Augustus John (54 page)

John asks me to say that he will be pleased to come. I’m afraid you’ll think I’m rather ungracious.’

While Dorelia was still in Paris, Augustus and Ottoline had seen each other several times a week. But even then Ottoline had come to realize that ‘what I can give him is not what he wants. He calls for something strong, reckless and rampant, which will carry him off his feet, and he knows too well that it is not mine to give.’
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What he gave her was a tantalizing glimpse of another world. ‘He would appear in my imagination as if he passed through the room, suddenly making the conventional scene appear absurd.’
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He gave her this glimpse, but he did not take her into his unconventional world – or at least not for long. And Ottoline, who seemed ready to risk everything, wanted more.

According to one of Ottoline’s biographers, Sandra Jobson Darroch, their affair ‘reached its peak around July 1908’;
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according to another, Miranda Seymour, ‘the relationship appears to have reached a climax in December 1908.’
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Both biographers agree that it was on the wane after Dorelia had returned to London and met Ottoline.

‘I have always been so excessively anxious to feel myself quite alive that I have plunged with needless precipitation into the most obviously fast flowing channels where there are rocks & bubbles & foam & whirlpools,’ Augustus had written to Ottoline in the summer of 1908; ‘…this plan has saved me from deadly morbidity at any rate if it has not improved my complexion.’
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There is no telling where this plan might have led Augustus and Ottoline had not Dorelia brought them to land with what may have been a shrewd stratagem or an instinctive move, merging the troublesome subplots of their lives.

In September 1909, the two women were shopping in London – Dorelia loved pretty shoes, Ottoline noticed – and stopping their taxi at 8 Fitzroy Street, Dorelia went in for a couple of minutes, leaving Ottoline in the taxi. Ottoline knew the Fitzroy Street studio intimately. It was here that Augustus had begun painting her; here that she had declared her love to him. But Augustus had recently handed over the place to Henry Lamb on his return from Paris, and it was Henry who suddenly appeared at the window of her taxi and invited her in.

Arrayed in tobacco-coloured frock coat and breeches, Lamb had flowered into an astonishing spectacle since parting from Euphemia. Ottoline could not take her eyes off his slim visionary figure, his almost translucent face and hair like pale flames. She took him and Dorelia and a girl who was in the studio, Lamb’s mistress Helen Maitland, who was a friend of Dorelia’s, back to her home in Bedford Square for tea.

Soon Ottoline and Henry were in friendly correspondence. Fortunately Henry found it easier to decipher her letters than Augustus had done, and could be more precise in his answers. ‘You say my friends can be yours, if I will,’ he replied to her, ‘yes, but are you ready to make enemies of my enemies?’
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By this time Augustus was becoming one of those enemies as Henry struggled to escape the straitjacket of imitation. ‘John and his set have done much to ruin and deface him and make him disbelieve in good,’
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Ottoline decided. Henry had all Augustus’s moodiness, and she was filled with a similar desire to ‘develop’ him into a happier person. ‘If God will work in me I may be able to help him.’

Early in 1910, Henry was to give up the Fitzroy Street studio. ‘Apparently vagabondage is my destiny,’
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he proclaimed to Ottoline. But his destiny still seemed to lie in Augustus’s footsteps. By the spring he was established among the rich coloured rugs and exotic flowers, the silks and stoves, of a coach house rigged up by Ottoline as a studio next to her country house at Peppard. While Philip Morrell went electioneering, Henry sketched Ottoline naked in the beechwoods, and was enveloped in her erotic maternal embrace. It was the start of a complex love affair full of the rocks and whirlpools Augustus had warned her against. That spring and summer Henry replaced Augustus as the most important person in Ottoline’s emotional life. ‘I burn to embrace you & cover all of your body with mine,’ Henry wrote to her. ‘…I kiss your face & your body all over but your face – where your beautiful spirit is most expressed – I return to & kiss all over again.’
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But even at the height of their passion, Ottoline still knew that ‘all his heart is given to Dorelia’.
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Despite this, and the disappearance of ‘Elffin’ from her life, Ottoline remained a useful friend to Augustus and Dorelia. Not the least of her uses – and the one that first melted Dorelia – was to the children. And with these they needed all the help available.

‘Though I admire children, I wouldn’t care to take charge of a nursery.’

Augustus John to John Davenport

Like a pair of skilled jugglers, Augustus and Dorelia had kept revolving in the air every one of the schemes they had introduced into their act at Equihen. To be or not to be married; to live together, or apart, or both – and where or anywhere: the range of alternatives spun before their faces ever more fantastically.

For much of the winter of 1907–8 Dorelia had stayed on in France. There were many matters to occupy her: sorting out ‘clothes, curtains, cushions etc’ from the studios – ‘and then there is the accordion and various musical instruments’, including the gypsy guitar Ida had never really learnt to play. Dorelia gave up her apartment and, with Pyramus and Romilly, moved through a series of hotels. She was seeing a good deal of Lamb and something of Gwen, spending much time ‘making clothes for the kids’ of the most anti-Wigmorian cut. She ordered Augustus to send her supplies of wool, money and tobacco; and she waited.

Augustus had begun to ‘look for a house about London’, he told her. He relied for success on a coincidence between what he happened to find and what his dreams of the perfect life happened to be. While exploring Hampstead Heath he dreamed fervently of Toulouse. Wyndham Lewis was thinking of going there, and anything Lewis could do… But then a brilliant notion seized him. Spain! A young friend, the celebrated practical joker Horace de Vere Cole who, in the guise of the Sultan of Zanzibar, had ceremonially inspected Cambridge, now (with a perfectly straight face) recommended a castle in Spain. ‘I met the Sultan of Zanzibar in Bond Street,’ Augustus reported to Dorelia. ‘He said he was going to Spain with Tyler.’ Royall Tyler,
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he added, was ‘my latest friend’, a Bostonian and a profound student of Spanish matters. ‘He is going to go mad one day,’ Augustus predicted, ‘ – I saw it in his hand and he knows it.’ The more he thought of Spain, the less attractive Hampstead or even Wantage (which he also scrutinized) appeared.

By April 1908 he had set off in pursuit of some Spanish gypsies, picking up Dorelia in Paris on the way. From the Hôtel du Mont Blanc in the boulevard Edgar-Quinet, where Gwen and Dorelia had stayed when they first came to Paris, he wrote to Ottoline (28 April 1908): ‘Spain is
cruel – but I have blood-thirsty moments myself… Have you ever found it necessary to strangle anybody – in imagination? There is indescribable satisfaction in it. At other times I feel more like bringing people to life. My Variability is rather disconcerting and hardly makes life easier. I must learn discipline and consistency.’

Spain, which had seemed for a few moments a likely winner among his many schemes, now began to fall back. In fact he got no nearer the Spanish border on this occasion than Paris itself, and it took him almost another fifteen years to complete the journey. His indecision was assisted by Dorelia who was preparing to ‘wander about’ France with a few of the children. ‘It would I think be out of the question to allow her to take Edwin for the reason that her own two boys are quite enough to keep her busy,’ Augustus appealed to Mrs Nettleship, ‘although she could cheerfully take charge of the whole lot… I know no princess with maternal instincts unsatisfied, unfortunately, who would open her gates to my poor boys. Perhaps I may meet one...’

Some final decision was becoming urgent. ‘Travel as we may,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia, ‘we want a pied-à-terre
somewhere
.’
In the interval there was nothing for him to do but go back to Fitzroy Street. ‘I haven’t taken the house yet – it seems to me sometimes quite unpractical without Ida,’ he wrote to Mrs Nettleship.

So far as the children were concerned, Augustus was considering farms. He bundled them along to stay with various friends, including Michel Salaman, now a country gentleman, and Ottoline at Peppard, Edna Clarke Hall at Upminster and Charles McEvoy,
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who lived ‘in a pigstye’ at Westcot in Berkshire. But he went there mainly for the sake of the ‘grand’ Berkshire backgrounds which lent themselves to ‘noble decoration’, he informed Lamb. ‘It is unfortunate that the peasants have taken to motor caps and bicycle shirts.’ Then, on his way back with the children, he fell in with a man who told ‘me about the country near Naples [where] he used to live’, Augustus wrote to Dorelia. ‘I asked him how much one could live [on] there with a family – he said £250. I have ordered a passport. It will be ready the day after to-morrow...’

An actual decision could only be wrung out of Augustus by some crisis, and it was Dorelia who now presented him with one, as he began to suspect she might never return from her wanderings.

‘I wish you were here – if you want to be absolutely independent I don’t want to be dependent,’ he wrote to her. ‘…Will you come over? or will I come back? Doing nothing is killing me. I wish you would come south with me. I can’t stand the thought of separating – only if you
want
to I can do nothing.’
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The danger of losing Dorelia, like another death, concentrated Augustus’s
mind. ‘C’est bien que toi que je désire – mon ange,’ he declared, ‘ – c’est bien que toi.’ Whenever Augustus was decisive, Dorelia fell in step with him. Between their various schemes it was now a photo finish, which revealed – a dead heat! For they agreed to marry, and yet not to marry; to marry, so far as the Nettleships were concerned, almost at once; but not to translate this policy very urgently into legal fact. Augustus promised ‘to raise the wind’ in Wigmore Street ‘which is quite willing to blow just now’, and added: ‘I’m beginning to feel myself – ten times as efficient as anybody else.’

This policy of ‘marriage’ was to convince the Nettleships that they proposed taking away the children and making a home for them. Believing that her son-in-law’s life was falling apart, Mrs Nettleship had recently swung into the attack, apprising Augustus that ‘a woman who kills an unborn child is not fit to have the care of children.’ In a heated exchange between the two of them Augustus felt able to answer that, in accusing Dorelia of bringing about a miscarriage, she was condemning Ida, ‘who had tried the same thing’. He himself took the other view – that by ‘annihilating a mass of inchoate blubber without identity at the risk of her life to spare me further burdens’, Dorelia had proved ‘her unusual fitness for the bringing up of children’. Was it not Mrs Nettleship herself who had first ‘instructed Ida in the mysteries of child prevention? – mysteries which she was evidently not equal to mastering, thank God!… I would have killed many an unborn child to keep her [Ida] alive – and even have felt myself perfectly fit to take charge of children.’ Both of them having lost their tempers, Augustus notified Mrs Nettleship that he ‘was taking all the children away and was at last happy at the thought of resuming our ménage where it left off – with Ida there in spirit and in the blood of her kids.’
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By treating Augustus in the way Uncle Ned had prescribed Mrs Nettleship had committed a bad error of tactics. Realizing this, she then sent him a conciliatory letter in which she allowed that to marry Dorelia was ‘obviously the correct thing to do’. But this irritated Augustus further:

‘It is by no means from a desire to be “correct” that I am going to marry Dorelia. It is precisely because she is the only possible mother to Ida’s children now Ida has gone, since I love her, knowing her to be such. And for no less reason would she consent to marry me, or I her. She is entirely and absolutely unselfish as Ida was and as their life together proved, with such proofs as stagger the intelligence. She is besides the only woman who does not stifle one in domesticity and who is on my own plane of intelligence (or above it) in a word the one woman with whom I can live, work and still be a father to all the children. Without her I would have
to say good-bye to the children, for I cannot recognize them or myself in a house and an atmosphere which will ever be strange and antipathetic to me as it was to their mother...

If I were not supremely confident that Dorelia and I are able to bring up the children immeasurably better than you or anybody else, I would not hesitate to leave them where they are. But as I distinctly object to the way they are being brought up with you, as I see quite clearly it is
not
a good way, nor their mother’s, Dorelia’s or my way, I am going to take them away at once...’

By now events had gained a momentum of their own, pulling in Dorelia, who ‘suddenly turned up here [8 Fitzroy Street] to help with the children’. Together they would roam France with four kids, two of Ida’s and Dorelia’s two, he explained to Ottoline. ‘They are not going to be brought up by Philistines any longer. I tell you I had to fight to come to the point.’

From Mrs Nettleship, however, he received literally more than he bargained for. At the end of June he had written to her outlining his plans: ‘I am off to France in a few days and want to take David and Caspar with me – I would
like
to take them all of course – but am not quite ready for that. I think we may go to Brittany for the summer… I hate the thought of leaving Robin behind – and Edwin – and Henry!’ Events now followed with what he called ‘admirable briskness’.
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Mrs Nettleship replied that she was holding on to the children, and that if Augustus attempted to abduct them she would have him committed to prison. As for Dorelia, she would prefer to see her dead than in charge of Ida’s sons. To this, Augustus sent back an ultimatum:
‘Take your proceedings at once, but deliver up all my children in your charge by tomorrow morning!’