Augustus John (37 page)

But no one left. Augustus went roaring from room to room driving the children before him, like cattle. ‘Never had so wretched a time, even over the festive season,’ he notified Sampson, ‘ – now its over & all right again.’
14

But for Ida it was not all right. She was in a dilemma. She had invited Dorelia to Matching Green, because the two of them had a better hold on Augustus than Ida by herself would have had. But then she was consumed by jealousy. For Augustus made no attempt to conceal his infatuation for Dorelia; while to Ida he seemed for long periods blind. ‘Have I lost my beauty altogether?’ she asked Dorelia. Sometimes she appeared ill with depression, going down with a succession of minor ailments that conspired to make her feel more ugly still. ‘I have
an eye
,’ she wrote to the Rani. ‘Dr says due to general weakness! It has a white sort of spot in it and runs green matter in the evening – which during the night effectually gums down the eyelids so that they have to be melted open! Isn’t it too loathesome?’ The
eye
was followed by a
throat –
‘dear me what next? Varicose veins probably.’

Jealousy infected everything. Since Dorelia had come Maggie, who had helped with the cooking and children, took herself off, disapproving of their immoral ways. It was natural that, to some extent, Dorelia should take her place. But Ida could not let her do too much in the house, partly,
it seems, because Augustus thought she was treating Dorelia like a servant. Nor could she bring herself to speak about Dorelia’s unborn baby; and she began to hate herself for this meanness of spirit. Obscure moods of attraction and revulsion mingled with her envy of Dorelia. Doubt and self-hatred, frustration and exhaustion so assailed her during these dark months that she emerged from the winter a changed person, her love for Augustus impaired, her attitude to herself and to Dorelia transformed.

It was to the Rani she confessed most. ‘I feel simply desperate,’ one of her letters begins; and another: ‘My depression is so great as to be almost exhilaration.’ As the days went by this depression deepened. ‘I feel utterly – like this □ – square as a box and mad as a lemon squeezer. What is the remedy?’ she asked her friend. ‘…Do you know what it is to sit down and be bounced up again by what you sat on, and for that to happen
continuously
so that you can’t sit
anywhere
?
Of course you do – I am now taking phenacetin to keep the furniture still.’ Up till then she had used humour to preserve her detachment and energy. But the effect of her phenacetin tablets appears to have reduced this detachment. For the first time she contemplated suicide. The Rani sometimes knew more of what was happening than Augustus and Dorelia, from whom Ida camouflaged her emotions. She did not complain, but told the Rani: ‘I live the life of a lady slavey. But I wouldn’t change – because of Augustus – c’est un homme pour qui mourir – and literally sometimes I am inclined to kill myself – I don’t seem exactly necessary.’ She still admired him – but was no longer so intimate with him. Also he was ‘impossible’, and so life itself had become impossible. ‘I long for an understanding face,’ she wrote to the Rani. ‘I am surrounded by cows and vulgarity here. Isn’t it awful when even the desire to live forsakes one? I
cannot
just now, see any reason why I should. Yet I feel if I tide over this bad time, I shall be glad later on. What do you think?’

Believing that Ida must not be left alone, the Rani wired Augustus, who was then in London with Dorelia, to return home at once. She also wrote to Ida urging her to shake off ill thoughts of death. ‘As to suicide,’ Ida replied,

‘why not? What a fuss about one life which is really not valuable!… Am I not a fool to make such a fuss about a thing I accepted, nay invited, but I have lost all my sense of reason or right. All that seems far over the sea and I can only hear sounds which don’t seem to matter. It’s so funny not to
want
to be good. I never remember to have felt it before. It is such a nice free feeling – animals must be like that.’

Augustus rushed back, the crisis lifted, and Ida confessed to the Rani:

‘You know
I was very near
the laudanum bottle – somehow it seemed the next thing. Like when you’re tired you see an armchair and sit down in it. Now you “know all” I feel a sort of support – it is funny. Others know, but no one has given me support in the right place as you have. One held up an arm, another a leg, one told me I wasn’t tired and there was nothing the matter… With you I have something to
sit on
!’

Dorelia too was not happy. She felt responsible for the bickering, the guilt, the dissatisfaction that pervaded the house. There were times, she knew, when Ida must have wished her at the bottom of the sea. She began to think it had been a mistake leaving Bruges, coming to Matching Green. Then, early in 1905, while Gus was painting her portrait, she told him categorically that once this picture was finished she must leave. There was nothing to stop her; she had no wish to stay.

Augustus could hardly believe it. Their life together, of which he had had such splendid dreams, was failing. It should have been so natural. He felt wretched.

Shortly before Dorelia’s baby was due, Ida went to stay with the Salamans at Oxford. But her imagination still stalked the rooms of Elm House, remembering so many sights and sounds she had never wanted to witness, imprisoning the details in her mind. No matter what her intelligence told her, she seemed affected biologically. In a remarkable letter she now sent privately to Dorelia, very long, but written hurriedly in pencil, she set down her conclusions.

‘…I tried not to be horrid – I know I am – I never hardly feel generous now like I did at first – I suppose you feel this through everything – I tried to be jolly – it is easy to be superficially jolly – I hate to think I made you miserable but I know I have – Gus blames me entirely for
everything
now – I daresay he’s right – but when I think of some things I feel I suffered too much – it was like physical suffering it was so intense – like being burnt or something – I can’t feel I am entirely responsible for this horrid ending – it was nature that was the enemy to our scheme. I have often wondered you have not gone away before – it has always been open to you to go, and if you have been as unhappy as Gus says you should have told me. I do not think it likely Gus and I can live together after this – I want to separate – I feel sick at heart. At present I hate you generally but I don’t know if I really do. It is all impossible now and we are simply living in a convention you know – a way of talking to each other which has no depth or heart. I should like to know if it gives you a feeling of relief and flying away to freedom to think of going… I don’t care what Gus thinks of me now, of course he’d be wild at this letter. He
seems centuries away. He puts himself away. I think he’s a mean and childish creature besides being the fine old chap he is.

I came here in order to have the rest cure, and I am, but it makes things seem worse than if one is occupied – but of course it will all come all right in the end. I know you and Gus think I ought to think of you as the sufferer, but I can’t. You are free – the man you love at present, loves you – you don’t care for convention or what people think – of course your future is perilous, but you love it. You are a wanderer – you would hate safety and cages – why are you to be pitied? It is only the ones who are bound who are to be pitied – the slaves. It seems to me utterly misjudging the case to pity you. You are living your life – you chose it – you did it because you wanted to – didn’t you? Do you regret it? I thought you were a wild free bird who loved life in its glorious hardships. If I am to think of you as a sad female who needs protection I must indeed change my ideas… It was for your freedom and all you represented I envied you so. Because you meant to Gus all that lay outside the dull home, the unspeakable fireside, the gruesome dinner table – that I became so hopeless – I was the chain – you were the key to unlock it. This is what I have been made to feel ever since you came. Gus will deny it but he denies many facts which are daily occurrences – apparently denies them because they are true and he wants to pretend they aren’t. One feels what is, doesn’t one? Nothing can change this fact – that you are the one outside who calls a man to
apparent
freedom and wild rocks and wind and air – and I am the one inside who says come to dinner, and who to live with is apparent slavery. Neither Gus nor I are strong enough to find freedom in domesticity – though I know it is there.

You are the wild bird – fly away – as Gus says our life does not suit you. He will follow, never fear. There was never a poet could stay at home. Do not think myself to be pitied either. I shudder when I think of those times, simply because it was pain… It has robbed me of the tenderness I felt for you – but you can do without that – and I would do anything for you if you would ever ask me to – you still seem to belong to us. I.’
15

What Ida overlooked was that, during the first few months of 1905, Augustus had grown rather less attentive towards Dorelia, as if the wild bird being caged was no longer capable of extraordinary flight. It was true that he could not find freedom, or poetry, or love in domesticity. Not for long. Love was like fire to Augustus. Confined within the grate of marriage, it smouldered drearily, collapsing into ashes. Its smoke choked him and its dying coals were cheerless. He wanted to spread it around, let it take light where it would, to make a splendid conflagration – rather than sit fixed by its embers. And now Dorelia, whom he had once likened to a
flame, was sinking into this domestic apathy. His poems dried up, his gaze fell vacant. What he needed from Dorelia, and also from Ida, was positively less of them. He needed distance and elusiveness to get his romantic view in focus. He was not really a demonstrative man and became impatient over homely displays of affection. Confused by this sudden heating and cooling of emotion, Dorelia grew defensive. Ida had hardened towards her; Augustus, at moments, appeared indifferent; neither of them mentioned her unborn baby, and, from Augustus, this hurt her. She confessed as much to Ida who, contradicting her avowed loss of tenderness, wrote back to reassure her:

‘My dear, men always seem indifferent about babies – that is, men of our sort. You must not think Gus is more so over yours than he was over mine. He never said anything about David except ‘don’t spill it’. They take us and leave us you know – it is nature. I thought he was rather solicitous about yours considering. Don’t you believe he came over to Belgium because he was sorry for you. He is a mean skunk to let you imagine such a thing. If ever a man was in love, he was – and is now, only of course it’s sunk down to the bottom again – a man doesn’t keep stirred up for long – and because we can’t see it we’re afraid it’s not there – but never you fear.’
16

This consolation, which was also needed by Ida herself, was to flower after the birth of Dorelia’s baby, leading to a special affection between the two women. But, for the time being, it was another confusing factor. Like a lake, swollen by the rivers of their mixed feelings, their bewilderment rose. At times, it was the only thing the three of them shared. Augustus’s pronouncements certainly sounded unmixed, but then they were so quick, and so quickly succeeded by other pronouncements equally strong and utterly different. Ida, for all her disenchantment, still harboured a deep affection for him – ‘he’s a mean and childish creature besides being the fine old chap he is’ – as Dorelia was to do. Admiration and anger, jealousy and tenderness for Dorelia spun within her. Amid all this eddying of emotion, it was up to Dorelia to steer a firm course. But for her pregnancy, it seems likely that she would have slipped away without a word. Words were not her
métier –
words, explanations, all this indulgence, were not in her line. She was, so she always insisted, ‘a very ordinary person’, blessed with an extraordinary vicarious gift. She had little talent for making independent decisions: she excelled at making the best of other people’s, and when, as now, no one made any decisions, she drifted without a compass. Hoping that Ida might decide for her – for the two of them
had never been so intimate as by post – she wrote expressing her confusion. But when Ida replied, she saw her confusion faithfully reflected:

‘About your going or not
you
must decide – I should not have suggested it, but I believe you’d be happier to go… Yes, to stay together seems impossible, only we know it isn’t – I don’t know what to say. Only I feel so sure you’d be happier away… I know I should be jolly glad now if we all lived apart – or anyway if I did with the children. Don’t you think we might as well? – if it can be arranged.

I don’t feel the same confidence in Gus I did, nor in myself.

Yes I know I always asked you to stay on, but still I don’t see why you should have – you knew it was pride made me ask you, and because I wouldn’t be instrumental in your going, having invited you – also because I didn’t see how I could live with Gus alone again. All, all selfish reasons.

…I have often felt a pig not to talk to you more about the
*2
baby, but I couldn’t manage it. Also I always feel you
are not
like ordinary people and don’t care for the things other people do. Gus says what I think of you is vulgar and insensible – I don’t know – I know I’m always fighting for you to people outside, but probably what I tell them is quite untrue – and vulgar. I know I admire you immensely as I do a great river or a sunny day – or anything else great and natural and inevitable. But perhaps this is not you. I don’t feel friendly or tender to you because you seem aloof and like some calm independent animal – you don’t seem to need anything from me, or from any woman – and it seems unnatural and a condescension for you to do things for me. Added to all this is my jealousy. This is a true statement of why I am like I am to you...

As to Gus he’s a poet, and knows no more about actual life than a poet does. This is sometimes everything, when he’s struck a spark to illumine the darkness, and sometimes nothing when he’s looking at the moon. As to me, we all know I’m nothing but a rubbish heap with a few buried treasures which will all be tarnished by the time they come to light.