Augustus John (73 page)

What has survived of their correspondence reveals the secret of Frida’s ubiquity. When unable to accompany John on his wild flittings to and fro, she would arrange for him to be shadowed by a private detective, and it is round the competence of this man’s reports that many of their arguments revolve.

Each claimed that the other was making a public exhibition of them both. ‘If all Chelsea is aware of your existence it is simply because you have a genius for advertising it,’ John blandly concluded. Frida’s chief complaints centred on the company he kept other than her own. ‘You write love letters to all the girls in London, which they all read aloud,’ she objected. One girl, in a leopard skin, had recited nine pages to music; and another, unaccompanied, had danced a dance of jealousy. Was it any wonder, then, that Frida ‘felt like murder yesterday – I was mad, mad, mad’. It was untrue, she added, that Edith Ashley (‘a silly Kensington girl from a penny novel’) had ‘been bribed by me not to see you, that I had twice tried to murder her, once by poison, once by pushing her from a cliff’.

John refused to disbelieve her. ‘You are determined to be melodramatic to the last!’ He felt imperilled by her threats of love, recognizing ‘an audacious attempt at intimidation’. For she had sensed his fear of publicity and was constantly playing on it. ‘I was born as the only woman of one man,’ she was to write in her autobiography.
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That man was temporarily John. She therefore promised to ‘unmask’ his other women. ‘I have
shunned it until now for your sake,’ she added, ‘…for your wife and children’s sake.’

John feared that she would, by means of the courts and press, try to disrupt his life at Alderney. To forestall this he had already made Frida a figure of fun. She has ‘gone off her head again,’ he told Dorelia. ‘…The waiters in the Café Royal look at me with discreet sympathy.’
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She had one very potent weapon: death. It happened that she was strong on suicide, swallowing down regular doses of Veronal mixed with Bovril, then dispatching her abominably pretty maid to John with the news that she had tossed down this fatal cocktail and was about to die. But when, in terror of some farewell message for the coroner and press, he hurried to her bedside, there would always ensue an intolerable interview; and on one occasion, having seized his hat and bolted down the hotel corridor, he was overtaken by the dying woman in the lift.

In
Chiaroscuro
John makes well-rehearsed comedy out of such episodes, though it appears from contemporary documents that he was sometimes seriously disturbed by them. To John Quinn, revisiting London at the beginning of September 1911, he unburdened himself. Quinn’s diary entry for 3 September records that John, at the Café Royal, ‘sober but normal looking’, told him that, in response to four or five pleading letters from Frida, he had just gone to see her at the Capitol Hotel. He advised her that she had made ‘a damnable nuisance of herself, and that their relationship must end. She ‘clutched and raved’, but though he felt sorry for her, he steeled himself not to surrender. Later that night, in his studio at the Chenil, he learnt that she had again killed herself and was not feeling well. She is ‘pegging out in earnest this time’, he warns Dorelia. Next morning Quinn called round: ‘Awful tale about Madame Strindberg all right,’ he confirmed in his diary. ‘…Mme S. had taken poison and the doctor said she would not last the night. John shaken but game & determined not to give in. I felt sorry for him and did my best to brace him up. I don’t think he had slept very much. This damned Austrian woman has wasted John’s time – upset his nerves – played hell with his work.’ The two men walked to the Queen’s restaurant near Sloane Square and ‘I advised John if Mme S.
did
die to “beat it” – clear out of the country,’ Quinn continued. ‘…John is really a combination of boy and man – but a man of the highest principle.’

As a result of their discussion, John made up his mind, whatever happened, to accompany Quinn to France. ‘Would you come over too?’ he asked Dorelia. ‘…We could persuade Quinn to eat in modest restaurants.’ But Dorelia was involved in her vegetable garden and could not join them. Disappointed, John met Quinn at the Café Royal next evening to call the journey off, but changed his mind on hearing reports of Frida
Strindberg’s worsening condition. In place of Dorelia, he arranged for the two of them to be accompanied by Euphemia Lamb and another model, Lillian Shelley, ‘a beautiful thing… red lips and hair as black as a Turk’s, stunning figure, great sense of humour’.
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Exhilaration and exhaustion struggled for possession of Quinn. At midnight, he allowed himself to be guided by Lillian and Euphemia to John’s studio. ‘All drunk,’ he rejoiced, ‘and John sang and acted wonderfully. Two divans full – L[illian] the best natured.’ After breakfast Quinn ordered four tickets, and John bought ‘a swell automobile coat & cap’.
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John was looking forward to ‘a few days’ peace’; Quinn, more apprehensively, hoped that ‘the trip will be pleasant’. The two of them arrived punctually at Charing Cross station, but the girls did not. Instead, upon the platform stood Frida Strindberg, her only luggage a revolver. Quinn’s notes at this stage become shaky, though the word ‘carnage’ is deceptively clear. ‘Only by appealing to the guard,’ John wrote, ‘and the use of a little physical force were we able to preserve our privacy’
*2
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Undeterred she followed them on to the boat at Dover. John locked himself into his cabin, but Quinn, relishing this contact with Bohemian life, bravely offered the huntress a cup of tea. John was appalled when he heard of this errand: ‘She spoke to Quinn on the boat and tried to get him into partnership with her to run me!!’ he protested in a letter to Dorelia. To this purpose she had made an appointment to see Quinn the following day in Paris. But in the interval, Quinn lost his nerve and instead of keeping his appointment he took John to the Hotel Bristol to meet an American copper king, Thomas Fortune Ryan; a tall elderly Southerner who talked wearily in immense sums of money and pessimistically chewed upon an unlit cigar. That evening they went to the Bal Tabarin and were joined by a young Kabyle woman. ‘This dusky girl’s whole person exhaled a delicious odour of musk or sandalwood. A childlike candour illuminated her smouldering eyes.’
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At two o’clock that morning they returned to their hotel: ‘finally to P1. Pantheon,’ Quinn noted wearily, ‘& John went with the girl.’

By now Madame Strindberg had reached their hotel and ‘committed suicide’. There was not a moment to lose. ‘We shall throw her off the scent by means of the car,’ John assured Dorelia.
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Hurriedly borrowing Ryan’s seventy-five-horsepower Mercedes manned by ‘the best chauffeur in Europe’,
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a German, Quinn and John set off and ‘careered over France ruthlessly’.
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The prospect of a week with Quinn in such delightful country depressed
John, and he proposed reviving their earlier scheme by fetching over Lillian and Euphemia. Quinn was game, but Dorelia, to whom John suggested this by letter, was not: and the plan was reluctantly abandoned. For much of the time John was sullen and aggressive. ‘O these Americans!!!’ he burst out. ‘I don’t think I can stand that accent much longer… their naivete, their innocence, their banality, their crass stupidity is unimaginable.’
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Yet Quinn stayed doggedly optimistic. ‘John and I had a great time in France,’ he loyally declared.
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What they achieved in this breathless ellipse to and back from the Mediterranean was a forerunner of the modern package tour.
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‘It was like a nightmare.’ At the start they fuelled themselves with prodigious quantities of champagne. ‘The first day out we started on champagne at lunch,’ Quinn told James G. Huneker (15 November 1911):

‘That night at dinner, feeling sure that I would be knocked out the next day, I might as well go the limit and so we had champagne at dinner. I slept like a top, woke up feeling like a prince, and did a hundred and fifty miles next day, and from then on and every day till we returned to Paris we had two and sometimes three quarts of champagne a day – champagne for lunch, champagne for dinner, liqueurs of all kinds, cassis and marc, vermouth, absinthe and the devil knows what else.’

For John, who had counted on Quinn retiring to bed most days with a hangover, such resilience was disappointing. But there were many hair-raising misadventures to enliven the excursion. Their progress was punctuated by several burst tyres and encounters with chickens and dogs. At one place they knocked down a young boy on a bicycle and themselves leapt wildly down a steep place into a ploughed field. ‘We landed after about three terrific jumps,’ Quinn reported, ‘…just missed bumping into a tree which would have smashed the machine… the kid’s thick skull that got him into trouble saved him when he fell.’
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Having deposited the child with a doctor, they raced on expecting at every town to be arrested. ‘Quinn’s French efforts are amazing,’ John wrote in a letter to Dorelia. ‘Imagine the language we have to talk to the chauffeur. Desperando!’ Descending a tortuous mountain road, Quinn had inquired the German for ‘slow’. ‘Schnell,’ John replied. ‘Schnell!’ Quinn shouted at their burly driver, who obediently accelerated. ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ Quinn repeatedly cried. They hurtled down the mountain at breakneck speed and arrived at their hotel ‘in good time for dinner’ – though on this occasion Quinn immediately retired to bed.

In a letter to Conrad
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Quinn recalled ‘feeling like a fighting man’ during this journey. But the points were massing up against him. At night
he was haunted by ‘horrible shapes – stone houses, fences, trees, hay stacks, stone walls, stone piles, dirt walls, chasms and precipices advancing towards us out of the fog all to fade away into grey mist again’. On one occasion, John recounts in
Chiaroscuro,
‘when the car was creeping at a snail’s pace on an unknown road through a dense fog in the Cévennes, the attorney [Quinn] suddenly gave vent to a despairing cry, and in one masterly leap precipitated himself clean through the open window, to land harmlessly on the grass by the road-side! He felt sure we were going over a precipice.’
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Quinn secretly, and John openly, were much relieved when their tour came to an end. ‘We were not quite a success as travelling companions,’ John conceded.
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The motor car, he concluded, ‘is a damnable invention’. Travelling on foot or by caravan was the proper progress for a painter. ‘Motoring is a fearfully wrong way of seeing the country but an awfully nice way of doing without railway trains,’ he instructed Dorelia. ‘It makes one very sleepy.’ Nevertheless, it had been impossible to overlook everything, the countryside, the cathedrals at Bourges and Chartres ‘veritably miraculous and power-communicating. The Ancients’, he told Will Rothenstein, ‘did nothing like this.’

Another success had been their final shaking-off of Mrs Strindberg. Two days after their return, Quinn embarked for New York; and John, having heard that Frida was again becoming ‘very active in London’, slipped quietly off to Wales. ‘It has been impossible to do any work travelling this way,’ he had complained to Dorelia from a brothel in Marseilles, ‘but one can think all the same.’ Now, in the peace of Wales, he could transfer these thoughts to paint.

‘Non Scholae sed vitae.’

Dane Court School motto
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One of the earliest visitors to Alderney was John’s father. He was a model of patience. For hours he would sit motionless and then move quietly about the garden, hoping to be photographed. Every day he put on the same costume he wore for promenading the beach at Tenby: a sober suit, leather gloves, dark hat, wing collar and spats. He too had recently moved, a distance of several hundred yards, to 5 Lexden Terrace, overlooking the sea. In this desirable residence he was to linger a little uncertainly some
thirty years, with the weather, a few illnesses and his ‘specimens of self-photography’ as companions. Occasionally he was looked in on by his grandchildren, and more occasionally by Augustus himself. It was a life spent patiently waiting, filling the long intervals with letters to Winifred to say he was writing to Gwen, and to Augustus saying he was writing to Thornton: and variations on this pattern.

From Dorelia’s family there came, among others, her mother – a very straight-backed old woman with shiny white hair and a comforting round face. She spent her days quilt-making, and in the evenings would take a hot brick from the fireplace, wrapping it in cloth to warm her bed.

From 1912 onwards the guests, many of them subjects for portraits and testifying to the rich variety of the human species, began to assemble at Alderney. Not everyone was immediately welcome. Wyndham Lewis ‘had an inner door slammed in my face’ by Dorelia who was nevertheless the object of his ‘most sympathetic admiration’. But this was because of his ‘empty abuse of Lamb’ which she had perhaps mistaken for ‘strenuous plotting’.
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And then, ‘Did you turn away Lord Howard de Walden & his wife one day at the door?’
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John mildly inquired. Perhaps she had, but if so it was because this valuable patron and important sitter (who was pregnant) looked like obvious troublemakers.

But many people found a home from home at Alderney. There was Iris Tree, with her freckles and blue shadows, gliding between the trees in a poetic trance; Lytton Strachey, who amazed the children by claiming he felt so weak before breakfast that he found it impossible to lift a match; Fanny Fletcher, a poor art student later revered for her wallpapers, who arrived for a few weeks, knitted herself into the household with her cardigans and gained the reputation for being a rather inefficient witch whose salad dressings were said to contain spells; there was also a Polish doctor of music, Jan Sliwinski, who became expert at tarring fences, mending walls and cataloguing books; the Chilean painter Alvaro Guevara with tales of terrific boxing matches in Valparaiso, where he had been a champion; and an ‘unknown quantity’, Haraldar Thorskinsson, called ‘the Icelander’, a speechless, hard-drinking Icelandic poet with bright carmine cheeks and stark black hair, who had written a play in which angels somehow figured and who was now heavily involved in defeating the law of gravity. Very often Henry Lamb (or ‘Arry Lamb’ as John called him) would ride over on a pony cart to play duets with Dorelia at the upright piano. Sounds of Mozart and of Bach fugues would float out of the open windows into the garden, sometimes followed by heated words as to who had played the wrong note and, more implausibly, whether or not there was a deity – for Dorelia was an agnostic and Lamb an atheist, and the two of them often argued over what neither of them believed. Horace de
Vere Cole, the country’s most eminent practical joker and inventor of turned-up trousers, who claimed descent from Old King Cole, would invite himself over, ‘such a hopeless child’, but always bringing a ‘Grand New Hoax’.