Authors: Michael Holroyd
Caspar was the only one of John’s children brought up at Alderney who, like Thornton, Gwen and Winifred, left home and made a life elsewhere. The others left too late or too incompletely, as perhaps John himself had done. Although one or two later illegitimate children, raised with their mothers, felt themselves deprived by not living at Alderney or Fryern, Ida’s and Dorelia’s children needed to escape these places – and for many of the same reasons that old Edwin John’s family had fled Tenby. The atmosphere was powerful and, as the boys grew older, it seemed to become less sympathetic. ‘He was extremely strict at table,’ one of John’s children wrote, ‘and we were hardly allowed to say a word – which resulted in one of us getting the giggles, which was fatal, because that infuriated him… Perhaps it was because of his own very strict upbringing with his father.’
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John loved babies. When they were very small he used to bath them and play with them, and in such a role they preferred him to anyone else. But he found it hard to bear the physical presence of his maturing sons. Overawed, they fell, one by one, into lines of self-preservation. It was the beginning of a long defensive war no one could win. ‘He always liked to have children around, plenty of them, not necessarily his own,’ Caspar remembered. ‘…He enjoyed children to that extent, but he was never a warm-hearted man, really, to us; he was a tremendously difficult sort of fellow to understand for a kid. I don’t think he ever understood himself, come to that.’
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Dorelia, too, was not good at demonstrating her love. She was not unfair, but only her own children seemed able to sense her fondness for them. John himself was inhibited from expressions of tenderness. ‘He intensely disliked seeing parents
fondling
their children and this may partly have accounted for my mother’s inhibitions in respect of us children,’ remembered his daughter Vivien. ‘In fact we never embraced our mother until the ages of 12 and 15, when [my sister] Poppet and I made a pact to break this “spell” in order to be like other families.’
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But this was
later, and for the time being the regime, for all its Bohemian tone, was almost Victorian in its rules of reticence.
Dorelia’s pregnancy, in the autumn of 1911, being against her doctor’s advice, was a time of anxiety. In the event everyone except Dorelia felt ill.
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By the end of February 1912, John was already confessing to ‘feeling so sick… Dorelia is expecting a baby momentarily… Pyramus mysteriously ill.’ In the following week this illness came to be diagnosed. ‘Little Pyramus is fearfully ill – meningitis, and I can’t believe he can recover, though I do hope still,’ John wrote to Ottoline Morrell (5 March 1912). ‘Last night I thought he was about to die but he kept on. Dorelia behaves most wonderfully – though she is expecting her baby at any moment. It will be terrible to lose Pyra...’ In desperation John had tried to get ‘the best specialist in London, perhaps in Europe’, but the man was in Europe, not London – and besides what was there he could do? ‘There is no treatment for the disease.’
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In a wobbly handwriting John wrote to his old crony John Sampson to tell him what was happening. ‘We are in a sad way here. Pyramus is frightfully ill… Dorelia about to have a baby. The doctor tells me he thinks she has postponed the event for 2 or 3 weeks so as to look after Pyramus – he says this has been known to happen.’
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On 8 March Dorelia’s labour pains began and she ‘had to take leave of Pyramus and go and have her baby’ which ‘turned out a big nice girl’. They told Dorelia that Pyramus was dead, but for four more days the child lay on his bed quite close to her, still just alive. ‘Pyra is still breathing feebly but happily has been unconscious for the last 2 or 3 days,’ John told Ottoline on 10 March. ‘I do not think he will outlive to-day. He was indeed a celestial child and that is why the Gods take him… The mind refuses to contemplate… such an awful fact.’ While Dorelia grew stronger, John continued to sit by their son, waiting for the end. ‘It was a terrible event,’ he wrote afterwards (9 May 1912) to Quinn. ‘…I must say the Missus behaved throughout as I think few women would – with amazing good sense and a splendid determination not to give way to the
luxury
of the expression of grief.’ It was this code of silence they shared. ‘I can’t talk about Pyra,’ Dorelia told Ottoline a year later (10 March 1913): and John wrote to Albert Rutherston: ‘It is indeed a terrible thing to have lost darling little Pyramus – the most adorable of children. Of course I can’t find words to say what I feel.’ Dorelia’s silence was natural and eloquent, and her grief was private. John recognized this. But when he spoke of feeling, as from time to time he was tempted to do, he always regretted it for the words seemed to let him down, making the reality something acted. When unhappiness threatened, he feared giving way to it because he knew the depths of depression to which his nature was
susceptible. No one could reach it, though ‘your wire was so welcome’, he told Sampson. ‘These things are stupefying.’
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So he concentrated on the birth of his daughter: ‘le roi est mort, vive la reine.’
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They called her Elizabeth Ann or Lizzie – at least that was their intention. But somehow these names never stuck. Then, one day, after contemplating her sometime, her half-brother Caspar chanced to remark: ‘What a little poppet it is!’: after which she was always known as Poppet.
Pyramus was cremated at Woking. Returning by train with the ashes – ‘one more urn for my collection’
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– John placed the receptacle carefully on the rack above his seat, and then forgot it. It was found further along the line and sent to Alderney.
‘People were getting too silly’.
Augustus John to Gwen John (24 October 1914)
‘All are well at home,’ John reported philosophically, ‘ – the baby-girl a god-send. My missus keeps fit. We have disturbances of the atmosphere occasionally but have so far managed to recover every time.’
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He seldom remained long at Alderney, preferring to visit rather than to stay there. ‘It is pleasant enough down here,’ he remarked to Ottoline Morrell (25 July 1913), ‘but a little uninspiring.’
Inspiration lay further off, waiting to be taken unawares. In the summer of 1912 he had set off with his family to Wales – then, abandoning them in the desolate valley round Nant-ddu, hurried on to Ireland. ‘Like a lion’ he entered Dublin, remembered Oliver St John Gogarty;
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‘or some sea king’...
‘Or a Viking who has steered,
All blue eyes and yellow beard.’
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This was John’s first meeting with stately, plump buck Gogarty, the quickwitted and long-talking professional Irishman of many parts – poet and busybody, surgeon, litigant and aviator, wearer of a primrose waistcoat and owner of the first butter-coloured Rolls-Royce. John had sought him out in the Bailey Restaurant, Dublin’s equivalent of the Café Royal, on the advice of Orpen and, despite Gogarty’s ‘ceaseless outpour of wit and wisdom’, confessed to being ‘immensely entertained’.
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‘All agog with good humour’, Gogarty fell headlong under John’s spell, describing him
as ‘a man of deep shadows and dazzling light… I noticed that he had a magnificent body… He was tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped. His limbs were not heavy, his hands and feet were long.’
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‘The aura of the man! The mental amplitude!’ Even so, Gogarty could not fail to notice that he was ‘a moody man’. There was always the problem of what to do with him.
An ear-nose-and-throat specialist, Gogarty examined John’s ears and pronounced them to be the very Seat of his Melancholy: in which case, John felt, he had much to answer for. Gogarty was a hectic monopolizer of all conversation. If he did not have enough words of his own, he borrowed other people’s, and so was never at a loss. Only once did John arrest him – by ‘flinging in his face a bowl of nuts’.
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He ‘is a brick but such a mad hatter’, John confided to Dorelia. He was also ‘rather awful sometimes’, and ‘dreams of the days when gentlemen addressed their wives as “Madam” and all was dignity and calm’. Not surprisingly it was difficult to make such a man ‘see one’s problems’.
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But often his problems sailed out of sight as he accepted Gogarty’s invitation to ‘float his intellect’ while in Dublin, and drink huge tumblers of whisky until the chatter retreated to a distant murmur. Bottles of John Jameson were what Gogarty was ‘inspired to give’ with almost sinister generosity. ‘It was very pleasant, this bathing in the glory of Augustus,’ Gogarty remembered
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– adding, to John’s chagrin: ‘I felt myself growing so witty that I was able to laugh at my own jokes.’
But still there was the problem of what to do with John. Gogarty put him up in lodgings next to the Royal Hotel, Dalkey, overlooking Shanagolden Bay. His presence there, at the window, was a constant invitation to take the day off. ‘We would pick up Joe Hone, who lived at Killiney, and go to Glendalough, the Glen of the Lakes, in Wicklow,’ Gogarty wrote. ‘…On through the lovely country we went. Augustus, who was sitting in the back, could not be distracted by scenery, for beside him sat Vera Hone.
‘…We bowled along the Rocky Valley. Suddenly I heard the word “Stop”. As it evidently was not meant for me, I didn’t stop. Joe Hone did not turn his head, so why should I?’
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This was the beginning of a lifelong infuriating friendship commemorated by John with two portraits
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of Gogarty, and by Gogarty with two of his ‘Odes and Addresses’. In a fragile verse at the end of his poem ‘To Augustus John’, Gogarty recorded how much, despite all its difficulties, this friendship meant to him:
When my hawk’s soul shall be
With little talk in her,
Trembling, about to flee,
And Father Falconer
Touches her off for me,
And I am gone –
All shall forgotten be
Save for you, John!
Meanwhile there was the problem of what to do. John had been offered the freedom of Ireland by another bizarre new friend, Francis Macnamara, ‘poet, philosopher and financial expert’,
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and though payment for such freedom could be heavy, he willingly accepted it. Macnamara was an extra ‘bright gem’ for John to add to his adornment of friends: at times simply ‘a queer fish, not like a man at all’;
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and then, when John recovered his admiration, a ‘warrior poet’. From a career in the law, from Magdalen College, Oxford, from his father the High Sheriff of County Clare, Francis Macnamara had turned to a career of literary and philosophical speculation. Over six feet tall, golden-haired and with blue-bright eyes, he carried himself (as John’s portrait of him eloquently reveals) ‘like a conqueror’.
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Famous for his wild deeds, he subsisted on theories embracing many subjects from Bishop Butler to tar water, admitted to having poetry as a vocation and claimed, by way of trade, to teach the stuff. ‘He has shown me a manuscript which seems to me most remarkable,’ John confided to Quinn (6 August 1912), whom he hoped might buy his friend’s jottings. ‘He has put soliloquies into the mouths of personages from the Irish legends and he has made them talk quite modern language albeit in free verse – the result is amazingly vivid and vital. The people live again!’
It was Francis’s pride, his daughter Nicolette later wrote, ‘to introduce Augustus to Ireland, to County Clare, Galway and Connemara; the land the Macnamaras had roamed since history began’.
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Though living in London, he owned a house in Doolin, a small fishing village in County Clare ‘seven Irish miles away from Ennistymon’, and it was here that John arrived at the end of July.
It was a lonely place, and wild. The troughs and furrows of the land, ‘like an immobilized rough sea’,
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were crested with outcrops of grey rock and ridden by a net of stone walls. Except for an obstinate few trees, stunted and windswept like masted wrecks, and sudden calm surges of lush green grass, it was a barren landscape, frozen from times of primitive survival: the very place for painting. Macnamara would harness his horse and ride off with John for days on end. Several times, either by steamship or, more recklessly, by native currach, they crossed over to the Aran Islands. The great Atlantic waves that thundered in from Newfoundland and Greenland and charged against the granite boulders of the coast had
protected the islanders from invasion. They lived among the same rocks and wind and weather that had long enveloped their families and seemed, as John sometimes felt himself to be, throwbacks to an earlier century. Grave dignified people, speaking English when unavoidable with a rich Elizabethan vocabulary, they wove their own garments and supported themselves without interference from the mainland. ‘The smoke of burning kelp rose from the shores,’ John wrote. ‘Women and girls in black shawls and red or saffron skirts stood or moved in groups with a kind of nun-like uniformity and decorum. Upon the precipitous Atlantic verge some forgotten people had disputed a last foothold upon the ramparts of more than one astounding fortress… who on earth were they?’
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It was a mystery which the bleakness of their lives made beautiful to him. They represented an ideal, a dream without a dream’s surreal exactness, never disappearing but growing dimmer as his actual life became more episodic and confusing.
It had been a reconnaissance. To these islands, to Doolin House, County Clare, as the guest of Macnamara, to Renvyle House, County Galway, where Gogarty lived, and the speckled hills of Connemara John was soon feeling impatient to return. He would get a studio and paint a big dramatization of the landscape, he told Quinn, and ‘some of the women’ who belonged to it.
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*
But in order to return he had first to leave. Innes, who was staying with Lady Gregory, had suddenly appeared – ‘God knows how’
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– and together the two painters crossed back into Wales. John had been invited by Lord Howard de Walden, despite his having been turned away from Alderney, to stay at Chirk Castle and paint his wife. Having separated from Innes and returned his family, safe and disgruntled, to Alderney, he rushed back to Wales again to find Lady Howard de Walden powerfully pregnant and unable to stand. No foreigner to this condition, he took up his brushes and started work on her, full length. But she was horrified, protesting that the picture was cruel, while he endeavoured to explain that ‘lots of husbands want it like that, you know’.
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In the saga of this picture, and John’s many visits to Chirk in order to complete it, lies much of the pattern his life would follow. After this first visit he wrote to Quinn (11 October 1912): ‘I enjoyed my stay at the medieval Castle of Chirk. I found deer stalking with bows and arrows exciting. Lord Howard goes in for falconry also and now and then dons a suit of steel armour...’ In such an atmosphere there was room for ideas to expand. ‘Howard de W ought to be taken in hand,’ he was soon telling Dorelia. His host had allowed second-rate people to ‘impose themselves on him’. By way of a new regime
he suggested substituting himself in their place as artist-in-residence. He would decorate the Music Room at Chirk: it was a grand scheme. But first there was the problem of her ladyship’s portrait. It was, he told Quinn, extremely promising. He waited patiently till after the birth of her twins, started again, exhibited it half-finished, recommenced, changed her black hair to pink and threatened to ‘alter everything’. Years went by: war came. Her ladyship’s nose, John complained, was an enigma, and he temporarily turned to her athletic antiquarian husband, his portrait giving ‘his lordship the severest shock he has experienced since the War began’.
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The Music Room was never begun. But he was not idle at Chirk; he painted all the time – small brilliant panels of the Welsh landscape which he conceived to be preliminary studies for his Music Room decorations but which were his real achievement.