Augustus John (29 page)

So his love grew. He could think of almost nothing else, could scarcely endure being parted from her. ‘Dear sweetheart Dorelia,’ he wrote to her early that summer on a short visit to Littlehampton.

‘Now I am going to bed, now I am under the blankets, and I wish that you were here too, you sweet girl-wife. I want to kiss you again on the lips, and eyes, and neck and nose and all over your bare fiery body. When our faces touch, my blood burns with a wild fire of love, so much I love you my wild girl. I don’t speak falsely. If you laugh you cannot love. Now I see your white teeth. Why are you not here with me? I hear the sea that sings and cries in the old way, my own great sad mother. Send me word very soon – Tell me that you love me a bit. Yours Gustavus Janik.’

It was not long before rumours of Augustus’s romance began to be whispered among his friends, and among Ida’s. ‘I have come to the conclusion that it is very difficult to deceive anyone,’ Ida wrote to Alice
Rothenstein, ‘and that people know one’s own business almost as well as one knows it oneself. I suppose you know that, as you know most things (I am not sarcastic). In a certain way you are a very wise person.’ This was Ida’s difficulty: she had no one in whom she could confide. Alice was a loyal friend, but perhaps not a very understanding one. Her own life was so different and so safe. There was about her a suspicion of vicarious living, of looking with disapproving relish at other people’s goings-on. Nobody could doubt that Alice had Ida’s interests sincerely at heart, but Ida tried to avoid revealing her problems. Besides, Alice seethed with high-principled gossip. She invariably counselled prudence, now that she had married Will. ‘I ask you why should a healthy young woman be particularly “prudent”,’ complained the Rani to Ida, ‘ – or was Alice herself ever – such rot!’ On the whole Ida preferred Will’s counsel and companionship. He too could lecture her, but when he addressed himself to young women his romanticism quite dissolved his moralizing. They were a strange couple, Alice and Will – she still so beautiful, a faintly overblown conventional pink rose ‘large and fair and cushiony and sleepy’, as Ida had written; he ‘a hideous little Jew with a wonderful mind – as quick as a sewing-machine, and with the quality of Bovril’.

Partly because of Alice, Ida was shy of disclosing her secrets to Will. And to Augustus himself it was always difficult to speak of anything intimate for long. It was like sending one’s words down a dark well. When he did talk, it was usually to deliver some laconic sentence that put an end to discussion. She was aware of becoming less attractive in his eyes when she tried to speak to him seriously. He seemed to believe that any talk about their problems could only exacerbate them. This was one of the reasons he drank – to be blind to his problems: to be rid of himself.

Although she would have preferred a man to talk to, Ida confided most to the Rani. To her she felt she might occasionally ‘grumple’ without disloyalty. The Rani could be trusted, and her humour made everything easier – ‘my heart’s blood to you’, she ended one of her letters, ‘and my liver to Augustus’. The world seemed a brighter place after one of her letters. ‘Yours is the proper way to have babies,’ she told Ida, ‘one after the other without fuss and let them roll around together and squabble and eat and be kissed and otherwise not bother.’ She would write of the entertaining disasters that had befallen her, such as poisoning her family with mushrooms; she sent Ida appalling photographs of herself ‘looking like the Virgin Mary with indigestion’; she told her how common her own children were becoming and how she disliked the Liverpool middle classes, ‘all bandy-legged and floppy nosed and streaky haired’, with their ‘jocky caps and sham pearls and bangles and dogs and three-quarter coats’ – they made her ache with anger, causing ‘the glands behind my ears to
swell’. Finally she would apologize for failing, despite everything, to be discontented. ‘I am sorry I am so happy and you so much the reverse – I think I really am too stupid to be anything else. You must pay the penalty for having the intelligence, I suppose – the lady Dorelia is a strange creature.’

Dorelia’s strangeness – ‘her face is a mystery’, Ida remarked, ‘like everyone else’s’ – and the uneasy partnership to which she had been admitted were increasingly the subject of speculation. ‘I saw John last week and he doesn’t seem to have been pulling himself together as he should have done,’ lamented Will Rothenstein to his brother Albert (3 June 1903), ‘ – he seems as restless as ever, and looks no better than he should do. Ida has gone off to Tenby for a month with her babes, so he is alive just now.’

A few weeks after Ida returned, Albert Rutherston went to dine with them at Fitzroy Street one evening. ‘They are well,’ he told Michel Salaman (9 August 1903), ‘and John showed me some exceedingly good starts of paintings – they have bred at least a dozen canaries from the original twain which fly about the room – perch on the rafters and sit on one’s head while one dines – it really was amusing… Miss MacNeill came after dinner – she… seems to be a great friend of all the Johns – I think John must have a secret agreement with that lady and Mrs J – but not a word to anyone of this – it is only my notion and a mad one at that.’

Others who saw this crowded household, with its multiplying flocks of canaries, women and children, were sadder and more critical. ‘Really matrimony is not a happy subject to talk about at present,’ Tonks wrote to Will Rothenstein (15 September 1903). ‘The John establishment makes me feel very melancholy, and I do not see that the future shines much.’

But Augustus loved Fitzroy Street. Before Whistler died that summer, he would occasionally meet him there and they would have lunch together. He had always been amused by Whistler’s panache, but no longer had quite the same reverence for him. Whistler had been a man of cities; his curiosity ‘stopped short at dockland to the east and Battersea to the west’.
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He belonged to the urban cult of Decadence, against which Augustus had now started to rebel.

The flat at Fitzroy Street was obviously too small for them all. Augustus felt unable to breathe in that bricked-up atmosphere. He dreamt of wide spaces, ‘the broad, open road, with the yellowhammer in the hedge and the blackthorn showing flower’.
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As the summer wore on, this feeling grew insupportable. ‘I have fled the town and my studio; dreary shed void of sunlight and the song of birds and the aspirant life of plants,’ he told
Will Rothenstein from Westcot, in Berkshire, where he had gone to see Charles McEvoy.
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‘Nor shall I soon consent to exchange the horizons that one can never reach for four mournful walls and a suffocating roof – where one’s thoughts grow pale and poisonous as fungi in dark cellars, and the Breath of the Almighty is banished, and shut off the vision of a myriad world in flight. Little Egypt for me – the land without bounds or Parliaments or Priests, the Primitive world of a people without a History, the country of the Pre-Adamites!’

The difference between town and country was like that between sleep and waking life. ‘Don’t get up so much,’ he advised Dorelia from Fitzroy Street, ‘it’s better to sleep. What beautiful weather we are having – it makes me dream of woods and wind and running water. I would like to live in any wooded place where the singing birds are heard, where you could smoke and sleep and stop without being stared at.’

The best plan, he suddenly decided, was to find some house in the country not far from London that would accommodate as many as might reasonably find themselves there – women, children, animals, friends, family, servants and, more intermittently, Augustus himself. Ida, who had recently completed her decorations to Fitzroy Street, agreed. ‘We have been house hunting,’ she wrote to Michel Salaman.

But Dorelia had other plans.

‘Everything is happy and inevitable here – one cannot quarrel with an invisible hand nor need one call it the Devil’s...’

Augustus John to John Sampson (n.d. [1904])

‘I hope for a different life later on – I think it can only be postponed.’

Ida John to Gwen John (21 September 1904)

‘Leave everybody and let them leave you. Then only will you be without fear.’

Gwen John, Diary

The Carfax Gallery, in the spring of 1903, had held a joint show of Gwen and Gus’s pictures. ‘I am devilish tired of putting up my exhibits,’ Augustus complained to Dorelia. ‘I would like to burn the bloody lot.’ Of the forty-eight pictures – paintings, pastels, drawings and etchings – forty-five were by Augustus, and Gwen withdrew one of hers. Nevertheless, he told Rothenstein, ‘Gwen has the honours or should have – for alas our smug critics don’t appear to have noticed the presence in the Gallery of two rare blossoms from the most delicate of trees. The little pictures to me are almost painfully charged with feeling; even as their neighbours are empty of it. And to think that Gwen so rarely brings herself to paint! We others are always in danger of becoming professional and to detect oneself red-handed in the very act of professional industry is a humiliating experience!’

Gwen had closed down her feelings for Ambrose McEvoy. But she needed to love someone. Until recently she had continued living in the McEvoy family home in Colville Terrace, while Ambrose and Mary moved down to Shrivenham in Oxfordshire, an address used by Gwen’s former friend Grace Westray. It was possibly at this time that Gwen went back to the cellar in Howland Street – ‘a kind of dungeon’, as Augustus described it, ‘…into which no ray of sunlight could ever penetrate’. Indifferent to physical discomfort, she seemed filled with a strange elation. ‘I have never seen her [Gwen] so well or so gay,’ Albert Rutherston told Michel Salaman (9 August 1903). ‘She was fat in the face and merry to a degree.’

The source of Gwen’s happiness was Dorelia. On an impulse, she proposed that the two of them should leave London and walk to Rome – and Dorelia calmly agreed. There was nothing, there was no one, to hold Gwen in England. She was to celebrate the opening of a new chapter in her life with a pilgrimage that cut her off geographically, physically and emotionally from her past. But for Dorelia the decision is less understandable since it meant abandoning Augustus, perhaps for months, at a critical stage of their relationship. With a man so volatile, what guarantee was there he would feel the same when she arrived back? Yet Dorelia’s mind did not work along these lines. If Fate intended her to live with Augustus, then that was how it would be – and nothing could alter this. Although she seldom revealed her thoughts, there can be little doubt that she was feeling the strain of being a visitor to Gus and Ida’s married life. Once they had settled into a house in the country perhaps everything would be different. All Dorelia knew was that her life, whatever form it took, would be involved with art, and that there was nothing inconsistent with this in going off for an adventure with Gwen.

The two girls were as excited as if it were an elopement. But Augustus
found himself occupying a parental role, advising caution, good sense, second thoughts. Their plan was impossible, he promised: it was also mad. Should they not at least pack a pistol? But Gwen would not listen to his arguments – ‘she never did’.
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Finally, he relented, giving them a little money and some cake. They set off that August, ‘carrying a minimum of belongings and a great deal of painting equipment’,
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and boarded a steamer in the Thames.

‘Give my love to that dear girl Dorelia,’ Ida wrote to Gwen. ‘…Aurevoir mes deux amies… Aurevoir encore.’ Ida hardly knew what to think, so confused were her feelings. She had been glad Dorelia was going abroad and yet she felt envious of her, and also curious about this escapade with Gwen. ‘Is Dorelia much admired?’ she questioned Gwen. ‘I can’t believe you tell me
everything,
it is all so golden. I suppose you will come with bags of money, & bank notes sewn about you.’
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But actually she was rather surprised to hear they had landed intact at Bordeaux and started walking up the Garonne. ‘What a success!’ she congratulated them. ‘I am so glad & I… long to be with you (now I know its nice). To sleep out in the middle of a river & have a great roaring wave at 3 in the morning – Really it must be gorgeous.’ In comparison her own life seemed tame. Now that Thornton and Winifred were across the Atlantic, Gwen and Dorelia across the Channel, and even Wyndham Lewis in Spain with his fellow artist Spencer Gore, Fitzroy Street filled up rapidly with Nettleships. ‘My tribe came round as usual tonight and assisted at the bathing etc.,’ Ida wrote to Gwen. ‘Gus lay on the bed – Ursula knelt by me – Ethel reclined by Gus – Mother loomed large on the other side of the bath.’ The good news was that Ida wasn’t pregnant again (‘So I feel very light hearted’); the bad news that Gus hadn’t found a house for them in the country. And then there was some further news. Esther Cerutti had stepped back into their lives, ‘as full of that curious thing called style as ever. I believe that is why I tolerate her nonsense.’
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From time to time over the next weeks, Gus and Ida would get morsels of news about the ‘crazy walkers’ as they made their way from village to village towards Toulouse. Sometimes they received odd letters themselves; sometimes they heard from Ursula Tyrwhitt who was also in correspondence with Gwen. The two girls obviously found the going hard. Once they travelled in a motor car – ‘till it broke down’; and more than once they were offered lifts in carts – ‘every lift seems saving of time and therefore money too so we always take them’, Gwen explained to Ursula. At each village they would try to earn some money by going to the inn and either singing or drawing portraits of those men who would pose. But their motives were sometimes misconstrued. At night they slept in the fields, under haystacks, on the icy stone flags beside the Garonne or, when they
were lucky, in stables, lying on each other to feel a little warmer, covering themselves with their portfolios and waking up encircled by congregations of farmers, gendarmes and stray animals. Between the villages, bowed beneath bundles of possessions that seemed larger than themselves, they would practise their singing. They lived mostly on grapes and bread, a little beer, some lemonade. There were many adventures; losing their tempers with the women, outwitting the men, shaking with fright at phantom shapes in the night, tearful with laughter when these turned out to be harmless pieces of farm machinery.