Augustus John Read online

  ‘Have patience with this literature of our misunderstanding,’ Lewis appealed.66 Aware of his friend’s superior education, Augustus strove to match Lewis’s ‘calligraphic obscurity’ by what he called ‘linguistic licence’ – that is, a fantastic prolixity which he considered the intellectual tenor of their relationship required. The result was an exchange of letters, part undiscoverable, part indecipherable, covering over fifty years, that is almost complete in its comic density. Both were flamboyantly secretive men with bombardier tempers, and their friendship, which somehow endured all its volcanic quarrels, kept being arrested by declarations that it was at an end – an event upon which they would with great warmth congratulate themselves. Yet such was the good feeling generated by these separations and congratulations that they quickly came together again, when all the damning-and-blasting of their complicated liaison would start up once more.67

  Their correspondence is extremely generous with offensive advice which they attempt to make more palatable by adding the odd ‘mon vieux’ or ‘old fellow’. Augustus frequently intends to return Lewis’s letters by post in order to get him to ‘admit [that] no more offensive statement could be penned’; but almost always he mislays the letter or, in his first fit of uncontrollable fury, flings it irrecoverably into some fire or sea. Besides, Lewis is always offering to provide batches of duplicates by special courier. Augustus is constantly being dumbfounded by Lewis’s requests for money coupled with his forgetfulness in repaying it; and by his insistence that Augustus was influencing mutual friends to his discredit. Augustus’s style grows more and more convoluted in grappling with these charges. Then, suddenly, the clouds clear and in a succinct moment of retaliation he announces that Lewis’s drawings ‘lack charm, my dear fellow’.68

  The whole relationship is bedevilled by ingenious dissension. Each credits the other with Machiavellian cunning. Lewis is amazed that Augustus never invites him for a drink; Augustus is perplexed that Lewis is never able to visit him – when he does so, Augustus is always out; while Lewis, on principle, never answers his doorbell. They make elaborate plans to meet on neutral territory, but then something goes wrong – the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong mood. Lewis becomes increasingly irritated that Augustus so seldom writes. Augustus becomes irritated because when he does write his letters go astray, Lewis in the meantime having moved in darkest secrecy to some unknown address such as the Pall Mall Deposit. The letters which do arrive express very adequately this irritation fanned, in Lewis’s case, by eloquent invective, and in Augustus’s by a circumlocution that ingeniously avoids answering any of Lewis’s inquiries. It is a most stimulating exchange.

  Life itself – beyond Fitzroy Street – was variously stimulating: but at home it was the old fruitful routine. On 11 March 1903 Ida’s second child was born. Gus had confidently predicted a girl, but ‘instead of Esther, a roaring boy has forced admittance to our household,’ he told Will Rothenstein. ‘…Ida welcomes him heartily. But what will David say?’ It was ‘much nicer’, Ida had told the Rani, ‘to have Gussie than the doctor, and a gamp twice a day than a hovering nurse in a starched cap. Lorenzo Paganini is quite lovely and so quiet.’ The boy, also referred to as ‘nice fat slug’ or ‘pig face’ (‘his face is like a pink pig’s,’ Ida boasted to Margaret Sampson), was eventually saddled with the name Caspar – nicknamed Capper (and occasionally ‘Caper Sauce’) – and a gate was fitted at the top of the stairs outside their flat to prevent the children from falling. Suddenly their home seemed very crowded. ‘I emerged into a melodramatic scene of human frailty,’ Caspar later wrote.69

  In a highly oblique passage of Finishing Touches,70 his posthumous and unfinished volume of memoirs, Augustus refers to himself under the pseudonym of ‘George’. George, a new recruit of Will Rothenstein’s and said to be on the threshold of a brilliant career, is ‘only just recovering from the nervous breakdown following his recent marriage’. At the informal parties in Will Rothenstein’s house, finding ‘an atmosphere no doubt very different from the climatic conditions of the home-life to which he was as yet uninured… he began to expand and blossom forth himself, in a style combining scholarship with an attractive diffidence and humour. He felt perhaps that here was a means of escape from the insidious encroachments of domesticity, and accordingly attached himself to Will Rothenstein with the desperate haste of a man caught in the quicksands.’

  If he expanded here and at the Café Royal, he often contracted again when he got home. This concertina motion, to which Ida responded with a mixture of excitement and dread, had by 1903 produced a strange fragmentation of himself. He became subject to sudden withdrawals from human contact. It seemed baffling that someone of such intelligence and strong physique could at times be so will-less. The only Will he had, apparently, was Rothenstein, whose remedy was to send him off on marathon walks round Hampstead Heath.

  Yet Augustus was not indolent. He could work well if tactfully organized. But to organize him was an operation needing remorseless diplomacy. Will Rothenstein, for all his energy and enthusiasm, could not begin to do this, and even Ida, continually pregnant and fretted by domestic duties, was unable to manage such an extra task. It needed a team to organize Augustus, and a team was precisely what he was about to assemble round him: a team of exasperated patrons and art dealers and dedicated women. He did not know why he needed this entourage, only that he must have it. His first steps to get what he wanted imperilled his marriage and brought him to a state which, in his autobiographical synopsis, he described as ‘madness’.

  4

  TEAM SPIRIT

  ‘What inconsiderate buggers we males are.’

  Augustus John to Mary Dowdall

  ‘Gus is painting several Masterpieces,’ Ida notified Gwen John. ‘…We are as happy as larks.’ To the winter exhibition of the New English Art Club, late in 1902, he sent two major pictures. The first of these, ‘Merikli’,71 was a portrait of Ida holding a basket of flowers and fruit painted as if by an Old Master: Rembrandt, with a helping hand from Velasquez. Ida’s figure, touched by warm light, emerges enthusiastically from the dark shadows of the background. The colouring is sombre, the tone low; the handling is accomplished but conventional and the pose rather artificial. Yet there are a number of peculiar elements in the painting that give it a veil of mystery. In John Sampson’s The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, merikli is defined as: ‘Connected with the Sanscrit “pearl”, “gem” or “jewel” ie., ornament worn round the neck’. In the picture Ida is wearing a necklace of coral (not precious stone but a once-live substance). Then, from the plaited-straw basket, full of roses and cherries, she proffers a ‘daisy’ – probably a pun on the slang use of ‘daisy’ meaning a first-rate specimen of anything. Ida also wears a wedding ring on the right hand. Such unorthodoxes and double entendres suggest a less conventional set of values than the pastiche seventeenth-century manner first conveys, and also reveals the literary methods by which he was attempting to combine new ideas with old forms.

  It was voted Picture of the Year at the exhibition.

  His other portrait at the NEAC was of an Italian girl, Signorina Estella Cerutti. In the opinion of John Rothenstein, this picture ‘proclaimed him a master in the art of painting’,72 being ‘clearly stamped with that indefinable largeness of form characteristic of major paintings’. The major painter it brings to mind is Ingres, and its striking dissimilarity to ‘Merikli’ (which also recalls Hals) shows a painter still in search of his own idiom. Estella Cerutti is a splendidly buxom woman, whose creamy-golden silhouette is rendered more piquant by the ballooning curves of her ribbed muslin dress. Whereas Ida’s features were painted broadly and spontaneously and looked somewhat masculine in their strength, all is subordinate in the portrait of Estella Cerutti to sinuous contour and the mapping of the shadows. She is not held in the frame but seems to be moving past a window, a self-assured figure holding a handkerchief in her hands (perhaps a reference to Othello) and casting a languorous backward glance.
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  It was a glance that Augustus followed. ‘Esther’ Cerutti, as he called her – the very name he was to have given his second child had it been a daughter – lived below them at Fitzroy Street. In the spring and summer of 1903 he made numerous drawings of her and at least one etching.73 Two or three times a week she would come up to their flat, and he would sometimes descend to hers. ‘The Cerutti’s vices necessitate frequent purchases of Turkish cigarettes,’ Augustus explained to Michel Salaman, ‘which act as a sedative.’ They were a sedative for him rather than her. Ida admired, envied, and was irritated by Esther in the most confusing way. What style she had! She was an accomplished pianist, dressed superbly well and suffered from such appealing illnesses. It was almost impossible not to be provoked.

  Augustus seemed held in tension between the two of them, motionlessly suspended within their opposing fields of attraction. ‘For days I have been inert and dejected,’ he confessed to the Rani in Liverpool.

  ‘I cannot account for the dejection except as the necessary complement of inanition, for my reasons to hope remain palpable and the same. Dearest Lady! How we married people need to cling and pull together and so make this holy state by union a force – for I begin now and then to suspect its weakening – or perhaps it is that I am a weak member, but then at least I am a link in the nuptial chain. But I think we ought to plan it so that we have the laugh on the others… As to Miss Esther I don’t know whether to be mühen [to exert himself] again or not to be mühen, both courses being fraught with problems distant and immediate. At present I slumber in the studio surrounded by my works.’

  To escape these problems he went that summer on a ‘short but brilliant campaign in Wales with the admirable Sampson’. But when he returned, the problems were still waiting for him, so he immediately set off again, this time for Liverpool with his sister Winifred, who was sailing to join Thornton in North America. Once he had put her on board, he combed the town for old friends. ‘The Town proved most inhospitable,’ he complained to the Rani. ‘…I had hoped to see Sampson – but alas! his house proved nothing but a silent tomb of memories with those wonderful blinds drawn gloomily down.’ The Rani herself was away in the country, though her elusiveness, he admitted, was stimulating in a disappointing sort of way. ‘Curiously enough ’tis to a dream I owe my most vivid, most tender recollection of you. (And they call dreams vague… hazy...) It happened in Liverpool the last night I spent there. (Heaven knows how I spent the next!)’ Afterwards he ‘fled down Brownlow Hill to the station and so home again’.

  A letter Ida sent Alice Rothenstein about this time gives some of the changes in the John household. From her mother Ida had got a few pieces of furniture, including their bed; on the walls of each room she had put plain white paper, and suspended baskets of roses from the ceiling. To do the cooking she had employed a rabbity young girl named Maggie – tempted by ‘friendly lettuce’ – and a maid called Alice whom David insisted on calling ‘Aunt Alice’.

  Ida’s day began at 5.30 a.m. and ended at 7.30 p.m. Between day and night came three delightful hours of idleness: then at 10.30 p.m. the night work began – ‘it is the hardest part,’ she told the Rani. ‘I am breaking the baby of having a bottle at 3 a.m., and it entails a constant hushing off to sleep again – as he keeps waking expecting it. Also he has not yet begun to turn himself over in bed, and requires making comfortable 2 or 3 times before 3 a.m. This is not grumbling but bragging.’ Nevertheless, it was a tremendous relief to her to get rid of the two children for short spells. That summer they went down with Maggie to stay at Tenby with Edwin John, and Ida felt almost guilty at her sense of liberation. ‘It is most delightful without them,’ she admitted to Alice Rothenstein.

  As soon as their flat was emptied of children, it filled up again with ‘aunts’ – that is, models for Augustus. Esther, magnificently attired in expensive dresses almost bursting at their fastenings, presented herself and posed, while Ida, who was not Mrs Nettleship’s daughter for nothing, set to work creating clothes for herself so as ‘to have at least one pretty feather to Esther’s hundred lovely costumes. I shall have to come down naked in my fichu [scarf or small shawl], for how can one wear grey linen by her silks and laces?’

  But while Ida was anxious at being outshone by Esther, Esther was about to be eclipsed by another girl. In the same letter to Alice Rothenstein, Ida mentions that ‘Gus and the beautiful Dorelia McNeill are here… Gus is painting Dorelia’. He was, she adds, feeding up Dorelia for her portrait. This is the first mention of the legendary Dorelia, who was to find a place at the centre of the lives of Ida and Augustus and play a short intense part in the life of Gwen John.

  Who was Dorelia? Over a period of sixty years, Augustus drew and painted her obsessively. Yet what these pictures convey is not her identity but her enchantment and mysteriousness. The most celebrated portrait of them all, ‘The Smiling Woman’,74 shows what Roger Fry called a ‘gypsy Giaconda’75 whose smile was often likened to that of the ‘Mona Lisa’. Another picture, ‘Dorelia Standing Before a Fence’, is more mellow and depicts her as a dream creature who, on our waking, continues to baffle and beguile us.

  In this sense, Dorelia was a creation of Augustus’s. He made her enigmatic; he made her his ideal woman. What he desired from women was at once simple and impossible to achieve; it was the unknown, tunelessly preserved intact; a fantasy blended with reality; a symbol of creativity and nature; mistress and mother. Though he felt a romantic reverence for high birth – ‘you darling little aristocratic love’, he used to call the Rani – he disliked sophisticated women on the whole, and avoided women famous for their intellect. Cleverness he could find elsewhere, if he needed it: he could even occasionally find it in men. But before the inscrutable beauty of a few women he could lose and renew himself, feel his imagination come alive in inexplicable ways.

  All that Augustus aspired to is suggested by the fantasies he wove around Dorelia. In his pictures we see Dorelia as tall, with a swan’s neck and well-proportioned head, often the mother-figure seen against a vibrant landscape. In truth she lived in town, was rather short, and no more the conventional mother than Ida. In his paintings he dressed her in broad-rimmed straw hats, their sweeping lines like those of the French peasants; and in long skirts that reached the ground, with high waistlines and tight bodices, like the costumes of the peasant women of Connemara: but she was not a peasant, French or Celt. He laid a false trail across the life of a gypsy girl called Dorelia Boswell, so that many concluded that his Dorelia was probably a Boswell and certainly a gypsy: she was neither. He called her ‘Ardor’; he called her ‘Relia’ and he called her Dorelia, and finally he called her ‘Dodo’: but none of these were her actual names.

  Dorothy McNeill had been born on 19 December 1881 at 97 Bellenden Road, Camberwell. Her father, William George McNeill, was a mercantile clerk, a position he held until promoted, through age, to the rank of retired mercantile clerk. Son of the stationmaster at Peckham, he had married a local girl, Kate Florence Neal, the daughter of a dairy farmer.76 They were an unremarkable couple given the collective nickname ‘Mr and Mrs Brown’. But all their seven children (of whom Dorothy was the fourth) were extraordinarily handsome – mostly small with dark complexions, prominent mouths curving downwards, voices gentle and low, black hair and large brooding eyes.

  Each of the four daughters had been taught some profession. Dorothy learnt to type. Her first job, at the age of sixteen, was for the editor of a magazine called The Idler. Then, for a short time, she worked for a writer. By 1902 she had become a junior secretary copying legal documents in the office of a solicitor, G. Watson Brown, in Basinghall Street. She did not appear discontented, but since her personality was very passive and she was not communicative, it was difficult to know what she felt. Another young typist in the office, Muriel Alexander, remembers that Dora, as everyone there called her, always dressed ‘artistically’ in a style entirely her own, wearing long full-skirted dresses and having her hair parted in the middle
and drawn in a knot at the back of her head. Everyone liked her; no one knew much about her. On the surface, it seemed, she had accepted a secretarial career, to be followed in the ordinary way by one as housewife. She was not ambitious in the usual sense; but she felt certain another kind of life awaited her, and that she belonged to the world of art. How this was she could not say; nor did she speak about it. But instinctively she felt it to be her destiny. This was her secret, the source of her patience, her means of emancipation. It was Dorothy who typed each day; but it was Dorelia who dreamed.

  And it was Dorelia who, in the evenings after the office closed, went off to the late classes at the Westminster School of Art. Here she got to know a number of artists and began to be invited to their parties, at one of which she met Gwen John. Gwen was then using a ‘most exquisite looking pupil of about 15 years old’ as a model in exchange for drawing lessons. ‘Gwen makes her draw the most hideous and wicked of the Roman emperors in the British Museum,’77 Ida reported. Dorelia had already seen Gwen’s brother at an exhibition of Spanish paintings at the Guildhall near her office, but they had not spoken and he did not see her. Yet she remembered this first glimpse of him as if, without words or contact of any kind, she had chosen him as the vehicle of her destiny.

  There are many stories of how they met. A popular one was that Augustus overtook her wearing a black hat in Holborn one day, looked back, and was unable to look away. They must have met early in 1903 while she was living in a basement in Fitzroy Street. By the summer he was already writing her passionate letters: