Early in 1909 Innes had visited Paris with Matthew Smith, but does not seem to have been particularly interested in the French painters who (some of them posthumously) were about to invade England. Once again illness curtailed his visit and he was sent to convalesce at St Ives. But in the spring of 1910 he was back in Paris and it was here, at a café in the boulevard du Montparnasse, that he met and fell in love with Euphemia Lamb. Together they made their way back to Collioure, Euphemia dancing in cafés to help pay their way.
As with so many British artists, this year was crucial for Innes. He had looked for guidance to John Fothergill. But Fothergill himself was in need of guidance. A romantic-looking young man, lithe and elegant ‘like a young fawn’, with almond-shaped eyes and a light curling beard, he had been admired by Oscar Wilde and by the surrealist lesbian painter Romaine Brooks. Caught in the cross-currents of his sexual ambiguities, he then came under the protection of E. P. Warren and his brotherhood of aesthetes. Early in 1910 Fothergill and Innes ended their friendship. It seems that Fothergill’s relationship with Innes was to some degree homosexual. There was a self-destructive aspect to Fothergill – an artist, gallery proprietor and classical archaeologist – who took up innkeeping. Such a masochistic vein Innes, with his violent Swiftian imagery, had been well fitted to exploit.
‘[Derwent] Lees tells me strange things about Innes,’ Fothergill complained to Albert Rutherston, ‘ – in short – [Euphemia] Lamb off – (sounds like 11 o’clock p.m. at a nasty eating house) and also his allowance from mother – gone to Paris, his savings gone also. Knocked a bobby on the head and arrested. He was also wounded in the head in a back street in Chelsea along with John in a fight. What stupidities some people allow themselves to indulge in because they call themselves artists.’
And the company he kept! Drunkards, practical jokers, loose women, known eccentrics. No wonder his mother had cancelled his allowance – Fothergill knew just how she must be feeling. One day when Innes, Horace de Vere Cole and Augustus were in a taxi they ‘bethought themselves of the rite of “blood brotherhood”… Innes drove a knife right through his left hand. One of the others [Augustus] stabbed himself in the leg and was laid up for some time afterwards. Cole made a prudent incision, sufficient to satisfy the needs of the case. The driver was indignant when he saw the state of his cab and its occupants, but the rite had been performed and no lasting damage was done.’61
Both Innes and Augustus, as John Rothenstein observed,62 were obsessed ‘by a highly personal conception of the ideal landscape which also haunted the imaginings of Puvis de Chavannes’; both, in the brilliant Mediterranean light, were working rapidly in high-key colours, and rediscovering what they felt they had first known in their sunlit days as children in Wales. Both were looking for what Augustus, writing about Innes, called ‘the reflection of some miraculous promised land’.63
It was in the autumn of 1910 that Innes and Augustus began seeing a lot of each other. Augustus’s exhibition at the Chenil in December 1910 was followed by a one-man show of Innes’s watercolours, and Augustus immediately wrote to Quinn advising him to buy some of them.
‘He’s a really gifted chap and shows a rare imagination in his landscapes. It is true he has not done much yet, being quite young, but if he can keep it up there can be no doubt about his future. London doesn’t do for him and he’s off to Wales and later to the south.’64
It was a relief to leave London and paint their way over the moorland and mountains from Bala to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where there were no theories of what should be painted or why. Innes visited London for exhibitions and would sometimes stay on, obeying what he called the ‘stern call of dissipation’. These were innocent romps. ‘Innes has just been given the option of 40/- or a month [in jail] for pulling Bells in the King’s Rd,’ Augustus wrote to Sampson after one episode. Innes was by now a bearded figure, still with his wide black Quaker hat, but permanently covered with paint, permanently ill and permanently out of doors, preferring to live rough and sleep under the stars. One night, wandering upon the moors of North Wales, he had come upon the lonely inn of Rhyd-y-fen and been cared for by its landlord, Washington Davies. Waking up next morning Innes had seen the mountain of Arenig against the sky and fallen in love. ‘Mynedd Arenig remained ever his sacred mountain and the slopes of the Migneint his spiritual home.’65 Upon the summit of this mountain, under the cairn, he was to bury a silver casket containing his letters from Euphemia.66 For him she was Arenig. This was the magnetic point to which, like the needle of a compass, he always returned.
Compelled, like a lover, to broadcast his feelings, Innes confided to Augustus about Arenig, and the two of them made a plan to meet at Rhyd-y-fen that March. ‘Our meeting was cordial,’ Augustus remembered, ‘but yet I felt on his part a little reserve, as if he felt the scruples of a lover on introducing a friend to the object of his passion.’67 Behind the inn, to the south, rose the flanks of Arenig Fawr, and beyond the little lake of Tryweryn they could see in the distance the peaks of Moelwyn. ‘This is the most wonderful place I’ve seen,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia (March 1911). ‘…The air is superb and the mountains wonderful… We are now off for a week to see a waterfall that falls 400 feet without a break.’ They decided to look for a cottage and found one some three miles from Rhyd-y-fen on the slopes of the Migneint by a brook called Nant-ddu. They furnished it sparsely and moved in when Augustus returned during May. ‘I think Innes was never happier than when painting in this district,’ Augustus wrote.68
‘But this happiness was not without a morbid side for his passionate devotion to the landscape was also a way of escape from his consciousness of the malady which then was casting its shadow across his days… This it was that hastened his steps across the moor and lent his brush a greater swiftness and decision as he set down in a single sitting view after jewelled view of the delectable mountains he loved before darkness came to hide everything… ’
‘Before working with John,’ wrote the art critic Eric Rowan, ‘Innes had been painting in water-colour… After John’s arrival in North Wales, Innes began to copy his technique of making quick sketches in oil paint on prepared wooden panels.’69 Though rapidly done, these panels had often entailed long expeditions over the moors looking for that moment of illumination which would suddenly burst through the procession of clouds. He worked like a man condemned. The effect of this upon Augustus was extraordinary. Never before had he met someone whose swiftness exceeded his own. What he had once done at the Slade for others, Innes, acting as a pacemaker, could now do for him.
But there was another way in which Innes helped. ‘He was an original, a “naif”,’ Augustus wrote70 – and in a letter to Quinn (15 June 1911) he describes him as an ‘entirely original chap and that’s saying a lot. He is not the sort who learns anything. He will die innocent and a virgin intellectually which I think a very charming and rare thing.’ Augustus did not imitate Innes or seek to learn from him any very painterly secrets. It was Innes’s example that inspired him. He had felt recently that his own innocence, the quality which W. B. Yeats had found so remarkable, was in jeopardy. Innes helped him to repossess it – so much is evident from his letter to Quinn in which, passing from Innes to himself, he adds: ‘I am on my way I think to get back (or forward) to a purely delightful way of decorating which shall in no way compete with the camera or the coal-hole. But one has a lot to unlearn before the instinct or the soul or what you call it can shine out uninstructed.’
It was ironic that their chief disciple should have been a copycat of genius, the Australian painter Derwent Lees. ‘I tire of seeing my own subjects so many times,’ Innes wrote of Lees’s pictures. Besides Inneses, Lees could paint McEvoys and Johns71 fluently. He had come from Melbourne, after a duty stop in Paris, to London, and now taught drawing at the Slade. A fair-complexioned man, rather thin yet somehow giving an impression of plumpness, he was remarkable, in the days when artificial limbs were still unusual, for a fine and exciting false right foot, comple
te with wooden toes in which, amid much giggling, a Slade girl once got her finger caught.
The pictures which these three painted before the war mark a short phase in British art which, though it has been labelled ‘Post-Impressionist’, belongs more properly to the tradition of the symbolist painters.
But the war was to signal the end of their landscape painting.
5
WHAT NEXT?
‘There is no doubt that he pines for comrades & is sick of his chance pub acquaintances… but [I] much doubt whether he has not become inaccessible.’
Henry Lamb
‘It was cruel to leave Provence,’ Augustus had complained to Ottoline on his arrival back in England in September 1910. Only a month before he had started to feel homesick – but for what home? London really suited neither Dorelia, nor himself, nor the children who, especially Ida’s David, fell far too readily under the sway of Mrs Nettleship. ‘Dorelia (my missus) is very keen on a house in the country,’ Augustus reminded Quinn (December 1910), ‘and we shall have to look out for one soon. She tends to get poor in London.’
He had recommenced work on Hugh Lane’s decorations – no longer in Lane’s house but at the Chenil Gallery. ‘I think you will find Chenil’s quite a good place now,’ he reported with some optimism to Will Rothenstein, ‘and Knewstub is improving.’ Determined to get Lane’s pictures done by the spring ‘or perish’, he several times gave up ‘touching a drop of liquor’ and felt ‘exceedingly good’.
Having the Chenil as his office brought some alleviation to their Church Street problems, but it fell far short of solving them. The old difficulties crowded in. ‘Do you want a ring?’ Augustus suddenly invited Dorelia: but answer there came none. He had moved up his squadron of caravans to Battersea ‘so that we may turn into the van any hour’. As soon as spring came they might begin trekking over England: the possibilities were endless.
Some days over these next twelve months, Augustus would leave for the Chenil in the morning – a distance of five hundred yards – and not return that night at all. Next day Dorelia would receive a note from Essex, Berkshire or Brittany: ‘the country is so beautiful – you wouldn’t believe it – I suddenly quitted London.’ In October he went to France; in November he took off to see Eric Gill at Ditchling, discussing there the question of a New Religion and a co-operative scheme for taking a house from which their work could be sold independently of the dealers. In December he hurried back to Charlie McEvoy’s ‘pig-stye’ at Wantage: ‘Mrs McEvoy frequently wishes you were here,’ he wrote to Dorelia – adding hastily: ‘So do I.’
A family Christmas at Church Street being obviously unsupportable, he once more set off for the Chenil and arrived this time in Paris. ‘I have been so embêté lately and have taken refuge in Paris and have neglected all my pleasures,’ he explained to Ottoline (27 December 1910). ‘…I found London quite deadly and think of going south again till England becomes more habitable. I hear Lamb has been doing your portrait72 – le salaud!’ He dined with Royall Tyler off stuffed pigs’ trotters; saw Epstein and Nevinson, and squared up to Boris Anrep;73 searched in vain for Gwen; attempted to teach Euphemia to ride a bicycle; was chased by a Swedish tiger-woman from whom he escaped through a smoke screen of Horace Cole’s practical jokes (including, apparently, a mock operation for appendicitis); and with devastating innocence concluded: ‘Paris is certainly preferable to Chelsea. I think I’d like to live here.’74
For most of this time he stayed at 40 rue Pascal with Fabian de Castro, the Spanish guitarist who, having outwitted his gaolers in Madrid, was now writing his autobiography. ‘He has wandered all over Europe,’ Augustus warned Quinn, ‘and even across the Caucasus on foot and speaking only Spanish – and has done everything except kill a man.’
He was thinking of passing on to Marseilles with a Miss George, possibly Teresa George who had called on him to say that Edwin, his father, was seeking her hand in marriage. ‘He and I had something in common after all, then,’ Augustus concluded. At any rate, he asked in a letter to Dorelia, she ‘might be useful, posing?’ But instead of Marseilles, he arrived in London leading, like small deer behind him, a troupe of his cronies up to the front door of Church Street. What with the cook’s two children to reinforce Augustus’s six, and the intermittent appearances of Helen Maitland and Edie McNeill to reinforce those of Fabian de Castro and Miss George, the place was crowded as for war. One packed night during the first week of January 1911, fire broke out in the house, and Augustus, wakened by screams, ‘leapt out of the room half-crazy and found our servant on top of the stairs burning like a torch. I happened to have been sleeping in a dressing-gown by some happy chance and managed to extinguish the poor girl with this. But it was a terrible moment… fortunately her face, which is a good face, was untouched. She was burnt about the arms, legs and stomach… She had come up the stairs from the dining-room, blazing – the smell nearly made me faint afterwards. It was the hottest embrace I’ve ever had of a woman.’75 They summoned a ‘smart little doctor’ to do the repairs to the girl and to Augustus himself, whose left hand and leg and areas nearby had got toasted without, he was anxious to demonstrate, putting him ‘out of action in the slightest degree’.76 He was, however, ordered to stay in bed. ‘This will mean keeping quiet for a few days,’ he told Quinn (5 January 1911), ‘after which I want to take one of my vans on the road for a week or so and then get back to work with full steam up.’
For Dorelia it was not these conflagrations so much as the convalescences that were arduous; not the explosive rows but the periods of ‘keeping quiet’. She, who could enjoy-and-endure so much of the heroic, found herself strangely vulnerable to the trivial. A small thing it was that finally cracked her: the matter of spitting. Fabian de Castro was a splendid guitarist, but he would spit in the bath, and this infuriated Dorelia. She lay awake thinking about it, and finally she put up a notice: PLEASE DO NOT SPIT IN THE BATHROOM. Then, when he took no notice of it, she left.
She left for Paris, and she left with Henry Lamb. It was a casual business. ‘Dorelia is in Paris for a few days and I in London,’ Augustus remarked in the course of a letter to his old Slade friend Michel Salaman dealing with the more pressing matter of ponies. But it was not casual for Lamb. ‘I stayed more than a week,’ he wrote to Lytton Strachey (1 February 1911): ‘seeing for the first time the city in all its glamour of history, art and romance. But I should explain Dorelia was there and that I came back with her in a motor car belonging to an American millionairess [Mrs Chadbourne]. Now I am completely rejuvenated and working with tenfold industry’ Intermittently Dorelia would have this effect on him, but his love for her in the shadow of Augustus caused him much pain and perhaps accounted for the wounds he inflicted on those, like Lytton Strachey, who fell in love with him. On the evening of their return, after they had parted, Lamb wrote to Ottoline:
‘I arrived about 6 this evening having travelled since very early on Sunday with Dorelia, Pyramus and Mrs Chad, in her motor. The excitements of Paris came in an unusually trebled dose, and the final shaking of the journey have reduced me too low… I have lived too giddily these last days to give them the thought they must have. It is an odd and desolate sensation to spend the evening alone. I must turn into bed immediately in the hope of a braver morning moral.’
By the time Dorelia arrived back in Church Street, ‘full steam’ was up. Augustus and his friends had journeyed into Essex for a gypsy evening during which Euphemia executed a fantastic belly dance, writing her name and address on the shirt fronts of those she favoured as she whirled past them. Then, on their return, Horace Cole charged his motor car into a cartload of miscellaneous people injuring many, one severely. Innes, too, had ‘been doing la Bombe lately by all appearances’, Augustus advised Dorelia; and McEvoy, in her absence, had sprouted ‘a moustache like an old blacking brush’. Now there was the Gauguin Ball in London; and after that Lady Gregory had invited him back to Coole. But first, he decided (10 February 1911), ‘I want to go sout
h again and work in the open.’ This was his way of announcing he was going west to meet Innes. But after returning from some intense days round the lakes and mountains of old Merionethshire, he found Dorelia had gone off with Lamb again. ‘Dorelia did come the last day at Peppard,’ Lamb wrote to Strachey (11 May 1911); ‘we walked through divine woods and lunched in an exquisite pub with the politest of yokels and I… got of course quite drunk. Then I had another evening with her all alone at Bedford Square. It was more than the expected comble [climax].’
Lamb’s original fantasy of ‘a discreet form of colony’ which he had illustrated in his letter to Ottoline with an amoeba-like drawing of Johns, Maitlands, Morrells and himself, was almost being translated into fact. Like a rock-pool by the sea, the colony was sometimes teeming, sometimes vacant. Innes and Euphemia and Epstein (whose ‘weak point’, Augustus disapprovingly noted, was ‘sex’); Alick Schepeler and Wyndham Lewis – all these and countless others would float in and be carried out from time to time, causing a little ripple. But for Lamb there was no one so important as Dorelia. He writes about her in a tone – rueful, tender, oblique – he reserves for no one else. He saw and heard too little of her; but he felt hopelessly in her debt.
Augustus John Page 54
