Augustus John (36 page)

From Alice she received advice: cautionary advice, reproachful advice, advice that ran contrary to everything she had already done. All Alice’s advice was seasoned with a flavour of inquisitiveness. ‘She [Alice] is so – oh I don’t know – she wants to know
why
and
how –
as if Chinese Ladies had answers to their riddles,’ Ida complained to the Rani. ‘The only nuisance about a riddle is its answer. Riddles are most fascinating by themselves.’ Yet although she was always unsettled by Alice – as Alice was by her – somehow they maintained a ‘tremendous admiration of each
other’ so that, worse than all Alice’s reproaches, were no letters. Alice’s silence seemed to deafen Ida with her own doings. ‘Your silence is chilling,’ she wrote to her. ‘I do not think, if it is caused by displeasure, that it is fair… Please to write at once, and tell me you adore me and everything I do is right… Oh Alice Alice Alice why don’t you write and tell me all your Nurse’s faults and all about Johnnie – and how you hope I am well and are longing to see me –
Darling
don’t be cross – I can’t help it. My heart is a well of deep happiness and this makes me malicious.’ Did she mean ‘unhappiness’? Here was another riddle.

What bewildered Alice was Ida’s attitude. Otherwise everything was melodramatically clear. Ida was the victim, noble but misguided; Dorelia the culprit who, if she had any decency, would take herself off; and Augustus was the man, a stereotypical artist whom Ida must control as Alice controlled poor Will. She knew the cast well enough. Will, however, disagreed and blamed Augustus. ‘Ida is simply an angel,’ he wrote to Alice (19 October 1905), ‘ – I think you are most unjust to Dorelia, who is looking after the children all the time and helping everything on, – Heaven knows she gets little for doing so.’

The friendship between the Johns and the Rothensteins was by the beginning of 1905 developing symptoms of burlesque. Ida, being especially fond of Will, was besieged by Alice; Augustus, attracted to the ‘mortal pretty’ Alice, was fêted by Will. It was as if each Rothenstein sought to protect the other from these explosive Johns. Ida’s correspondence to ‘darling Will’ contains what are almost love letters and these would be dutifully answered – by Alice. But when Alice sat to Augustus, Will objected to her expression – the head flung back, the eyes closed – and would turn up at Augustus’s studio to escort his wife home so punctually that sometimes Alice had not yet arrived there.

‘You are a dear good friend to Gus,’ Ida had written to Will. But Augustus, though he could not disagree, sometimes wished it were otherwise. He could not feel what he knew he was expected to feel. He could not pretend. He knew very well that he should feel grateful – Will needed to be kept well oiled with gratitude – but so often it was irritation that swarmed through him. His fate was to be helped, with extreme magnanimity, at many twists and crises of his career, by someone whose personality he increasingly disliked. Wherever he turned he seemed unable to avoid the rigours of Rothenstein’s generosity, and his reaction, as he was well aware, appeared mean. A number of times he tried to end their relationship. ‘I have broken with Rothenstein by the bye which of course is base ingratitude,’ he later told Lady Ottoline Morrell (8 February 1909), ‘ – in extenuation I must say the sensation so far has been quite tolerable’. But breaking with Rothenstein was no easy matter. He was like a boxer
for ever turning the other cheek to his assailant, yet never to be knocked out: a nightmare figure.

‘It is more difficult to receive than to give,’ Augustus wrote.
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This was the lesson many of Rothenstein’s beneficiaries had to learn. Epstein, for example, who once assured him: ‘Your help so freely given me has been of the greatest service to me,’ was also to write (20 June 1911):

‘Dear Rothenstein –

I want no more of your damned insincere invitations.

This pretence of friendship has gone on far enough.

Yours etc Jacob Epstein.

It is the comic element in your attitude that has prevented me writing the above before this. I did not believe till now you could have gone on with it.’

Augustus’s reaction was similar to Epstein’s. ‘How I wish someone would record the diverting history of Rothenstein’s career – it would be the most ludicrous, abject and scurrilous psychological document ever penned,’ Augustus assured Ottoline Morrell (23 March 1909). ‘He is I think… Le Sale Juif par excellence de notre siècle. There is I think one man only who could write adequately about him and that’s [Wyndham] Lewis...’

According to his son, John Rothenstein, ‘no-one among his contemporaries had shown such perceptive generosity towards his brother artists of succeeding generations from Augustus John and Epstein to Henry Moore and Ceri Richards’. This is true, yet in the opinion of Max Beerbohm he had no friends at all.
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What, then, was the secret of this gift for unpopularity? He was a figure somewhat similar to that, in the literary world, of Hugh Walpole, increasingly the patron rather than the creative artist, fixing his personal ambitions on the performance of his protégés. It was as if he sought to ride to immortality on their backs. Will Rothenstein’s two prize rebellious steeds were Augustus John and Stanley Spencer, whom he entered against the rival stables of Roger Fry. But of all his string, Augustus was the greatest disappointment to him, winning in brilliant fashion so many of the minor races, running under false colours, starting favourite for the classics but seldom running to form.

During 1905, disillusionment had begun to set in. ‘I am sorry John has no success,’ Will wrote to Alice (19 October 1905). ‘I slid some advice
in on the subject before the Puvis [de Chavannes] decoration at the Sorbonne, and I still think he may do great work – at any rate he feels it, and can do it.’

Will’s advice, like Alice’s, was a formidable commodity. A Max Beerbohm multiple caricature shows him advising poets how to write poetry, playwrights how to stage their plays, painters how to paint, and himself (looking into a mirror) on modesty. Augustus, unfortunately, was not susceptible to advice. He preferred to use Rothenstein for money. ‘I had a letter from John – not one I cared for much, for there was a hint of further pecuniary needs,’ Will complained to his brother Albert (10 September 1908). What Will traded in, what he purchased, was gratitude. But this was not a quality with which Augustus was richly endowed. ‘I have not found him [Augustus] the most grateful of men in the days of his splendour,’ Will sorrowfully confided to the Rani years later (19 August 1933). But then, who was properly grateful? Gwen John, he thought, was the exception. ‘No shadow, I thank Heaven, has ever come between us,’ he wrote to her in 1926. ‘The years have gone by, but our hearts remain the same, and people like you, in whom no mean thought can ever find a resting place, become ever more precious.’
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In fact it was people like the Rothensteins who made Gwen feel happy she had left England. She had ‘a contempt’, she told Augustus, for Will’s brother Albert; and as for Alice Rothenstein, ‘I hope she is not coming over here or if she does, I shall not have to see her.’
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Rothenstein was always being short-changed because, he felt, he lacked the mysterious spirit of charm. ‘The Gods who made me energetic & gave me a little passion & a little faith did me an ill turn when they made me ugly & charmless,’ he confessed (28 July 1915) to Rabindranath Tagore.
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The gratitude he squeezed out of people was a substitute for the love he felt he could never attract. He had been brought up in the Whistlerian tradition where the slightest whisper of criticism was intolerable. To this sensitivity was added an exceptional sanctimoniousness. He seemed to view everything through a mist of high-mindedness. In the racialist climate of Edwardian England, though he was not a practising Jew, he started off with disadvantages, and built them into a positive handicap.

For Augustus there was also the embarrassing problem of Rothenstein’s praise. He needed praise. But he was not so susceptible as to think more highly of those who provided it. He imbibed Rothenstein’s praise for a time: then suddenly it sickened him.
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It was partly because Will had made such an aesthetic investment in Augustus’s future that he welcomed the presence of Dorelia. The inspiration which Augustus originally found in Ida had begun to fail; but, in
‘the matchless Dorelia’, Rothenstein later rhapsodized, ‘in her dazzling beauty, now lyrical, now dramatic, John found constant inspiration. Who, indeed, could approach John in the interpretation of a woman’s sensuous charm? No wonder fair ladies besieged his studio, and his person, too; for John had other magic than that of his brush; no one so irresistible as he, or with such looks, such brains, such romantic and reckless daring and indifference to public opinion.’
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The Winter Show of the New English Art Club at the end of 1904 included two paintings of Dorelia. ‘This year for the first time Mr John gives promise of becoming a painter,’ Roger Fry wrote in the
Athenaeum.
‘…At last he has seen where the logic of his views as a draughtsman should lead him… he has already arrived at a control of his medium which astonishes one by comparison with the work of a year or two back… One must go back to Alfred Stevens or Etty or the youthful Watts to find its like… People will no doubt… complain of his love of low life, just as they complain of Rubens’s fat blondes; but in the one case as in the other they will have to bow to the mastery of power… In modern life a thousand accidents may intervene to defraud an artist’s talents of fruition, but if only fate and his temperament are not adverse, we hardly dare confess how high are the hopes of Mr John’s future which his paintings this year have led us to form...’
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With supporters like Fry and Sickert, ‘an amusing and curious character’,
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who came down to Matching Green to look at his drawings; with his small additional income from the Chelsea Art School and from exhibitions at the Carfax Gallery, he could surely afford to dispense with Rothenstein’s favours. He had further strengthened his position when, late in 1904, he was elected as one of the original members of the Society of Twelve, a group of British draughtsmen, etchers, wood-engravers and lithographers. The secretary of this group was Muirhead Bone, who organized its exhibitions at Obachs in New Bond Street. For Augustus this was another valuable outlet for his work; for Rothenstein, who was also an original member, it was a new arena in which to display, like an inverted Iago, his apparently motiveless generosity. His methods of alienating everyone were particularly adroit. To the Society of Twelve he proposed electing a thirteenth member, Lucien Pissarro, who, not being British, was ineligible for membership. It was a master-stroke. Inevitably, when Pissarro failed to gain the necessary vote, Will resigned. Augustus, who hated being dragged into these affairs, was persuaded to use his influence to bring him back, and this, somewhat improbably, he achieved. But no sooner was Will re-elected than he was at it again, returning undaunted and unavailing for three years in succession to the same charge, resigning again, and throwing the whole group into confusion. ‘I was
tenacious,’ he later owned, ‘and many letters passed between Bone and myself, until Pissarro was admitted.’ By which time the society was so shaken with squabbles it did not long survive Will’s quixotic triumph.

Five years after Rothenstein died, Augustus wrote an appreciation of him in the Catalogue to the Tate Gallery Memorial Exhibition.
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In this he paid tribute to him as a man ‘always intransigent and sometimes truculent’, subject to a rare disease, ‘madness of self-sacrifice’, and bound therefore to make enemies. He also described him as ‘a generous, candid and perspicacious soul’. While walking round the exhibition the day before it opened, his eyes filled with tears and he admitted that he had sometimes been unjust to his old friend. Yet if Will had come tripping through the door just then, Augustus would soon have struggled out, infuriated by his admirer. For one of the persistent features of Augustus’s character, arising from his difficulties with Edwin John, was a dislike of anyone who assumed the role of father-figure. Rothenstein, who came from an authoritarian family, was enraptured with the father-figure, feeling a need both to promote others in that part, and to assume it himself. Augustus would neither play the parent, nor swallow the well-meaning reprimands. They were incompatible; and yet each felt he needed the other.

A new strain had been placed on Augustus’s financial resources by the birth of Robin that autumn. By the New Year, despite his success in the galleries, he was even more dependent on Rothenstein for help. For Dorelia was now pregnant.

‘It is more difficult at first to be wise, but it is infinitely harder afterwards
not
to be.’

Ida John to Margaret Sampson (May 1905)

The baby must have been conceived in early August 1904, when Dorelia and Gus left Bruges – and for almost five months Dorelia seems to have kept her pregnancy a secret. ‘I did not know you are making un petit, how could I?’ Gwen wrote to her early in 1905. ‘Are you glad?… When we continue our walk to Rome we will carry it by turns on our backs in a shawl… ’
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Though she may have been glad for herself, Dorelia was apprehensive over the complications it might stir up, and the effect it could have on Ida. Already, by the end of 1904, violent scenes had broken out between
them. Shortly after Robin’s birth, Ida had made one of her ‘little journeys’ up to London for a few days, avoiding her friends, feeling strangely hysterical. ‘I simply drifted – from one omnibus to another – without aim or intention,’ she admitted to Alice (December 1904). Yet the sudden flow of freedom, the release from duty, appeared to have ‘done me worlds of good’. She returned to Matching Green shortly before Christmas, to find that a double portrait Augustus was painting of her and Dorelia had gone wrong. In her absence, Augustus had altered the design and there was no room on the canvas for Ida at all. Instantly, and beyond anything this incident seemed to warrant, she was plunged into misery and anger. She had a demonic temper; she could not contain it and ‘there was a black storm’. After the storm was over and, rather to their surprise, they were still all afloat, Ida felt easier and ‘there was a fair amount of sunlight’. But over the rest of this winter quarrels erupted. One morning Augustus and Ida would take sides against Dorelia, and Augustus would volunteer that she could leave whenever she liked; but the following morning it was Ida who was invited to leave – ‘pack up your luggage and take your brats with you!’ Next day Augustus would suddenly announce that
he
was leaving for ‘the Blue Danube’; after which it was once more the turn of Ida (who threatened to leave for Amsterdam); then again Dorelia. Finally: ‘We are all thinking of going to the tropics.’