Augustus John (44 page)

The man who sent Alick Schepeler so many letters during 1906 is a costume actor – but something kept pulling the masks a little from his face. ‘The thought haunts me that in a gross state of satisfaction I have allowed myself to utter the most abominable sincerity,’ he tells her. ‘I ask you in your turn to make allowances.’ But these letters are not insincere; they are elaborately undeceiving. They expose, perhaps more clearly than anything else he wrote, the fluidity of his character, with its hectic crosscurrents of whim and temper. They show the urge to cover up his uncertainty with the hats and coats and hand-made shoes of the confident outer man. But what he intended as a means of self-confidence often made for agonized self-consciousness.
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He was sometimes embarrassed by his sentimentality. In such a mood he later destroyed many of his letters to Ida, telling the Rani that ‘they made me almost wither up in disgust’.

Augustus’s infatuation with Alick Schepeler had at its source the knowledge that, for whatever reason, her face and figure could summon from him good work. For this paragon of boredom was forever Lady Enigma to him. In the years 1906 and 1907 he drew and painted her numerous times, the drawings displaying more than any other group the use of oblique-stroke shading, moving downward from right to left, reminiscent of Leonardo’s silverpoints. His finest portrait of her in oils, entitled ‘Seraphita’, he accidentally set alight in the 1930s during one of his cigarette fires. But there are more than half a dozen remarkable drawings in galleries and private collections.
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Alick Schepeler herself is said to have remarked that she had never noticed she was beautiful until Augustus
drew her. Yet the drawings are in no way prettified. They show a haunting face which, though it may have some characteristic John features – a slight slanting of the eyes or high prominence of the cheekbones – is individual. The eyes drill through the spectator with peculiar insistence; the hair, like great flying fingers, is wild; the expression varies between animation, mischief and secrecy. Always enormous strength is conveyed – a reflection of the force of Augustus’s feelings – without the cosiness occasionally present in his portraits of Ida and even Dorelia. Sometimes, as in a drawing entitled ‘Study of an Undine’, there is a hint of insanity. The face emerges out of soft contours and shadow, with its wispy strands of hair, like the head of Medusa. She is a cross between a witch and a nymph.

The letters he wrote to Alick Schepeler form a good commentary on these portraits. In the spring of 1906 he writes from Paris: ‘Am I painting? – why yes – and I have burst certain bonds too that bound my brain with iron and now my bewildered eye mixes dream with reality...’

To mix dream with reality was his ambition. He saw in Alick a perfect focus for this ambition since she lived most intensely in his imagination. He observed her and painted her in England; but it was in France that his portraits were conceived.

‘I see you standing on the summit of a sea-hill and, turning towards the sea with a gesture divinely nonchalant, project me a surreptitious yawn which, carried by the waves is at length deposited moistly yet merrily on my shore,’ he wrote to her from across the Channel. ‘I picture you extended, partly in and partly out of the water like an Undine hesitating between immortality and love, or like some sweet reptile of old discovering the first dry land or like some formerly aquatic species at the moment of differentiation. And how brown you are – O pray – retain the bloom till I come. Do not wash till I see you.’

On land he saw her, thought of her, as a witch:

‘It is regrettable that I have not persevered with my occult studies,’ he wrote in the summer of 1906. ‘I used to wonder whether you were a young witch… given to broom-stick riding and Sabbats of a Saturday. Perhaps if I surprised you astrally at this moment I should detect you in the act of performing some diabolical incantation or brewing a hellish potion or suchlike. Sweet one! More probably I should find you sleeping soundly and I would be able to see how many kisses one required to wake you up.’

Dream and reality, the very mainspring of his art, seemed by June 1906 to have moved to the Sleeping Beauty of Stanhope Gardens. Paris, which was to have given him the impetus for so much new work, was already beginning to lose its glow.

‘We have a source in us that can only produce its own fruits. Instinct is our genius.’

Gwen John

‘A sojourn at Ste Honorine-sur-Mer, near Bayeux, was memorable for little save the birth of my son Romilly,’ Augustus recorded over thirty-five years later.
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In his correspondence at the time, and in that of Ida, there is much that is memorable, though no mention of Romilly’s birth which, like that of Dorelia’s first son Pyramus, was never registered.

Within two months of moving to the rue Dareau, though living there only intermittently, Augustus was grumbling to Alick Schepeler (June 1906): ‘So far rather gloomy here – I am decidedly sleepy and feel the dullest of all devils.’ He resolved to reconnoitre a long holiday by the sea for himself and for what Wyndham Lewis had called ‘a numerous retinue, or a formidable staff – or a not inconsiderable suite, – or any polite phrase that occurs to you
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that might include his patriarchical ménage.’ ‘I am off to-night,’ Augustus signalled Alick one June evening, ‘to find a place by the sea, somewhere in Normandy I think. First of all I mean to go to Caen. The poet [Wyndham Lewis] is coming with me… I shall be moving about… Cher ange – why don’t you come over too, as you thought of doing? I will find a place. I will arrange everything...’

He roved the Normandy coast until he came to Ste-Honorine-des-Perthes and fell in with a band of Piedmontese gypsies – about a hundred vans packed with grand men and women with some sparkling children. He took out his charcoal, began drawing,
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and his spirits immediately veered upwards. ‘They spoke very good Romany,’ he reported to Alick, ‘and played very badly, alas. At Port-en-Bessin, near Ste-Honorine, there are wonderful sea-women who collect shellfish – they are very tall and quite pre-historic – just the sort you’d hate. I suppose I want to do a painting of them all the same.’ His mind was now made up. He would lead his families to Ste-Honorine, and station Alick Schepeler off the coast on Jersey. She could wear a beret and her splendid new pink dress – and for good measure she could bring her friend Frieda Bloch too. It would be a terrific summer. A ‘glorious bathe in the sea’ at Ste-Honorine confirmed that this was the correct decision, and he hurried back to Paris to fetch everyone.

‘Gus has just come back from finding a little house by the sea for all
of us to go to,’ Ida informed Margaret Sampson. ‘The kids ought to enjoy it.’ Her implication seemed to be that the adults might not enjoy it. From July to the end of September they lived ‘chez Madame Beck’ at Ste-Honorine. ‘It is a tiny village,’ Ida told Alice Rothenstein. ‘…We are between Cherbourg and Caen. Bayeux is the nearest town, and we only get there by cart and steam tram.’

Here Ida had time to brood over the ‘patriarchical ménage’. As Dorelia had looked after her during Edwin’s birth, so now she looked after Dorelia. But the children, with whom Dorelia had dealt so calmly, rasped on Ida’s nerves and the demon of discontent rose in her. Only four years ago, after David’s birth, she had written to her sister Ursula: ‘I
cannot
realize I have a little boy yet – I cannot believe I am his mother.’ Now she had four boys and could hardly remember what it had been like without them. ‘I don’t care for them much,’
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she admitted. David, who was ‘very silly and not very interesting’, seemed in the last year not to have advanced beyond making cheeky jokes or noises like an engine. Caspar spent his time dashing idiotically in and out of the water – up to his ankles; Robin still did little but climb and jump; Edwin, who now looked like a huge swollen doll – ‘very ugly with tiny blue eyes’ – had developed so red a face that ‘we bathe him in sea weed’;
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Pyramus appeared more Wordsworthian than ever and, as ever, did nothing.

As at Matching Green, Ida’s ‘formidable staff comprised two girls – Clara, who had joined them when they originally came to Paris, and Félice, a very ladylike woman who made disagreeable noises in her nose and suffered from palpitations. She screamed at mice, had fearful starts when failing to spot people approaching her, and yawned all day – huge, lionlike yawns. Yet she worked very well, though no one liked her, least of all Clara. The two of them were seldom on speaking terms – either it was ear-splitting peals of abuse rivalling the children’s, or a disdainful silence. Their bad humour contributed to the tenseness of this holiday.

The confidence, the strength, even the humour of their life in Paris were ebbing. ‘We are in a village miles from the railway and by the sea,’ Ida wrote to the Rani that August. ‘It is very relaxing and we all, except the children, feel awful.’ What had gone wrong? At first it had promised so well. The sun shone gloriously and Augustus would lead off his sprightly troop on bathing parties, on long walks to pick blackberries for jam and ‘English puddings’, and to picnics along the sandy beaches or on the clifftops – ‘there is a lovely place on the cliffs where we slide down. Gus goes head first.’ These cliffs were ‘full of arches & covered with pale green seaweed,’ Dorelia wrote invitingly to Gwen as she waited for her baby to be born. ‘We’ve got a tame rabbit – we were going to have it for dinner but it looked so pretty we kept it instead – it races madly about
the field.’
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They encountered several battalions of gypsies – ‘glorious chaps’ – and Augustus bought Ida a guitar which she promised she would ‘learn to play well’. The poet Wyndham Lewis arrived – ‘a nice beautiful young man’, Ida called him – and stayed five weeks, grew a beard, let off cheap fireworks and made everyone cry with laughter
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over his plans. He was ‘a refreshment in the desert’ for Ida. ‘…I love him as a brother.’

Gwen John also joined them with her cat, Edgar Quinet, otherwise known as Tiger, and bathed each day at Port-en-Bessin. She came, she said, for the sake of Tiger who had jumped out of a train and been lost for eleven days while Gwen, desperate and dishevelled and ‘living like Robinson Crusoe’ under a tree among nettles and rubbish, mice and owls, camped out on a piece of waste ground near St-Cloud. Still thin and nervous, Tiger needed a holiday: so Gwen allowed herself five days by the sea with the John tribe. She told Gus with justifiable pride that Rodin had declared her to be ‘
belle artiste’.
But actually Rodin had been angry with her over this matter of the cat. ‘All is finished for me,’ she told him before Tiger returned to her. ‘I would like to live longer but I will not be pretty and happy for you without my cat.’
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Rodin did not understand that this cat was a love-object whose loss symbolized a loveless world in which she did not wish to live. ‘Nobody suffered from frustrated love as she did,’ Augustus wrote. She would send Rodin three letters a day, almost two thousand letters over two years, as she waited for his weekly visits to her room. Rodin had ‘got in the habit of sleeping with her when the posing sessions were over’, his biographer Frederick V. Grunfeld writes, and sometimes Hilda Flodin, a sculptress who had introduced them, ‘would join in their lovemaking’. When the posing came to an end Gwen became his ‘
cinq-à-sept
,
the lover one sees from five to seven, after work and before going home. In her case the caresses lasted barely an hour: he would make love to her, give her an orgasm, and then go instantly off.’
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She felt stupid in comparison to him, knowing so much less than he did – rather as she had felt with Gus in the days of their adolescence. He explained to her that ‘a man could love many things in many women,’
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her biographer Susan Chitty writes. But sometimes, like Ida, she was filled with ‘a mad rage mounting from the heart to the brain’ and would wonder if ‘this monster [was] in all women’s hearts to devour them and tear them to pieces?’ At such times she felt like accusing Rodin of ‘criminal cruelty and thoughtlessness’,
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as Gus still stood accused in her dreams. Then she would revert again to being Rodin’s ‘obedient model’, the perpetually waiting woman who believed, as she told Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘one can be more free & independent in the mind & heart sometimes when one is tied practically.’
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Augustus, who was a prey to ‘unreasonable desires’ similar to Gwen’s, could not master that paradox. Whenever he felt tied, panic would run through him, and he made another bolt for this elusive independence. He was sure he had cornered it against the sea at Ste-Honorine-des-Perthes. But then, abruptly, the sun went in; the gypsies vanished; Gwen left; Wyndham Lewis, after sitting for his portrait, failed to amuse any longer; and Augustus was ‘plunged into gloom by a thousand tragedies’.
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Instead of turning up in Jersey, Alick Schepeler had drifted north to, of all places, Cumberland, taking with her Frieda Bloch. Augustus shut himself away, refused to paint out of doors, refused even to bathe except after dark. ‘I have had most horrible spells of ennui,’ he admitted. ‘I sat in a garden the other day and wondered what there was in the world at all tolerable. I examined a tree attentively to discover any beauty in it – without success. The sky seemed an awful bore and I wondered why it should be blue. If it had been dark indigo and the trees gold perhaps I should have been rather pleased.’ He could not paint, could not ‘get’ the colour of trees and sky, could not stop trying to paint. He could not rest, he had no energy. His melancholia was not just the absence of high spirits: it was a disease that consumed his very talent. The one cure was a stimulus for his work, and the one stimulus just then was Alick Schepeler. Now that she was further off than ever, she began to obsess him.