Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Ottoline provided just such a potent theatrical influence. Sitting next to each other at dinner in Lowndes Square they talked of troubadours and Romanies, of Balzac and Dostoevsky, French Primitive painters and Russian anarchists; and then, abruptly, Augustus demanded: ‘Will you sit to me? Come and see me tomorrow in my studio.’ This signalled the beginning of a friendship, important to each of them, that was to last until Ottoline’s death in 1937. The very next morning she went round to Fitzroy Street chaperoned by the Member of Parliament for South Oxfordshire, her husband Philip Morrell. ‘We knock, and John himself appeared – in his usual clothes; a greyish suit, the coat long and full in the skirts, and with a bright green velvet collar, a large silk handkerchief round his neck. He waved us in.’40 After inspecting his pictures and making arrangements for sittings, they were introduced to Clive and Vanessa Bell. ‘Vanessa had the beauty of an early Watts portrait,’ Ottoline recorded, ‘melancholy and dreamy. They stood in front of the picture of the lake [‘The Childhood of Pyramus’], Clive Bell gesticulating in an excited way, showering speechless admiration, Vanessa, head bent, approving.’41

  Augustus fulfilled Ottoline’s pictorial notion of genius, and she was soon deeply enamoured. The impression she gives of his appearance speaks eloquently of her excitement. ‘His dark auburn hair was long and cut across the front like a fringe, and with a square beard, his curious pale face and sea-anemone eyes, he might have been a Macedonian king or a Renaissance poet. He had a power of drawing out all one’s sympathy.’42

  Over these first months he did many pen-and-wash watercolour drawings of her; and she grew more infatuated by him. She did not really see herself as the sibyl Augustus saw, but his sketches were so ravishing she could not resist them. Nor could she resist going again and again to his studio though, preferring to be either upright or recumbent, she was ‘not much good at sitting’, Augustus noted. Each visit to Fitzroy Street sent her into a turmoil of emotions. With every step along the short walk from Bedford Square what tension there was! Before advancing, she would bombard him with a heavy artillery of gifts – fine editions of Wordsworth and Goethe, Browning and Plato, even Euripides, the works of Synge and eventually of Strachey. Augustus fell back. She was, he told her, ‘the most generous woman in the world’. Perhaps too generous. ‘You keep giving me things,’ he remonstrated (8 June 1908). But she could not stop, and the first trickle of presents became a downpour. There was about their relationship a curious reversal of roles: it is Ottoline who plays the masculine part, bold and despairing, almost aggressive at times. Augustus is shy, rather coyly flattered by all these attentions, sometimes embarrassed, usually cautious. She invites him to concerts of love music, and to tragic melodramas. She sends him a little watch which keeps breaking – a kind of stop-watch; she sends him rings for his fingers and assorted jewellery including a magnificent opal. By every post the presents pour in – lilies (which Romilly ate) for his studio, and lotions for his hair; variously coloured scarves and cloaks for his hypochondria; a green shawl, a rug, and a capacious wool quilt for his bed which, he claims, will keep his whole family warm. If Augustus created the John-girl with her characteristic tight bodice, long-waisted full skirt and broad-brimmed peasant hat, Ottoline must have contributed generously to Augustus’s own appearance. Her most triumphant adornment was a large replica of Thomas Carlyle’s hat which ‘is stupendous’, he proclaimed (24 May 1909). ‘It reduces even the rudest street gamin to speechlessness. But it is not a hat for every day of the week.’

  Nor was their romance an everyday affair. His rapid mobility and hibernating illnesses made him an elusive lover. Yet this elusiveness only scalded her imagination the more. She was haunted by thoughts of him: his poverty, his vagabond freedom, the complex simplicity of his life, the poetry in his paintings; those mesmerizing eyes and long fine sensitive hands; his deep resonant voice echoing in her mind. At parties she would introduce his name into the conversation for the pleasure of hearing people talking about him. But so often what they said distressed her. Most conventional Englishwomen looked on her as affected or even amoral simply for knowing such a raffish creature. Even other artists and writers failed to hit the right note – Henry James, for example, who produced an off-key mot: ‘John paints human beings as if they were animals, and dogs as if they were human beings’; or Lytton Strachey, who likened him to Byron. Ottoline could accept that some people thought Augustus mad – perhaps he was divinely mad. But was he also ‘bad, and dangerous to know’? It was natural that Henry James should think so, for Henry James was already out of date, and Ottoline welcomed the new moral climate. ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’43 Virginia Woolf wrote of this time. But Virginia also thought that ‘the wonderful Ottoline Morrell’, with her open-eyed, open-armed worship of the arts, was ‘very simple and innocent’. And so, in his complex and wicked fashion, was Augustus.

  Despite her intoxication, there is shrewdness in Ottoline’s observations. Her heart might beat for the legendary Augustus, but her intelligence comprehended the man. ‘Engagements were intolerable to him. When I mixed in an ordinary London life, the figure of this man, so unquestionably remarkable, living a life so completely different from anything I saw around me, haunted and disturbed me’.44

  Mysteriousness, which he so highly prized in women, she had discovered in him. It was like a grain of love-powder that itched and irritated, that stimulated and would not leave her in peace. Above all, it was his melancholia that affected her, the silence that alternated with his flashing high spirits, the sudden boldness that interrupted his courtly manner with women.

  Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of their relationship was that they hardly ever quarrelled. His moodiness and her possessiveness seemed made for difficulties, but she could not get past his melancholy and her possessiveness had little to feed on. Often he would call her ‘an angel’ – yet with the knowledge he could not travel with an angel very far. They remained on friendly but still quite formal terms until 30 May 1908. That day Ottoline sailed across to his studio and told him frankly of her love. He was unlike anyone she had met. She felt excited by his ‘direct, ruthless, animal gypsy side, loving primitive men and women, and things ugly and cruel’; and she was even more responsive to his ‘simple nervous sensitive side – the imaginative, idealist poet’. Without knowing it, he had become the most important person in her life. She felt sure she could ‘develop’ him, form a ‘creative flame’ between them, share their ‘experiences of the soul’. She wanted to be his inspiration – and she wanted something else. Talking to him she began to lose the burden of her loneliness. She saw that he was lonely too – otherwise he could not listen to her so sympathetically. She felt she could ease his loneliness. She wanted to be his lover. Later that night, after she had left, Augustus wrote to her:

  ‘When you were in my studio to-day I wished I could cry – I should have felt more intelligent – perhaps – with the delicatest and noblest woman loving me so infinitely beyond my deserts. Do you know what a horror I have of hurting a hair of your head and bringing a shadow into your thoughts… and you are trying to assure me you are just like others are! Is it not something to realise that change and development is possible still – that one is not yet altogether finished and one is still young! still adolescent! still living...’

  Four pages he wrote that night, and he ended with a sentiment that might have drawn a rueful smile from Ida: ‘Since my wife’s death there have been few opportunities of excitement or intoxication that I have let pass...’ Nevertheless, he concludes: ‘We cant go on thus, darling that you are… Good-night, angel.’

  Yet the affair did go on. Like the little watch she gave him, it was always stopping: then starting again. So far as was possible, Augustus acted honourably. He discouraged her quite gently, and from reasonable motives. ‘You must know that I do care for you,’ he told her (17 June 1908), ‘…and how I hate to pain you… but I see the inevitable… Forgive me Ottoline.’ It is possible, of course, that, t
hough she was an eyeful, he was not sexually very attracted to her, but some of his letters suggest an attraction. It is also possible that, seeing her as a patron for his work and as someone who would introduce him to prospective purchasers, he was at pains to avoid a situation that, by promising too much, might alienate her. But again his correspondence does not corroborate this. It is true he did benefit a little through Ottoline’s friendship,45 but those letters in which he writes of pictures invariably petition help for his friends, particularly Epstein and Lamb.46

  For Augustus love affairs were explorations within himself of new possibilities, symbolized by his request to each woman to rechristen him. Ottoline called him Elffin. When he no longer signed himself Elffin, their affair (though not their friendship) was at an end. Each love affair was an opportunity to get away from the dull old stamping grounds and make new discoveries. But when the new continent had been thoroughly explored, the new discoveries mapped and assimilated into the central empire of the self, there was no more renewal: and interest died. Once the passion had gone, the dead-end of a relationship would depress him dreadfully. It is this he sees as the inevitable outcome of his affair with Ottoline – unless, that is, like some of his best pictures, they could end it while it was yet unfinished.

  He warns her clearly that prolonged contact between them can only lead to disenchantment. He needs her – as a model. ‘I am aware of my brutalities – and all my agonies and joys, and will continue as God made me,’ he writes (28 July 1908), ‘…and will do yet the work that no one else can do quand même? He blames his character for their difficulties. ‘I should be called Legion and you know only one or two of me yet.’ Some of these selves were not attractive – and he had no control over their comings and goings. ‘I felt I was fated to cause you in the long run more pain than happiness – and that I could not acquiesce in,’ he writes in another letter (21 December 1908). ‘I dislike sailing under colours none of my hoisting...

  ‘With every wish to be honest I suppose I cannot escape those notorious disabilities which I must share with all true Welshmen...’

  Truth gradually gives way before the romantic assumptions held by each of them on behalf of the other. ‘You are the most generous soul in the world and I the mouldiest,’ he asserts (June 1908). But Ottoline maintains that it is she who is worthless – worthless without him. He is a genius: what do her petty pains and cares matter beside his needs? She will come to him tomorrow. Her letter awaits him when he gets back very late to Fitzroy Street, and at four in the morning (4 June 1908), in some panic, he replies: ‘Ottoline, Don’t come to-morrow. I am not able – yes you are too great for me, vulgarly tragical or unhappy.’ But Ottoline only wants to serve him. She feels humbled before his goodness, his concern and tenderness for her. If only she had more to offer him. The postman hurries back and forth with their bits of paper, delivering questions, answers, counter-questions, often whole conversations on a single day. Even so, in their haste, they cannot always wait for him but must dash out to convey some vital postscript by hand. ‘It is you who crush me with your goodness – no, exalt me!’ Augustus contradicts her (3.45 p.m. 4 June 1908). ‘Never will I cease to love and honour you, dear Ottoline. It is you have genius… Elffin.’

  Truth gives way: but it never disappears beneath the haze of protective romance, for other people are involved. One of these is Ottoline’s husband, Philip Morrell. Augustus’s attitude to him had commenced jocular: ‘Keep Philip happy,’ he counsels her (9 June 1908), ‘and make him blow up the houses of Parliament.’ But Ottoline cannot conceal her feelings and soon the situation grows awkward. ‘I think it is evident that your husband don’t like me,’ Augustus protests (8 January 1909). The possibility of a scandal that, since it involved a Member of Parliament, would hit the headlines alarms him to the point of pomposity. ‘I was not really surprised that Morrell should have been out of humour,’ he informs Ottoline (18 December 1908). ‘I felt I was cutting rather an offensive figure in your house. I should be very sorry to disturb so admirable a personage as your husband. I have nothing but respect for him and would never question his right to object to me...’

  The other person involved was Dorelia, whom Augustus was anxious to avoid offending. Whenever he sees Dorelia, he reassures Ottoline: ‘Do not harbour the thought that I am going to forget you’; or ‘I hope you will never suspect me of indifference’. But there is never any doubt, particularly after her return from Paris to London, that the incorruptible Dorelia comes first – about this he is specific: ‘I love no one living more than Dorelia, and in loving her I am loyal to my wife [Ida] and not else,’ he explains to Ottoline – then adds: ‘You are certainly wonderful – Ottoline… There will always be that infinitely precious cord between us – so fine, so fragile that to strain it would break it… Bless you, Ottoline. Elffin.’

  Although Dorelia was very strict at this time, and very suspicious, there were several reasons why she did not object to Ottoline. Their relationship was partly a business one; and besides, Lady Ottoline Morrell was utterly unlike the barmaids, actresses and models Dorelia had so far come up against. Then, until March 1909, she had not met Ottoline.

  They met for the first time in Augustus’s studio one day while Ottoline was sitting for her portrait. Dorelia seemed to take little notice of Ottoline; but Ottoline studied Dorelia keenly. ‘She had the dignity and repose of a peasant from a foreign land,’ Ottoline noted in her diary, ‘…nonchalance and domination towards the children, a slightly mocking attitude to John, and shyness, méfiance, towards me, which melted by degrees. Between my sittings we sat round the large table for tea, the children eating slices of bread and jam, John looking a magnificent patriarch of a Nomad tribe, watching but talking very little. I saw that in every movement Dorelia made there was such grace and rhythm that she was indeed a stimulating model for any painter.’47

  From this day Ottoline set out to make a friend of Dorelia. It was uphill work. The two women were so different – Ottoline sophisticated and histrionic; Dorelia simple and laconic. To complement Augustus’s Carlyle, Ottoline bought Dorelia a large straw hat. She put it on without a word, but with her special smile, and looked beautiful. Yet despite all Ottoline’s overtures of friendship, Dorelia remained unforthcoming, and when Ottoline invited her with Augustus to a dinner party with the stars of Bloomsbury, Virginia Stephen, Roger Fry, Clive and Vanessa Bell, she received a disconcerting refusal:

  ‘Dear Lady Ottoline. Thank you very much for your invitation but I cannot come as I think it rather ridiculous to be introduced to people as Mrs John. I do not know the Bells.

  John asks me to say that he will be pleased to come. I’m afraid you’ll think I’m rather ungracious.’

  While Dorelia was still in Paris, Augustus and Ottoline had seen each other several times a week. But even then Ottoline had come to realize that ‘what I can give him is not what he wants. He calls for something strong, reckless and rampant, which will carry him off his feet, and he knows too well that it is not mine to give.’48 What he gave her was a tantalizing glimpse of another world. ‘He would appear in my imagination as if he passed through the room, suddenly making the conventional scene appear absurd.’49 He gave her this glimpse, but he did not take her into his unconventional world – or at least not for long. And Ottoline, who seemed ready to risk everything, wanted more.

  According to one of Ottoline’s biographers, Sandra Jobson Darroch, their affair ‘reached its peak around July 1908’;50 according to another, Miranda Seymour, ‘the relationship appears to have reached a climax in December 1908.’51 Both biographers agree that it was on the wane after Dorelia had returned to London and met Ottoline.

  ‘I have always been so excessively anxious to feel myself quite alive that I have plunged with needless precipitation into the most obviously fast flowing channels where there are rocks & bubbles & foam & whirlpools,’ Augustus had written to Ottoline in the summer of 1908; ‘…this plan has saved me from deadly morbidity at any rate if it has
not improved my complexion.’52

  There is no telling where this plan might have led Augustus and Ottoline had not Dorelia brought them to land with what may have been a shrewd stratagem or an instinctive move, merging the troublesome subplots of their lives.

  In September 1909, the two women were shopping in London – Dorelia loved pretty shoes, Ottoline noticed – and stopping their taxi at 8 Fitzroy Street, Dorelia went in for a couple of minutes, leaving Ottoline in the taxi. Ottoline knew the Fitzroy Street studio intimately. It was here that Augustus had begun painting her; here that she had declared her love to him. But Augustus had recently handed over the place to Henry Lamb on his return from Paris, and it was Henry who suddenly appeared at the window of her taxi and invited her in.

  Arrayed in tobacco-coloured frock coat and breeches, Lamb had flowered into an astonishing spectacle since parting from Euphemia. Ottoline could not take her eyes off his slim visionary figure, his almost translucent face and hair like pale flames. She took him and Dorelia and a girl who was in the studio, Lamb’s mistress Helen Maitland, who was a friend of Dorelia’s, back to her home in Bedford Square for tea.

  Soon Ottoline and Henry were in friendly correspondence. Fortunately Henry found it easier to decipher her letters than Augustus had done, and could be more precise in his answers. ‘You say my friends can be yours, if I will,’ he replied to her, ‘yes, but are you ready to make enemies of my enemies?’53 By this time Augustus was becoming one of those enemies as Henry struggled to escape the straitjacket of imitation. ‘John and his set have done much to ruin and deface him and make him disbelieve in good,’54 Ottoline decided. Henry had all Augustus’s moodiness, and she was filled with a similar desire to ‘develop’ him into a happier person. ‘If God will work in me I may be able to help him.’