastic, but bankrupt, Swede. Having relieved Augustus of some of his Irish money, the Swede hurried on to Paris, while Euphemia, falling ill with a mysterious disease, was condemned for a week to bed. ‘She makes an irresistible boy,’ Augustus admitted to her husband, ‘ – I feel, myself, better after assisting at her recovery.’
According to Euphemia, she had been given a knife by Madame Maeterlinck with which to kill Dorelia. But while she lay asleep under a van, Augustus had joined her and they had both been arrested as practising homosexuals. In gaol she was obliged to take off her clothes to prove their innocence. But how much could you believe such stories from someone who also claimed to have been responsible for Ida’s death (‘I got a sage femme for her, but she was dirty and infected Ida. Her hair turned quite white in one night and her head shrank...’20)?
Although she was not to allow him a divorce until the late 1920s, Euphemia had already parted from Lamb and was starting out on an exotic career. ‘Henry has left Nina perhaps for ever,’ Duncan Grant wrote to Lytton Strachey, ‘and the white haired whore still goes on eating “crèmes nouveautés”.’ Her adventures were to lead her, in one guise or another, into many memoirs – as ‘Dorothy’, for example, in the Confessions of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666, who wrote that she ‘would have been a grande passion had it not been that my instinct warned me that she was incapable of true love. She was incomparably beautiful… capable of stimulating the greatest extravagancies of passion.’ For Augustus, who gave her the name ‘Lobelia’, these extravagancies were wonderfully comic. ‘She has made the acquaintance of a number of nations,’ he assured Lamb (5 August 1907); and he told Dorelia (April 1908) that ‘Lobelia had 6 men in her room last night, representing the six European powers, and all silent as the grave.’
For Lamb himself, Euphemia remained a unique experience. ‘I always feel grateful for the privilege of having been so closely associated with so much beauty & genius & glorious energy of character,’ he wrote fifty years later. But the great figure of Lamb’s life was to be Dorelia. It was almost inevitable, fulfilling his role as Augustus’s alter ego, that he should fall in love with her. Since he was an artist, this also made destiny-sense to Dorelia. Already they had begun a love affair – the second of Dorelia’s two ‘discreditable episodes’ – that was to continue, with intervals, over twenty years. During those years, Lamb never lost hope that she would free herself from ‘the August clutches’ and come to live with him. ‘There is a fair chance of it all coming off some day,’ he was still writing in the summer of 1926.
For the time being their involvement remained part of the entente cordiale, an agreeable échange that had no unpleasant repercussions: except with Mrs Nettleship. Ada Nettleship had never liked Dorelia, and everything she learnt this summer confirmed her in this dislike. Obviously Dorelia was quite the wrong person with whom to entrust Ida’s boys. It was not simply a matter of immorality: it was incompetence – an incompetence so superlative it made Mrs Nettleship dizzy. It was out of the question for her grandchildren never to be washed, never brushed or combed, decked out in fanciful rags and left unsuperintended. Their bedrooms were full of unchecked frogs, absurd grasshoppers and other scattered atrocities: it was bedlam. Even Augustus was forced to own that ‘this crêche-like establishment is a little too heroic – in the long run’.21 Within a week of arriving at Equihen, the boys had been drowned en masse – or rather almost drowned, being uniquely rescued by a local fisherman who ‘was getting food for his rabbits on the cliff when he heard their screaming’, Mrs Nettleship explained to her daughter Ursula (19 July 1907). ‘He has never saved anyone before and he hopes to get a medal.’
So different were these goings-on from the calm atmosphere at Wigmore Street, she felt as if she had landed on a distant world where no one knew what was right or wrong, and no normal standards applied. Every day was a carnival, and the amoral beauty of it all drove her frantic. ‘There never seems time for anything here,’ she complained to Ursula, ‘ – the weather is so lovely, we are out all day and in the evening we are too sleepy to do anything. It is almost irritating that this place is so lovely – I hate it all for being so placid and “only man is vile”… Something must come to relieve this tension.’
Something did come and it brought the tension to breaking point. Dorelia had succeeded in not telling anyone that her children this summer were suffering from ophthalmia, a painful eye disease. She had even forgotten it herself and, by arranging for all the children to share a single sponge and towel, had spread the infection to two of Ida’s children, Edwin and Robin. Mrs Nettleship was appalled. Here was actual proof that Dorelia could not be trusted. She dismissed Dorelia’s argument that many of these sicknesses cured themselves, and briskly herding I
da’s untainted sons together she drove them out of the infected area. ‘I should like to bring them back right away,’ she told Ursula in London, ‘but Gus does not think it matters!… He says the village children get over it all right and so will ours!… He is nearly driving me mad… I have never known anyone so impossible to deal with.’ At the same time, fearing to lose the boys altogether, she had to check her temper. Nor could she leave while the ophthalmia persisted, since no one did anything to cure the disease unless she herself insisted on it being done – Dorelia still preferring what she called ‘natural methods’. At first, Mrs Nettleship’s monumental diplomacy seemed to be effective, especially when Augustus, responding to the strain of their holiday, remarked that the two families could never be brought up together. ‘If either of our boys [David or Caspar] get ophthalmia I shall use it as a weapon,’ Mrs Nettleship promised.
Twelve days later, diplomacy had disappeared and ‘it is war to the knife’. Each side had marshalled a team of doctors with strongly opposing advice. ‘Gus is hopeless – just one mass of selfishness – not thinking of anyone, but his own desires – and so surly and cross,’ Mrs Nettleship reported to Ursula. ‘How Ida can have endured it I can’t imagine – he has no heart at all.’
Another twelve days and Mrs Nettleship had returned to Wigmore Street, triumphantly carrying off with her David, Caspar, Robin, and the urn containing Ida’s ashes. ‘We had a healthy respect for Grannie Nettleship,’ Caspar remembered. This tubby woman with grizzled hair and plump face was strict but not ungenerous. The boys were chiefly looked after by Ursula, the elder of their two aunts. ‘We had to wash and scrub thoroughly in preparation for an inspection by Ursula before being accepted as adequately clean,’ Caspar wrote. ‘We wore shoes and socks regularly and had our straggling locks cut short.’22
All this was distressing for Augustus. ‘I am saddened to realise that I have allowed an immoral and bourgeois society of women to capture my 3 eldest boys,’ he admitted to Henry Lamb (17 July 1907). ‘It will be the devil to get them back again but it must be done when opportunity offers. Perhaps I may ask you to assist me one day in recovering them. Can you shoot? I cannot stand finding those chaps in the hands of people among whom I shall always be a stranger, and no longer in the brave and beautiful attire their mother gave them to wear. I cannot leave them with people who although they are Ida’s mother and sisters did not even know her.’
Mrs Nettleship was used to getting her own way and, once back in Wigmore Street, she set about consolidating her advantage. She knew that Augustus did not want to prolong the present arrangement, yet sensed he was somehow in two minds. His uncertainty was catching and she could not make up her own mind as to what her best tactics should be. If she wanted to mollify him she might approach him via her daughter Ursula; if she wanted to frighten him she would appeal to Edward Nettleship – ‘Uncle Ned of Nutcombe Hill’, said to be a dragon of a man. Finally, after canvassing opinion among various aunts and cousins, she did both. Ursula acted at once, writing to assure Augustus that, if the children were left with the Nettleship family, she would see to it that their education was not old-fashioned and would look after them herself. In his reply, Augustus sets down his feelings with unusual explicitness:
‘Be sure that if any consideration could induce me to part with the children it would be the fact that you alone would have them. The immediate future has an unsettled aspect for me. Homeless, penniless and lawless I present a pretty spectacle of a paterfamilias! But thanks to you things begin to look much more tractable.
I want badly to retain the children as Ida’s and mine – to keep them in the atmosphere they were born in – a delightful atmosphere and not at all dreadful you know – and to think of them being educated into ordinary little early Victorian bourgeois prigs is a horrid thought! You have eased me of that apprehension at least… and you would have some of Ida’s sublime gigantic composure in dealing with them – I really was beginning to fear I shouldn’t recognise them in a year or so, or they me. I was preparing myself for the moment when they would approach me and earnestly implore me to get my hair cut!
In addition to these perhaps morbid fancies the spirit of opposition was kindled somewhat on finding my section of the family treated to a kind of super-discreet aloofness – and the three kids in question hardly to be viewed and that only under formidable escort… I must have a try at getting people to know that Dorelia is a Person and a very rare and respectable being, to wit full of sense and sensibility, having no shams in her being, indeed a kind of feminine genius I fancy. I would like to mention that had she been only my “mistress” we would not be together now. Had she not been a worthy soul, do you think I could have stood it so long? I say this as no superior person, believe me – I might say like Hamlet “I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse myself of things it were better my mother had not borne me. I am proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my back than I had thought to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such a fellow as I do, crawling between heaven and earth!”
But Dorelia was loved of Ida and her very good friend in spite of appearances and all great mistakes not withstanding. Barring their mother she had more to do with the children than anyone else; and because Ida happened to die it doesn’t strike me as indispensable to hurry D. out by the back stairs. In a word she has been and so far remains part of my family and I should like her always to continue to give the children the benefit of her honesty and simplicity and affection, and help to dress them bravely too – as she knows how to. For without brave attire I can’t put up with them.
It would be a frightfully difficult thing to take them away from you even now: but I don’t want to. They can always pay you visits… But I suppose it’s not impossible that you may have babies of your own some time and you might think that better than having other people’s babies… since my proposal to reassume the parental responsibilities sooner or later – friendliness and Patience have to become established...’23
While Augustus was writing this letter to Ursula, Uncle Ned was sharpening his pen up at Nutcombe Hill. With long-drawn-out relish he was preparing himself ‘a good slapping letter’ for Augustus. It was congenial labour. He lingered lovingly over the vituperative phrases, savouring them, hardly liking to let them go. He was still remorselessly chewing over all this when he received from Ursula Augustus’s letter and, as he read through it, it occurred to him that his carefully charged time bomb fell ‘rather flat’. It was a sad waste, but at least a little of his invective could be discharged vicariously.
The letter he now (28 September 1907) addressed to Ursula shows between what bewildering changes of background some of Ida’s sons were to pass their formative years. At first, Uncle Ned allowed, he had thought the fellow must have been mad drunk when he wrote, ‘but on re-reading, there is too much essential coherence for that. He [Augustus] whines that he is penniless and homeless and lawless (the last evidently, like the other two, from his misfortune doubtless, not from any preventable fault!). He wants to keep the children for himself and Dorelia, but he wants you with your gigantic composure to carry on their Bohemian Education when in the intervals of their home life they pay you visits in some place where the atmosphere is “anti-Wigmorian”.’ Such a response, Uncle Ned urged, called in question the whole policy of conciliation. Instead, he would like to hear that Augustus was being instructed ‘in quite simple words that it is his business to put his back into his work to maintain his children’; that no Nettleship worth the name would be a party to brave attire – if ‘“brave” means (as I am told it does) squalid or dirty or gutter-snipe attire’; and that to talk of the inhabitants of Wigmore Street as bourgeois prigs was ‘impudent nonsense’ for which an instantaneous apology was required. This, like music, was what Uncle Ned would like to hear – but it would have to come now from Ursula, since she had opened the negotiations. She must change the tune – but he, if called upon, would conduct her
playing. It must, however, be a solo programme – they couldn’t have every aunt and cousin chiming in. Then the dragon roared his last paragraph of flame:
‘I think that subtle, absolutely selfish and introspective as he is, and morose and bad tempered to boot, he is a coward at any rate when dealing with women; and that hard hitting, at any rate now, is at least as likely to succeed with him and Dorelia (who of course is doing her best as wire-puller) as any other plan… Dorelia wants to keep him; she does not really want Ida’s children.’24
Augustus John Page 39
