Augustus John (51 page)

So different were these goings-on from the calm atmosphere at Wigmore Street, she felt as if she had landed on a distant world where no one knew what was right or wrong, and no normal standards applied. Every day was a carnival, and the amoral beauty of it all drove her frantic. ‘There never seems time for anything here,’ she complained to Ursula, ‘ – the weather is so lovely, we are out all day and in the evening we are too sleepy to do anything. It is almost irritating that this place is so lovely – I hate it all for being so placid and “only man is vile”… Something must come to relieve this tension.’

Something did come and it brought the tension to breaking point. Dorelia had succeeded in not telling anyone that her children this summer were suffering from ophthalmia, a painful eye disease. She had even forgotten it herself and, by arranging for all the children to share a single
sponge and towel, had spread the infection to two of Ida’s children, Edwin and Robin. Mrs Nettleship was appalled. Here was actual proof that Dorelia could not be trusted. She dismissed Dorelia’s argument that many of these sicknesses cured themselves, and briskly herding Ida’s untainted sons together she drove them out of the infected area. ‘I should like to bring them back right away,’ she told Ursula in London, ‘but Gus does not think it matters!… He says the village children get over it all right and so will ours!… He is nearly driving me mad… I have never known anyone so impossible to deal with.’ At the same time, fearing to lose the boys altogether, she had to check her temper. Nor could she leave while the ophthalmia persisted, since no one did anything to cure the disease unless she herself insisted on it being done – Dorelia still preferring what she called ‘natural methods’. At first, Mrs Nettleship’s monumental diplomacy seemed to be effective, especially when Augustus, responding to the strain of their holiday, remarked that the two families could never be brought up together. ‘If either of our boys [David or Caspar] get ophthalmia I shall use it as a weapon,’ Mrs Nettleship promised.

Twelve days later, diplomacy had disappeared and ‘it is war to the knife’. Each side had marshalled a team of doctors with strongly opposing advice. ‘Gus is hopeless – just one mass of selfishness – not thinking of anyone, but his own desires – and so surly and cross,’ Mrs Nettleship reported to Ursula. ‘How Ida can have endured it I can’t imagine – he has no heart at all.’

Another twelve days and Mrs Nettleship had returned to Wigmore Street, triumphantly carrying off with her David, Caspar, Robin, and the urn containing Ida’s ashes. ‘We had a healthy respect for Grannie Nettleship,’ Caspar remembered. This tubby woman with grizzled hair and plump face was strict but not ungenerous. The boys were chiefly looked after by Ursula, the elder of their two aunts. ‘We had to wash and scrub thoroughly in preparation for an inspection by Ursula before being accepted as adequately clean,’ Caspar wrote. ‘We wore shoes and socks regularly and had our straggling locks cut short.’
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All this was distressing for Augustus. ‘I am saddened to realise that I have allowed an immoral and bourgeois society of women to capture my 3 eldest boys,’ he admitted to Henry Lamb (17 July 1907). ‘It will be the devil to get them back again but it must be done when opportunity offers. Perhaps I may ask you to assist me one day in recovering them. Can you shoot? I cannot stand finding those chaps in the hands of people among whom I shall always be a stranger, and no longer in the brave and beautiful attire their mother gave them to wear. I cannot leave them with people who although they are Ida’s mother and sisters did not even know her.’

Mrs Nettleship was used to getting her own way and, once back in
Wigmore Street, she set about consolidating her advantage. She knew that Augustus did not want to prolong the present arrangement, yet sensed he was somehow in two minds. His uncertainty was catching and she could not make up her own mind as to what her best tactics should be. If she wanted to mollify him she might approach him via her daughter Ursula; if she wanted to frighten him she would appeal to Edward Nettleship – ‘Uncle Ned of Nutcombe Hill’, said to be a dragon of a man. Finally, after canvassing opinion among various aunts and cousins, she did both. Ursula acted at once, writing to assure Augustus that, if the children were left with the Nettleship family, she would see to it that their education was not old-fashioned and would look after them herself. In his reply, Augustus sets down his feelings with unusual explicitness:

‘Be sure that if any consideration could induce me to part with the children it would be the fact that
you
alone would have them. The
immediate
future has an unsettled aspect for me. Homeless, penniless and lawless I present a pretty spectacle of a paterfamilias! But thanks to you things begin to look much more tractable.

I want badly to retain the children as Ida’s and mine – to keep them in the atmosphere they were born in – a delightful atmosphere and not at all dreadful you know – and to think of them being educated into ordinary little early Victorian bourgeois prigs is a horrid thought! You have eased me of that apprehension at least… and you would have some of Ida’s sublime gigantic composure in dealing with them – I really was beginning to fear I shouldn’t recognise them in a year or so, or they me. I was preparing myself for the moment when they would approach me and earnestly implore me to get my hair cut!

In addition to these perhaps morbid fancies the spirit of opposition was kindled somewhat on finding my section of the family treated to a kind of super-discreet aloofness – and the three kids in question hardly to be viewed and that only under formidable escort… I must have a try at getting people to know that Dorelia is a Person and a very rare and respectable being, to wit full of sense and sensibility, having no shams in her being, indeed a kind of feminine genius I fancy. I would like to mention that had she been only my “mistress” we would not be together now. Had she not been a worthy soul, do you think I could have stood it so long? I say this as no superior person, believe me – I might say like Hamlet “I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse myself of things it were better my mother had not borne me. I am proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my back than I had thought to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such a fellow as I do, crawling between heaven and earth!”

But Dorelia was loved of Ida and her very good friend in spite of appearances and all great mistakes not withstanding. Barring their mother she had more to do with the children than anyone else; and because Ida happened to die it doesn’t strike me as indispensable to hurry D. out by the back stairs. In a word she has been and so far remains part of my family and I should like her always to continue to give the children the benefit of her honesty and simplicity and affection, and help to dress them bravely too – as she knows how to. For without brave attire I can’t put up with them.

It would be a frightfully difficult thing to take them away from you even now: but I don’t want to. They can always pay you visits… But I suppose it’s not impossible that you may have babies of your own some time and you might think that better than having other people’s babies… since my proposal to reassume the parental responsibilities sooner or later – friendliness and Patience have to become established...’
23

While Augustus was writing this letter to Ursula, Uncle Ned was sharpening his pen up at Nutcombe Hill. With long-drawn-out relish he was preparing himself ‘a good slapping letter’ for Augustus. It was congenial labour. He lingered lovingly over the vituperative phrases, savouring them, hardly liking to let them go. He was still remorselessly chewing over all this when he received from Ursula Augustus’s letter and, as he read through it, it occurred to him that his carefully charged time bomb fell ‘rather flat’. It was a sad waste, but at least a little of his invective could be discharged vicariously.

The letter he now (28 September 1907) addressed to Ursula shows between what bewildering changes of background some of Ida’s sons were to pass their formative years. At first, Uncle Ned allowed, he had thought the fellow must have been mad drunk when he wrote, ‘but on re-reading, there is too much essential coherence for that. He [Augustus] whines that he is penniless and homeless and lawless (the last evidently, like the other two, from his misfortune doubtless, not from any preventable fault!). He wants to keep the children for himself and Dorelia, but he wants you with your gigantic composure to carry on their Bohemian Education when in the intervals of their home life they pay you visits in some place where the atmosphere is “anti-Wigmorian”.’ Such a response, Uncle Ned urged, called in question the whole policy of conciliation. Instead, he would like to hear that Augustus was being instructed ‘in quite simple words that it is his business to put his back into his work to maintain his children’; that no Nettleship worth the name would be a party to brave attire – if ‘“brave” means (as I am told it does) squalid or dirty or gutter-snipe attire’; and that to talk of the inhabitants of Wigmore Street as bourgeois
prigs was ‘impudent nonsense’ for which an instantaneous apology was required. This, like music, was what Uncle Ned would like to hear – but it would have to come now from Ursula, since she had opened the negotiations. She must change the tune – but he, if called upon, would conduct her playing. It must, however, be a solo programme – they couldn’t have every aunt and cousin chiming in. Then the dragon roared his last paragraph of flame:

‘I think that subtle, absolutely selfish and introspective as he is, and morose and bad tempered to boot, he is a coward at any rate when dealing with women; and that hard hitting, at any rate now, is at least as likely to succeed with him and Dorelia (who of course is doing her best as wire-puller) as any other plan… Dorelia wants to keep him; she does not really want Ida’s children.’
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So with both sides convinced of the other’s immorality as parents, the autumn passed; and, for their winter quarters, they took up entrenched positions in this war to the knife.

‘Do we not rise on stepping stones of our dead selves – or am I wrong?’

Augustus John to Caspar John

In one respect at least Uncle Ned had misunderstood the situation. He had attributed calculation to Augustus and Dorelia, and in doing so had stumbled on an untruth that made his generalship of incalculable value to the enemy. ‘Wire-pulling’ or any other species of long-term cunning had no part in Dorelia’s make-up. Her gift was for taking things as they came – and when they didn’t come, but hung around some distance off, she had little talent for advancing on them. The present suspended state of affairs did not bring into play her best qualities. To a degree, her desires were the very opposite of what Uncle Ned had represented: as her affair with Henry Lamb showed, she did not inevitably want to keep Augustus. But she did want one or two of Ida’s children. Her point of view was beyond the comprehension of the Nettleships.

Over the summer, over the autumn, Dorelia and Augustus had debated the situation as fully as two inarticulate people could. They hit on all
manner of schemes for taking care of the future, but without Ida they were strangely undecided and, despite much activity, made little progress. There were two main plans: first that they should continue living together; and secondly that they should not. The first plan came in many forms. One night, for example, Dorelia dreamt of ‘a lovely country… terrific mountains and forests and rivers – the people were Russians but I think it must have been Spain’;
25
and next day they were hot for setting off to find this place. Then, their mood changing, they thought of settling for a house in England. ‘We must have an aquarium in the country,’ Dorelia affirmed. ‘We might get one in exchange for a baby or something.’
26
It was that continual ‘or something’ that foxed them.

Dorelia’s difficulty was the adoring Henry Lamb, whose presence acted like that of a magnet upon a compass. She simply did not know what to do. ‘I haven’t the faintest wish to get married,’ she informed Augustus (September 1907). ‘I think it would be best if I went on the road and left you in peace which I should be only too glad to do if you would let me have one of the children – Caspar or Robin – he would be better with me than in that virginal atmosphere [Wigmore Street].’
27

Lamb, who was to walk through Brittany from inn to inn the following summer with Caspar in a sack over his shoulders, had already been sounded out by Augustus in connection with the children. The argument was simple. Since Lamb was apprenticed to Augustus, what could be better than apprenticing one of Augustus’s sons to Lamb? It was a merry scheme. ‘I found Robin overwhelming!’ he recommended. ‘When one sings or even whistles to him, he lies back and closes his eyes luxuriously. It is he who should be your pupil… ’

During the next three years, the relationship between Augustus and Dorelia was to be more fluid and circumstantial than at any other period. Sometimes they lived on wheels together, sometimes the Channel flowed between them. Sometimes they were close; sometimes they seemed to move apart, carried this way and that by currents they could not control. ‘Don’t worry,’ Dorelia reassured him, ‘as I think either plan extremely desirable.’ There were indeed times when
any
plan seemed desirable – but still they could not decide. Yet whenever Dorelia drifted too far away, Augustus would suddenly be resolute: ‘Beloved, of course it’s you I want.’
28

*

One thing at least had been agreed: they could no longer afford, scattered through two countries, quite such a multitude of unsuitable flats and studios. On returning to London, Augustus wrote to Lamb (‘mon cher Agneau’) asking him to sell the lease of his studio in the cour de Rohan.
Though he would make other parts of France his second home in the future, he was never again to live in Paris. Ironically, perhaps, this parting was to coincide with his meeting with Picasso. ‘I saw a young artist called Picasso whose work is wonderful in Paris,’ he had written that summer (5 August 1907) to Lamb. And two months later, once his studio was let and all connections with Paris severed (4 November 1907), he had become convinced that ‘Picasso is a wonder’. The two painters, fellow-sympathizers with society’s outcasts, had visited each other at their studios, and Augustus who saw ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, was greatly impressed by Picasso’s work, chiefly because, like his own, it was steeped in the past, drew part of its inspiration from Puvis de Chavannes, and revealed ‘elements derived from remote antiquity or the art forms of primitive peoples’.
29
Some of Augustus’s paintings done at this time, such as the ‘French Fisher-boy’
30
and ‘Peasant Woman with Baby and Small Boy’,
31
show resemblance to Picasso’s Blue Period, and indicate a direction his work might have taken had the circumstances of his life been different.