As a result of their discussion, John made up his mind, whatever happened, to accompany Quinn to France. ‘Would you come over too?’ he asked Dorelia. ‘…We could persuade Quinn to eat in modest restaurants.’ But Dorelia was involved in her vegetable garden and could not join them. Disappointed, John met Quinn at the Café Royal next evening to call the journey off, but changed his mind on hearing reports of Frida Strindberg’s worsening condition. In place of Dorelia, he arranged for the two of them to be accompanied by Euphemia Lamb and another model, Lillian Shelley, ‘a beautiful thing… red lips and hair as black as a Turk’s, stunning figure, great sense of humour’.30 Exhilaration and exhaustion struggled for possession of Quinn. At midnight, he allowed himself to be guided by Lillian and Euphemia to John’s studio. ‘All drunk,’ he rejoiced, ‘and John sang and acted wonderfully. Two divans full – L[illian] the best natured.’ After breakfast Quinn ordered four tickets, and John bought ‘a swell automobile coat & cap’.31
John was looking forward to ‘a few days’ peace’; Quinn, more apprehensively, hoped that ‘the trip will be pleasant’. The two of them arrived punctually at Charing Cross station, but the girls did not. Instead, upon the platform stood Frida Strindberg, her only luggage a revolver. Quinn’s notes at this stage become shaky, though the word ‘carnage’ is deceptively clear. ‘Only by appealing to the guard,’ John wrote, ‘and the use of a little physical force were we able to preserve our privacy’*232 Undeterred she followed them on to the boat at Dover. John locked himself into his cabin, but Quinn, relishing this contact with Bohemian life, bravely offered the huntress a cup of tea. John was appalled when he heard of this errand: ‘She spoke to Quinn on the boat and tried to get him into partnership with her to run me!!’ he protested in a letter to Dorelia. To this purpose she had made an appointment to see Quinn the following day in Paris. But in the interval, Quinn lost his nerve and instead of keeping his appointment he took John to the Hotel Bristol to meet an American copper king, Thomas Fortune Ryan; a tall elderly Southerner who talked wearily in immense sums of money and pessimistically chewed upon an unlit cigar. That evening they went to the Bal Tabarin and were joined by a young Kabyle woman. ‘This dusky girl’s whole person exhaled a delicious odour of musk or sandalwood. A childlike candour illuminated her smouldering eyes.’33 At two o’clock that morning they returned to their hotel: ‘finally to P1. Pantheon,’ Quinn noted wearily, ‘& John went with the girl.’
By now Madame Strindberg had reached their hotel and ‘committed suicide’. There was not a moment to lose. ‘We shall throw her off the scent by means of the car,’ John assured Dorelia.34 Hurriedly borrowing Ryan’s seventy-five-horsepower Mercedes manned by ‘the best chauffeur in Europe’,35 a German, Quinn and John set off and ‘careered over France ruthlessly’.36
The prospect of a week with Quinn in such delightful country depressed John, and he proposed reviving their earlier scheme by fetching over Lillian and Euphemia. Quinn was game, but Dorelia, to whom John suggested this by letter, was not: and the plan was reluctantly abandoned. For much of the time John was sullen and aggressive. ‘O these Americans!!!’ he burst out. ‘I don’t think I can stand that accent much longer… their naivete, their innocence, their banality, their crass stupidity is unimaginable.’37 Yet Quinn stayed doggedly optimistic. ‘John and I had a great time in France,’ he loyally declared.38
What they achieved in this breathless ellipse to and back from the Mediterranean was a forerunner of the modern package tour.39 ‘It was like a nightmare.’ At the start they fuelled themselves with prodigious quantities of champagne. ‘The first day out we started on champagne at lunch,’ Quinn told James G. Huneker (15 November 1911):
‘That night at dinner, feeling sure that I would be knocked out the next day, I might as well go the limit and so we had champagne at dinner. I slept like a top, woke up feeling like a prince, and did a hundred and fifty miles next day, and from then on and every day till we returned to Paris we had two and sometimes three quarts of champagne a day – champagne for lunch, champagne for dinner, liqueurs of all kinds, cassis and marc, vermouth, absinthe and the devil knows what else.’
For John, who had counted on Quinn retiring to bed most days with a hangover, such resilience was disappointing. But there were many hair-raising misadventures to enliven the excursion. Their progress was punctuated by several burst tyres and encounters with chickens and dogs. At one place they knocked down a young boy on a bicycle and themselves leapt wildly down a steep place into a ploughed field. ‘We landed after about three terrific jumps,’ Quinn reported, ‘…just missed bumping into a tree which would have smashed the machine… the kid’s thick skull that got him into trouble saved him when he fell.’40 Having deposited the child with a doctor, they raced on expecting at every town to be arrested. ‘Quinn’s French efforts are amazing,’ John wrote in a letter to Dorelia. ‘Imagine the language we have to talk to the chauffeur. Desperando!’ Descending a tortuous mountain road, Quinn had inquired the German for ‘slow’. ‘Schnell,’ John replied. ‘Schnell!’ Quinn shouted at their burly driver, who obediently accelerated. ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ Quinn repeatedly cried. They hurtled down the mountain at breakneck speed and arrived at their hotel ‘in good time for dinner’ – though on this occasion Quinn immediately retired to bed.
In a letter to Conrad41 Quinn recalled ‘feeling like a fighting man’ during this journey. But the points were massing up against him. At night he was haunted by ‘horrible shapes – stone houses, fences, trees, hay stacks, stone walls, stone piles, dirt walls, chasms and precipices advancing towards us out of the fog all to fade away into grey mist again’. On one occasion, John recounts in Chiaroscuro, ‘when the car was creeping at a snail’s pace on an unknown road through a dense fog in the Cévennes, the attorney [Quinn] suddenly gave vent to a despairing cry, and in one masterly leap precipitated himself clean through the open window, to land harmlessly on the grass by the road-side! He felt sure we were going over a precipice.’42
Quinn secretly, and John openly, were much relieved when their tour came to an end. ‘We were not quite a success as travelling companions,’ John conceded.43 The motor car, he concluded, ‘is a damnable invention’. Travelling on foot or by caravan was the proper progress for a painter. ‘Motoring is a fearfully wrong way of seeing the country but an awfully nice way of doing without railway trains,’ he instructed Dorelia. ‘It makes one very sleepy.’ Nevertheless, it had been impossible to overlook everything, the countryside, the cathedrals at Bourges and Chartres ‘veritably miraculous and power-communicating. The Ancients’, he told Will Rothenstein, ‘did nothing like this.’
Another success had been their final shaking-off of Mrs Strindberg. Two days after their return, Quinn embarked for New York; and John, having heard that Frida was again becoming ‘very active in London’, slipped quietly off to Wales. ‘It has been impossible to do any work travelling this way,’ he had complained to Dorelia from a brothel in Marseilles, ‘but one can think all the same.’ Now, in the peace of Wales, he could transfer these thoughts to paint.
3
CAVALIERS AND EGGHEADS
‘Non Scholae sed vitae.’
Dane Court School motto44
One of the earliest visitors to Alderney was John’s father. He was a model of patience. For hours he would sit motionless and then move quietly about the garden, hoping to be photographed. Every day he put on the same costume he wore for promenading the beach at Tenby: a sober suit, leather gloves, dark hat, wing collar and spats. He too had recently moved, a distance of several hundred yards, to 5 Lexden Terrace, overlooking the sea. In this desirable residence he was to linger a little uncertainly some thirty years, with the weather, a few illnesses and his ‘specimens of self-photography’ as companions. Occasionally he was looked in on by his grandchildren, and more occasionally by Augustus himself. It was a life spent patiently waiting, filling the long intervals with letters to Winifred to say he was writing to Gwen, and to Augustus saying he
was writing to Thornton: and variations on this pattern.
From Dorelia’s family there came, among others, her mother – a very straight-backed old woman with shiny white hair and a comforting round face. She spent her days quilt-making, and in the evenings would take a hot brick from the fireplace, wrapping it in cloth to warm her bed.
From 1912 onwards the guests, many of them subjects for portraits and testifying to the rich variety of the human species, began to assemble at Alderney. Not everyone was immediately welcome. Wyndham Lewis ‘had an inner door slammed in my face’ by Dorelia who was nevertheless the object of his ‘most sympathetic admiration’. But this was because of his ‘empty abuse of Lamb’ which she had perhaps mistaken for ‘strenuous plotting’.45 And then, ‘Did you turn away Lord Howard de Walden & his wife one day at the door?’46 John mildly inquired. Perhaps she had, but if so it was because this valuable patron and important sitter (who was pregnant) looked like obvious troublemakers.
But many people found a home from home at Alderney. There was Iris Tree, with her freckles and blue shadows, gliding between the trees in a poetic trance; Lytton Strachey, who amazed the children by claiming he felt so weak before breakfast that he found it impossible to lift a match; Fanny Fletcher, a poor art student later revered for her wallpapers, who arrived for a few weeks, knitted herself into the household with her cardigans and gained the reputation for being a rather inefficient witch whose salad dressings were said to contain spells; there was also a Polish doctor of music, Jan Sliwinski, who became expert at tarring fences, mending walls and cataloguing books; the Chilean painter Alvaro Guevara with tales of terrific boxing matches in Valparaiso, where he had been a champion; and an ‘unknown quantity’, Haraldar Thorskinsson, called ‘the Icelander’, a speechless, hard-drinking Icelandic poet with bright carmine cheeks and stark black hair, who had written a play in which angels somehow figured and who was now heavily involved in defeating the law of gravity. Very often Henry Lamb (or ‘Arry Lamb’ as John called him) would ride over on a pony cart to play duets with Dorelia at the upright piano. Sounds of Mozart and of Bach fugues would float out of the open windows into the garden, sometimes followed by heated words as to who had played the wrong note and, more implausibly, whether or not there was a deity – for Dorelia was an agnostic and Lamb an atheist, and the two of them often argued over what neither of them believed. Horace de Vere Cole, the country’s most eminent practical joker and inventor of turned-up trousers, who claimed descent from Old King Cole, would invite himself over, ‘such a hopeless child’, but always bringing a ‘Grand New Hoax’.
More cavalier still was the farmer, archaeologist*3 and anti-aircraft pioneer, Trelawney Dayrell Reed, who dropped in for a cup of tea one afternoon, hung on a few years, then bought a farm near by into which he settled with his grim mother, unmarried sister and some eighteenth-century furniture. Black-bearded and fanatic, he looked like a prince in the manner of El Greco, and was much admired for the violence of his Oxford stammer, his loud check tweeds, and socks of revolutionary red. An occasional poet, he also took to painting, executing in his farmhouse a series of vigorous and explicit frescoes. He was attended by two spaniels and his ‘man’, a wide-eyed factotum named Ernest. His air of refinement infuriated John. ‘Huntin’ does give one the opportunity of dressin’ like a gentleman,’ he would drawl. ‘But I’ve always thought the real test was how to undress like a gentleman.’ When asked whether he had pigs on his farm, he had replied: ‘No. The boys have the pigs. I have the boys.’ He liked to sing ballads of extreme bawdiness, accompanying his tuneless voice with free-flowing gestures. A great hero to the children, he was master of many accomplishments from darts to the deepest dialect of Dorset. He was also a landscape and market gardener with a special knowledge of hollyhocks and roses – his chief love. It was in defence of these blooms, his dogs, pigs and an apple tree that he later served his finest hour. Every afternoon he would go to bed, and every afternoon he was woken by aeroplanes which had selected his cottage as a turning point in their local races. He wrote letters, he remonstrated, he complained by every lawful means: but the flying monsters still howled about the chimney pots, creating havoc among his cattle and female relatives. Then, one afternoon, awakened by a deafening racket, he sprang from his bed and let fly with a double-barrelled shotgun, winging one of the brutes. Although no vital damage was done, Trelawney was arrested and tried at Dorchester Assizes on a charge of attempted murder. In opposition to the judge, a man much loved for his severity, the jury (being composed mostly of farmers like himself) acquitted him. It was a triumph for the individual, amateur and eccentric against the ascent of technology; and there was a grand celebration.
To be brought up amid such people constituted an education in itself. John, however, pressed matters to extremes: he hired a tutor. As long ago as May 1910 he had been persuaded that ‘the immediate necessity seems to be an able tutor and major-domo for my family.’47 If the search had been long and hesitant, this was because he needed someone exceptional. On 16 August 1911 he reported to Quinn that ‘I have just secured a young tutor who really seems a jewel’; and a month later48 he was telling Ottoline Morrell that ‘our tutor is an excellent and charming youth.’
His name was John Hope-Johnstone. He was then in his late twenties, a man of many attainments and no profession, an adventurous past and a waxed moustache. He had been educated between Bradfield, Hanover and Trinity College, Cambridge, which he had been obliged to leave prematurely when his mother abandoned her second fortune to the roulette wheel. From this time onwards he lived by his wits. But, as Romilly John observed, ‘he was very fortunate in combining, at that time, extreme poverty with the most epicurean tastes I have ever known.’49 He had a hunger for knowledge that ranged from the intricacies of Arabic to the address of the only place in Britain where a certain toothpaste might be bought. It was part of a programme of self-perfection to which he had dedicated himself pending the death of eleven persons which, he calculated, would bring him into a fortune with a title. Undeterred by a lack of ‘ear’, he mastered the penny whistle and then, by sheer perseverance, the flute.*4 He was a confirmed wanderer. Before taking up his post as a tutor, he had spent some years pushing a pram charged with grammars and metaphysical works through Asia, reputedly in pursuit of a village where chickens were said to cost a penny each.
He never found it, but arrived instead at Alderney into which, for a time, he fitted very well. Slim and well built, with finely cut features, dark hair and pale skin, he wore heavy hornrimmed spectacles, an innovation at the time. It was not long before he conceived an immense admiration for John and Dorelia and the romantic life they led around their battlemented bungalow, with their entourage of gypsy caravans and ponies and naked children. As a mark of admiration he took to wearing a medley of Bohemian clothes – buff corduroy suits cut by a grand tailor in Savile Row after the style of a dress suit, with swallow tails behind, a coloured handkerchief or ‘diklo’ round his neck and, to complete the bizarre effect, a black felt hat of the kind later made fashionable by Anthony Eden when Prime Minister, though with a broad rim. To John’s eyes he was every inch a tutor.
It is doubtful if his pupils benefited as much as John and Dorelia did from his encyclopedic tutelage. ‘For Hope the argument – long, persistent, remorseless, carried back to first logical principles – was an almost indispensable element in the day’s hygiene,’ his friend the ‘bright young intellectual’ Gerald Brenan recorded.50 The day began at first light. He would sit over the breakfast table dilating upon Symbolic Logic or Four Dimensional Geometry while the children fled on to the heath. Then Dorelia, who in any case did not believe in education, would murmur: ‘Never mind. Leave them for to-day,’ and the tutor would be free to retreat into the cottage kitchen, which he had converted, with retorts and bottles of coloured fluid, into a laboratory for malodorous experiments. At other moments, possibly when it was raining, he would lead the older boys off and propound to them Latin gender rhymes and t
he names of the Hebrew kings. They learnt to write Gothic script with calligraphic pens and black ink. He also made a speciality of the Book of Job, parts of which he encouraged them to learn by heart to train their ears for sonorous language, give them a sense of the remote past, and instil patience.*5 He was not entirely popular, however, with the children, chiefly because of his greed. At table, when the cream jug was passed round, he would ‘accidentally’ spill most of it over his own plate, leaving nothing for them.
To Dorelia, with whom he was a little in love, he made himself more helpful. He was a scholar of ancient herbs and jellies, and she made use of his book-knowledge in the kitchen and when laying out her garden. To John also he tried to make himself useful by persuading him to buy an expensive camera with which to photograph his paintings. But Hope’s technique of photography – ‘losing bits of his machine & tripping over the trypod continually’51 – led to a gradual fading away of all the prints into invisibility. It was an accurate record at Alderney of his waning popularity. John had warmed to him at first as an authentic dilettante – someone magnificently irrelevant to the commerce of modern life. He had been impressed by his mathematics and had liked the way he dived into their rigorously easygoing way of life, accompanying, unshaven, the barefoot boys through the Cotswolds to North Wales with pony and cart. Then John began to tire of him, as he did of everyone whom he saw regularly. He had encouraged Hope as an entertainer, and within a year his repertoire of tricks and stories had run out. ‘He’s a garrulous creature and extremely irritating sometimes,’ John admitted to Dorelia. ‘The way he makes smoke rings with a cluck.’52 John was never one for encores. The tutor’s capacity for absorbing knowledge, which appeared so limitless, was replenished by his growing library and by John’s depleted one. As a future editor of the Burlington Magazine, it was necessary that he should study art, but not perhaps by the method of absconding with John’s own pictures, of which he amassed a good private collection. His passion for argument pierced through the growing barrier of John’s deafness, especially when it developed into vast literary quarrels with Trelawney or with Edie, whose reading was confined to the Daily Mirror and romantic novels from the lending library at Parkstone station. So it was with some relief on all sides that in the last week of August 1912, with his entire capital of sixteen pounds, camel-hair sleeping bag and a good many grammars, he wheeled his perambulator off once more in the direction of China. Although he had been tutor for little more than a year, he was regularly to re-enter the lives of the Johns, in Spain, in Italy, at the corner of Oxford Street. Gerald Brenan, with whom he set out for the borders of Outer Mongolia, gives as Hope’s reason for this sudden journey the rainy weather – though it was also rumoured that John had hit on a plan to marry him off to one of his models who was soon to give birth to a child.
Augustus John Page 57
