Early in 1910, Henry was to give up the Fitzroy Street studio. ‘Apparently vagabondage is my destiny,’55 he proclaimed to Ottoline. But his destiny still seemed to lie in Augustus’s footsteps. By the spring he was established among the rich coloured rugs and exotic flowers, the silks and stoves, of a coach house rigged up by Ottoline as a studio next to her country house at Peppard. While Philip Morrell went electioneering, Henry sketched Ottoline naked in the beechwoods, and was enveloped in her erotic maternal embrace. It was the start of a complex love affair full of the rocks and whirlpools Augustus had warned her against. That spring and summer Henry replaced Augustus as the most important person in Ottoline’s emotional life. ‘I burn to embrace you & cover all of your body with mine,’ Henry wrote to her. ‘…I kiss your face & your body all over but your face – where your beautiful spirit is most expressed – I return to & kiss all over again.’56
But even at the height of their passion, Ottoline still knew that ‘all his heart is given to Dorelia’.57
Despite this, and the disappearance of ‘Elffin’ from her life, Ottoline remained a useful friend to Augustus and Dorelia. Not the least of her uses – and the one that first melted Dorelia – was to the children. And with these they needed all the help available.
6
INLAWS AND OUTLAWS
‘Though I admire children, I wouldn’t care to take charge of a nursery.’
Augustus John to John Davenport
Like a pair of skilled jugglers, Augustus and Dorelia had kept revolving in the air every one of the schemes they had introduced into their act at Equihen. To be or not to be married; to live together, or apart, or both – and where or anywhere: the range of alternatives spun before their faces ever more fantastically.
For much of the winter of 1907–8 Dorelia had stayed on in France. There were many matters to occupy her: sorting out ‘clothes, curtains, cushions etc’ from the studios – ‘and then there is the accordion and various musical instruments’, including the gypsy guitar Ida had never really learnt to play. Dorelia gave up her apartment and, with Pyramus and Romilly, moved through a series of hotels. She was seeing a good deal of Lamb and something of Gwen, spending much time ‘making clothes for the kids’ of the most anti-Wigmorian cut. She ordered Augustus to send her supplies of wool, money and tobacco; and she waited.
Augustus had begun to ‘look for a house about London’, he told her. He relied for success on a coincidence between what he happened to find and what his dreams of the perfect life happened to be. While exploring Hampstead Heath he dreamed fervently of Toulouse. Wyndham Lewis was thinking of going there, and anything Lewis could do… But then a brilliant notion seized him. Spain! A young friend, the celebrated practical joker Horace de Vere Cole who, in the guise of the Sultan of Zanzibar, had ceremonially inspected Cambridge, now (with a perfectly straight face) recommended a castle in Spain. ‘I met the Sultan of Zanzibar in Bond Street,’ Augustus reported to Dorelia. ‘He said he was going to Spain with Tyler.’ Royall Tyler,58 he added, was ‘my latest friend’, a Bostonian and a profound student of Spanish matters. ‘He is going to go mad one day,’ Augustus predicted, ‘ – I saw it in his hand and he knows it.’ The more he thought of Spain, the less attractive Hampstead or even Wantage (which he also scrutinized) appeared.
By April 1908 he had set off in pursuit of some Spanish gypsies, picking up Dorelia in Paris on the way. From the Hôtel du Mont Blanc in the boulevard Edgar-Quinet, where Gwen and Dorelia had stayed when they first came to Paris, he wrote to Ottoline (28 April 1908): ‘Spain is cruel – but I have blood-thirsty moments myself… Have you ever found it necessary to strangle anybody – in imagination? There is indescribable satisfaction in it. At other times I feel more like bringing people to life. My Variability is rather disconcerting and hardly makes life easier. I must learn discipline and consistency.’
Spain, which had seemed for a few moments a likely winner among his many schemes, now began to fall back. In fact he got no nearer the Spanish border on this occasion than Paris itself, and it took him almost another fifteen years to complete the journey. His indecision was assisted by Dorelia who was preparing to ‘wander about’ France with a few of the children. ‘It would I think be out of the question to allow her to take Edwin for the reason that her own two boys are quite enough to keep her busy,’ Augustus appealed to Mrs Nettleship, ‘although she could cheerfully take charge of the whole lot… I know no princess with maternal instincts unsatisfied, unfortunately, who would open her gates to my poor boys. Perhaps I may meet one...’
Some final decision was becoming urgent. ‘Travel as we may,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia, ‘we want a pied-à-terre somewhere.’ In the interval there was nothing for him to do but go back to Fitzroy Street. ‘I haven’t taken the house yet – it seems to me sometimes quite unpractical without Ida,’ he wrote to Mrs Nettleship.
So far as the children were concerned, Augustus was considering farms. He bundled them along to stay with various friends, including Michel Salaman, now a country gentleman, and Ottoline at Peppard, Edna Clarke Hall at Upminster and Charles McEvoy,59 who lived ‘in a pigstye’ at Westcot in Berkshire. But he went there mainly for the sake of the ‘grand’ Berkshire backgrounds which lent themselves to ‘noble decoration’, he informed Lamb. ‘It is unfortunate that the peasants have taken to motor caps and bicycle shirts.’ Then, on his way back with the children, he fell in with a man who told ‘me about the country near Naples [where] he used to live’, Augustus wrote to Dorelia. ‘I asked him how much one could live [on] there with a family – he said £250. I have ordered a passport. It will be ready the day after to-morrow...’
An actual decision could only be wrung out of Augustus by some crisis, and it was Dorelia who now presented him with one, as he began to suspect she might never return from her wanderings.
‘I wish you were here – if you want to be absolutely independent I don’t want to be dependent,’ he wrote to her. ‘…Will you come over? or will I come back? Doing nothing is killing me. I wish you would come south with me. I can’t stand the thought of separating – only if you want to I can do nothing.’60
The danger of losing Dorelia, like another death, concentrated Augustus’s mind. ‘C’est bien que toi que je désire – mon ange,’ he declared, ‘ – c’est bien que toi.’ Whenever Augustus was decisive, Dorelia fell in step with him. Between their various schemes it was now a photo finish, which revealed – a dead heat! For they agreed to marry, and yet not to marry; to marry, so far as the Nettleships were concerned, almost at once; but not to translate this policy very urgently into legal fact. Augustus promised ‘to raise the wind’ in Wigmore Street ‘which is quite willing to blow just now’, and added: ‘I’m beginning to feel myself – ten times as efficient as anybody else.’
This policy of ‘marriage’ was to convince the Nettleships that they proposed taking away the children and making a home for them. Believing that her son-in-law’s life was falling apart, Mrs Nettleship had recently swung into the attack, apprising Augustus that ‘a woman who kills an unborn child is not fit to have the care of children.’ In a heated exchange between the two of them Augustus felt able to answer that, in accusing Dorelia of bringing about a miscarriage, she was condemning Ida, ‘who had tried the same thing’. He himself took the other view – that by ‘annihilating a mass of inchoate blubber without identity at the risk of her life to spare me further burdens’, Dorelia had proved ‘her unusual fitness for the bringing up of children’. Was it not Mrs Nettleship herself who had first ‘instructed Ida in the mysteries of child prevention? – mysteries which she was evidently not equal to mastering, thank God!… I would have killed many an unborn child to keep her [Ida] alive – and even have felt myself perfectly fit to take charge of children.’ Both of them having lost their tempers, Augustus notified Mrs Nettleship that he ‘was taking all the children away and was at last happy at the thought of resuming our ménage where it left off – with Ida there in spirit and in the blo
od of her kids.’61
By treating Augustus in the way Uncle Ned had prescribed Mrs Nettleship had committed a bad error of tactics. Realizing this, she then sent him a conciliatory letter in which she allowed that to marry Dorelia was ‘obviously the correct thing to do’. But this irritated Augustus further:
‘It is by no means from a desire to be “correct” that I am going to marry Dorelia. It is precisely because she is the only possible mother to Ida’s children now Ida has gone, since I love her, knowing her to be such. And for no less reason would she consent to marry me, or I her. She is entirely and absolutely unselfish as Ida was and as their life together proved, with such proofs as stagger the intelligence. She is besides the only woman who does not stifle one in domesticity and who is on my own plane of intelligence (or above it) in a word the one woman with whom I can live, work and still be a father to all the children. Without her I would have to say good-bye to the children, for I cannot recognize them or myself in a house and an atmosphere which will ever be strange and antipathetic to me as it was to their mother...
If I were not supremely confident that Dorelia and I are able to bring up the children immeasurably better than you or anybody else, I would not hesitate to leave them where they are. But as I distinctly object to the way they are being brought up with you, as I see quite clearly it is not a good way, nor their mother’s, Dorelia’s or my way, I am going to take them away at once...’
By now events had gained a momentum of their own, pulling in Dorelia, who ‘suddenly turned up here [8 Fitzroy Street] to help with the children’. Together they would roam France with four kids, two of Ida’s and Dorelia’s two, he explained to Ottoline. ‘They are not going to be brought up by Philistines any longer. I tell you I had to fight to come to the point.’
From Mrs Nettleship, however, he received literally more than he bargained for. At the end of June he had written to her outlining his plans: ‘I am off to France in a few days and want to take David and Caspar with me – I would like to take them all of course – but am not quite ready for that. I think we may go to Brittany for the summer… I hate the thought of leaving Robin behind – and Edwin – and Henry!’ Events now followed with what he called ‘admirable briskness’.62 Mrs Nettleship replied that she was holding on to the children, and that if Augustus attempted to abduct them she would have him committed to prison. As for Dorelia, she would prefer to see her dead than in charge of Ida’s sons. To this, Augustus sent back an ultimatum: ‘Take your proceedings at once, but deliver up all my children in your charge by tomorrow morning!’
Next morning no children arrived at his studio, and Augustus marched round to Wigmore Street. He gave a version of what then happened in a letter to Wyndham Lewis (28 June 1908). Mrs Nettleship tried ‘to take refuge in the zoo with my 3 eldest boys and only after a heated chase through the monkey house did I succeed in coming upon the guilty party immediately behind the pelicans’ enclosure. Seizing two children as hostages I bore them off in a cab and left them in a remote village for a few days in charge of an elderly but devoted woman. The coup d’Etat was completely successful of course. Dorelia appears on the scene with almost miraculous promptitude and we take off the bunch of 4 to-morrow morning...’
Ida’s son Henry, who was only fifteen months old, missed this escapade and was exempted from the bargaining. For all of them, the results of that morning’s manoeuvres round the zoo were permanent. Though they visited Wigmore Street in their holidays, Ida’s four eldest boys, David, Caspar, Robin and Edwin, were to be brought up by Augustus and Dorelia, along with her children, Pyramus and Romilly; while Henry, the odd one out, was brought up by the Nettleships. ‘It certainly might have been rather better for all of you boys if Ida could have lived,’ her sister Ethel Nettleship wrote many years later to Caspar. ‘…If only Mother [Mrs Nettleship] had been a wise woman instead of being completely haywire through those 7 years. If Father had been alive too – & lots of other ifs...
‘You know Gus really tried with Mother – I mean he was willing to be helped and a wise woman could have done him no end of good – he was so young & I think he longed for it, but his tremendous vitality and passions used to get the better of him.’63
7
IN THE ROVING LINE
‘I shall always be more or less suspect.’
Augustus John to Dorelia McNeill
‘Paris is amazingly beautiful and brilliant… Was it not mad of me to abduct my children in this way?’ Augustus asked Ottoline (1 July 1908). ‘But I was provoked to the point of action.’
After a week in Paris, Augustus led his troupe off to Rouen, and from there they went by boat to Cherbourg, the appearance of which ‘pleased me well’.64 He had money to last them all three months, and confidence enough to take them anywhere. Leaving Dorelia and the six boys in Cherbourg, he set off on a walking reconnaissance. ‘If my stars prove favourable I shall, I hope, start some beasts and vehicles and what not,’ he explained to Wyndham Lewis.
But his stars glimmered luridly. At Les Pieux he was seized by the police and interrogated on suspicion of loitering with intent, though he had been plainly walking without much intent. Later he was robbed of his money in a restaurant and, without funds, was refused a bed – ‘so I stole into the country by bye-ways and slept under a hedge,’ he told Lamb (July 1908), ‘ – got down to a place called La Royel in the early morning, bathed my poor sore feet and… was refused milk and coffee’. It was not before he reached Flamanville that his luck began to turn. Here he caught up with ‘a modest circus and a number of revellers keeping it up, was recognised by a charming circus man I met at Bayeux 2 years ago… There was also a little Gypsy girl black as night who did the fil de fer. An intoxicated man conducted me down to Dielette where I finished him off with a bottle of wine. In the evening the crazy band drove round in a kind of box emitting gusty strains from various base instruments, the aged philosopher still capering and kissing his hand to the girls – a very wonderful company this – a very wonderful meeting.’
Next day he was again stopped by the police, and it became clear that any crime committed in the neighbourhood would be credited to him. For the rest of his journey he ‘took tortuous ways to avoid the police’, he told Dorelia, sleeping in ditches and fields, under bridges and hedges, often walking through the night. In a revealing letter to Dorelia, written from Diélette (to which, in his efforts to throw off the police, he had secretly doubled back), he confessed:
‘My love of my kind had already vanished and I was becoming a rooted pessimist – as for J. F. Millet, he seemed to me a damned blagueur – a bloody romanticist and liar – as he was in fact. But Dielette renews me – it is astonishing – it is even better than my native town where I ought to have stopped… The place is lovely – so varied – sandy beaches, rocks, harbours and prehistoric landscape behind...
I shall probably be about here all to-morrow, so send me some calculations, I pray you, to guide me a little… You have only to lose your temper to gain everything you want with people.’
To Will Rothenstein he had explained: ‘I don’t want to fix myself long in hired rooms.’ Yet his designs to gather beasts and vehicles together and follow a nomad life through Europe had been hit hard by the police hostility, and he reluctantly decided to assemble Dorelia and the boys in seaside apartments.
They moved into the Maison Delort late that July and stayed there until the end of September. ‘The boys are exceedingly well,’ Augustus reassured Mrs Nettleship, ‘so don’t be anxious.’ They looked, so he boasted to Ottoline (September 1908), ‘like healthy vagabonds’. He himself was anxious about Henry. ‘I trust he is not over-clothed,’ he warned Mrs Nettleship. ‘It is wonderful how children can stand cold if they wear few things.’
The sun shone and he worked hard and happily. ‘I am working up to colour at last,’ he wrote to Ottoline (20 September 1908). ‘Do you know Cézanne’s work? His colours are more powerful than Titian’s and searched for with more intensity.’ His own co
lours he was now restricting to three primary ones represented by ultramarine, crimson lake and cadmium, with green oxide of chromium. It was with these that he painted ‘Girl on the Cliff’, another exploration of the link between landscape and the human figure.
The model for ‘Girl on the Cliff’ was Edna Clarke Hall. Three years earlier, in 1905, with ‘a happiness that is beyond words’, Edna had given birth to a son. But, like Ida, she soon found motherhood a demanding business that left her no time or energy for painting. ‘It’s a dull life I lead now,’ she told one of her sisters. It might have been all right if her husband Willie had loved her. As it was, life ‘goes on OK as long as I keep quiet and live without thinking or worrying or drawing or reading or anything else’.65
Ida’s death had devastated Edna. ‘I loved her more deeply than I realized – I realize it now,’66 she wrote. Ida was the special ‘friend of my youth’ whose death seemed to symbolize the death of Edna’s own youth.
Noticing her sadness, Willie arranged a holiday for them in France that summer of 1908. He had a ‘peculiar gift for finding places no one had heard of, and at the end of a tortuous sixteen-mile cart ride through the night from Cherbourg, he found Diélette. Waking the next morning, Edna was charmed to see ‘wide stretching sands and beautiful sand dunes, lonely and full of sunshine and blue butterflies and streams that are guarded by masses of flowers, purple ones, and flag leaves.’67
She also found that the sands around the sunlit village were teeming with Johns, and suspected that Willie would be angry. But he accepted the facts peacefully enough, and even allowed her to join the reprobates on their bathing and sketching parties.
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