Augustus John (50 page)

“Married, Mr John? Children?”

“Yes.” “How many?” “Seven.” “You married young?”

“Five years ago.” “Twins doubtless?” – after that frank horrifying discourse on the part of Augustus John, who considers himself a particularly good well-behaved man. The only difference is in code… He is the strangest creature I have ever met, a kind of fawn… a magnificent-looking person, and looks the wild creature he is.’

Augustus was on his best behaviour at Coole. Painter and poet would sit up late in intimate talk, each out-charming the other. ‘He is most delightful,’ Augustus told Alick Schepeler, ‘nobody seems to know him but me – unless it is the Gregorys, but that is my conceit no doubt.’ Except for these late-night conversations, Augustus spoke little, worked hard and would wander off for long solitary walks in the wooded park round Coole where he had located ‘a region which is obviously holy ground’. Needing to escape out of doors, he passed many evenings rowing idly on the lake, with only the swans, which Yeats had celebrated, for company. Then, to the apprehensive admiration of Robert Gregory and the astonishment of everyone else, he would surge indoors, do wonderful athletic things on the drawing-room floor, rush out again and climb to the top of the tallest tree in the Coole garden, where he carved a cryptic symbol. Poets, playwrights and patrons struggled among its lower branches, but ‘nobody else has been able to get up there to know what it is, even Robert stuck halfway.’
12

By the time he left, Augustus had seen enough of Ireland to know that it was rich territory for him as a painter. Already he had vast schemes to paint all Galway. He would return, several times; and the last time he would again paint Yeats.

‘God knows I am buffeted mightily by fate.’

Augustus John to Alice Rothenstein

At Equihen Augustus had left a situation full of passionate uncertainties.

Attended by one of her sisters – ‘voluptuous Jessie’
13
– Dorelia had gone through an illness culminating, to the satisfaction of everyone, in a miscarriage. Nothing could be wrong with this unless it was the timing, which coincided with the arrival of Mrs Nettleship, bringing with her Ida’s three eldest boys, David, Caspar and Robin.

Augustus had wanted to surround himself with all his children this summer, and to spend his time working over them and the admirable sea-girls. He had not reckoned on Mrs Nettleship’s presence, nor on the unpainterly school clothes with which she had decked out her grandchildren – quite wrong for late-fifteenth-century Italian work. It was a shock – yet he was determined to prove the optimist. ‘This is a jolly place,’ he wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘My numberless kids are all here now. I have a dilapidated studio to work in. The fish people here are very amusing. The girls look fine in their old costumes. Multitudes of children teem in the gutters together with the debris of centuries.’

He was resolved not to put up with the children’s noise, but to
enjoy
it. After all, it was natural, and enjoyment was necessary for work – it accelerated his perceptions. Yet it was elusive. Everything seemed to rub away at this quality of enjoyment at Equihen, and in the most abrasive manner. Before Mrs Nettleship’s commanding presence, the beauty of Nature seemed to hesitate and retreat; even alcohol could no longer call forth those ‘delightful sensations old Debaucheries used to procure me… angelic glimpses secreted like pearls in piggeries.’
14

In a letter to Henry Lamb (5 August 1907) he wrote: ‘I wish this house were on wheels.’ Wherever he was he wanted to move on. He had been enchanted by the magic lake or
turlough
at Coole, islanded, and mysteriously rising and subsiding. What he desired now was a miraculous encampment that contained all possibilities, that moved yet rested, that congregated the right people – artists and comedians, women and children – but that had hidden places into which he could retire. In such a place the tension between the necessities of involvement and solitude would disappear.

‘I understand that solitude is not always and ever good for a man,’ he advised Henry Lamb. ‘Are we not much too solitary?… I think company is better medicine than loneliness. Let us see new faces, lest the old ones grow old under our tiring eyes, and damn it we are artists not misanthropists. Anthropology is our business. Solitude be damned. One seeks solitude – with one’s woman only.’

These were brave-sounding words, but they trumpeted a virtue of what, for Augustus, was becoming a necessity. He needed more solitude, not less; more opportunity to train his memory in recapturing the fleeting
moment; more emphasis on sustained imagination. But this gypsy way to artistic fulfilment was new and needed to be worked out.

Henry Lamb was ‘no ordinary personage’, Augustus was to assure the art patron Lady Ottoline Morrell (20 September 1908), ‘and has the divine mark on his brow’. Lamb was still taking his apprenticeship to Augustus very seriously. While Euphemia was becoming the very model of a John model, Henry was allowing the John style to grow over him. His drawings resembled Augustus’s, and so did his clothes. He had let his hair grow long; he failed to shave; he fastened on gold earrings. He was spectacularly handsome. With his hypnotic deep-blue eyes he fascinated men and women alike, and his entrance into any gathering was almost as striking as that of the
maître.
When the Chelsea Art School went into a decline – or rather when Augustus’s attendances there declined – Lamb quitted it and with Euphemia followed him to Paris. By the beginning of 1907 he was living in the rue Cels and studying under Jacques-Émile Blanche at L’Ècole de la Palette, an
académie
of some twenty students which included Duncan Grant.

Ida had liked Lamb. It would be ‘rather nice to have a Lamb on the doormat’, she had written to Augustus, on hearing at the end of 1906 that Lamb was coming over. When he did come, they discussed the French translations of Dostoevsky. Dorelia liked him too: they often played the piano together. After Ida’s death, Dorelia and Henry drew closer. ‘Dorelia will I hope buck up under your sunny influence,’ Augustus encouraged him (13 June 1907), ‘ – yours is evidently the touch. My person is like a blight on the household.’ Meanwhile Augustus was doing countless studies of the alluring Euphemia. She was an excellent model, especially when nude. The presence of this girl, with her pale oval face, husky voice and honey-coloured hair, had already provoked a rather sharp inquiry from Alick Schepeler. ‘I have never had time or inclination to consider her very seriously,’ Augustus airily defended himself. ‘I have simply taken her for granted. It is true I have thought her rather eccentric...’ Then, in Paris, immediately following Ida’s death, time and the inclination had coincided. So the two households, the Lambs and the Johns, mingled, amoeba-like, revolved and came together again in a formation of rich complexity. ‘Could we not form a discreet form of colony’, Lamb soon began wondering, ‘…in couples. For the sake of symmetry I could double myself no doubt at suitable intervals.’
15
To those looking on their fantasies appeared madness. ‘Do you think he [Henry] is all right in his intellect?’
16
his brother Walter Lamb had asked Clive Bell, who was spending part of his honeymoon in Paris. But it was Euphemia’s scattiness that struck Vanessa Bell as being so extreme, and her sister Virginia agreed (‘my head spins with her stories’
17
). As Maynard Keynes later remarked
to them, Euphemia enjoyed more sexual life ‘than the rest of us put together’.
18

‘What will Mrs Lamb do?’
19
Ida had asked before Euphemia arrived in Paris. What she did was to fight with Henry (‘using dinner plates and knives in their battles’), drift uncomfortably apart from Augustus, and fall in to the thankless arms of Duncan Grant. ‘That Lamb family sickens me,’ Grant complained to Lytton Strachey (7 April 1907),

‘and that man John. I’m convinced now he’s a bad lot. His mistress, Dorelia, fell in love with Henry and invited him to copulate and as far as I can make out John encouraged the liaison and arranged or at any rate winked at the arrangements for keeping Nina [Euphemia] out of the way, although Henry didn’t in the least want to have any dealings with Dorelia. However it was apparently all fixed up that they should “go on the roads” together when Nina was (according to her own story) found with a loaded revolver ready to shoot herself (and Henry as far as I could gather). So Henry was left by himself… Dorelia and John seem to be the devils and the others merely absurd...’

This account, which suffers from being overcoloured by Euphemia’s testimony, nevertheless indicated how Augustus remained separated from Fry’s group of Bloomsbury painters. He felt ill-at-ease in their educated presence; and they were disconcerted by his deliberate thoughtlessness and irrationality. There seemed no common ground between his pursuit of ‘meaningless’ beauty, and their imposition of ‘significant form’. To Bloomsbury, Augustus John was a meteor, dazzling and self-destructive, a brilliant phenomenon that was burning itself out. ‘Oh John! Oh… what a “warning”! as the Clergy say,’ Lytton Strachey exclaimed in reply to Duncan Grant (12 April 1907). ‘When I think of him, I often feel that the only thing to do is to chuck up everything and make a dash for some such safe secluded office-stool [the Treasury] as is pressed by dear Maynard’s [Keynes’s] happy bottom. The dangers of freedom are appalling! In the meantime it seems to me that one had better immediately buy up every drawing by him that’s on the market. For surely he’s bound to fizzle out; and then the prices!’

To Bloomsbury eyes, Augustus appeared to live a life based upon the casual whim. They could not know the annihilating force of his solitude, or sense the panic. He seldom defended or explained his way of life. It was based upon a natural law of self-interest. If some desire swept through you, then you gave expression to it with all your being – physically, vocally, at once and until it was exhausted and you were left empty or filled by another desire. Lock antlers, copulate and procreate; work, accept risks
and avoid deceits. Those who acted upon their emotions lived longer because they lived by a deeper biological reality than social convention. However admirable your motives for bottling up feelings might be, the contents of the bottle often turned to poison. There was a danger in modern society of the animal in man being neglected, and human history dwindling into devious tributaries. Such pollution of nature and exploitation of human nature revolted John. He preferred the simple life.

Yet it was surprisingly difficult to achieve the simple life. What could be more simple, for example, than to invite Henry Lamb to Equihen? And what, in the society of Mrs Nettleship, could be more amusing? ‘I hope you will come and bathe here,’ had run his innocent invitation. But instead of Henry, Euphemia arrived, dressed rather improbably as a young man and followed by an enthusiastic, but bankrupt, Swede. Having relieved Augustus of some of his Irish money, the Swede hurried on to Paris, while Euphemia, falling ill with a mysterious disease, was condemned for a week to bed. ‘She makes an irresistible boy,’ Augustus admitted to her husband, ‘ – I feel, myself, better after assisting at her recovery.’

According to Euphemia, she had been given a knife by Madame Maeterlinck with which to kill Dorelia. But while she lay asleep under a van, Augustus had joined her and they had both been arrested as practising homosexuals. In gaol she was obliged to take off her clothes to prove their innocence. But how much could you believe such stories from someone who also claimed to have been responsible for Ida’s death (‘I got a
sage femme
for her, but she was dirty and infected Ida. Her hair turned quite white in one night and her head shrank...’
20
)?

Although she was not to allow him a divorce until the late 1920s, Euphemia had already parted from Lamb and was starting out on an exotic career. ‘Henry has left Nina perhaps for ever,’ Duncan Grant wrote to Lytton Strachey, ‘and the white haired whore still goes on eating “
crèmes nouveautés
”.’ Her adventures were to lead her, in one guise or another, into many memoirs – as ‘Dorothy’, for example, in the
Confessions
of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666, who wrote that she ‘would have been a
grande
passion had it not been that my instinct warned me that she was incapable of true love. She was incomparably beautiful… capable of stimulating the greatest extravagancies of passion.’ For Augustus, who gave her the name ‘Lobelia’, these extravagancies were wonderfully comic. ‘She has made the acquaintance of a number of nations,’ he assured Lamb (5 August 1907); and he told Dorelia (April 1908) that ‘Lobelia had 6 men in her room last night, representing the six European powers, and all silent as the grave.’

For Lamb himself, Euphemia remained a unique experience. ‘I always
feel grateful for the privilege of having been so closely associated with so much beauty & genius & glorious energy of character,’ he wrote fifty years later. But the great figure of Lamb’s life was to be Dorelia. It was almost inevitable, fulfilling his role as Augustus’s
alter ego
,
that he should fall in love with her. Since he was an artist, this also made destiny-sense to Dorelia. Already they had begun a love affair – the second of Dorelia’s two ‘discreditable episodes’ – that was to continue, with intervals, over twenty years. During those years, Lamb never lost hope that she would free herself from ‘the August clutches’ and come to live with him. ‘There is a fair chance of it all coming off some day,’ he was still writing in the summer of 1926.

For the time being their involvement remained part of the
entente cordiale
,
an agreeable
échange
that had no unpleasant repercussions: except with Mrs Nettleship. Ada Nettleship had never liked Dorelia, and everything she learnt this summer confirmed her in this dislike. Obviously Dorelia was quite the wrong person with whom to entrust Ida’s boys. It was not simply a matter of immorality: it was incompetence – an incompetence so superlative it made Mrs Nettleship dizzy. It was out of the question for her grandchildren never to be washed, never brushed or combed, decked out in fanciful rags and left unsuperintended. Their bedrooms were full of unchecked frogs, absurd grasshoppers and other scattered atrocities: it was bedlam. Even Augustus was forced to own that ‘this crêche-like establishment is a little too heroic – in the long run’.
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Within a week of arriving at Equihen, the boys had been drowned
en masse –
or rather almost drowned, being uniquely rescued by a local fisherman who ‘was getting food for his rabbits on the cliff when he heard their screaming’, Mrs Nettleship explained to her daughter Ursula (19 July 1907). ‘He has never saved anyone before and he hopes to get a medal.’