Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  So with both sides convinced of the other’s immorality as parents, the autumn passed; and, for their winter quarters, they took up entrenched positions in this war to the knife.

  4

  OR SOMETHING

  ‘Do we not rise on stepping stones of our dead selves – or am I wrong?’

  Augustus John to Caspar John

  In one respect at least Uncle Ned had misunderstood the situation. He had attributed calculation to Augustus and Dorelia, and in doing so had stumbled on an untruth that made his generalship of incalculable value to the enemy. ‘Wire-pulling’ or any other species of long-term cunning had no part in Dorelia’s make-up. Her gift was for taking things as they came – and when they didn’t come, but hung around some distance off, she had little talent for advancing on them. The present suspended state of affairs did not bring into play her best qualities. To a degree, her desires were the very opposite of what Uncle Ned had represented: as her affair with Henry Lamb showed, she did not inevitably want to keep Augustus. But she did want one or two of Ida’s children. Her point of view was beyond the comprehension of the Nettleships.

  Over the summer, over the autumn, Dorelia and Augustus had debated the situation as fully as two inarticulate people could. They hit on all manner of schemes for taking care of the future, but without Ida they were strangely undecided and, despite much activity, made little progress. There were two main plans: first that they should continue living together; and secondly that they should not. The first plan came in many forms. One night, for example, Dorelia dreamt of ‘a lovely country… terrific mountains and forests and rivers – the people were Russians but I think it must have been Spain’;25 and next day they were hot for setting off to find this place. Then, their mood changing, they thought of settling for a house in England. ‘We must have an aquarium in the country,’ Dorelia affirmed. ‘We might get one in exchange for a baby or something.’26 It was that continual ‘or something’ that foxed them.

  Dorelia’s difficulty was the adoring Henry Lamb, whose presence acted like that of a magnet upon a compass. She simply did not know what to do. ‘I haven’t the faintest wish to get married,’ she informed Augustus (September 1907). ‘I think it would be best if I went on the road and left you in peace which I should be only too glad to do if you would let me have one of the children – Caspar or Robin – he would be better with me than in that virginal atmosphere [Wigmore Street].’27

  Lamb, who was to walk through Brittany from inn to inn the following summer with Caspar in a sack over his shoulders, had already been sounded out by Augustus in connection with the children. The argument was simple. Since Lamb was apprenticed to Augustus, what could be better than apprenticing one of Augustus’s sons to Lamb? It was a merry scheme. ‘I found Robin overwhelming!’ he recommended. ‘When one sings or even whistles to him, he lies back and closes his eyes luxuriously. It is he who should be your pupil… ’

  During the next three years, the relationship between Augustus and Dorelia was to be more fluid and circumstantial than at any other period. Sometimes they lived on wheels together, sometimes the Channel flowed between them. Sometimes they were close; sometimes they seemed to move apart, carried this way and that by currents they could not control. ‘Don’t worry,’ Dorelia reassured him, ‘as I think either plan extremely desirable.’ There were indeed times when any plan seemed desirable – but still they could not decide. Yet whenever Dorelia drifted too far away, Augustus would suddenly be resolute: ‘Beloved, of course it’s you I want.’28

  *

  One thing at least had been agreed: they could no longer afford, scattered through two countries, quite such a multitude of unsuitable flats and studios. On returning to London, Augustus wrote to Lamb (‘mon cher Agneau’) asking him to sell the lease of his studio in the cour de Rohan. Though he would make other parts of France his second home in the future, he was never again to live in Paris. Ironically, perhaps, this parting was to coincide with his meeting with Picasso. ‘I saw a young artist called Picasso whose work is wonderful in Paris,’ he had written that summer (5 August 1907) to Lamb. And two months later, once his studio was let and all connections with Paris severed (4 November 1907), he had become convinced that ‘Picasso is a wonder’. The two painters, fellow-sympathizers with society’s outcasts, had visited each other at their studios, and Augustus who saw ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, was greatly impressed by Picasso’s work, chiefly because, like his own, it was steeped in the past, drew part of its inspiration from Puvis de Chavannes, and revealed ‘elements derived from remote antiquity or the art forms of primitive peoples’.29 Some of Augustus’s paintings done at this time, such as the ‘French Fisher-boy’30 and ‘Peasant Woman with Baby and Small Boy’,31 show resemblance to Picasso’s Blue Period, and indicate a direction his work might have taken had the circumstances of his life been different.

  But only in London could he sell his work. Lack of money was the Nettleships’ best weapon and he was determined to disarm them. However, for the first few days, having nowhere else to go, he was obliged to put up in, of all places, Wigmore Street. ‘I took a small studio here (28 Wigmore Street) which I now see is quite impossible,’ he informed Lamb (25 September 1907). After a short period of ‘perfect hell’, he stopped off with Ambrose McEvoy’s playwright brother Charles at 132 Cheyne Walk, then landed up at Whistler’s old studio in 8 Fitzroy Street, ‘a fine place’, where he stayed, intermittently, for almost a year. It was his sole foothold in London, from where, at the prompting of his spirit, he liked to wander off to pubs and music halls, to the Café Royal or, in some painted wagon, to remoter spots.

  ‘I am thinking of raising a little money with a preliminary show of drawings alone,’ he notified Lamb on 11 November 1907. The results of this exhibition at the Carfax Gallery that December were encouraging. ‘The show opened most successfully,’ he told Dorelia. ‘I sold about £225 [equivalent to £11,000 in 1996] worth the first morning. ’Twas a scene of great brilliance. Epstein and his wife looked grand.’ After it was over he wrote to Lamb: ‘I hope now to paint pictures for the rest of my life.’ But he had other plans too. ‘I must have a press,’ he told Dorelia. ‘I long to bring out a book of etchings. It might be called “etchings of Innocence” or “Phantasmagoria” or “The Simple Way”...’

  Over the next months there were plenty of opportunities to sell his work: etchings and drawings at the Society of Twelve into which he was planning to elect Lamb; drawings and paintings at the NEAC, which had opened that winter with the ‘paltriest of shows’. He was arranging a one-man summer show at the Chenil Gallery, and hoped to send in something big to the celebrated ‘Exhibition of Fair Women’ to be held by the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and ’Gravers in February and March 1909 at the New Gallery. It was the field work for this last affair that gave him most trouble. He had been presented with a huge canvas by William Nicholson: the problem was how to fill it. ‘I have a scheme for a picture of fair women [the virgins of Damascus suing Tamburlaine for money] in which Lobelia ought to figure,’ he apprised Lamb (24 December 1907). But Lobelia, alias Euphemia, had temporarily vanished and he had to look elsewhere. ‘I just passed Bertha in the street (the girl in black tights),’ he wrote hopefully to Dorelia. But Dorelia, unlike Ida, was determined to be firm with him. ‘That barmaid has disappeared from my ken,’ he reassured her. Next he unearthed ‘La Seraphita’, his still unfinished (as he now thought of it) portrait of Alick Schepeler, named after Balzac’s ambiguous novel. ‘Having changed the background it now looks rather remarkable,’ he wrote to Lamb (10 January 1908), ‘ – her face embodies all that is corrupt, but the thing has a monumental character and the pose is perfect I think.’ The picture showed Alick in a tight black dress, standing on a mountain top with strange ice-floes growing at her feet. It needed only a few more sittings. ‘Seraphita still stands upon her crest and smiles her smile of specious profundity to a nervous and half-credulous world,’ Augustus assured Alick. ‘I hope you w
ill come and see me here… when I will show you some things.’ But again Dorelia, who particularly disliked Alick, put her foot down, and again Augustus yielded: ‘I have written to the Schepeler and said goodbye so now you cheer up and get well, there’s an angel.’ Finally it was a superb picture of Dorelia herself, ‘The Smiling Woman’, which he submitted to the Exhibition of Fair Women.32

  Though he himself was doing good work, the English art world depressed him. Of many fellow artists, with names like Bone and Dodd, he held no high opinion. In his letters over this period he seems to have been most excited by some drawings of Alfred Stevens, and some ‘reproductions of wonderful pictures by Gauguin’. Of his contemporaries, Gwen was still the best. He had persuaded her to exhibit two pictures, both oil on canvas, at the NEAC show in the spring of 1908: her first portrait of Chloë Boughton-Leigh, and ‘La Chambre sur la Cour’ with herself seated, sewing at a window opposite her cat at the rue St-Placide. ‘Gwen’s pictures are simply staggering,’ he told Dorelia. ‘I have put up the prices to £50 [equivalent to £2,400 in 1996]. They will surely sell.’

  As for his own work, ‘I seem to make millions as usual,’ he apologized to Lamb (10 January 1908) to whom, out of the blue, he sent a present of five pounds. But although no one exhibited more than he, no one in certain moods disliked it more. ‘Would that I could leave exhibiting alone for years and years,’ he confided to Lady Ottoline Morrell (20 September 1908). ‘Perhaps some day I may be able to buy back the rubbish I have sold and have a grand auto-da-fé.’

  The English art scene was dim, but there were some bright stars. ‘It is surprising to find men in England apparently alive to the tendency of modern art to symbolism,’ he wrote (17 January 1908) to Lamb, who had recently been telling him about the work of Van Gogh.

  ‘I met [Roger] Fry the other night and he is quite a lively person – on the other hand “Impressionism” is still lectured on as the new gospel by certain persons of importance. I feel utterly incompetent to cope with problems outside art – without my wife, whom I want. Terrible glooms and ennuis visit me in the evenings when I can think of no one I want to see and am yet tormented in solitude. Sometimes I have tried seeing how much I can drink in one night but it’s a dismal experiment. At any rate I have nearly done a large painting which I think is lovely – a nude virgin by a lake. I am thinking of giving up models altogether.’

  He suffered very energetically from the great malaise of the times, Edwardian neurasthenia, treating it with complex diagnoses, simple prescriptions. ‘I am myself a prey to chronic pulmonary bronchial and stomach catarrh but occasional spells of country air keep me going.’ His symptoms were tremendous, and he became the very battleground for contests between his valiant phagocytes and every marauding macrophage. ‘My macrophags are having a fight for it,’ he reported back from the front line of this war. But the real culprit was that malign monster, London. ‘The London people are sickening,’ he informed Ottoline Morrell (20 September 1908). He had taken up riding, and this stirred his blood about a bit. ‘You must come and ride over the downs with me,’ he invited Lamb (14 December 1907). But Lamb always fell off his horse and Augustus got so hot riding, and afterwards so cold – it could not be good for his ‘corpuscles’.

  After the banishment of Alick Schepeler he felt more hemmed in than ever. He could not help thinking of the clairvoyant Ida sometimes. ‘It is terrible,’ he told Michel Salaman. ‘I can’t realise she is gone so very far away.’ The only way to make sense of her death was to paint as she would have wished him to paint. But so much seemed impractical without her. He was seeing Dorelia only intermittently: it was an impossible situation. So he turned to Ida’s Liverpool friend the Rani: ‘La plus chère de toutes les dames!!’ he greeted her in his wildest handwriting. ‘Let me have a word, please – I live here [8 Fitzroy Street] now. They tell me you are coming to London for the Slade dance – if that’s true – mightn’t I see you – yourself. I have heard with incredible joy how much better you are for Canary carryings-on. Let me then assure myself – formally – visually – tangibly of your well-being… After the ball come and rest under my lofty roof – there’s a little angel.’

  Like a Colossus chained, he seemed incapable of independent action except under the impulse of terrific necessities; while by others, for a time, he could be led as simply as a child. Only at present he had no one to lead him, no one opposite whom to play a new Augustus. Self-escape, by one means or another, was essential. ‘For the moment dreadful glooms blot out the glittering vistas of life – even debauch would afford me no illusion,’ he confessed to Lamb (14 December 1907), ‘…nor bring back a sense of triumphant reality. In a word I am in a sorry state. Perhaps the fog will lift before to-morrow...’

  He was about to meet a woman altogether different from any he had known before who, opening up the panoramic comedy of his life to new ironies, would dispel this fog. And for special reasons, Dorelia could not object.

  5

  ETHICS AND RAINBOWS

  ‘You are able to do so much for me in spirit. And I, what can I do for you?’

  Augustus John to Ottoline Morrell

  Lady Ottoline Morrell had already heard about Augustus John before she met him. The artist Jimmy Pryde had described him in his black billycock hat as looking like ‘Christ come to Chicago’, and living a ‘here to-day and gone-to-borrow sort of life’.33 She had seen some of his paintings at Charles Conder’s Chelsea studio in 1906 and been startled by the expanses of bare flesh. But Conder said John was a great artist, a great man, a man who would dare anything. She listened and longed to meet him. For she too dreamed of doing daring acts in some great cause. ‘Conventionality is deadness,’ she counselled herself in her diary. ‘Your life must break bounds set by the world.’34

  She met him not long afterwards with Conder. Tall and intensely silent, he had an air that was somehow méfiant. Gold earrings he wore, and a suspiciously dark sweater. His hair was shaped like that of some figure in a Renaissance picture, and he watched everyone with a curious intentness. It was the eyes that first mesmerized her – his eyes, then his voice, then his hands.

  ‘They were remarkably beautifully-shaped eyes,’ she recalled,

  ‘and were of that mysterious pale grey-green colour, expanding like a sea-anemone, and more liquid, more aesthetically and poetically perceptive, than any of the darker and more definite shades. His voice, when he did speak, was not very unlike Conder’s, only rather deeper and more melodious, but like Conder’s hesitating – and he also had the same trick of pushing his hair back with one of his hands – hands that were more beautiful almost than any man’s hands I have ever seen.’35

  Lady Ottoline was every inch as strange a figure as Augustus. When they met again early in 1908 at a smart dinner party in Lowndes Place, he felt self-conscious in his uncomfortable dinner jacket, shy and rather aggressive, until he caught sight of Ottoline: then he forgot himself. Tall, with deep mahogany red hair, a prognathous jaw, swan’s neck and bold baronial nose, she had the features to command his self-forgetfulness. She was, he later calculated, ‘a yard or two too long’, but he liked people who were ‘over the top’.36 In a high-voltage oil portrait, painted nearly a dozen years later, he depicts her as some splendid galleon in full sail, triumphantly breasting the high seas. Her head, under its flamboyant topsail of a hat, is held at a proud angle and she wears, like rigging, several strings of pearls (painted with the aid of tooth powder) above a bottle-green velvet dress. Her eyes are rolled sideways in their sockets like those of a runaway horse and her mouth bared soundlessly. This portrait, though not unfriendly, produced a furore, and people asked themselves how Lady Ottoline could have allowed the artist to paint such a fantastic likeness of her. ‘I hope it will give you pleasure, that you won’t think it ill-natured as some foolish people did,’ he wrote. Truth had called it ‘witch-like’, Everyman ‘snake-like and snarling’, The Star a ‘grotesque travesty of aristocratic, almost imbecile hauteur’, and the Daily News conc
luded: ‘she is not flattered’.37 Eventually Augustus was to grow rather nervous over her reaction to this press comment. ‘I would like you to have that portrait but I don’t think it’s one you would like to hand down to posterity as a complete representation of you,’ he told her (10 February 1922). He need not have worried.38 She brushed aside the paper storm, went on to buy another portrait and hung it for all to see over the mantelpiece in her drawing-room. ‘Whatever she may have lacked it wasn’t courage,’ Augustus acknowledged in Chiaroscuro; ‘in spite of a dull and conventional upbringing, this fine woman was always prepared to do battle for Culture, Freedom and the People.’

  Lady Ottoline was to stimulate Augustus as she did many novelists and painters: Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence; Simon Bussy and Duncan Grant. To stimulate the imaginations of such men was her talent – almost her genius. She had crossed over from her aristocratic homeland (she was the daughter of a duke) to this country of art and letters, and she offered those artists and authors whom she admired excursions to her native country. ‘We were all swept in to that extraordinary whirlpool where such odd sticks and straws were brought momentarily together,’ wrote Virginia Woolf. ‘There was Augustus John very sinister [?] in a black stock and a velvet coat; Winston Churchill very rubicund all gold lace and medals on his way to Buckingham Palace… There was Lord Henry Bentinck at one end of a sofa & perhaps Nina [Euphemia] Lamb at the other… There was Gilbert Cannan who was said to be in love with Ottoline. There was Bertie Russell, whom she was said to be in love with. Above all there was Ottoline herself.’39

  At her house in Bedford Square – a symphony of pale grey walls and yellow taffeta curtains – Augustus first made contact with the smart world, for which, in years to come, he would develop such an intermittent taste. It was like a rich food that melted in the imagination but, in larger quantities, sickened the stomach. Yet in 1908 this drawing-room world was appealing, offering him an attractive theatre where he could assume a different role. He needed to move from one self to another, to play many parts like a travelling mummer. He also needed to come under the influence of someone he could admire.