Augustus John (70 page)

The pictures which these three painted before the war mark a short
phase in British art which, though it has been labelled ‘Post-Impressionist’, belongs more properly to the tradition of the symbolist painters.

But the war was to signal the end of their landscape painting.

‘There is no doubt that he pines for comrades & is sick of his chance pub acquaintances… but [I] much doubt whether he has not become inaccessible.’

Henry Lamb

‘It was cruel to leave Provence,’ Augustus had complained to Ottoline on his arrival back in England in September 1910. Only a month before he had started to feel homesick – but for what home? London really suited neither Dorelia, nor himself, nor the children who, especially Ida’s David, fell far too readily under the sway of Mrs Nettleship. ‘Dorelia (my missus) is very keen on a house in the country,’ Augustus reminded Quinn (December 1910), ‘and we shall have to look out for one soon. She tends to get poor in London.’

He had recommenced work on Hugh Lane’s decorations – no longer in Lane’s house but at the Chenil Gallery. ‘I think you will find Chenil’s quite a good place now,’ he reported with some optimism to Will Rothenstein, ‘and Knewstub is improving.’ Determined to get Lane’s pictures done by the spring ‘or perish’, he several times gave up ‘touching a drop of liquor’ and felt ‘exceedingly good’.

Having the Chenil as his office brought some alleviation to their Church Street problems, but it fell far short of solving them. The old difficulties crowded in. ‘Do you want a ring?’ Augustus suddenly invited Dorelia: but answer there came none. He had moved up his squadron of caravans to Battersea ‘so that we may turn into the van any hour’. As soon as spring came they might begin trekking over England: the possibilities were endless.

Some days over these next twelve months, Augustus would leave for the Chenil in the morning – a distance of five hundred yards – and not return that night at all. Next day Dorelia would receive a note from Essex, Berkshire or Brittany: ‘the country is so beautiful – you wouldn’t believe it – I suddenly quitted London.’ In October he went to France; in November he took off to see Eric Gill at Ditchling, discussing there the question of a New Religion and a co-operative scheme for taking a house
from which their work could be sold independently of the dealers. In December he hurried back to Charlie McEvoy’s ‘pig-stye’ at Wantage: ‘Mrs McEvoy frequently wishes you were here,’ he wrote to Dorelia – adding hastily: ‘So do I.’

A family Christmas at Church Street being obviously unsupportable, he once more set off for the Chenil and arrived this time in Paris. ‘I have been so embêté lately and have taken refuge in Paris and have neglected all my pleasures,’ he explained to Ottoline (27 December 1910). ‘…I found London quite deadly and think of going south again till England becomes more habitable. I hear Lamb has been doing your portrait
72
– le salaud!’ He dined with Royall Tyler off stuffed pigs’ trotters; saw Epstein and Nevinson, and squared up to Boris Anrep;
73
searched in vain for Gwen; attempted to teach Euphemia to ride a bicycle; was chased by a Swedish tiger-woman from whom he escaped through a smoke screen of Horace Cole’s practical jokes (including, apparently, a mock operation for appendicitis); and with devastating innocence concluded: ‘Paris is certainly preferable to Chelsea. I think I’d like to live here.’
74

For most of this time he stayed at 40 rue Pascal with Fabian de Castro, the Spanish guitarist who, having outwitted his gaolers in Madrid, was now writing his autobiography. ‘He has wandered all over Europe,’ Augustus warned Quinn, ‘and even across the Caucasus on foot and speaking only Spanish – and has done everything except kill a man.’

He was thinking of passing on to Marseilles with a Miss George, possibly Teresa George who had called on him to say that Edwin, his father, was seeking her hand in marriage. ‘He and I had something in common after all, then,’ Augustus concluded. At any rate, he asked in a letter to Dorelia, she ‘might be useful, posing?’ But instead of Marseilles, he arrived in London leading, like small deer behind him, a troupe of his cronies up to the front door of Church Street. What with the cook’s two children to reinforce Augustus’s six, and the intermittent appearances of Helen Maitland and Edie McNeill to reinforce those of Fabian de Castro and Miss George, the place was crowded as for war. One packed night during the first week of January 1911, fire broke out in the house, and Augustus, wakened by screams, ‘leapt out of the room half-crazy and found our servant on top of the stairs burning like a torch. I happened to have been sleeping in a dressing-gown by some happy chance and managed to extinguish the poor girl with this. But it was a terrible moment… fortunately her face, which is a good face, was untouched. She was burnt about the arms, legs and stomach… She had come up the stairs from the dining-room, blazing – the smell nearly made me faint afterwards. It was the hottest embrace I’ve ever had of a woman.’
75
They summoned a ‘smart little doctor’ to do the repairs to the girl and to Augustus himself,
whose left hand and leg and areas nearby had got toasted without, he was anxious to demonstrate, putting him ‘out of action in the slightest degree’.
76
He was, however, ordered to stay in bed. ‘This will mean keeping quiet for a few days,’ he told Quinn (5 January 1911), ‘after which I want to take one of my vans on the road for a week or so and then get back to work with full steam up.’

For Dorelia it was not these conflagrations so much as the convalescences that were arduous; not the explosive rows but the periods of ‘keeping quiet’. She, who could enjoy-and-endure so much of the heroic, found herself strangely vulnerable to the trivial. A small thing it was that finally cracked her: the matter of spitting. Fabian de Castro was a splendid guitarist, but he
would spit in the bath,
and this infuriated Dorelia. She lay awake thinking about it, and finally she put up a notice: PLEASE DO NOT SPIT IN THE BATHROOM. Then, when he took no notice of it, she left.

She left for Paris, and she left with Henry Lamb. It was a casual business. ‘Dorelia is in Paris for a few days and I in London,’ Augustus remarked in the course of a letter to his old Slade friend Michel Salaman dealing with the more pressing matter of ponies. But it was not casual for Lamb. ‘I stayed more than a week,’ he wrote to Lytton Strachey (1 February 1911): ‘seeing for the first time the city in all its glamour of history, art and romance. But I should explain Dorelia was there and that I came back with her in a motor car belonging to an American millionairess [Mrs Chadbourne]. Now I am completely rejuvenated and working with tenfold industry’ Intermittently Dorelia would have this effect on him, but his love for her in the shadow of Augustus caused him much pain and perhaps accounted for the wounds he inflicted on those, like Lytton Strachey, who fell in love with him. On the evening of their return, after they had parted, Lamb wrote to Ottoline:

‘I arrived about 6 this evening having travelled since very early on Sunday with Dorelia, Pyramus and Mrs Chad, in her motor. The excitements of Paris came in an unusually trebled dose, and the final shaking of the journey have reduced me too low… I have lived too giddily these last days to give them the thought they must have. It is an odd and desolate sensation to spend the evening alone. I must turn into bed immediately in the hope of a braver morning moral.’

By the time Dorelia arrived back in Church Street, ‘full steam’ was up. Augustus and his friends had journeyed into Essex for a gypsy evening during which Euphemia executed a fantastic belly dance, writing her name and address on the shirt fronts of those she favoured as she whirled past
them. Then, on their return, Horace Cole charged his motor car into a cartload of miscellaneous people injuring many, one severely. Innes, too, had ‘been doing la Bombe lately by all appearances’, Augustus advised Dorelia; and McEvoy, in her absence, had sprouted ‘a moustache like an old blacking brush’. Now there was the Gauguin Ball in London; and after that Lady Gregory had invited him back to Coole. But first, he decided (10 February 1911), ‘I want to go south again and work in the open.’ This was his way of announcing he was going west to meet Innes. But after returning from some intense days round the lakes and mountains of old Merionethshire, he found Dorelia had gone off with Lamb again. ‘Dorelia did come the last day at Peppard,’ Lamb wrote to Strachey (11 May 1911); ‘we walked through divine woods and lunched in an exquisite pub with the politest of yokels and I… got of course quite drunk. Then I had another evening with her all alone at Bedford Square. It was more than the expected comble [climax].’

Lamb’s original fantasy of ‘a discreet form of colony’ which he had illustrated in his letter to Ottoline with an amoeba-like drawing of Johns, Maitlands, Morrells and himself, was almost being translated into fact. Like a rock-pool by the sea, the colony was sometimes teeming, sometimes vacant. Innes and Euphemia and Epstein (whose ‘weak point’, Augustus disapprovingly noted, was ‘sex’); Alick Schepeler and Wyndham Lewis – all these and countless others would float in and be carried out from time to time, causing a little ripple. But for Lamb there was no one so important as Dorelia. He writes about her in a tone – rueful, tender, oblique – he reserves for no one else. He saw and heard too little of her; but he felt hopelessly in her debt.

When Augustus returned to North Wales in May he took Dorelia with him. But she did not like the bare unruly place and came back alone. ‘We are getting restless about moving,’ Augustus had confided to Quinn (10 February 1911). Dorelia was certainly restless. Cut off from the country she seemed to lose strength. There was no sun in London, no air, no time, no involvement with real things. She had to get away.

They had written to a number of friends asking them to look out for a house in the country. Investigations had not begun well. Pursuing a house in the west with Charlie Slade, Augustus tripped, fell, damaged his leg and returned home an invalid. ‘Please get me a house, John,’ he had desperately wired to his friends the Everetts. In reply he received a list of questions with intervening spaces, which he loyally filled in and sent back. Shortly afterwards, Katherine Everett came upon Alderney Manor, a strange fortified bungalow, larger than most houses, which had been built by an eccentric Frenchman. It was set in sixty acres of woodland near the Ringwood road outside Parkstone in Dorset, included a walled
garden, cottage and stables – all for a rent of fifty pounds a year (equivalent to £2,290 in 1996). The owner, Lady Wimborne, a keen Liberal and evangelical leader, insisted in conversation with Katherine Everett that ‘we should be pleased to have a clever artist for a tenant.’
77
Dorelia was ready to take the house sight unseen, but Augustus, in the guise of a practical man, cautioned her: ‘The house is no doubt lovely in itself, but it must be seen – so much depends on the placing of it.’ They therefore went down to spend a few days with the Everetts, who lived some three miles from Alderney.

‘I can still visualize the group coming up our pine-shaded, sun-dappled drive,’ Katherine Everett wrote. ‘Mrs John, who was leading a grey donkey with a small boy astride it dressed in brilliant blue and another equally vivid small boy at her side, wore a tight-fitting, hand-sewn, canary-coloured bodice above a dark, gathered, flowing skirt, and her hair very black and gleaming, emphasized the long silver earrings which were her only adornment.’
78

‘It’s a good find,’ Augustus informed Quinn, ‘any amount of land with pine woods goes to it, and inexpensive.’
79
Some repairs and alterations were needed and, while these were being arranged, the Johns camped in the Everetts’ grounds, amusing themselves by decorating the small empty gardener’s cottage where they ate, painting the walls black and the furniture scarlet.

‘One afternoon,’ Katherine Everett remembered, ‘the children decided to get the red and black paint off their persons, so they all undressed and, with turpentine soap and scrubbing brushes, set to work to clean themselves up. It was while they were so occupied that Lady Wimborne paid her first call.’
80

For a moment Alderney seemed to tremble in the balance, but Lady Wimborne, her liberal principles fully extended, sailed past this test and all was settled. Over these summer months, Dorelia spent her time preparing for their move. ‘D. has gone to live for ever near Poole,’ Lamb wrote in despair to Lytton Strachey. But already, in the second week of July, he had joined her there for what he called ‘a supreme time’. In a letter to Strachey (24 July 1911) he described what was to become for him a second home.

‘She [Dorelia] lives in an amazing place – a vast secluded park of prairies, pine woods, birch woods, dells and moors with a house, cottages and a circular walled-garden. And, pensez, all these you could have possessed for £50
a year –
we
could have possessed them!! It was very hot when I was there and lovely naked boys running about the woods. John was away.
In the course of some almost endless conversations with D. I thought her as superior as ever, but in danger of becoming overgrown in such isolation.’

On leaving Alderney, Lamb crossed over to France, a sudden enterprise inciting him to carry off with him Dorelia’s sister, poor picturesque Ede’ – a substitution he instantly regretted.

‘Funny things continue to happen,’ Augustus told Ottoline (14 July 1911). While Lamb was lingering at Alderney, Augustus had been in Liverpool finishing his portrait of Kuno Meyer – a good portrait though painted in an ‘awful cellar’ at the Sandon Studios Society. He liked to keep up his Liverpool associations. ‘I am really attached to Liverpool,’ he told his friend, the architect Charles Reilly with whom he was lodging, ‘and I would rather paint a Liverpool portrait than another.’ Reilly was roused from sleep one night by Augustus climbing through his bedroom window; next day the playwright Harley Granville Barker was surprised at finding himself cross-examined over dinner on the subject of ‘a horse and trap’; then Innes was infuriated on being joined at Nant-ddu by the painter Albert Lipczinski and his beautiful wife Doonie, sent expressly from Liverpool – ‘they are incredibly poor’, Augustus explained; the Sampsons and Dowdalls were of course visited, and Susan their maid. And all Liverpool was praised and blamed: ‘The Mersey is a grand thing. The ordinary Li-pool population is awful – hopeless barbarians.’
81