Augustus John (26 page)

‘As to being happy, you know, don’t you, that when a picture is done – whatever it is, it might as well not be as far as the artist is concerned – and in all the time he has taken to do it, it has only given him a few seconds’ pleasure. To me the writing of a letter is a very important event! I try to say what I mean exactly, it is the only chance I have – for in talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words in people’s ears – that I think is one reason I am such a waif… I don’t pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.’

But with a few people, mostly women, Gwen was at ease – and one of them was Ida. She could trust Ida, she told Salaman, ‘with all my thoughts and feelings and secrets’; and Ida felt she could trust Gwen. Gwen had
been hurt by McEvoy – ‘sister Gwen upset’, Augustus noted.
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An etching he did of her probably during this visit
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shows her as a contained and upright figure, on her guard, the daughter of Edwin John. Her expression is impassive, giving nothing away. On her head sits a pancake hat; her hair is pinned into a tight bun; her dress firmly tied at the neck; her lips buttoned. There is an impression of solitude. No gentleness.

‘I have been very busy with the baby,’ Gwen wrote to Salaman. She would take him out for ‘air’, and scandalize the neighbourhood by sitting unconcernedly on a doorstep whenever she felt like a rest. But for the sake of their families there was also a formal occasion when they stood shoulder to shoulder, Gus, Gwen and Ida (holding the baby), all looking to their front, present and correct, in the photographer’s studio.

After Gwen left, Ida felt her own isolation with fresh sharpness. In the middle of April she went with ‘her dearest and wickedest’ baby for a few days to London to see her father, who had not been well. ‘I am left deserted,’ Augustus exclaimed to Will Rothenstein (16 April 1902). ‘As a consequence I lay abed last night with a moonlit sky in front of me and chased infinite thoughts. Decidedly it is inspiring to lie alone at times. I fear continued cosiness is risky… I wish I had somebody to think with.’

He had never pretended to be an ‘exponent of the faithful dog business’. Ida knew this when she married him. He trusted her to recognize that the overpowering attraction of other women did not diminish his loyalty to her. He loved Ida and would always love her – it was important she understood this. But he needed to play truant. Then he would return to her, choosing the moment that best suited him. But if his freedom were curtailed, if he were prevented from acting as his nature demanded, then a hot-and-cold madness would break out in him and instinctively he would say and do things for which he felt hardly responsible. It was as if another being had taken control and he was no longer ‘himself. The last thing he wanted to do was to hurt Ida, but too much ‘moral living’ might imperil them both.

At the end of July they left Liverpool
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and returned to live in Fitzroy Street. ‘We are in a great turmoil packing,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman. Liverpool was ‘fresh and airy with a clean blue and white sky’,
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but it was no longer the ‘gorgeous place’ it had been eighteen months earlier. Both of them, for rather different reasons, were happy to be back in London. The ‘cosiness’ of their married life was almost at an end.

‘An artist is at the mercy of his temperament and his preferences are apt to be purely personal, quite disproportionate and utterly unhistorical.’

Augustus John (William Rothenstein Memorial Exhibition Catalogue, Tate Gallery 1950)

In the eighteen months since her marriage Ida had changed considerably. ‘Ida with her shock of black hair, as wild as a Maenad in a wood pursued by Pan,’ Arthur Symons had romantically pictured her.
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‘Intractable, a creature of uncertain moods and passion. One never knew what she was going to say or do… She had – to me – the almost terrible fascination of the Wild Beast. There was something almost Witch-like in her.’ This had been her fascination for Augustus. But with the metamorphosis from Ida Nettleship to Mrs John she had developed into a more substantial figure – both physically, following the birth of David, but also in character. Gone was the feyness, the whimsicality of her early Mowgli letters; and gone too was much of her moralizing. Her moods and passion had been the longing of a vigorous nature for everything from which young Victorian ladies were hermetically protected. Now there was reality enough – she was glutted with it. Her character gained unexpected depths in grappling with new problems; she grew more resilient, more direct, at times more ironical. But, in Augustus’s eyes, she lost something of her wild mystery. She was obliged to give up painting in order to become a mother, and her letters from Liverpool had been full of baby news. ‘Mr Dafydd John is very well & fat & cheeky, & oh how he laughs,’ she wrote to Gus’s sister Winifred. ‘He plays bo-peep. He sits up, but does not crawl at all yet.’ By the time they returned to London, the novelty was gone. Motherhood was a full-time job to which she did not easily resign herself – ‘I certainly was not made for a mother,’ she admitted to Alice Rothenstein (1903). She was made, she felt, for Augustus, and wanted to be his mistress. But the roles of mistress and of mother were often in conflict, and in the nature of things – though not in her nature – the mother began to overshadow the mistress.

‘Look what a grand life she had,’ her sister Ethel later wrote, ‘going full tilt.’
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But really it was life that had gone full tilt into her. The first blow came shortly after her return from Liverpool when her father became ill. Though having great difficulty in breathing, he would gasp out page after page of Browning each day, until gradually he grew too weak. Ida and
Augustus were with him during this final illness, though for much of the time he was barely conscious and could recognize no one. Once he called out: ‘Are you there, Ethel?’ and, after a silence, called back: ‘Yes, I thought you might come and see us through this risk.’ His daughters Ethel and Ursula were abroad (‘If there had been time,’ their mother wrote, ‘I would have sent for you’), but Ida was at Wigmore Street all week. ‘Old Nettleship is at his last,’ Augustus told Will Rothenstein. ‘He will die before the morning it is thought. Ida and I go round at midnight to see him. He has been in a high temperature… and his mind has not been clear.’

He survived that night, and in a moment of consciousness assured Augustus that God was ‘nearer to me than the door’. Next morning his arm went up like a semaphore and could not be kept down until suddenly he died. ‘It was a very wonderful experience,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman. ‘Mrs N. is immensely philosophical.’ For Ida it was a deep loss. ‘The dear old chap was quite unconscious,’ she wrote afterwards to Will Rothenstein (1 September 1902), ‘and did not suffer, except in the struggle for breath, and at the end he was quite peaceful. He was so grand and simple.’ The day before the funeral, at her request, Gus drew the dead man’s head. Then they carried him off to Kensal Green.

Besides Gus, her father had been the only man who meant anything to Ida. Now she would have to rely on Augustus alone. As if sensing this extra responsibility, he grew wilder. He was meant to be hanging his pictures in the Carfax Gallery, but this depressed him and to rid himself of this depression he was drinking more. ‘I thank you sincerely for bearing me home in safety,’ he afterwards wrote to Will. ‘I was utterly incapable. I had been imbibing a quantity of bad rum. I knew it to be poison yet drank it with relish… After having slept 3 hours I awoke perfectly well again.’ His powers of recovery were remarkable, and he tested them to the full. ‘John had the drinks,’ L. A. G. Strong wryly noted in his diary, ‘and his friends had the headache.’
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The pattern that had established itself in Liverpool was now broadly repeated in London. By the autumn Ida was pregnant again. She was visited at Fitzroy Street by all her old jungle friends, Gwen Salmond, Edna Clarke Hall, Bessie Salaman, Ursula Tyrwhitt, and by her family, in particular her mother who brought along, brightly intact, all her old grievances. She didn’t like the poor district they lived in and she didn’t like Augustus. It was as if the two of them were in a tug-of-war over the possession of Ida – but however attached Ida was to her mother, she had given herself to Gus. He tried to get on with Mrs Nettleship, but she was so reproving that he would storm out of the house.

‘Our life flows so evenly and regularly, I love it,’ Ida wrote to the Rani, Mary Dowdall, soon after returning to London. ‘But’, she added, ‘I’m
afraid Gus finds it rather a bore.’ They still lived in ‘that varied harmony’, as Augustus described it to Michel Salaman, ‘which is the essence of great music’. But he was growing ‘very staid and old fashioned in my ways’, he liked to claim. ‘A french maid cooks my meals. Beer, tobacco & slippers figure largely in my existence. A parrot tempers my solitude and occasionally screeches. Sometimes [Wyndham] Lewis & Albert [Rutherston] or Will or McEvoy call, and arrest my incipient vegetation.’
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He had begun to find something of a home from home in the Café Royal which, by the beginning of the century, had become the rendezvous of many artists and writers living in London. With its exuberant neo-classical ornament, its abundance of gilt, its ubiquitous flashing mirrors and surfaces of crimson velvet, it formed a cosily grandiose setting for their gatherings. It was unique in Britain, a café–restaurant on the French pattern where people could wander from table to table. ‘If you want to see English people at their most English, go to the Café Royal,’ Beerbohm Tree advised Hesketh Pearson, ‘where they are trying their hardest to be French.’ The atmosphere owed something to the nineties – crème de menthe frappé drunk through straws; the clatter of dominoes; and drawings on menus. Through its ‘smoky acres of painted goddesses and cupids and tarnished gilding, its golden caryatids and garlands, and its filtered submarine illumination, composed of tobacco smoke, of the flames from chafing dishes and the fumes from food, of the London fog outside and the dim electric light within’, Augustus appeared a monumental figure ‘like some kind of Rasputin-Jehovah’, Osbert Sitwell remembered.
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He liked the place for its casualness, for the easy coming-and-going, the undemanding companionship. He liked it because, by simple force of personality, he dominated the place. His observant eyes, his voice so confiding and laconic, ruminating, rumbling; his manners, formal yet large; the beautiful hands which threw a spell about his conversation; and that alarming residue of rage and outrage which could be so innocently stirred up: all these ingredients contributed to a physical presence that could pull you into its orbit. ‘Of all the men I have met,’ wrote Frank Harris, who claimed to have met everyone, ‘Augustus John has the most striking personality.’

Though he tended to be silent at home, at the Café Royal he was a different person and, after a few drinks, wonderfully exuberant. Here, by popular acclaim, he was acknowledged a Bohemian king, with the waiters his courtiers, all his companions guests. In such a genial climate, his uncertainties dissolved, his morale rose and he inflated himself terrifically. He could be arrogant, sometimes childishly offensive to people, and he would grow sullen if others became too talkative. He liked to be at the centre of things, and because this suited him so well and he had charm
and was such fun, people were generally happy for him to be a star. And there was another reason. Almost always he was left with the bill, and would pay it uncomplainingly with a huge fistful of notes that was sometimes all the money he possessed. In a sense he paid friends to entertain him, and he valued them as entertainers more than friends. His generosity was agreeably complicated by a vein of sardonic humour. One evening in the Domino Room, George Moore was denigrating him to Steer and Rothenstein – ‘Why, the man can no more draw than I can!’ – when Augustus himself walked in and sat down at their table. He took no notice of Moore, who tried to engage his attention, but in silence, Will Rothenstein recorded, ‘he took out a sketch book, and made as if to draw, doing nothing, however, but scribble. Moore, flattered, imagining John to be sketching him, sat bolt upright not moving a muscle. When John, tired of scribbling, shut up his book, Moore asked to see it, and turning over the pages, said unctuously, “One can see the man can
draww.
”’
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In the three most famous paintings of the Café Royal, those by Adrian Allinson, Charles Ginner and William Orpen, Augustus is prominently depicted. He liked best the company of other artists and of models – though he did not talk much about painting. Writers, preferably of the romantic school; decaying aristocrats, circus people, magicians and vagabonds, Celtic gentlemen with a knowledge of archaeology, some philosophical or mathematical ambitions or perhaps a smattering of Sanskrit or Hindi; Social Creditors, practical jokers, picturesque anarchists of the Kropotkin school, flamenco dancers, Buddhists: these were his crew. He welcomed anyone stranded in a tributary off the mainstream of twentieth-century commercial advancement.

With such companions he felt a natural affinity – for was he not also an exile from the modern world, however loudly, in fits and starts, it might applaud him? Was he not a revolutionary in almost everything except perhaps his painting? ‘Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois,’ Flaubert had advised artists, ‘so that you can be violent and original in your works.’ But Augustus often squandered his vitality in acts of nonconformity. ‘Perfect conformity’, he remarked, ‘is perhaps only possible in prison.’
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His whole life was directed to avoiding, or escaping from, any form of imprisonment; and his revolutionary energies were to be directed as much against the bureaucratic future as the restrictive past. ‘The flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep,’ Henry James wrote. In England (especially after the First World War) Augustus would find little depth of soil. ‘The march of progress will leave the struggling artist behind,’ he warned.