Augustus John (55 page)

Next morning no children arrived at his studio, and Augustus marched round to Wigmore Street. He gave a version of what then happened in a letter to Wyndham Lewis (28 June 1908). Mrs Nettleship tried ‘to take refuge in the zoo with my 3 eldest boys and only after a heated chase through the monkey house did I succeed in coming upon the guilty party immediately behind the pelicans’ enclosure. Seizing two children as hostages I bore them off in a cab and left them in a remote village for a few days in charge of an elderly but devoted woman. The coup d’Etat was completely successful of course. Dorelia appears on the scene with almost miraculous promptitude and we take off the bunch of 4 to-morrow morning...’

Ida’s son Henry, who was only fifteen months old, missed this escapade and was exempted from the bargaining. For all of them, the results of that morning’s manoeuvres round the zoo were permanent. Though they
visited Wigmore Street in their holidays, Ida’s four eldest boys, David, Caspar, Robin and Edwin, were to be brought up by Augustus and Dorelia, along with her children, Pyramus and Romilly; while Henry, the odd one out, was brought up by the Nettleships. ‘It certainly might have been rather better for all of you boys if Ida could have lived,’ her sister Ethel Nettleship wrote many years later to Caspar. ‘…If only Mother [Mrs Nettleship] had been a wise woman instead of being completely haywire through those 7 years. If Father had been alive too – & lots of other ifs...

‘You know Gus really
tried
with Mother – I mean he was willing to be helped and a wise woman could have done him no end of good – he was so young & I think he longed for it, but his tremendous vitality and passions used to get the better of him.’
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‘I shall always be more or less suspect.’

Augustus John to Dorelia McNeill

‘Paris is amazingly beautiful and brilliant… Was it not mad of me to abduct my children in this way?’ Augustus asked Ottoline (1 July 1908). ‘But I was provoked to the point of action.’

After a week in Paris, Augustus led his troupe off to Rouen, and from there they went by boat to Cherbourg, the appearance of which ‘pleased me well’.
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He had money to last them all three months, and confidence enough to take them anywhere. Leaving Dorelia and the six boys in Cherbourg, he set off on a walking reconnaissance. ‘If my stars prove favourable I shall, I hope, start some beasts and vehicles and what not,’ he explained to Wyndham Lewis.

But his stars glimmered luridly. At Les Pieux he was seized by the police and interrogated on suspicion of loitering with intent, though he had been plainly walking without much intent. Later he was robbed of his money in a restaurant and, without funds, was refused a bed – ‘so I stole into the country by bye-ways and slept under a hedge,’ he told Lamb (July 1908), ‘ – got down to a place called La Royel in the early morning, bathed my poor sore feet and… was refused milk and coffee’. It was not before he reached Flamanville that his luck began to turn. Here he caught up with ‘a modest circus and a number of revellers keeping it up, was recognised by a charming circus man I met at Bayeux 2 years ago…
There was also a little Gypsy girl black as night who did the fil de fer. An intoxicated man conducted me down to Dielette where I finished him off with a bottle of wine. In the evening the crazy band drove round in a kind of box emitting gusty strains from various base instruments, the aged philosopher still capering and kissing his hand to the girls – a very wonderful company this – a very wonderful meeting.’

Next day he was again stopped by the police, and it became clear that any crime committed in the neighbourhood would be credited to him. For the rest of his journey he ‘took tortuous ways to avoid the police’, he told Dorelia, sleeping in ditches and fields, under bridges and hedges, often walking through the night. In a revealing letter to Dorelia, written from Diélette (to which, in his efforts to throw off the police, he had secretly doubled back), he confessed:

‘My love of my kind had already vanished and I was becoming a rooted pessimist – as for J. F. Millet, he seemed to me a damned blagueur – a bloody romanticist and liar – as he was in fact. But Dielette renews me – it is astonishing – it is even better than my native town where I ought to have stopped… The place is lovely – so varied – sandy beaches, rocks, harbours and prehistoric landscape behind...

I shall probably be about here all to-morrow, so send me some calculations, I pray you, to guide me a little… You have only to lose your temper to gain everything you want with people.’

To Will Rothenstein he had explained: ‘I don’t want to fix myself long in hired rooms.’ Yet his designs to gather beasts and vehicles together and follow a nomad life through Europe had been hit hard by the police hostility, and he reluctantly decided to assemble Dorelia and the boys in seaside apartments.

They moved into the Maison Delort late that July and stayed there until the end of September. ‘The boys are exceedingly well,’ Augustus reassured Mrs Nettleship, ‘so don’t be anxious.’ They looked, so he boasted to Ottoline (September 1908), ‘like healthy vagabonds’. He himself was anxious about Henry. ‘I trust he is not over-clothed,’ he warned Mrs Nettleship. ‘It is wonderful how children can stand cold if they wear few things.’

The sun shone and he worked hard and happily. ‘I am working up to colour at last,’ he wrote to Ottoline (20 September 1908). ‘Do you know Cézanne’s work? His colours are more powerful than Titian’s and searched for with more intensity.’ His own colours he was now restricting to three primary ones represented by ultramarine, crimson lake and cadmium, with green oxide of chromium. It was with these that he painted ‘Girl on
the Cliff’, another exploration of the link between landscape and the human figure.

The model for ‘Girl on the Cliff’ was Edna Clarke Hall. Three years earlier, in 1905, with ‘a happiness that is beyond words’, Edna had given birth to a son. But, like Ida, she soon found motherhood a demanding business that left her no time or energy for painting. ‘It’s a dull life I lead now,’ she told one of her sisters. It might have been all right if her husband Willie had loved her. As it was, life ‘goes on OK as long as I keep quiet and live without thinking or worrying or drawing or reading or anything else’.
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Ida’s death had devastated Edna. ‘I loved her more deeply than I realized – I realize it now,’
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she wrote. Ida was the special ‘friend of my youth’ whose death seemed to symbolize the death of Edna’s own youth.

Noticing her sadness, Willie arranged a holiday for them in France that summer of 1908. He had a ‘peculiar gift for finding places no one had heard of, and at the end of a tortuous sixteen-mile cart ride through the night from Cherbourg, he found Diélette. Waking the next morning, Edna was charmed to see ‘wide stretching sands and beautiful sand dunes, lonely and full of sunshine and blue butterflies and streams that are guarded by masses of flowers, purple ones, and flag leaves.’
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She also found that the sands around the sunlit village were teeming with Johns, and suspected that Willie would be angry. But he accepted the facts peacefully enough, and even allowed her to join the reprobates on their bathing and sketching parties.

As Ida’s friend, Edna felt ill at ease with Dorelia. ‘She never spoke very much to me,’ she remembered, ‘…and she never called me Edna.’ Nevertheless Edna was pleased to be posing for Gus. She seemed a perfect model for him. Something about her beauty in this summer landscape, to which she had so briefly come from the emotional aridity of her home, stirred him. Later, when he showed her the oil painting of his ‘Girl on the Cliff’, her face turned to the sky with the eyes closed, it seemed to her ‘to have in it the spirit of myself – he has put the figure on a cliff with bright green grass full of wild flowers and the sea is blue but dark and the sky almost gloomy.’
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A number of Augustus’s preliminary sketches had been done indoors, the only free area being his bedroom. But the children would keep dashing in and out, excited and uncontrollable, and so he was obliged to lock the door. ‘He showed me two or three rather nice drawings he had done of me,’ she recalled, ‘and then he kissed me in the most enchanting way. There was something very lovely about it. But I drew back – because just then I was in rather a disturbed emotional condition – I had so little of what I needed [and] wanted so much that I wouldn’t let anyone touch me.’
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But when Edna drew back after their kiss he suddenly began to cry, explaining that he had kissed her because the poses she was taking for him were so beautiful.

During the next days, he seemed to be struggling to keep his feelings on that ‘spiritual plane’ he had appealed to when guarding himself against Ottoline’s advances. But Ottoline was ‘rather awful to examine closely’,
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while Edna’s ‘disturbed emotional condition’ seemed to add to her attractiveness.

A few days later, Edna joined Gus and Dorelia for a walk along the cliff top to the next village where Henry Lamb had arrived. Then the four of them went off to an inn where Gus began drinking and, perhaps provoked by Lamb’s company, concentrating all his attention on Edna, his eyes fixed upon her face. Finally, in his deep voice, he began serenading her.

Suddenly Dorelia stretched out her arms in a curious protecting gesture towards Edna, took her hand and hurried her outside. They ran, stumbling along the dark cliff top, back to Diélette, Augustus careering after them, Lamb left by himself. Next day, and during the remainder of the holiday, no one mentioned this episode, and Augustus, smiling and sympathetic, was back at work painting the children and Dorelia.

‘Girl on the Cliff’ was shown at the New English Art Club exhibition at the end of 1909. ‘I am
longing
for it,’ Edna wrote. But it was bought for £40 and ‘I hadn’t got £40.’
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The buyer was Ottoline, who re-titled the picture ‘Nirvana’, the state of beatitude where all passions are dissolved.
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*

Though he had not liked the idea of taking seaside rooms again (‘It would be cheaper and infinitely better to have a few houses about the place to go to’), Augustus profited by his season at Diélette. ‘I have got, it seems to me, much further,’ he told Ottoline. But the prospect of a London studio and dingy London streets was not alluring. ‘I wanted to get to the Pyrenees or further instead of lingering in the chilly north, but I lack the necessary millions. So back again to the horrors of a Cockney winter. Are there no millionaires of spirit?’ he asked Will Rothenstein.

He returned to London early in October, and within a month he had found a house ‘in Chelsea with a big studio’.
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This was 153 Church Street, off the King’s Road – ‘a good house’, Dorelia decided.
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They took a two-and-a-half-year lease and moved in shortly before Christmas. ‘There is plenty of room and a piano,’ Augustus invited Lamb (23 December 1908). ‘…I hope you will come at once. You’ll have a room to yourself.’

It was also a jolly good place for the boys because of the patch of waste
ground, littered with bricks and bushes, that ran beside the King’s Road and was ideal for games. Round the corner, in Beaufort Street, was Epstein’s studio where they would help themselves to clay from the metal tins, roll the pieces into pellets and expertly flick them at one another. They were still sometimes farmed out to friends: to Ottoline (or ‘Ottofat’ as they called her), and to Edna Clarke Hall, who thought they looked somewhat forlorn. But it was a useful arrangement for Augustus who could paint their guardians whenever he came to fetch or deposit them.

London that winter of 1908 was ‘very hostile and the English sillier than usual’.
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Jobless men roamed the towns in their thousands, and Members of Parliament warned one another that blood would soon be flowing in the streets. ‘I hope blood will flow as nothing good can happen without,’ Augustus declared.
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Meanwhile, despite his mood of anarchy, he settled into the shell of his new home as if for protection against storms to come. ‘Perhaps the Epsteins may come to dinner to-day,’ he wrote to Ottoline (26 December 1908), ‘ – now that we are bourgeois folk with carpets and front doors and dining-rooms.’

Wanderers, you have sunrise and the stars;

And we, beneath our comfortable roofs,

Lamplight and daily fires upon the hearth,

And four walls of a prison, and sure food.

But God has given you freedom, wanderers!
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A broken collarbone partly accounts for Augustus having ceased wandering and turned bourgeois that winter. But, with the coming of spring, mended and eager, he resolved to abandon his carpets and comfortable roof. For three months, he had chafed within his prison walls, finding some relief in reading Dostoevsky’s
Les Possédés
,
‘a wonderful book’, and submitting himself to be ‘overhauled’ by a new doctor, ‘a celestial emissary in disguise’, recommended by Ottoline. ‘I am tired of nerves and glooms,’ he confided to her (13 January 1909), ‘and one could certainly surmount them, unhandicapped physically.’ By February he was already feeling ‘dangerously healthy’, the proper condition in which to take the open road.

During this interval, while dreaming of the freedom which would soon overtake him, he threw off a wonderfully dandified and belligerent portrait of the painter William Nicholson. ‘I have started Nicholson,’ he wrote to Ottoline on 8 January 1909, ‘ – as a set off to his rare beauty I am putting in a huge nude girl at his side. This will add to his interest, I feel… ’ Eventually, as one of several cross-references between the two artists, he put in one of his own paintings – a girl, fully clothed, against a mountainous
landscape at the lower right-hand corner of the composition, where his signature would have been.

The bold composition, with its low-key palette and associations with the royal pictures of Velázquez, was a style much favoured by Nicholson himself, who seems to stare from the canvas in alarm. There are also ironic references to William Orpen, who specialized in this genre of grand-manner portraiture, and had painted Augustus in a similar pose in 1900 as well as the Nicholson family in 1908. ‘William, overcoated, yellow-gloved, the picture of a Georgian buck, glares from the corner of an overdark eye at the beholder,’ wrote Marguerite Steen: ‘a superb piece of coloratura painting… one of the finest of John’s portraits, though not quite convincing as a likeness of the sitter. Still, perhaps in those days William did look like a gentleman pugilist, or perhaps this aspect of his personality was called out by their mutual fondness for the ring.’ For several years Augustus himself believed this to be his best portrait which, in the words of Andrew Wilton, ‘set the standards of his career as portrait painter: ambitious, slightly scandalous yet old masterly, respectful of mind and character rather than social rank, and not too serious’.
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He had recognized in Nicholson an excellent subject, but unless commissioned he could not afford to paint him. So Nicholson himself provided the canvas and commissioned the painting for a hundred pounds (equivalent to £4,700 in 1996), which he nevertheless forgot to pay and for which Augustus forgot to ask. It was a gentleman’s agreement, and when, some years later, the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge bought the portrait for a thousand pounds, the two painters happily pocketed five hundred each.