Augustus John (20 page)

Augustus too was impressed by Conder’s painting ‘which becomes everyday more beautiful’, he told Will Rothenstein. ‘The country here is lovely beyond words. Corfe Castle and the neighbourhood would make you mad with painter’s cupidity!… I have started a colossal canvas whereon I depict Dr Faust on the Brocken. I sweat at it from morn till eve.’ Not even an attack of German measles could interrupt such work. ‘Conder had them some weeks ago,’ he reported to Will Rothenstein.

‘I had quite forgotten about it when I woke up one morning horrified to find myself struck of a murrain – I have been kept in ever since, shut off from the world. In the daylight it isn’t so bad, but I dread the night season which means little sleep and tragic horrors of dreams at that. I mean in the day I work desperately hard at my colossal task. I can say at any rate Faust has benefited by my malady. In fact it is getting near the
finish. There are about 17 figures in it not to speak of a carrion-laden gibbet.’
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Illness benefited their painting, but the renewal of good health, seasoned by the salt air, brought its problems. Mrs Everett, protected from a knowledge of their world by her harmonium, had invited down two fine-looking Slade girls, Elie Monsell and Daisy Legge, to keep them all company. John Everett, who visited Pevril Tower during weekends, watched the danger approaching gloomily. It seemed inevitable that some romantic entanglements would develop, and before long Conder, to his dismay, found himself engaged to the Irish art student Elie Monsell. Hauled up to London for a difficult interview with the girl’s mother (who seems to have been younger than himself), he shortly afterwards fled across the Channel to join Orpen in France. The engagement appeared to lapse, and the following year Conder found himself married to Stella Bedford.

Augustus was also experiencing what he called ‘the compulsion of sea-air’
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directed towards ‘a superb woman of Vienna’,
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Maria Katerina, an aristocrat employed by Mrs Everett in the guise of parlourmaid. ‘A beautiful Viennese lady here has had the misfortune to wrench away a considerable portion of my already much mutilated heart,’ was how he broke the news to Orpen. ‘Misfortune because such things cannot be brooked too complacently… Conder is engaged on an even more beautiful fête galante.’

In a letter written nearly twenty years later (2 February 1918) to his friend Alick Schepeler, Augustus was to make a unique admission. ‘The sort of paranoia or mental hail storm from which I suffer continually’, he told her, ‘…means that each impression I receive is immediately obliterated by the next girl’s, irrespective of its importance. Other people have remarked upon my consistent omission to keep appointments but only to you have I ever confessed the real and dreadful reason.’

This new mental hailstorm temporarily obliterated his feelings for Ida. It was as if he had never met her, as if he had been blinded and could no longer see her. Possibly his confinement with measles – ‘
German
measles please!’ he reminded Will Rothenstein, ‘I did not catch them in Vienna’ – had helped to bring about the dreadful impatience of his emotions; and this impatience was exacerbated by the girl’s elusiveness. The letters he wrote to his friends reverberate with the echoes of this passion. ‘It was without surprise I learnt she was descended from the old nobility of Austria. Her uncle, the familiar of Goethe, was Count von Astz,’ he admitted to Michel Salaman. ‘This damnably aristocratic pedigree, you will understand, only goes to make her more fatally attractive to my
perverse self… She wears patent leather shoes with open work stockings and –’

On Conder’s advice, he bought a ring and presented it to her one dark night at the top of a drainpipe that led to her bedroom window. This gesture had a telling effect upon Maria Katerina’s defences, which ‘proved in the end to be not insurmountable’.
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She ‘has sucked the soul out of my lips’, Augustus boasted to Will Rothenstein. ‘I polish up my German lore. I spend spare moments trying to recall phrases from Ollendorf and am so grateful for your lines of Schiller which are all that remain to me of the
Lied von der Glocke.
’
But with the very instant of success, perhaps even fractionally preceding it, came the first encroachment of boredom.

‘Sometimes when I surprise myself not quite happy tho’ alone I begin to fear I have lost that crown of youth, the art of loving fanatically. I begin to suspect I have passed the virtues of juvenescence and that its follies are all that remain to me. Write to me dear Will and tell me… those little intimacies which are the salt of friendship and the pepper of love.’

On his last night in Swanage, Augustus and Maria met secretly on the cliffs. She was wearing her ring and promised to meet him in France where he was shortly to go with Michel Salaman. Back in London he felt desolate, and more than usually unself-sufficient. On 18 May, Mafeking Night, he strolled down to Trafalgar Square to see the fun, as people celebrated the lifting of the seven-month siege of Mafeking by the Boers. London had gone mad with excitement. Bells rang, guns were being fired, streamers waving; people danced in groups, clapping, shouting, kissing. The streets filled with omnibuses, people of all sorts, policemen without helmets. As if by magic, whistles appeared in everyone’s mouths, Union Jacks in their hands, and in the tumult of tears and laughter and singing complete strangers threw their arms about one another’s necks; it was, as Winston Churchill said, a most ‘unseemly’ spectacle. Some were shocked by such a ‘frantic and hysterical outburst of patriotic enthusiasm’, as Arnold Bennett called it. ‘[Trafalgar] Square, the Strand and all the adjacent avenues were packed with a seething mass of patriots celebrating the great day in a style that would have made a “savage” blush,’ Augustus wrote.

‘Mad with drink and tribal hysteria, the citizens formed themselves into solid phalanxes, and plunging at random this way and that, swept all before them. The women, foremost in this mêlée, danced like Maenads, their shrill cat-calls swelling the general din. Feeling out of place and
rather scared, I extricated myself from this pandemonium with some difficulty, and crept home in a state of dejection.’
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*

‘You have evidently forgotten my address,’ Augustus remarked with surprise to Michel Salaman. This was not difficult. By June 1900, shortly before he was due to join Salaman in France, he had reached the same point of crisis at Albany Street as had been achieved the previous year in Charlotte Street, and by much the same methods. ‘We all went back to John’s place in Albany Street,’ John Everett wrote in his journal. ‘On the way they picked up an old whore, made some hot whisky. The result was John fell on the floor paralytic, the old whore on top of him in the same condition… Orpen and [Sidney] Starr tried to pull the old whore’s drawers off, but she was too heavy to move.’

‘I cannot come just yet,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman in France, ‘ – I have some old commissions to finish amongst other deterrents to immediate migration. Yet in a little while I have hopes of being able to join you. I have had notice to quit this place. I think I will take a room somewhere in Soho if I can find one – a real “mansarde” I hope – I want to hide myself away for some time… I shall have to see my Pa before I would come as it is now a long while since I have seen him… it would be nice if Gwen could come too and good for her too me thinks.’ Salaman had taken rooms at a house called Cité Titand in Le Puy-en-Velay, a medieval village in the Auvergne built about a central rock and dominated by a colossal Virgin in cast iron with doors opening into her body. Augustus arrived early in August. ‘It is a wonderful country I assure you – unimaginably wonderful!’ he wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt on 19 September 1900.

‘…There are most exquisite hills, little and big, Rembrandtesque, Titianesque, Giorgionesque, Turneresque, growing out from volcanic rocks, dominating the fat valleys watered by pleasant streams, tilled by robust peasants bowed by labour and age or upright with the pride of youth and carrying things on their heads. I have bathed in the waters of the Borne and have felt quite Hellenic! At first the country gave me indigestion; used to plainer fare it proved too rich, too high for my northern stomach; now I begin to recover and will find a lifetime too short to assimilate its menu of many courses...’
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To the golden-haired Alice Rothenstein, who had recommended Le
Puy, he wrote with equal enthusiasm. ‘Really, you have troubled my peace with your golden hills and fat valleys of Burgundy!...

‘I work indoors mostly now. I am painting Michel’s portrait. I hope to make a success of it. If when finished it will be as good as it is now I may count on that. I am also painting Polignac castle which ought to make a fine picture...
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The very excellent military band plays in the park certain nights, and we have enjoyed sitting listening to it. It is very beautiful to watch the people under the trees. At intervals the attention of the populace is diverted from following the vigorous explanatory movements of the conductor by an appeal to patriotism, effected by illuminating the flag by Bengal lights at the window of the museum! It is dazzling and undeniable! The band plays very well. Rendered clairvoyant by the music one feels very intimate with humanity, only Michel’s voice when he breaks in with a laborious attempt at describing how beautifully the band played 3 years ago at the Queen’s Hall that time he took Edna Waugh – is rather disturbing – or is it that I am becoming ill-tempered?’

Where Augustus went, could Will be far behind? He turned up with Alice early in September and stayed two weeks at the Grand Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. ‘Every day we met at lunch in a vast kitchen, full of great copper vessels, a true rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque,’ Will Rothenstein remembered, ‘presided over by a hostess who might have been mother to Pantagruel himself, so heroic in size she was, and of so genial and warm a nature.’
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On their bicycles, the four of them pedalled as far south as Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, where Stevenson had once stayed on his travels with a donkey. Augustus on wheels was a fabulous sight, and Will noticed that the girls minding their cattle in the fields crossed themselves as he whizzed past, and that the men in horror would exclaim: ‘Quel type de rapin!’ At Arlempdes, a village of such devilish repute it went unmarked on any map, they were entertained by the
curé,
who commented ecstatically upon Augustus’s fitness for the principal role in their Passion play. ‘Who does he remind you of?’ he asked his sister. ‘Notre Seigneur, le bon Dieu,’ she answered without hesitation. ‘I take it as a compliment,’ Augustus remarked, but refused the part – understandably, since the previous year, in the heat of the occasion, Christ had been stabbed in the side. On reaching Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Alice took sanctuary at an inn while the three men spent the night in a Trappist monastery where Will believed he might see Huysmans. Though rising early, he saw no one. Augustus
lay abed in his cell where he was served by the silent monks with a breakfast of wine and cheese.

After returning to Le Puy, Will and Alice wheeled their machines over the horizon and were gone. ‘Is it that I am becoming ill-tempered?’ Augustus had queried. His temper was affected by the failure of Maria Katerina to appear. He had written long letters urging her to meet him in Paris, but these were intercepted by Mrs Everett who, after Augustus left Swanage, had discovered hairpins in his bed. Brandishing these instruments she had extracted from her servant a full confession. Her duty now was clear. From reading Augustus’s letters it was a small step to writing Maria’s, the tone of which, Augustus noticed, suddenly changed. ‘When you will no longer have me – what will I do then?’ she asked. ‘What will become of me then? Repudiated by my husband who loves me? Can you answer that?’ Augustus did answer it according to his lights, but at such a distance, and screened by Mrs Everett, they were not strong enough. ‘Women always suspect me of fickleness,’ he explained to Alice Rothenstein, ‘but will they never give me a chance of vindicating myself? They are too modest, too cautious, for to do that they would have to give their lives. I am not an exponent of the faithful dog business.’

Michel Salaman, who was financing their holiday, suffered grievously from his disappointment. Almost every day Augustus complained of ailments and accidents. His womanizing brought out in him a satyr-like quality. Some women were alarmed, others hypnotized. Michel Salaman was shocked.

Augustus did his best to pull himself together. ‘I am painting beyond Esplay,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein.
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‘…I want to travel again next year hitherwards and be a painter. I am, dear Will, full of ideas for work.’ He read – in particular Balzac’s
Vie conjugale
which ‘pains and makes me laugh at the same time’. He travelled – to Paris for a few days to see some Daumiers and Courbets and ‘was profoundly moved’.

He was soon joined by ‘the waif of Pimlico’ as he called his sister Gwen, and by ‘the gentle Ambrose McEvoy’. Salaman was rather on his guard with Gwen. She had once had a crush on him and he found her exacting. When she and McEvoy arrived at Le Puy, he returned to England. ‘I am conducted about by McEvoy and Gwen,’ Augustus wrote to Salaman, ‘who explain the beauties and show me new and ever more surprising spots.’ After a long evening walk they would hurry back ‘to cook a dinner which is often successful in some items’. Sometimes the two men – ‘the absinthe friends’ – would sit in a café where, Augustus told Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘a young lady exquisitely beautiful, attired as a soldier, sings songs of dubious meaning’.

By October, Augustus had become, according to McEvoy, a ‘demon’
for work, refusing to budge from his easel. He was as quick to infatuation as to anger: and quick to forget both. But for McEvoy and for Gwen it was a less happy time. McEvoy seemed in a dream. ‘After a strange period of mental and physical bewilderment I am beginning to regain some of my normal senses,’ he wrote to Salaman. ‘…At first I felt like some animal and incapable of expressing anything. Drawing was quite impossible. I should like to live here for years and then I might hope to paint pictures that would have something of the grand air of the Auvergne – but now! Gus seems to retain his self-control. Perhaps he has been through my stage. He constantly does the most wonderful drawings. Oh, it is most perplexing.’