Authors: Michael Holroyd
In his letters to Dorelia, John makes no reference to Nora Brownsword that can be construed as sympathetic. But then Dorelia was not in the business of easy sympathy. He himself appears to have believed that he offered Brownsword money, but that she accepted nothing. She remembered asking for £4
a week for the baby, not herself: and receiving nothing. That nothing positively changed hands on a number of businesslike occasions appears indisputable. Having a musical degree she was just able to support herself and her daughter, and their independence was complete. It was only casually, years later, that John learnt she had married. As for Dorelia, she provided Brownsword with a ring; and within limits she was kind. But she was not welcoming. She offered to take the baby and bring it up as one of the family, provided Brownsword never saw the girl again. But since that was unacceptable to Brownsword, she took no further interest in the matter.
The Brownsword affair shot a warning across John’s bows.
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Through the deep gloom of war he needed, like pilot lights, a girl to call and a girl to play. After one party at Mallord Street, Dorelia and Helen Anrep could hear him shuffling about in the entrance hall and, with hushed comic intensity, confiding to a procession of female guests: ‘When shall I see you again?… You know how much it means to me… I never cease thinking of you… Relax a little and inspire your poor artist with a kiss… Or shall I drown myself?’ Each time, for a moment, the tone carried conviction. His need seemed, if almost indiscriminate, almost real. Without these girls he was in the dark. He could not stop himself. At the beginning and in the end, he drank: first to make contact, then to forget.
The roll-call reverberated on. Lady Tredegar, with her strange gift for climbing into trees and arranging nests in which polite birds would settle; Iris Tree, with her pink hair and poetry, ‘someone quite marvellous’; Sylvia Gough, with her thin loose legs, whose husband later paid John
the compliment of placing his name on the list of co-respondents in her divorce case; Sybil Hart-Davis, nice and apologetic and also ‘determined to give up the drink’;
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a famous Russian ballerina, from whose Italianate husband John was said to have ‘taken a loan of her’: these and others were among his girlfriends or mistresses over these few years. Not all the voluminous gossip that rose up round him was true: but the smoke did not wholly obscure the flames. Even before the war his reputation, along with that of Ezra Pound, had been popularly celebrated in the ‘Virgin’s Prayer’:
Ezra Pound
And Augustus John
Bless the bed
That I lie on.
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Of such notoriety John was growing increasingly shy. ‘The only difference between the World’s treatment of me and other of her illustrious sons is that it doesn’t wait till I am dead before weaving its legends about my name,’ he complained (February 1918) to Alick Schepeler. By becoming more stealthy he did not diminish this legend, but gave it an infusion of mystery. The addict’s spell is written in the many moods of revulsion and counter-resolution, the promises, promises, that chart his downhill flight. Sometimes it seemed as if Dorelia alone could arrest this descent. ‘If you come here I’ll promise to be good,’ he wrote to her from Mallord Street at the end of the war, ‘…I am discharging all my mistresses at the rate of about 3 a week – Goodbye Girls, I’m through.’
‘Do you manage to get any work done in spite of the war?’
Augustus John to Gwen John (18 November 1918)
Alderney was also changing with the war. Visitors no longer floated in and out in such abundant numbers. Henry Lamb had left. ‘We are square enough I suppose,’ he had written to John before the war. But in truth, Lamb never felt square with John. After drawing up his first Will and Testament, and handing it to Dorelia during a farewell party at Alderney,
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he was gone, looking ‘very sweet in his uniform’, to serve as an army doctor in France. Deprived of ‘poor darling Lamb’,
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Dorelia dug herself
more deeply still into the plant world. Assured by John that ‘in a week or two there’ll be no money about and no food,’
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she surrounded herself with useful vegetables. They clustered about the house giving her comfort. ‘It’s rather a sickening life,’ she confessed to Lytton Strachey, ‘but the garden looks nice.’
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God came to Alderney less often these days: God was Dorelia’s new name for John. The war had thrown shadows over both their lives, as well as between them. ‘Do you feel 200?’ he asked her, ‘ – I feel 300.’ While Dorelia was immersing herself in the life of the soil, John sought distraction at clubs and parties in London. He went everywhere and belonged nowhere. Though he still drank elbow-to-elbow with poets and prostitutes under the flyblown rococo of the Café Royal, the place was beginning to revolve almost too crazily. There were raucous-voiced sportsmen; alchemists and sorcerers sitting innocuously over their spells; a grave contingent from the British Museum; well-dressed gangs of blackmailers, bullies, pimps and
agents provocateurs
muttering over plans; intoxicated social reformers and Anglo-Irish jokers with their whoops and slogans; the exquisite herd of Old Boys from the Nineties ‘recognizable by their bright chestnut wigs and raddled faces’ whispering in the sub-dialect of the period; a
schlemozzle
of Cubists sitting algebraically at the domino tables; and, not far off, under the glittering façade of the bar, his eye fixed on the fluctuating crisis of power, the leader of the Vorticists kept company with his lieutenants. Decidedly the place was getting a bit ‘thick’
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for
John.
Throughout London a bewildering variety of clubs and pubs had sprung up offering wartime consolations. There was the Cave of the Golden Calf, a cabaret club lodged deep in a Soho basement where the miraculous Madame Strindberg had been resurrected. As queen of this vapid cellardom, wrapped in a fur coat, her face chalk white, her hair wonderfully dark, her eyes blazing with fatigue, she drifted among her guests diverting their attention from entertainments that featured everything most up to date. Under walls ‘relevantly frescoed’ by Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner, beside a huge raw-meat drop curtain designed by Wyndham Lewis, and watched over by the heads of hawks, cats and camels which, executed by Epstein in scarlet and shocking white, served as decorative reliefs for the columns supporting the ceiling, couples went through the latest dances, the bunny hug and turkey trot. There were also experiments in amateur theatre, foreign folk songs led by an Hungarian fiddler, and the spectacle of performing coppersmiths. Everything was expensive, but democratic. Girls, young and poor, were introduced to rich men on the periphery of the art world; various writers and artists, including John, found themselves elected honorary members ‘out of deference
to their personalities’ and given the privilege of charging drinks to non-artistic patrons in their absence. Into its holes and corners slunk the Vorticists, ‘Cubists, Voo-dooists, Futurists and other Boomists’
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for whom it was transfigured into a campaign headquarters. But not for long. As war advanced from the East, so Madame Strindberg went west. ‘I’m leaving the Cabaret,’ she wrote to John. ‘Dreams are sweeter than reality.’ Stripping the cellar of everything she could carry, she sailed for New York. ‘We shall never meet again now,’ she wrote from the ship. ‘…I could neither help loving you, nor hating you – and… friendship and esteem and everything got drowned between those two feelings.’
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Even before Madame Strindberg left, John had absconded to help set up a rival haunt in Greek Street. ‘We are starting a new club in town called the “Crab-tree” for artists, poets and musicians,’ he wrote to Quinn. ‘It ought to be amusing and useful at times.’ The Crabtree opened in April 1914, and for a time it tasted sweet to him: the only thing wrong with it, he hinted darkly, were the crabs. Like the Cave of the Golden Calf it was a very democratic affair, and provided customers with what John called ‘the real thing’. Euphemia Lamb, Betty May, Lillian Shelley and other famous models went there night after night wearing black hats and throwing bottles: and for the men there were boxing contests. Actresses flocked in from the West End theatres to meet these swaggering painter-pugilists and the atmosphere was wild. ‘A most disgusting place!’ was Paul Nash’s recommendation in a letter to Albert Rutherston, ‘where only the very lowest city jews and the most pinched harlots attend. A place of utter coarseness and dull unrelieved monotony. John alone, a great pathetic muzzy god, a sort of Silenus – but also no nymphs, satyrs and leopards to complete the picture.’
Much the same spirit saturated the atmosphere of the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street which was owned by Rosa Lewis, a suave and sinister nanny, who ran it along the lines of a plush asylum in her own Welfare State. For connoisseurs there was nothing like the Cavendish, with its acres of faded red morocco, and hideous landscape of battered furniture, massive and monogrammed. Beneath every cushion lay a bottle, and beside it a girl. The place flowed with brandy and champagne, paid for by innocent millionaires. Much of this money came from the United States, among whose well-brought-up young men, bitten with the notion of being Bohemians Abroad, Rosa Lewis became a legend. Financially it was the artists, models and other poorer people who benefited: but for those who did not have John’s constitution it was a risky lair.
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In quieter vein, he would appear at the Café Verrey, a public house in the Continental style in Soho; then, for the sake of the Chianti – though he always ‘walked out nice and lovely’ – at Bertorelli’s; and, a little later,
also in Charlotte Street near the Scala Theatre, at the Saint-Bernard Restaurant, a small friendly place with an enormous friendly dog that filled the alley between the tables to the exclusion of the single waiter and Signor del Fiume, its gesticulating owner. But of all these restaurants the most celebrated was the Eiffel Tower in Percy Street, ‘our carnal-spiritual home’ as Nancy Cunard called it.
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The story is that one stormy night, John and Nancy Cunard found refuge there, and taking a liking to its genial Austrian proprietor, Rudolph Stulik, transformed the place during these war years into a club patronized chiefly by those who were connected with the arts. Its series of windows, each with a daffodil-yellow half-blind looking wearily up Charlotte Street, became a cultural landmark of the metropolis. The décor was simple, with white tablecloths, narrow crusty rolls wrapped up in napkins beside the plates and long slender wine glasses. The food was elaborate (‘Canard Pressé’, ‘Sole Dieppoise’, ‘Chicken à la King’ and ‘Gâteau St-Honoré’ were among its specialities); and it was costly. For the art students and impoverished writers drinking opposite in the Marquis of Granby it represented luxury. To be invited there, to catch sight of the elegant figure of Sickert amid his entourage; and the Sibyl of Soho, Nina Hamnett, being helped home, a waiter at each elbow; of the Prime Minister’s son Herbert Asquith in poetic travail; of minor royalty slumming for the evening; of actresses and Irishmen, models, musicians, magicians; a pageant of Sitwells, some outriders from Bloomsbury: to be part of this for a single evening was to feel a man or woman of the world.
Those who were well looked upon by Stulik could stay on long after the front door had been closed, drinking into the early hours of the morning mostly German wines known collectively as ‘Stulik’s Wee’. Stulik himself spoke indecipherably in galloping broken-back English, hinting that he was the fruit of an irregular attachment ‘in which the charms of a famous ballerina had overcome the scruples of an exalted but anonymous personage’ – a story that was attributed to the fact that he had once been chef to the Emperor Franz Josef to whom he bore an uncertain resemblance. He was assisted in the running of the place by a team of tactful waiters, a parrot and a dog.
Upstairs lay the private dining-room, stuffy with aspidistras, glowing dully under a good deal of dark crimson. Here secret liaisons took place, grand ladies and raffish men entering by the side door and ascending the hen-roost stairs. Those modestly sitting below could feel tremors of activity and hear scufflings up and down the narrow staircase. Then, on the topmost floors, ‘dark and cluttered with huge articles of central European furniture’,
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lay the bedrooms.
The high prices were partly subsidized by young diplomats on leave,
and the tariff was tempered to the visitor’s purse. John was a popular host, sometimes even in his absence. ‘Stulik’s friends could run up enormous bills,’ Constantine FitzGibbon recalled.
‘Augustus once asked for his bill after a dinner party, Stulik produced his accumulated account, and Augustus took out £300 from his pocket with which to pay it… Stulik himself was sometimes penniless. On one occasion when John Davenport ordered an omelette there, Stulik asked if he might have the money to buy the eggs with which to make it. On another occasion, when Augustus grumbled at the size of his dinner bill, Stulik explained calmly in his guttural and almost incomprehensible English that it included the cost of Dylan [Thomas]’s dinner, bed and breakfast the night before.’
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Such bursts of generosity were followed by bouts of financial remorse deepened by the weight of Dorelia’s disapproval. But for John money was freedom, and he could not tolerate being imprisoned by the lack of it. Money worries buzzed about him like flies, persistent though unstinting. A request by post from a deserving relative, if it arrived in the wrong hour, would detonate a terrifying explosion of anger. But he did not covet money. One day at Mallord Street, when he was grumbling about money, his friend Hugo Pitman offered to search through the house and found, in notes and uncashed cheques, many hundreds of pounds.
His generosity was unpremeditated. Money was important to him for his morale, not his bank account. He needed it about his person. All manner of creditors, from builders to schoolmasters, would queue for their bills to be paid, while he entertained his debtors at the Eiffel Tower. In times of war, he would explain severely, it was necessary for everyone to make sacrifices. But he himself did not sacrifice popularity. Among the art students he was now a fabled figure, a king of Chelsea, Soho and Fitzrovia. ‘I can see him now walking… beneath the plane trees,’ recalled the sculptor Charles Wheeler.