Augustus John (23 page)

Augustus’s contacts with the university staff were not pushed to extremes, but among the exceptions were the Professor of Modern Literature, Walter Raleigh, who abashed him with his early morning brilliance – ‘he shone even at breakfast!’
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– Charles Bonnier, the French professor, a victim to the theory and practice of
pointillisme,
who ‘has been producing a most astoundingly horrible marmalade of spots yellow, purple, blue and green in my studio’;
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and Herbert MacNair, Instructor in Design and Stained Glass, a lusty bicyclist who, in later life, became a postman. He and his wife Frances, working in perfect unison, involved themselves with a peculiar form of art nouveau, producing, to Augustus’s dismay, friezes of quaint mermaids designed after the MacNair crest, staircases encrusted in sheet lead, lamps of fancifully twisted wrought iron, symbolic watercolours on vellum, embroideries depicting bulbous gnomes and fairies prettily arranged, and as their
pièce de résistance
a
burly door-knocker 18
inches long, the delight of small boys who used it ‘to keep themselves in constant touch with the most advanced Art movement’, Augustus told Will Rothenstein. ‘…Between them [they] have produced one baby [Sylvan] and a multitude of spooks – their drawing-room is very creepy and the dinner-table was illuminated with two rows of nightlights in a lantern of the “MacNair” pattern...’

By far the most valuable new friend Augustus made was the university Librarian, John Sampson. A portly man, almost twice Augustus’s age, Sampson was ponderous in his manner but at heart a poet, a romantic and a rebel. His influence on Augustus over the next two years was to change his life. The two men met in the late spring of 1901 and struck up an immediate friendship.

Sampson was almost pedantically self-taught. He had left school at fourteen, been apprenticed to a lithographer and engraver in Liverpool, read literature at night and, having learnt the aesthetic disciplines of typography and design, set up a small business as printer in the Liverpool Corn Exchange. He had ambitions to become an artist – ambitions which Augustus quickly quelled. But his abiding passion was the pursuit of lost languages, the unknown vocabularies and grammars of ancient mother tongues still miraculously to be heard across woods and fields and mountainsides in the heart of Wales. These fugitive words – ‘ablatives or adverbs or queer things of that sort’ – spread through him an extraordinary pleasure, especially when their curators turned out to be those ‘exasperating lovely creatures’, the gypsy girls; for ‘man does not live by philology alone.’ Sampson seemed to regard the rhyming slang and ‘flying cant’, the beautiful grand syllables of forgotten tongues, as orchestrated clues to some treasure. It was, he later said, ‘like finding a tribe of organ-grinders who among themselves spoke Ciceronian Latin’. He particularly relished the challenge of locating Shelta, the obscure uncorrupted jargon in which the tinkers communicated their secret messages, tracking it down ‘from one squalid lodging house and thieves’ kitchen to another’.
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His search had led him to a great Celtic scholar from Leipzig, Kuno Meyer, then teaching German at University College, Liverpool. It was through Meyer’s influence that Sampson was appointed the first Librarian at the university.

There was much in the huge and gentle figure of Sampson for Augustus to admire: the sardonic humour, the irresistible lure of the fields and hills, the vast accumulation of odd knowledge. ‘You are a learned man,’ Walter Raleigh wrote to Sampson (16 July 1908), ‘and a rogue, one of the sort of fellows who think they can conduct the business of life on inspirationist principles, and who run an office pretty well much the same way as they make love to a woman.’
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He was said to write seventy-seven love letters
a year, and looked a commanding figure as he strode through the streets of Liverpool in his old velvet jacket, disgracefully baggy trousers, with his muff and gin bottle and a battered slouch hat set at an angle, his chest thrust out, legs moving powerfully. He knew how to drink, was a great smoker, liked reading Romany poems amid clouds of strong tobacco smoke. ‘A heavy figure with a florid countenance’, Geoffrey Keynes remembered him, ‘hunched in an armchair at a great desk covered with papers, a gold-rimmed pince-nez dripping off his nose over a wide waistcoat scattered with portions of food...’
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Despite his intimidating scholarship, a rather overbearing manner and fierce temper, there was something lovable about him: a gentleness in his voice and much boyish ardour. He was followed everywhere by devoted women with exotic names – Damaris, Doonie, Kish – who dedicated themselves to him and his work.

‘The majestic Sampson’ reminded Augustus of ‘a magnificent ship on a swelling sea’. His chief influence in the first year or two of their friendship lay in the refreshing new model of married life he presented. Augustus was fearful of domesticity; the long dark imprisonment of wedlock filled him with unease. Sampson, though never indiscreet, showed him a freer, more open-air version of marriage. Seven years ago he had married a pretty Scottish girl, Meg Sprunt, much younger than himself and famed for her flying hair. Now they had two sons and a daughter. ‘I really must abandon these casual wandering ways now that I am a husband and parent,’ Sampson admitted. But he could not help slipping off for a day or a week to the favoured camping places of the travellers, gazing at their long black hair glittering with gold coins, their fields ablaze with quilts and tents. He would sit eating the delicious
otchi-witches
(hedgehogs) and listen in ecstasy to their riddles, folk-tales and songs played on harps and on fiddles improvised from an ashplant and a few hairs from the tail of a horse. To hear the lovely words, the marvellous rising sounds of their language, became a linguistic passion for Sampson, guiding him to happiness or to madness – perhaps both. His face lit up, he was overcome by an immense emotion. ‘Did you hear him use the ablative – how perfectly beautiful!’ He was a very perfect
Rai
(gentleman scholar): ‘the large and rolling Rai’, Augustus called him, or ‘Rai of Rai’s’ as he was known in wild places beyond the university.

Augustus had a quick ear for languages and under Sampson’s tutelage he soon picked up the English dialect of Romany and later something of the deep inflected Welsh dialect. When he arrived in Liverpool he had been reading the novels of Turgenev in the recent translations by Constance Garnett, and Kropotkin’s
Memoirs of a Revolutionist.
Now he turned to
Kriegspiel,
the unique gypsy novel by Francis Hindes Groome, and to the picaresque romances of George Borrow, ‘the prince among vagabonds’,
who could make his readers hear ‘the music of the wind on the heath’. Like Augustus, Borrow had suffered from ‘the Horrors’; and like Sampson he found relief in ‘a dream partly of study, partly of adventure’. For both Augustus and Sampson, united by a longing for poetic escapades, Borrow became an inspiration, replacing bourgeois with bohemian life, promising nothing, beckoning his followers away from the ethics of nineteenth-century empire-building and the commercial practices of twentieth-century industrialism.

As a learned guide to the ways of the road, ‘Beloved Sampson’ became a new kind of hero for Augustus. Their friendship was to be interrupted by glaring quarrels and rivalries, but it lasted a lifetime. They exchanged passwords and countersigns and indelicate verses in Romany. ‘You must hate my jargon compounded of all the dialects in Europe,’
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Augustus acknowledged. It was not really a letter-writing relationship. ‘Many a time have I started writing to you and in many places,’ Augustus assured him the following year, ‘ – but my pockets are always full of unfinished letters.’
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Sampson seldom got so far as beginning letters. ‘You will never write to me I suppose,’ Augustus lamented; ‘all I can do is to write to
you
and assure you of the sweet pleasure it would always be for me to hear from you, a pleasure which might well come at a time when blank glooms shut out the beauty of the world – one cannot
always
keep the horizon clear. It is as well to have a pal a long way off when those at hand and in sight are… rather spectral and unconvincing shapes!’
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And yet, because there would be long wandering intervals between their meetings, and distance was always precious to them and separation a necessity, the letters they did eventually send each other over thirty years possessed a special value. ‘What’s the point of seeing Gypsies if I can’t talk to you about them?’
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Augustus demanded. So, with long meditative silences, they did talk a little, partly in Romany, partly in English, through their correspondence. Sampson’s letters, with their reminiscences of sunlight and tobacco smoke, green leaves and wayside pubs, were a magical pick-me-up for Augustus, like an old perfume invading his mind. ‘I shall count the hours till I hear from you,’ he implored, ‘…don’t keep me in suspense.’ It was important to him that Sampson ‘remember your brother of the Predilection’ and send him news of ‘little Egypt’. From time to time he would fire back ‘a pack of Romani stuff’ from his travels through Europe, and Sampson would examine it through his pince-nez and surround it all with his illuminating annotations.

Augustus venerated Sampson’s eclectic scholarship, ranging from the
Lyrical Poems of William Blake
which he was preparing when they met, to his subversive
Poachers’ Calendar
and collection of ‘songs for singing at encampments’. Augustus put him on to W. H. Hudson’s
The Purple
Land
(‘a beautiful book’) and Sampson introduced him to Hardy’s poems (‘wonderful things’, Augustus discovered). On good days they felt each was the other’s kindred spirit in art and letters, two names that should be coupled down the long ages. ‘Now partner, you must play straight, no publishing songs without my collaboration – that is the bond,’
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Augustus exhorted Sampson. He provided lyrical or bawdy frontispieces for several of Sampson’s books: his Romany version of
Omar Khayyám,
his volume of poems
Romane Gilia,
and gypsy anthology
The Wind on the Heath
which, Sampson assured Augustus, was a ‘strictly amoral’ book, and therefore ‘an excellent one to give to chyes [children]’.
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But what Augustus chiefly prized was Sampson’s massive masterpiece-to-be,
The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales,
tracing the connections between Romany, Sanskrit, Persian and the languages of Europe. ‘It will be a masterpiece old pal,’ Augustus confidently assured his friend, ‘and will probably make Romani in future an indispensable adjunct of a gentleman’s education – like Greek used to be.’
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Augustus was all impatience to see the book – ‘how is the great book going on? Surely you are near Z by now’ – but impatience was inappropriate. In Sampson’s opinion ‘no time or trouble should be grudged to make the book a perfect specimen of its kind.’
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It was a good corrective to Augustus’s hasty spirit. Early in 1924 Sampson wrote: ‘My vocab. has now reached p. 368, beginning of letter T. I send you a proof of an earlier sheet – R being rather an interesting letter – to show you what it’s like. References to “o Janos” [John] wind through the pages “like a golden thread”.’
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‘How delighted I was to receive the specimen sheets!’ Augustus replied. ‘…It’s always a joy to me to read a word of the old tongue and now soon we shall have the big book at last… It’s a fine thing to have accomplished so complete a thing in one’s life.’ The implication was that Augustus’s life had become scattered with too many unaccomplished, or at least unfinished, things.

Augustus was Sampson’s most eclectic disciple. When, falling one day in later life into despair after a gypsy informed him that he was getting bald at the top of his head, Sampson turned and asked Augustus: ‘What should I do?’ he was sternly instructed, ‘Return to your innocence’ – by which Augustus meant ‘sin openly and scandalize the world.’
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But Sampson could not do this: his flirtations were furtive and he led a secret life. Augustus seemed to him exorbitantly favoured by the gods. It was almost impossible not to sentimentalize over him. Sampson described him as ‘strong, handsome, a genius, beloved by many men and women with a calling which is also his chief pleasure and allows him the most entire freedom, successful beyond his dreams or needs and assured of immortality as long as art lasts’. This was the legendary being Sampson was to
celebrate in his poem ‘The Apotheosis of Augustus John’. ‘It is almost more than one mortal deserves,’ Sampson wrote to his son Michael, ‘but somehow it seems all right in his case.’
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Augustus needed to put himself in the service of some master. And if the service was intermittent and Sampson a master in the wrong artistic medium, nevertheless the older man’s influence was strong in those early Liverpool days. By the gypsies themselves, Sampson was already admitted as one of their own. Augustus had been attracted to gypsies since childhood, but always from a distance. Now, as the Rai’s friend, he was welcomed by these ‘outlandish and despised people’ as a fellow vagrant. He could not keep away Sampson would take him to Cabbage Hall, a strip of wasteland beyond Liverpool where there was no hall and no cabbages, only the tents and caravans of the gypsy tribes which congregated there throughout the winter; and their visits were rich in speculation and adventure.

There was something strangely satisfying in this life of singing and dancing and odd journeys. The tents, the wagons, the gaily painted carts and great shining flanks of the horses, the sight of the women with their children, stirred Augustus in a way he could not explain. They were so fine-looking, these weathered people, as they crowded round, their language flying everywhere, their beauty intensified by a proud and enigmatic bearing. ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’ – the possibilities seemed endless. Noah, Kenza, Eros and Bohemia; Sinfai, Athaliah, Counseletta and Tihanna – their extraordinary names, and the mystery and antiquity of their origins conjured up a world, remote yet sympathetic, to which he should have belonged.