Augustus John (19 page)

In August, Orpen returned to complete his ‘Hamlet’ and Augustus travelled with him and Grace Knewstub as far as Paris. They stayed close to Montparnasse station, and the two painters spent their nights on the town, their days half-asleep in the Louvre. ‘It was so pleasant there,’ Augustus wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘I wish you had been with us to wander in the Louvre, after the hot sun and dazzling light outside to be in the cool sculpture galleries… I envy the sleeping Hermaphrodite its frozen passion, its marble self-sufficiency, its eternal languor.’

Augustus’s own passions were sleepless. He returned to Vattetot and was soon addressing rhapsodies to Grace Knewstub’s chiffon scarf. ‘Seeing it round your neck and tinted with your blood, it was unto me even Beauty’s embellishment.’ But his drawing of Grace, done in his new etching style, was to be given with ‘unhesitating devotion’ to Orpen’s new young model Emile Scobel. ‘Mr Augustus is very well,’ Orpen reported to Michel Salaman on his return from France. ‘I left him with a lady! He was to come to the station to see me off (myself and Miss Knewstub) but did not turn up.’ Everything seemed to be going wrong for Orpen. He was using Augustus’s studio in Charlotte Street which had no gas stove. ‘When I return I’ll get a more presentable machine,’ Augustus assured him, ‘which will make the house sweet and render the studio an absolute trap for pretty girls.’ But Orpen was then more interested in his summer composition for the Slade. ‘My Hamlet would kill high morality,’ he wrote in another letter to Salaman that September, ‘ – Hamlet ought to be treated like a “Day of Judgement”. Miss John is settled in 122 Gower Street. She is a most beautiful lady! Miss Nettleship I have seen but she has not posed yet, to tell the truth I am afraid to ask her to take
the pose as she has seen my Hamlet – I will wait till Gus comes back I think – Miss John says she would not take it.’

Ida, however, agreed to take the pose which would involve her and Gus leaning together, with their arms round each other. Then Orpen fell ill. ‘The wretched Orpen has got jaundice or verdigris or something horrible,’ Augustus later told Ursula Tyrwhitt. According to Orpen his complaint was more complicated, and not unconnected with Augustus. ‘My illness [jaundice] has been very severe. I was not able to eat for nearly ten days, but everything has started going down now! – I am still yellow – I have also got some nasty animals on a certain portion of my body – Gus’s doing – Dog that he is – this is my judgement for Paris! Tell him not!’

Augustus himself appeared wonderfully unaffected by these adventures, as if protected by unthinking innocence. ‘How he escaped getting the Ladies Fever we couldn’t make out,’ John Everett noted with irritation in his journal (1899). ‘Tonks used to say it must be his natural dirt.’

At the end of September, Augustus, Conder, Alice and the convalescent Will left for Paris where, over the next ten days, they fell in with that ‘distinguished reprobate’ Oscar Wilde. Wilde had recently been released from prison and was living in a small hotel on the Left Bank. Though appreciative of him as ‘a great man of inaction’ and a ‘big and good-natured fellow with an enormous sense of fun, impeccable bad taste, and a deeply religious apprehension of the Devil’,
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Augustus felt embarrassed by his elaborate performances of wit, not knowing how to respond. ‘I could think of nothing whatever to say. Even my laughter sounded hollow.’ Despite this, Wilde seems to have been much taken with ‘the charming Celtish poet in colour’,
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as he described Augustus. Alice Rothenstein, noticing this friendliness, grew unexpectedly fearful for his reputation and hurried Augustus along to the hairdresser. Next day Oscar looked grave. ‘You should have consulted me’, he said, laying a hand reproachfully on Augustus’s shoulder, ‘before taking this important step.’

Stifled by these long unspontaneous lunches at the Café de la Régence and the Café Procope, Augustus was on the lookout to escape with Conder and find ‘easier if less distinguished company’. The two of them would go off ‘whoring’, as Conder called it, visiting a succession of
boîtes de nuit
in Montmartre until the first pale gleams of the Parisian dawn showed in the sky, and each with a companion went his way. Once again much of the waking and sleeping day was spent in the Louvre, of which Augustus never seemed to tire. ‘Imagine,’ he wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘we were on the top of the Louvre yesterday! On the roof, and grapes and flowers are there. The prospect was wonderful – Paris at one’s feet!’

Two painters made a special impression on him. The first was Honoré Daumier who ‘reinforced with immense authority the lesson he had begun
to learn from Rembrandt, of seeing broadly and simply, and who taught him to interpret human personality boldly, without fearing to pass, if need be, the arbitrary line commonly held to divide objective representation from caricature’.
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The second was Puvis de Chavannes whose pictures of an idealized humanity and the relationship between figures and landscape were to be a lifelong inspiration to him.

After he had spent his money from the Carfax exhibition, Augustus borrowed twenty pounds from Michel Salaman with the intention of travelling back via Brussels and Antwerp. But the life in Montmartre held him until his last pound note was gone. ‘I’ve had a fantastic time here,’ he told Ursula Tyrwhitt (October 1899) ‘ – we spent all our money and can’t go to Belgium so we’re off home tonight.’

‘I have no ability for affairs.’

Augustus John to Michel Salaman (1902)

The legend that was sown when Augustus dived on to a rock at the age of seventeen had by now bloomed. Only after he left the Slade, and the exterior discipline of Tonks and Brown had been removed, did he, in Michel Salaman’s words, ‘kick over the traces’. This transformation particularly astonished John Everett,
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who had met Augustus in October 1896, shared 21 Fitzroy Street with him during part of 1897, and who had left England for a year at sea in 1898. On his return to London in 1899 the first person he met was Orpen, who eagerly apprised him of all the scandalous things Augustus was up to: how he went pub-crawling and got gloriously drunk; how he knew a prostitute who would always go back to him if she could not pick up anyone in the streets; how he had careered all over the flowerbeds in Hyde Park with the police in hot pursuit – and other marvels. Remembering his companion of two or three years ago – ‘a poor physical specimen [who] never played any games… a very quiet boy, a great reader, a studious youth’ who avoided all the organized rags and tugs-of-war and was thought by some to be ‘a nonentity’ – Everett was nonplussed. ‘If you had told me that of any man at the Slade I’d have believed you,’ he replied to Orpen. ‘But not John.’

Over the next year Everett saw a lot of Augustus. ‘All the things Orpen had told me about John were true,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘His character had completely changed. It was not the John I’d known in the early
days at the Slade.’ He was getting commissions for portraits and drawings and the quality of his work had never been higher. He seemed, however, quite irresponsible. In some ways he was like the sailors Everett rubbed shoulders with during his voyages. He would make an appointment with some sitter for the following morning, go off drinking half the night with his friends, then wake up grumpily next afternoon. Yet he was not really a heavy drinker. Very little alcohol got the better of him and he could quickly become morose; unlike Conder, who drank far more, remained cheerful, but had a tendency to see yellow-striped cats. Sometimes Augustus stayed out all night, and more than once he was arrested by the police and not released with a caution until the next day. Despite his broken appointments, he was making a reasonable income, though often obliged to borrow from his friends. Money had only one significance for him: it meant freedom of action. To his friends he was open-handed, and when in funds it was generally he who, at restaurants, demanded the bill, or was left with it. Other bills, such as the rent, he sometimes omitted to pay. ‘Gus says you need never pay Mrs Everett!’ Orpen assured Michel Salaman. Some landladies were more exigent. ‘I want to talk to you about this studio [76 Charlotte Street],’ Orpen wrote in another letter to Salaman on his return from Vattetot. ‘There is great trouble going on about Gus. I’m afraid he will not get back here.’ Mrs Laurence, who kept the house, had grown alarmed by what she called ‘Mr John’s saturnalias’. One night, simply it appears in order to terrify her, he had danced on the roof of the Church of St John the Evangelist next door. Other times he was apparently more conscientious, working late into the night with a nude model over his composition of ‘Adam and Eve’, and, in the heat of inspiration, stripping off his own clothes. Woken from her sleep by sounds of revelry from this Garden of Eden, Mrs Laurence, chaperoned by her friend old Mrs Young, went to investigate and, without benefit of art training, was shocked by what she found. When Augustus had left suddenly for France with the Carfax money in his pocket, he had paid her nothing; and so, when he returned in October, she refused him entry. He retreated, therefore, to old territory: 21 Fitzroy Street – ‘comfortless quarters’, as Will Rothenstein described them, but economical.

Here was Will Rothenstein’s cue once more to hurry to the rescue by generously offering his own house, No. 1 Pembroke Cottages, off Edwardes Square in Kensington, to Gus and Gwen. Augustus used the house only spasmodically, preferring to sleep in Orpen’s Fitzroy Street cellar rather than trudge back to Kensington late at night. The springs of this bed had collapsed at the centre, so only the artist who reached it first and sank into the precipitous valley of the mattress was comfortable. Neither liked early nights, but Orpen was eventually driven by lack of sleep to extra-ordinary
ingenuities, falling into bed in the afternoon twilight, bolting doors, undressing in the dark, anything at all, to win a restful night. Augustus would then mount the stairs to John Everett’s room, drink rum in front of his fire till past midnight, and suddenly jump up exclaiming: ‘My God! I’ve missed the last train!’ For weeks on end he slept on two of Everett’s armchairs.

When Will Rothenstein returned to London, ‘I found the house empty and no fire burning. In front of a cold grate choked with cinders lay a collection of muddy boots… late in the evening John appeared, having climbed through a window; he rarely, he explained, remembered to take the house-key with him.’
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This was a sincere test of Rothenstein’s hero-worship. ‘There were none I loved more than Augustus and Gwen John,’ he admitted, ‘but they could scarcely be called “comfortable” friends.’
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As for his wife Alice, she insisted that the walls must be whitewashed and the floors scrubbed before their little home would again be habitable.

Will Rothenstein had recently finished, for the New English Art Club, a portrait of Augustus
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that won the difficult approbation of Tonks and, more difficult still, avoided the disapprobation of Augustus himself. It shows a soft and dreamy young man whose efforts to roughen and toughen himself are visibly unconvincing. Yet the life he was now leading was certainly rough. After a last effort to recapture 76 Charlotte Street – from which he was repelled ‘with a charming County Court summons beautifully printed’
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– he took up fresh quarters at 61 Albany Street, by the side of Regent’s Park. ‘I’ve abandoned my kopje in Charlotte Street,’ he told Will Rothenstein in the new Boer War language, ‘trekked and laagered up at the above, strongly fortified but scantily supplied. Generals Laurence and Young hover at my rear… the garrison [is] in excellent spirits.’

He had briefly taken up with a Miss Simpson who, dismissing him as hopelessly impoverished, decided to marry a bank clerk – and invited Augustus to her wedding. Except for his pale-blue corduroys he had nothing to wear. What happened was described by Orpen in a letter to John Everett:

‘I met John last night – he had been to Miss Simpson’s wedding, drunk as a lord. Dressed out in Conder’s clothes, check waistcoat, high collar, tail coat, striped trousers. He seemed to say he was playing a much more important part than the bridegroom at the wedding and spoke with commiseration at the thought of how bored they must be getting at each other’s society… He almost wept over this, gave long lectures on moral living, and left us.’

Augustus’s theories of ‘moral living’ had strained his relationship with Ida almost to breaking point. He was painting a portrait of her which ‘has clothed itself in scarlet’, she told Michel Salaman (1 February 1900), adding: ‘Gwen John has gone back to 122 Gower Street.
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John sleeps, apparently, anywhere.’

The break between them came after an eventful trip Augustus took with Conder that spring to Mrs Everett’s boarding house at Swanage. His hair was now cut short, his beard trimmed and he went everywhere in part of Conder’s wedding equipment – tail coat, high collar and cap. After the dissipations of London, both painters tried hard to discipline themselves. ‘I am quite well now and had almost a providential attack of measles which left me for some days to do my work,’ Conder wrote from Swanage to Will Rothenstein. Not since his early days had he worked so consistently out of doors, painting at least nine views of Swanage.
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He seemed to have found a technique for combining life and work. He would sit painting at the very centre of a rowdy group of friends. ‘There would be a whole lot of us smoking, talking, telling good stories,’ Everett optimistically recorded. ‘Conder would join in the conversation, talk the whole time, yet his hand would go on doing the fan. At times it really seemed as if somebody else was doing the watercolour.’

‘We drink milk and soda and tea in large quantities,’ Augustus solemnly confided to Orpen. ‘I must confess to a pint of beer occasionally on going into the town.’ As at Vattetot, both painters worked hard. Conder reported that Augustus was painting ‘a decoration 8 ft by 6… with a score of figures half life size’. Though this was ‘no easy matter’, he nevertheless appeared to ‘work away with great ease’ and, Conder concluded, large composition ‘seems to be his forte’.