Augustus John (45 page)

‘I have awful fits of boredom –
awful
… I dreamt such a dream of you last night’, he confided to her,

‘ – and you had at last actually consented to take off your clothes – at any rate you were quite naked and quite beautiful… I would love to lie about with you – no, I mean walk long walks with you – and perhaps have a bathe now and then. The people I see on the beach don’t please me… I am horribly restless – I wonder why the devil I came here now. I curse myself – and calculate the maximum of years I have to live… Kiss me Alick – if you love me still a bit – darling you strange one. It is time I went on with that portrait. I believe I shall do nothing before – almost. I am expecting a letter from you – Alick – I kiss your knees and eyes and mouth.’

He lived for her disappointing letters, wrote to her almost nightly, and composed sonnets to her in which he discovered (with apologies) her Christian name rhymed with ‘phallic’.

Maddened by frustration – and insect bites – he could not wait to be out of ‘this sea-side hole’ and begin to paint ‘Whitmanic’ pictures. ‘Just write, beloved,’ he urged Alick, ‘and keep my spirits up. I foresee dismal
things if you don’t. The sea is beautiful all the same – I would like to lie in the sun with you and let the water dry on us.’

The other side of these generous letters was a lack of generosity to those around him. He could not help himself. For day after day Ida, Dorelia and the children were subjected to his devouring apathy. Deprivation – if only as conjecture – restored the prevailing condition of his childhood: deprivation of a mother; deprivation of love. He reacted like a difficult adolescent, grew surly, then aggressive. After many dangerous days of simmering, he could hold himself back no longer. ‘I have been dissecting myself assiduously here,’ he informed Alick, ‘and as a consequence have thrown overboard all self-respect and feel infinitely more comfortable and free and on excellent terms with the Devil.’

This allusiveness concealed a crisis that split apart the arrangements that Ida, with Dorelia’s collaboration, had so carefully prepared. Augustus had no wish to hurt either of them, but misfortune moved in his blood like a poison, and he had to expel it or die. ‘How I hate causing worry!’ he exclaimed. And how much he caused! For he hated being ‘unnatural’, and he hated secrets, which were claustrophobia to him. But his awful melancholy made him ‘careless of other people’s feelings’. What he now did was to blurt out the truth to Ida and Dorelia – the unstable truth of the moment. He told them that domestic life, even the ramshackle variety with which they had experimented, smothered him; he told them of his liberating passion for Alick, how his painting could not advance without her. People said you could not have your cake and eat it: but what was the point of having a cake and not eating it? There was no personal criticism in all this – it was simply that he could not be restricted; he would explode. Boredom, guilt, frustration, sterility: to such morbid sensations had their
ménage
led him. ‘I think I have about done with family life or perhaps I should say it has done for me,’ he wrote to Alick, ‘ – so there is nothing to prevent us getting married now.’

Marriage to Alick was only another fantasy he sported because ‘I wish to remain as respectable as possible in your eyes.’ What in fact he proposed was something less original: to duplicate the arrangement he had with Ida and Dorelia in Paris, with a similar arrangement with Alick and Frieda Bloch. He was full of plans for them to join him. ‘If I had a wish for the fairies to fulfil it would be that you would come to Paris with Miss Bloch before long and collaborate with me,’ he tells Alick; and then: ‘I begin to see very plainly that Miss Blocky will never get on unless she comes to Paris and brings you with her. I will find her a studio – and I will show her things I’m pretty sure she never suspected.’

Only now, for the first time, did Ida and Dorelia acknowledge that they could not contain Augustus. He was not proposing to leave them, simply
to add to their number. He made no secret of it. ‘John is taking a studio in Montmartre, where he thinks of installing two women he has found in England,’ Wyndham Lewis confided to his mother; ‘and I think John will end by building a city, and being worshipped as sole man therein, – the deity of Masculinity.’
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It was Dorelia who resolved that she wanted no place in this city. Once Romilly was three or four months old, she would ‘buzz off’.
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Ida too would have liked to leave. Her predicament is set out poignantly in a letter she wrote from Ste-Honorine to the Rani:

‘Dearest, daily and many times a day I think I
must
leave Augustus. Isn’t it awful? I feel so stifled and oppressed. If I had the money I think I really should do it – but I can’t leave him and take his money – and I can’t keep the kids on what I have – and if I left the kids I should not find peace – you must not mind these confidences, angel. It is nothing much – I haven’t the money so I must stay, as many another woman does. It isn’t that Aug is different or unkind. He is the same as ever and rather more considerate in many ways. It’s the mental state – I don’t understand it and probably I should be equally slavish – No – I know I am freer alone. However one has lucid moments anywhere. Don’t think me miserable. All this is a sign of health. But it’s a pity one’s got to live with a man. I shall have to get back home sooner or later – not meaning 28 Wigmore Street and it doesn’t matter as long as I don’t arrive a lunatic. It’s awful to be lodged in a place where one can’t understand the language and where the jokes aren’t funny. Why did I ever go there? Because I did – because there lives a King I had to meet and love. And now I am bound hand and foot darling how will it end? By death or escape? And wouldn’t escape be as bad a bondage? Would one find one’s way… ’

At the end of September they all left Ste-Honorine and returned to the rue Dareau where the flowerbeds in their little garden had now been dug into mud-holes by the children. ‘I get fits of depression about every two hours – alternately intervals of malign joy,’ Augustus confessed to Alick. ‘Paris is a queen of cities but I think Smyrna would suit me better.’ Next moment he hankered after Italy – the Italians were surely the finest people in the world, and besides, he would be able to see in Italy ‘my darling Piero della Francesca’. Genoa might suit him, of course, or ‘Shall we go to Padua?’ he asked Alick. But even before his invitation had arrived, several new brainwaves were upon him: ‘I am inclined to take refuge in Bucharest at the nearest, to seek serenity in some Balkan insurrection, or danger in a Gypsy tent, or inevitable activity in Turkistan… I am horribly aware of the power of Fate to-night.’ This self-destructive
urge quickly passed and, in a more hibernating mood, he suddenly inquired: ‘Perhaps I may depend on you for warmth this winter… I feel that once back in London I shall never leave it.’ By now Alick was thoroughly confused. What really
was
happening? Augustus was astonished at her question. Surely everything was perfectly clear. ‘As to my coming to London, is it not already definitely arranged?’ he demanded. ‘Haven’t I said jusqu’à l’automne a dozen times? And is not my word unimpeachable – am I not integrity itself?’

He did return to London that October, while Dorelia prepared to move off the following month. Only Ida was to stay on at the rue Dareau – with her pack of boys, and two quarrelling servants. Her bondage there was now tighter than ever for, to add to the complications, Clara had become pregnant.

And, since it was her turn, Ida herself was again pregnant.

‘It was more circumstances than anyone’s fault.’

Ida John to Alice Rothenstein (August 1905)

For the next six months, between October 1906 and the spring of the following year, Augustus, Ida and Dorelia tried for the last time to find a scheme of separate co-existing ways of life.

For Augustus the first taste of this new regime was indeed sweet. His depression lifted like clouds at evening, and exhilaration blazed through. The world was a grand mixed metaphor and he stood, in superb uncertainty, an extended simile at its centre. ‘I feel recurrent as the ocean waves,’ he noticed on arriving in London, ‘blue as the sky, ceaseless as the winds, multitudinous as a bee-hive, ardent as flames, cold as an exquisite hollow cave, generous and as pliant as a tree, aloof and pensive as an angel, tumultuous as the obscenest of demons...’
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But how long would this combination of feelings persist? Augustus himself was as confident as a boy. ‘I no longer suffer from the blues,’ he told Alick, ‘and my soul seems to have returned to its habitation. I think you are more adorable than ever.’ Though painting some of the ‘prehistoric sea-women’ that summer, he had been damnably lazy but, as he explained, ‘it is when I am not at work enough that I get bored’. The will to work throbbed through him. Seldom had he felt so vigorous.

But first there were some small practical matters to attend to. For while
his soul had found its habitation, there was still no place to house his body. He required a new studio in London – a fine new studio to match his mood – and, while he was about it, should he not take another new studio in Paris? Then he would be free at last to paint. He wanted some place in Paris, ‘remote and alone – in some teeming street – where I can pounce on people as they pass, hob-nob with Apaches [gangsters] and maquereaux [pimps] and paint as I can. Then of course the studio in London – the new one – in your [Alick Schepeler’s] neighbourhood.’
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He had found nothing in Paris before leaving. He now took up the search in London trusting to ‘the Gods’ to guide him to ‘a studio I can live in and where you can come and sit without being spied on’. But the Gods, and estate agents, led him a complicated dance – to Paddington, Bermondsey and the East End: all without success. For the time being he still used his studio in the Chenil Gallery, which Knewstub offered to lease to him for a further year. But independence meant freedom from the Knewstubs, Orpens and Rothensteins, and so he refused it – while continuing to use it
faute de mieux.
For a short period he rented another studio in Manresa Road from the Australian painter George Coates. It seemed a splendid place – Holman Hunt had painted there – but Augustus did not stay long. Dora Coates noted that he had ‘a compelling stare when he looked at a woman that I much resented’. She also resented his treatment of the studio – soiled socks and odd clothes lay thick upon the floor amid the dust of weeks, and by the time he left it was as ‘dirty as a rag and bone shop’ and had to be scrubbed with carbolic soap. He found no other place so good as this, and by February 1907 was reduced to a ‘beastly lodging’ at 55 Paultons Square, owned by Madame Herminie Considerant, corset-maker.

The only virtue of such a place was that, being in Chelsea, it was near Alick. They saw a lot of each other that winter. Often their meetings ended rowdily. She is always striking him in the face with her ‘formidable fist’, he apologizing too late for being ‘so damnably careless’. Sitting to him, she discovered, like almost everything else, bored her excessively. Yet he had to paint her. His seriousness surprised her. ‘You have not come to-day – but, dear, come to-morrow – You know I am not stable – my moods follow, but they repeat themselves – alas – sometimes – I must paint you dear – to-day – probably you don’t quite like me – but do come to-morrow. Who knows? – You may find me less intolerable to-morrow… à demain, n’est-ce-pas chère, petite Ondine souriante. Soyons intimes – franches – connaissants – alors amants.’ By the end of the year, feeling ‘I want to wash myself in the Ocean’, Augustus returned to Paris.

It was desperate work this seeking for studios. Gwen was also looking for a new place – her flowers at the rue St-Placide were dying for lack of
light. Besides, her room there was too square, and Tiger had taken against it. Like Gus she found the seeing of ‘horrible rooms’ very depressing. ‘Either the concierges were rude or their husbands lewd or there were single men among the
locataires
,’
wrote her biographer Susan Chitty. Towards the end of the winter she found what she wanted, ‘the prettiest ever room’ on the fourth floor at 87 rue du Cherche-Midi, a wider street round the corner of rue St-Placide. Tiger was happy, sharpening her claws on the wicker chair, and so was Gwen. After almost three years, Rodin had asked her to model nude for him again.

At about the same time as Gwen was moving round on a horse and cart, Gus also struck lucky, finding a vast room off the boulevard St-Germain, in an old
hôtel
(town house) belonging to the famous Rohan family. ‘I have taken a studio – with a noble address. Cour de Rohan [3], Rue du Jardinet,’ he told Alick. By February 1907 the workmen were busy converting it – ‘my studio commences to be magnificent’ – and by March he had moved in – ‘I will be about doing things in it soon.’ But by March it was too late.

*

As soon as Augustus had returned to London, Dorelia made her move. Ida sublet the studio at rue Dareau, and the two women set off to find a
logement
for Dorelia. By the beginning of November they had found what she wanted at 48 rue du Château. ‘It has 2 rooms and a kitchen and an alcove – one of the rooms is a good size,’ Ida told Gus.

‘It is in a lovely disreputable looking building – very light and airy, the view is a few lilac trees, some washing hanging up and a railway – very pleasant – and to our taste… The logement is 300frs a year. It is rather dear in comparison with ours, but we couldn’t find anything better or cheaper, and there will be room to store all your things in it… Dodo and I had an amusing interview with the landlord and his wife of the logement last night at 9. We had to go down to his apartment near the Madeleine – a real French drawing-room with real French people – Very suspicious and anxious about their rent and Dodo’s future behaviour – D. was mute and smiling. I did my best to reassure them that she was très sage and her man (they asked me at once if she was married or not and didn’t mind a bit her not being) was “solvent”. We said she was a model (she’s going to sit again) and the wife wanted to know if the artists came to her or she went to the artists! The husband kept squashing the wife all the time though he called her in for her opinion of us. He was small and concise and sensible, and she was big and sweet and stupid.’
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