Authors: Michael Holroyd
Babies, as a substitute for art, had failed even before Robin’s birth. ‘As soon as I am up,’ she wrote to Margaret Sampson, ‘I am going to climb an apple tree – and
never
have another baby.’ For a time, cooking, gardening, even hens had become surrogates. Yet still the babies kept on coming and her disenchantment deepened: ‘We are all such impostors!’ she exclaimed. Then, in a letter from Paris in April 1906 Ida revealed to the Rani that she had made ‘violent efforts’ to dislodge her fourth child during early pregnancy. Her ambition to have a large family had died and was being replaced by something else.
They did not have, she and Gus, any skill or habit of contraception.
Nor did most people. Almost half a century after his marriage, Augustus was to make a quick sketch of the birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes, whom he portrayed as a beneficent ‘witch’. But before the social revolution in family planning which Marie Stopes began in the 1920s, contraception was not easy for men and almost impossible for women. Neither men nor women were given any sex education and ignorance was equated with innocence. So they relied on the rumours of folklore, odd pieces of sponge and rubber, on periodic infertility and the split-second practice of
coitus interruptus.
Augustus was no good at this French-farce timing. There was only one time for him: the present. So he was seldom prepared. Condoms were in any case not openly for sale in pharmacies, and for someone prudish over such matters it was devilish awkward ordering these almost unmentionable provisions in a public place. Besides all these difficulties, he and Ida and Dorelia never knew when sexual intercourse would overtake them. They were all young, potent, fertile and, in their inevitable rebellion against the late-nineteenth-century culture of suppression, driven to act spontaneously.
Even before Dorelia had arrived at Matching Green, Ida had written to the Rani: ‘It suddenly strikes me how perfectly divine it would be if you and I were living in Paris together. I can imagine going to the Louvre and then back to a small room over a restaurant or something… think of all the salads, and the sun, and blue dresses, and waiters. And the smell of butter and cheese in the small streets.’ Conceived as fantasy, her romance was coming to life in fact. It represented for Ida a new attitude to the world and her place in it. ‘I should like to live on a mountainside and never speak to anybody – or in a copse with one companion,’ she wrote. ‘I think to live with a girl friend and have lovers would be almost perfect. Whatever are we all training for that we have to shape ourselves and compromise with things all our lives? It’s eternally fitting a square peg into a round hole and squeezing up one’s eyes to make it look a better fit.’
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The girlfriend was different, but the philosophy was the same. In her experience, men were of two conditions: the artists and poets, who were beyond good or evil, and with whom one fell in love; and the others who mostly bored her. Both were impractical as husbands. With girls, however, she could develop an enduring intimacy. ‘I wish I’d been a man,’ she confessed to the Rani. ‘I should then have felt at home in this infinitely simple world.’ To some extent, it was the man’s part she intended to play in Paris.
*
Augustus, Ida and Dorelia, with David and Caspar, Robin and Pyramus
and Bobster their dog, set sail for France at the end of September 1905. The sea was rough, the boat rolled and Caspar (who was violently sick) declared in some alarm: ‘We’d better go back.’ Ida had taken two rooms for them all at the Hôtel St-Pierre in the rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine. ‘The hotel people are very kind and the food lovely,’ she assured her mother. ‘Children
perfectly
well and Tony [David] especially cheerful… [he] asked last evening if all the people in Paris talked nonsense.’ Robin, however, seemed to pick up the new language astonishingly fast, and very soon was calling everyone
fou, sot
and
nigaud
in the most threatening manner.
From the hotel Ida sent Gus out to find a good cheap apartment for them all. ‘I really feel more disposed to sit down comfortably & await the miracle rather than go through the faithless formality of climbing several thousand stairs a day, and arousing a thousand suspicions, a thousand vain hopes,’ he wrote to Sampson. ‘…Ida has forbad me the Louvre till I bring home glad tidings. I admit I called on [Louis] Anquetin to-day… I went and had an ostentatious drink at the nearest café… and then bought a brown plush hat with a feather in it which must be very irritating seen from a bird’s eye point of view.’
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These tactics were surprisingly successful and he soon came across what they wanted, near the Luxembourg Gardens. By the middle of October they had moved into 63, rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and engaged a young girl called Clara to look after them while they looked after the children. ‘She [Clara] cleans a room thoroughly in the twinkling of an eye,’ Ida informed Alice, ‘cooks exquisitely, is clean to a fault, and can remember the exact mixture and amount and time of food for 3 babies under 1 year.’ She was, moreover, not physically beautiful and seemed ideally suited to them.
Ida’s fourth child, confidently referred to as Suzannah since its conception, was born on 27 November. It was ‘another beastly boy – a great coarse looking bull necked unpoetical unmusical commercial snoring blockhead’, she told Margaret Sampson. Yet he was the weakest of all her children and for over a year lived on bread, milk and grapes. ‘He is called Quart Pot – as being a beery fourth,’ Ida wrote to the Rani. ‘…After my experience I have quite given up the belief in a good god who gives us what we want. To think I must make trousers to the end of my days instead of the dainty skirt I long to sew… he is a difficult child like David was… Poor little unwelcome man.’ Later called Jim, he finally settled, after gigantic difficulties in registering his birth, into the name of Edwin.
The world was fuller than ever of babies. But in these new surroundings, and fortified by her new outlook on life, Ida did not feel submerged. ‘I
almost think it worth while to live in this little world of children,’ she confessed to the Rani. ‘We are sometimes convulsed with laughter.’ Laughter was the new ingredient in her life. ‘Things mostly get worse in this world,’ she had written to Margaret Sampson from Matching Green. Now, from Paris, she wrote to her: ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that laughter is the chief reason for living… One is not bound to be too serious.’ This was her new discovery, and with it rose ‘those bubbles inside’ that made her feel ‘like a champagne bottle that wants to be opened’.
Dorelia was the centre of this happiness. While Augustus came and went, appearing over the horizon of London and Paris, she looked after Ida during her confinement and after Edwin’s birth; she coped with the crises ranging from burst hot-water bottles to outbreaks of measles. Difficulties dwindled in her presence like weeds starved of nourishment: it seemed ridiculous to get worked up over such trivial affairs. ‘My dear, you have no idea of the merits of Dorelia,’ Ida confided to the Rani. ‘Imagine me in bed, and she looking after the 4 others – good as gold – cheerful – patient – beautiful to look upon – ready to laugh at everything and nothing. She wheels out 2 in the pram, David and Caspar walking, daily, morning and evening – baths and dresses them – feeds them – smacks them.’
A few years back, Ida remembered, she had thought the Dowdalls very rich because they drank wine with their dinner. The food in Paris was so delicious and the wine so cheap that they ate and drank whatever they wanted, thanks to Gus’s industry. ‘I think we must be rich,’ she wrote to Margaret Sampson, ‘because though there is such a lot of us, we live very comfortably and are out of debt.’
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Their new life contained many aspects of the old, but the two mothers were better able to deal with it. Ida, in particular, regained her self-confidence. ‘This place is divine,’ she wrote to Margaret Sampson, ‘and one can do everything – one feels so strong.’ Outside the flat, their routine was of an almost bourgeois respectability. ‘Time was spent taking the children out in a pram to the Luxembourg Gardens and in the evenings sitting in cafés or sometimes going to concerts, art shows, museums,’ Dorelia remembered. ‘How attractive Paris was in those days, separate tables outside the cafés and discreet lighting.’
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On the surface, their days were ‘fairly ordinary’. But those who called upon these bourgeois-bohemians at rue Monsieur-le-Prince saw something extraordinary. They had almost no furniture and only one bed between the lot of them – the children sleeping in boxes on rollers, the babies in baskets. ‘Here is a picture of our life in one of its rarely peaceful moments,’ Ida wrote to Alice early in 1906.
‘Imagine a long room with bare boards – one long window looking on to a large courtyard and through an opening in the houses round to the sky and a distant white house, very lovely and glowing in the sun, and trees. In the room an alcove with a big wooden bed in it. At a writing table David doing “lessons” – on the floor two baskets – Pyramus intent on a small piece of biscuit in one – Edwin intent on his own hands in another. Robin in a baby chair with some odd toy – Caspar on the ground with another. The quiet lasts about ten minutes at the outside. Unless they are asleep or out there is nearly always a howling or a grumbling from one or more – unless a romp is going on when the row is terrific.’
Will Rothenstein, who looked in at their flat on his way to Venice shortly after they moved in, was deeply shocked by what he witnessed. The Johns seemed like a slum family with Augustus, on one of his visits, one of his bad days, a fearful figure, stamping around the bare boards. ‘He is very impatient with his children and they are terribly afraid of him – the whole picture is rather a dark one,’ Will reported to Alice (19 October 1905). ‘…I felt terribly sad when I saw how the kiddies were brought up, though anyone may be considered richly endowed who has such a mother as Ida. Ours seem so clean and bright compared with them just now.’
But in Augustus’s eyes it was the children who terrorized him. They needed money, prevented work, wanted to be entertained, got on his nerves. One day, amid the uproar, losing his temper with David and Robin, he slapped both their faces: and then smarted with remorse. ‘They will never really forget my having clouted them in the face like that,’ he told Dorelia. ‘I have never forgotten my father (whom I would give you for 2d) kicking me upstairs once – when I was almost Tony’s [David’s] age. Tell Tony I want him to enjoy himself – but to be somewhat useful and intelligent at the same time.’ It was impossible to work in such an atmosphere and he returned after a fortnight to England.
Ida was now free to construct the life of which she had dreamed. Liberated from the man-dominated world, she struggled to escape the domination of children. In addition to the quick and intelligent Clara, she employed another servant, ‘an old sheep’ – ‘which is why we can saunter out, and spend money to an outrageous extent… and we come in again, after an absence of 4 hours and find absolute tranquillity – babies everywhere asleep in cots (literally 3) and 2 virtuous little boys looking out of [the] windows at the rain from a house built of chairs – too sweet for words. Life is pleasant and exciting.’
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At last Ida seemed to have won that great luxury, time: time in which to read Balzac, Dostoevsky, Emerson and the
Daily Mail;
time to buy
straw hats and cashmere shawls, to make clothes in which to sit for pictures which Gus might some day paint; time for music – Beethoven and Chopin; time to fill with talk and laughter and fantasy and sensuous laziness. They were not gregarious, the two of them: it was a secret life they led. ‘It is, for 2 or 3 reasons, impossible to know people well here – so I keep out of it altogether,’ Ida explained to the Rani. ‘…And it is just as nice in many ways not knowing people.’ Not knowing people was part of Ida’s detachment, her strength and freedom. ‘How delightful not to care what the neighbours think!’ she had sighed to Margaret Sampson at Matching Green. ‘My utmost is to tell myself and others that I do not care – I do all the time.’ In Paris she no longer cared so much. She had escaped from her family and the neighbours. She could be as free as Dorelia now: she felt sure she could.
Almost the only person they saw regularly was Gwen John – ‘always the same strange reserved creature’, as Ida described her.
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Dorelia offered to sit again for Gwen and made a black velvet jacket for her. But this phase of Gwen’s life was over – she was far from reserved with Rodin. Yet she was also strangely secretive. ‘Gwen persists in Paris,’ Augustus reported to Michel Salaman. ‘I suppose she prefers penurious liberty to social dependence. She has several pictures which she never shows to anyone.’ Gwen told Rodin nothing of the arrival of Ida, Dorelia and Gus in Paris (the new velvet jacket, she said, was made by a dressmaker), but wrote to him of her dreams and nightmares. Nevertheless, she would invite them over to her pretty new apartment at 7 rue St-Placide, a wide sunlit street of little shops on the northern boundary of Montparnasse. In the evenings they would dine with her on eggs and spinach and charcuterie in the room where she lived with her ‘horrid’ cat and where they would meet Miss Hart, an ex-pupil of Augustus’s at Liverpool ‘who has attached herself uncomfortably to Gwen’.
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Gwen gave them three beautiful pictures for their bare flat: also, Ida wrote to Augustus, ‘there was a head of Gwen by Rodin in the Salon’.
To be as irresponsible as she could allow herself, ‘as gay as possible under the circumstances’ – this was Ida’s ambition. Dorelia took to wearing bright jerseys and short velvet skirts; Ida cut her hair short but did not look
very
‘new womanish, because it curls rather’. But who were the new women if not Ida and Dorelia and Gwen? Then David, presumably pursuing this fashion, cut off all his own and all Caspar’s hair so that they were almost unrecognizable when Ida and Dorelia returned home. Released from the awful presence of their father – the eyes that stared, the voice that roared – the children had never been more boisterous. David, very light and springy, imitated bears and baboons; Caspar, very fat and solid in a sealskin cap, turned somersaults, and boasted that he
was a king; Robin, who climbed and jumped a lot, was constantly teased by David and Caspar, constantly teasing the beautiful Pyramus; while Edwin, a long thin cross creature, howled independently in toothless rage. But though the ‘acrobats’, as Ida called them, had never been more lawless, yet ‘I lose my temper less than of yore – Dorelia never did lose hers. We take it in turns to take them out.’