Augustus John (62 page)

Deciding to postpone Rome, he turned north and travelled between thick gloomy mountains with half-melted snow on them, through a grey mist hiding the sky, to Ravenna. ‘The mosaics here are superb,’ he wrote to Dorelia. ‘Westminster Cathedral ought to be done in the same manner.’
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He had intended only to change trains at Ravenna, but it was difficult to relinquish the Court of Justinian and Theodora, and so he stayed on several days. The Tomb of Theodoric, with its echoes of Gothic heroes, gave a sense of semi-barbaric splendour compared with which the modern world seemed pale. Padua, his next halting place, and the paintings of Giotto also slowed down his progress. He had seen so much he was growing confused. ‘Was it here I saw Piero della Francesca’s majestic Christ rising from the tomb?’ he wondered.
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‘I think not.’

But what did it matter, the provenance? Italy, he was discovering, represented for him the authentic tradition to which, undismayed by its splendour, he meant to dedicate himself. But it was in Provence that he was to find another home – ‘I love that patch of ground,’ he told Symons – and it was to the Provençal landscape, and to the landscape of North Wales, that he would look for his finest pictures. In such an atmosphere, less charged with the accumulated glory of the past and where there were no masterpieces to overawe him, Augustus would set to work: but enriched by what he had seen during these two brilliant weeks in Italy. For to Giotto of Padua, to Duccio, Masaccio and Raphael, to Piero della Francesca wherever exactly his resurrected Christ might be, and to Botticelli whose ‘Primavera’, lovely beyond compare, was the brightest jewel of Florence, he would ultimately trace his own cultural beginnings.

And so to Milan. A vast assembly of gypsies – twenty tents of pleasure – occupied a field outside the city. Work was in progress when Augustus approached, and the air rang with the din of hammering and the cries of these wild tribes. To his astonishment he found not only his Marseilles friends but also the coppersmiths he had met two years previously in Cherbourg – and there was a grand reunion. That evening a party filled
the principal tent. Black-bearded, sharp-eyed, fierce and friendly, the men had dressed themselves in the costumes of stage brigands. They carried long staves, and their white-braided tunics were decorated with silver buttons as large as hens’ eggs. The women were mostly in scarlet, and each had threaded twenty or more huge gold coins in her hair and on her blouse – a total, in sterling, of at least a hundred pounds. As the great celebration proceeded, these young girls were called upon to dance to the accordions, while the men lifted up their voices in melancholy song. The dancers, without shifting their position on the carpet, agitated their hips and breasts in a kind of shivering ecstasy. Cross-legged at a low table, Todor, the elderly chief next to whom Augustus sat, beat time until the bottles leapt, sometimes in sudden frenzy shattering his great German pipe – immediately to be handed another. Solid silver samovars littered the floor, and on the tables stood elaborately chased silver flagons a foot high and filled with wine and rum. Troops of old men were seated round them in a state of Bacchic inspiration, while outside the tent a crowd of
gâjos
looked on as if in a hypnotic trance. ‘The absolute isolation of the Gypsies seemed to me the rarest and most unattainable thing in the world,’ Augustus wrote to Scott Macfie (14 February 1910). ‘The surge of music, which rose and fell as
naturally
as the wind makes music in the trees or the waves upon the shore affected one strangely. It was
religious –
orgiastic. I murmured to my neighbour “Kerela te kamav te rovav” [“It makes one want to cry”].’

Late that night, while the festivities were in full swing, he tore himself away and, returning the next morning to annotate some songs, found the party still going strong – together with the rattle of twenty hammers beating out copper vessels, and the yelling of youths with shining eyes swaying together in a vast embrace. ‘If ever my own life becomes insupportable I know where to turn for another,’ he wrote to Quinn (3 March 1910), ‘and I shall be welcomed in the tents.’

*

Back to Marseilles. ‘In some respect it beats Liverpool even,’ he wrote to Chaloner Dowdall. He relished the roughness of the place. ‘You ought to let me take you round Marseilles one day,’ he offered the Rani. ‘There are things there to raise the hairs on Rothenstein’s back.’ Now he knew the night spots ‘I feel ready to live here,’ he told Dorelia. ‘One sees
beautiful
Gitano girls about with orange, green and purple clothes… Hundreds of people to paint… One of the women, without being very dark, is as splendid as antiquity and her character is that of the Mother of God.’

But his letters to Dorelia were filled with anxiety. For however urgently
he wrote, she did not answer him. When, for example, he asked for a bundle of postal orders and blank cheques to be sent, a registered envelope arrived at the poste restante which, since he still travelled without a passport, could not be released to him. After summoning two stalwart gypsies to swear in strange tongues as to his identity, he was eventually allowed to open the envelope, which was found to contain a dentist’s bill. He began besieging Dorelia with telegrams. ‘As you don’t answer my three telegrams I conclude you have had enough of me.’ What trickle of news did come through worried him. ‘You had better see a doctor about your poor tummy,’ he had written near the start of his journey, ‘ – and so leave nothing undone that might be good for you. Tell him you thought you had a fausse couche the other day.
Now do
!
’
The only information he had received since then was a note telling him she was suffering from mysterious pains in her side. ‘Your belly is very enigmatic,’ he replied. ‘You’d better come this way at the next period and make sure. You’d don’t want to have any more babies just yet. I don’t suppose you’ld better Pyramus and Romilly. Don’t forget to write… Au revoir, my love, I wish you were here.’

Finally she wrote. ‘I was overjoyed to hear from you,’ he answered. ‘I was steeling myself for another disappointment.’ The news itself was bad – and good. She
was
pregnant again: it had been a ‘false miscarriage’. She would join him in Provence, together with her friend Helen Maitland and a detachment of family. ‘This is splendid news!’ Augustus wrote back cheerfully. ‘I hope it’ll be another boy! Glad your belly has settled down to proper working order. I wonder what part of the babe will be missing. Its kâri perhaps, in which case it may turn out to be a girl after all.’

‘Certainly she deserves a rest & holiday,’ Lamb remarked, but ‘travelling with Augustus is a rather doubtful way of getting it.’ As for Dorelia herself, she seemed neither happy nor unhappy. Pregnancy was no mighty matter. ‘The terrible thing is I am going to have another infant in August (I don’t really mind),’ she wrote to Ottoline (February 1910). ‘…It is sure to be another boy.’

In view of what was to happen, and of the criticism voiced by Henry Lamb that Augustus was endangering Dorelia’s life, as he had done Ida’s, it is important to establish facts. An unusually intimate letter (‘to no one else could I write so intimately’) which Augustus sent Quinn (3 March 1910) reveals an aspect of what happened that seems to have been unknown to Henry Lamb and others. It also reveals a concern over this new pregnancy that Augustus was careful to keep veiled from Dorelia.

‘The infernal fact is that she is in for another baby sometime this summer. God knows I’ve got plenty of kids as it is, and worst of all Dorelia is not in robust health. Her inside bothers her. I tried my best to
avoid this – but she hates interfering with nature. All I hope is that she will at least get strong here. She insisted on bringing 3 of the youngest kids here; 3 remain in London and go to school.’

In his fashion he had been faithful to her, and besides she could always bring him to heel. Almost always. ‘I went through Italy without sampling a single Italian female,’ he gravely reassured Quinn. ‘I saw, however, many with whom I slept (with my eyes open) in fancy.’ He was to rejoin Dorelia at Arles. Travelling up there slowly from Marseilles, he wrote to Ottoline:

‘These really barren hills round here
enchant
me… I visited this evening two bordels here… the ladies were not very beautiful, strictly speaking – but I found them very aimable… There was a mechanical piano which my acquaintance played with the utmost dexterity. I was thoroughly interested and lost more money than if I had been a “client sérieux”.

At Avignon also I introduced myself into a bordel – “une maison très sérieuse”. The ladies of these establishments are absolute slaves. The patron took all this money and the travailleuses are not allowed to quit the house without permission. However they don’t complain – si le patron est gentil et pour vu qu’il y aurait beaucoup de clients. They are excessively simple.’

Two days later, ‘looking incredible with some white veil over her head’,
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Dorelia arrived.

*

She came with Pyramus, Romilly and Edwin; and with Helen Maitland. Helen was now her closest friend. She was a striking girl, with clear grey-blue eyes, a rosy complexion and finely formed features. Rather small, she held herself upright and moved with a slow, purposeful stride. The set of her face expressed a somewhat daunting determination; her tone of voice, flavoured with irony, was sometimes harsh: and she had a hard energy within. But it was her smile that was remarkable, softening her expression, sending out a challenge, an air of complicity. And it was this smile, which she offered like a bouquet of flowers, that made people pour out their troubles to her. For herself, she seldom spoke of her own difficulties. Like Dorelia, she was a listener.

Like Dorelia, too, she saw her life as a vocation to be fulfilled among artists. She was a woman who preferred, in a maternal fashion, to give love than to have the responsibility of receiving it. She was to marry, eight years later, the brilliant and burly Russian artist in mosaic, Boris Anrep – reputed to be the only man in London capable of standing up to Augustus in a fist fight; and in 1926 she was to leave him to live with
Roger Fry,
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many of whose ideas on modern art she was said to have ‘invited’ out of his head. But now she was in love with Henry Lamb.

It was galling to Augustus that, even though Helen’s love might not primarily be a thing of the senses, she should prefer the understudy to the star.
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Besides, in her loyalty to Dorelia, she was quick to be critical of him. His sense of the ridiculous often reduced her to tears of laughter, but though she laughed, she was not happy. Her love affair with Lamb was going badly and she blamed this on his erratic moods which, she believed, he had picked up from Augustus. She disapproved of the insensitive treatment of women on the excuse that they were raw material for art. Such masculine self-importance stirred her fighting qualities. Men she treated as children, and children as nonentities. She preferred men who sustained her belief that women were the more practical sex and should manage things. It was a belief shortly to be tested.

They assembled, the six of them, at Arles and caught the same train south which Augustus had taken the previous month along the Étang de Berre. Like a jewel in a chain changing colour and extending between the barren hills, the great lake seemed to mesmerize them all. ‘I have seen this Étang de Berre looking wonderful,’ Helen wrote to Lamb, ‘it has these pale brown hills all around and it’s small enough to get perfectly smooth the moment the wind is down and then the colours are lovely – very brilliant green one evening with a blue sky. All the way from Arles I was ecstatic with delight… simply speechless with astonishment at the curious light blue of one Étang we passed. It was so bright that it made the sky look dull and dark. They had planted cypresses all along the line so we only saw it for a moment or two now and again through a break in them. But I doubt if any mortal could have stood such loveliness much prolonged. On the other side was a vast stony plain, quite limitless and bare except for sage bushes and sheep.’

They were en route for the town whose spires Augustus had briefly seen rising from the waters on his first journey to Marseilles. At Pas des Lanciers they descended, ate their food squatting in a circle on the platform, then changed to a little railway line whose train skirted the Étang, passing close under hills of extraordinary shape, some very thin with jagged edges stacked one behind another and all bare except for grey aromatic herbs in patches – thyme, lavender and sage. At every orchard, at almost every cowshed, the train would stop. But at last they came to Martigues.

*

‘An enchanting spot this, situated in the water at the mouth of an island sea where it joins the Mediterranean,’ Augustus wrote to Ottoline. ‘…I
have seen so many powerful women whose essential nudity no clothing can disguise. In the little port at hand are found sea-farers from all the shores of the Mediterranean.’

For several days they stayed at a hotel, then moved into ‘an admirable logement unfurnished and unwallpapered, with a large room in which to paint’. This was the Villa Ste-Anne, a house they were to keep, using it intermittently, for the next eighteen years. On the outskirts of Martigues, along the route to Marseilles, it stood upon a steep yellow bank overlooking the blue waters of the lagoon. From the terrace stretched a plantation of pine trees, and all around were trackless stones, and rocky grey hills interfused with heather and sweet-smelling herbs. To Dorelia’s delight, they had a large wild garden with olives, vines, almonds, figs and ‘weeds all over the ground which is covered in pale coloured stones’.
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For the time being they shared the villa with its proprietor, a hawk-faced Huguenot with a passion for flying named Albert Bazin. Over twenty experimental years he had constructed a squadron of aeroplanes, all of which
flapped their wings.
From time to time, while Mme Bazin delivered a narrative of proceedings from the shore, he would launch one of them, like some enormous gnat, across the waters where at a desperate rate it would rise fractionally from the waves, sweep through a wide arc, then plunge into the bosom of the lake. Although these machines were always reduced to salads, Bazin himself was miraculously unhurt. With the arrival of Augustus his aviation fantasies soared to their highest altitude. For he recognized in this painter the perfect ‘jockey’ for his machines, and a source of revenue with which to continue his inventive industry. Augustus was delighted with this philosopher of the air and promised to sound out various art patrons on his behalf. Bazin needed, initially, a mere two hundred pounds (equivalent to £9,400 in 1996) to take off and ‘it must be found’, Augustus informed Ottoline (May 1910), since he was the ‘finest man and aviator in France’. But it was Quinn who, through many months, bore the brunt of Augustus’s enthusiasm. In letter after letter he was buried under information about this ‘real savant as regards flying matters’, flooded with journals that contained articles by Bazin proving that he ‘has got ahead theoretically at least of the other men’ such as Blériot. Augustus’s appeals took many forms. Would Quinn like ‘to collaborate with him and his machine No. 8 which ought to be ready in the autumn, if he finds the cash?’ Could some ‘American energy’ be harnessed for ‘my bird-like neighbour’? Perhaps someone from ‘the Land of Enterprise’ might investigate his ‘case’. ‘I wrote to you lately as longwindedly as I could about Albert Bazin,’ Augustus reminded him (23 May 1910). ‘…Do not be bored with Bazin yourself but bore your friends as much as you can.’ Quinn alternated between alarm on Augustus’s behalf –
‘don’t you attempt to go out on Bazin’s machine’ – and alarm on his own: ‘Personally I can’t afford to “take a flyer” now myself.’ Although any appeal to bore his friends was irresistible, he disliked such methods when applied to himself. ‘Say at once if you are not interested in the matter,’ Augustus would beg him like someone stone deaf, ‘and I will cease to bore you.’ ‘I am afraid it is hopeless!’ cried Quinn. But Augustus, approaching the problem from a different angle, urged: ‘He [Bazin]’s got a fine young daughter of 18 summers. The fact might as well be mentioned in view of the collaboration.’ ‘I’d rather collaborate with his daughter than I would with the old man,’ Quinn conceded, adding however that ‘Marseilles seems to be far off. But though the geography might be poor, the biology was strong enough, he insisted: ‘I may tell you that not eating much meat and not drinking lessens the strain on the testicles… I have doubled my efficiency since I quit eating so much and since I stopped drinking. If only I could cut out smoking entirely, I would treble my efficiency.’