Augustus John (41 page)

Other people’s tempers were less shock-proof. After three months, the neighbours, unable to endure the reverberating wet tumult any longer, demanded their eviction. ‘We shall probably take a small house,’ Ida wrote (12 January 1906) to Alice who, in the confusion of breeding, had sent a bonnet for Pyramus, mistaking him for Ida’s baby. Not living on a mountainside or in a copse, it seemed impossible to avoid compromise. In January they began house-hunting in the quarter beyond rue de la Gaieté. After exploring ‘millions of studios’ and a number of houses, they provisionally decided on 77 rue Dareau, where Augustus had already booked a studio for the spring. ‘The concierge of your studio showed us his rez de chaussée [ground floor],’ Ida wrote to Gus (January 1906). ‘Do you think it would do?’ There were many advantages: a garden, and the studio to sit in during the evenings, besides three living-rooms, a kitchen and scullery; the rent was low, they could take it on a quarterly basis, and they would still be near the Luxembourg Gardens. Best of all ‘your concierge says there can be no objection to the kids – he says he understands “qu’ils crient – qu’ils ne chantent pas!” He was incredulous when I said the neighbours would object – and if they do they can go and we’ll take their places.’ Both Ida and Dorelia were convinced they would not ‘find anything so good in every way as the R de C’. Their only doubt was Gus’s attitude. ‘If you dread having the kids and all at your place – if you think it will interfere with your work – we will find something else.’ Ida’s letter reached Augustus (who had just sold several pictures) in a jovial mood and he urged them to take the
rez-de-chaussée
at once. The clamour of the children seemed no great impediment now he could no longer hear it. ‘I trust the family is well to the last unit,’ he replied, enclosing a bundle of pound notes (February 1906). ‘I hope to get everything done in a week and then back again my hearties!… Feed up well… and circulate the money.’

The new apartment would not be ready till April. Meanwhile Ida proposed taking the three eldest children to the South of France. Mrs Nettleship had not been well and was planning to go to Menton for three weeks’ recuperation. To accompany her she invited her daughter Ursula together with Ida and the children. ‘I cannot refuse can I?’ Ida asked Augustus.

They set off early in March and spent the rest of the month at ‘a
highly respectable hotel’ crowded with British gentlewomen of ‘comfortable means’ attended by their very correct daughters – prim little moppets in muslin. But the beauty of the country was heart-lifting. ‘Shall I tell you of the mountains?’ Ida inquired in a letter to the Rani (29 March 1906),

‘ – their grand grey forms right upon the clouds, the lower parts covered with trees – fir trees – and the lowest with Olive trees – and up at the top streaks of snow in the cracks (as seen from here) in reality masses of snow in the ravines and crevasses. And the town of Mentone all built up in piles against the hill and the sea – good old sea, ordinary old sea – spreading out at the bottom, with the steam yachts of the rich and the fishing boats of the poor and the eternal waves – so stupid and so graceful. And the mongrel population – selling in silly sounding French. They’re all Italian or half Italian.’

In the sunlight of the hotel garden among the tulips and the wallflowers, the pansies, stocks and daffodils, Ida sat reflecting on how strange everything was and how happy she ought to have been, yet wasn’t. Instead she fretted impatiently, filled with that familiar sense of exclusion that had devoured her at Matching Green. Gus had returned to Paris not long after she left for Menton. What was happening there? She longed yet dreaded to be back. These cushioned hotel days were a terrible waste of time. She felt like some general witnessing a battle swinging away from him, powerless to do anything about it. Good manners and an English sense of duty – all she had endeavoured to escape by coming to France – held her in check. If only she had been a different kind of person! ‘I crave to go to school,’ she told the Rani.

‘Not quite literally, but to set about learning from the beginning – Lord, how I long to. The 3 kids are here, and very brave and jolly. Edwin is left in the care of the loveliest girl in the world God damn her. And I believe Gus has gone back to Paris to-day; so they’ll all have a good time together, especially as his Poet Friend [Wyndham] Lewis is there, and great friends with Dorelia… I am here biting my nails with rage and jealousy and
impotence.
Because if I were there it would spoil the fun don’t you see? Oh why was I not born otherwise?’

This was Ida’s first setback since coming to France. Early in April she returned to Paris, and then she, Dorelia and their string of children moved into the rue Dareau.
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The two women re-papered the walls of their new home, covering them with sketches, pictures, photographs. It was another
fresh start, and hope rose again in Ida. Augustus came and went; the children (‘it makes them all look very interesting’) all caught colds; and Dorelia (‘it’s her turn’) ‘is decidedly enceinte’, Ida informed Augustus.

‘I think I shall be a supernaturalist in Paris, and in London a naturalist.’

Augustus John to Alick Schepeler (1906)

‘About to embark shortly for England,’ Augustus had written to Wyndham Lewis. ‘I would be encouraged to the adventure by a word from you as to your welfare and whereabouts.’ No sooner had he settled on a studio for his work in Paris than the work began to flow in – but from London. He hurried back. ‘We had £255 [equivalent to £13,600 in 1996] in about ten days ago, to my amazement,’ Ida wrote to him from Paris. ‘You do make a lot.’

Augustus had hoped by this time to sell the Chelsea Art School to a Mrs Flower, ‘a remarkable woman’ and a cousin of Ida’s, so that he could spend more time in Paris. ‘The school has been very successful so far – I mean the first year was remarkably so – we have almost paid off our debts,’ he wrote invitingly to Michel Salaman. ‘No doubt there is a veritable goldmine in it, but the process of digging is long & tedious. Having prospected so successfully both Orpen & I would be happy to retire with all the glory & leave the yellow dirt for others to grab. We have the school with its lavish appurtenances, its golden prospects and a nucleus of brilliant pupils complete for sale & for a mere song.’
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Augustus hoped that Michel Salaman might hurry along the negotiations, but it was not until the summer of 1907 that they completed the sale. The delay did not please Orpen and irritated Augustus, who continued to be bound to the school, though ‘only morally bound’, he explained. In fact he was wonderfully neglectful after the first year. ‘I hope the school will go on merrily,’ he wrote cheerfully to Orpen in 1906. ‘I thought it had stopped long ago.’
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But Orpen too had been away, in Dublin. He did not like to be connected with something that might turn out to be a failure. Their gold-mine was tiresome for both of them. ‘I am sick of the school and tired of Orpen,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia (1906). ‘…I think of chucking it – even if I have to pay off debts.’

That he did continue teaching at Rossetti Studios was partly due to an exciting new development early that winter. This was the acquisition of a gallery next to Chelsea Town Hall in the King’s Road. Orpen, who largely financed it at the start, persuaded Knewstub to open the Chenil Gallery, as it was called – a small town house ideally suited, Knewstub saw, for accommodating his cultural dreams. Downstairs were two small rooms: one he converted into a ‘shop’ selling canvases, paints and all manner of artist’s equipment; the other he established as an etching-press room for artists wishing to print from or prove their own plates. Upstairs there were two exhibition rooms, one of which held a permanent collection of work by the regular platoon of Chenil painters: Ambrose and Mary McEvoy, David Muirhead, William Nicholson, James Pryde, Orpen and Augustus himself. At the back was a large studio which Augustus was often to use in the years to come.

The first one-man show at the new gallery, in May 1906, was of etchings by Augustus, and this stimulated continuous work over the early months of this year. ‘I have to spend days seeing to my etchings,’ he explained to the pregnant Dorelia as the weeks passed and still he did not return to Paris, ‘ – a man has ordered a complete set. I find to my astonishment I have done about 100.’ This man was the art historian Campbell Dodgson who, on 20 February 1906, had written to Will Rothenstein asking him to approach Augustus and find out whether he would let the British Museum (for which Dodgson worked) have a selection of his etchings and drawings. Rothenstein put Dodgson directly in touch with Augustus and a week later they met. ‘I went to see John yesterday and looked through his etchings which interest me very much,’ Dodgson reported to Rothenstein (28 February 1906). ‘He is quite willing to give me specimens of his drawings hesitating only on the grounds that he hopes to do better, and would not like us to have things that he hopes to tear up some years hence; but there is not much fear of such a fate befalling certain things that I saw yesterday and would like to secure. But [Sidney] Colvin will go himself in a few days and settle the matter.’
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Once his initial interest in the plates had passed, Augustus was often careless about their preservation, allowing them to be scratched, battered and corroded by verdigris. So when Knewstub stepped forward to rescue these plates from further harm, and superintend their printing and publication in the catalogue of the coming exhibition, he found himself confronted by a vast salvage operation. He cleaned, he scraped, he searched, and as many plates as he could find (whether in sufficiently good condition to yield editions, or so badly treated that they had to be destroyed) he took over and numbered, together with all such early proofs as he could discover in Augustus’s studio.

The Chenil exhibition ‘far exceeded what I expected’, Augustus told Charles Rutherston.
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He would continue his experiments with needle and copper for another three years, though on a gradually diminishing scale. After 1910 he produced only half a dozen or so more etchings – a small group of portrait studies of a girl’s head; a head of John Hope-Johnstone recovering from measles; and two self-portraits. His later work shows an advance from the sometimes rather laboured earlier efforts, with their ample use of dry-point, to the pure etched line of his most successful plates. But the medium was too slow, too small. The paraphernalia of needles and plates, of nitric and sulphuric acid, which had captured his interest at first, eventually fatigued him. He wanted to try something new.

*

Augustus’s treatment of his copperplates was similar to the way he treated his friendships. He liked to keep an army of acquaintances in reserve, upon any number of which he could call when the mood was on him. He wanted fair-weather friends; he wanted them to be, like some fire brigade, in permanent readiness for his calls; and he enjoyed summoning them fitfully. Among the etchings at the Chenil Gallery were several portraits of friends who had already sped out of his life: Benjamin Evans, who had shot down the drain;
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Ursula Tyrwhitt and Esther Cerutti, who had been outshone by later models. There were others, too, of whom he saw only little these days. Michel Salaman, who had graduated from art student into fox-hunting squire; ‘little Albert’ Rutherston, already partially eclipsed by little Will Rothenstein; the monkey-like Orpen, who had grown curiously attached to a gorilla in the Dublin zoo – ‘perhaps the only serious love affair in his life’;
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and Conder, who in June 1906 had become so ill he was forced to relinquish painting.

There were two motives behind all Augustus’s friendships: inspiration and entertainment. Either they stimulated him when at work, or they induced self-forgetfulness in the intervals between working. But none of them could live up to his veering needs. He knew this and mocked himself for it. ‘I am in love with a new man,’ he told Dorelia on 16 March 1906, ‘Egmont Hake – a bright gem!’ Such mysterious gems – and there were many of them – would glitter for a day and then be lost for ever. His most consistent relationships were those which were held together by humour or, more simply, renewed by imaginative periods of absence. He welcomed the retreating back, the cheerful goodbye, the disappearing companion whose tactful vanishing trick saved in the nick of time their comradeship from the terrible contempt that grew with familiarity. He relished people such as John Sampson, whom he could abandon ‘in the Euston Road while he was immobilized under the hands of a shoe-black’,
and then meet again, their feelings charged with nostalgia; and of course Gwen, for whom, though she could not work under her brother’s shadow, he continued to feel admiration shot through with exasperated concern.

What Gwen had known about Gus, others, such as Wyndham Lewis, were beginning to discover for themselves. ‘I want also to do some painting very badly, and can’t do so near John,’ Lewis complained to his mother (1906). ‘…Near John I can never paint, since his artistic personality is just too strong, and he [is] much more developed, naturally, and this frustrates any effort.’
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Partly because of this frustration, Lewis turned to his writing, being known by Augustus as ‘the Poet’ because he had produced, in next to no time, ‘thirty sonnettes’, some of them as good as Baudelaire’s. Now that Augustus was jostling between Paris and London, he was able to see far more of Lewis, then on the move between England, France and Germany while brewing up his Dostoevskyan cocktail of a novel,
Tarr.
They would go off to nightclubs together, or sit drinking and talking at the Brasserie Dumesnil in the rue Dareau, recommended by Sickert for its excellent sauerkraut. ‘Not that I find him absolutely indispensable,’ Augustus conceded, ‘but at times I love to talk with him about Shelley or somebody.’
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Lewis himself preferred to talk about Apaches and ‘to frighten young people’ with tales of these Parisian gangsters. But what chiefly amused Augustus were Lewis’s ‘matrimonial projects’ which formed part of his material for
Tarr.
If the artist, Lewis seems to argue, finds much in his work that other men seek in women, then it follows that he must be particularly discriminating in his love affairs, and scrupulously avoid sentimentality and all other false trails that lead him away from reality. It was a theme nicely attuned to Augustus’s own predicament. ‘I am like a noble, untaught and untainted savage who, embracing with fearful enthusiasm the newly arrived Bottle, Bible and Whore of civilization, contracts at once with horrible violence their apoplectic corollary, the Paralysis, the Hypocrisy and the Pox,’ he wrote. ‘…So far I have been marvellously immune.’