Augustus John (42 page)

Lewis’s immunity appeared even stronger. Prudence, suspicion and an aggressive shyness ringed him about like some fortress from which he seldom escaped. ‘Lewis announced last night that he was
loved
!’
Augustus reported to one of their model-friends, Alick Schepeler.

‘At last! It seems he had observed a demoiselle in a restaurant who whenever he regarded her sucked her cheeks in slightly and looked embarrassed. The glorious fact was patent then – l’amour! He means to follow this up like a bloodhound. In the meanwhile however he has gone to Rouen for a week to see his mother, which in my opinion is not good generalship. He has a delightful notion – I am to get a set of young ladies
during the summer as pupils and of course he will figure in the company and possibly be able to make love to one of them.’

But when not in the vein to be amused by Lewis’s eccentricities, Augustus would quickly get needled. It was almost as if his own easy romanticism was being caricatured. ‘The poet irritates me,’ he admitted, ‘he is always asking for petits suisses which are unheard of in this country and his prudence is boundless.’ The conclusion was obvious. ‘What a mistake it is to have a friend – or, having one, ever to see him.’

The trouble was that Augustus could not be alone for long. Without an audience he disappeared. The dark interiors of the pubs and cafés were like wombs from which he could be reborn. He would saunter in as if on the spur of the moment, choose his companion for an hour or two, a Juliet for a night: then it was over and he could be someone else. Such encounters, with no hangover of duty, were marvellously invigorating. If friends were God’s apology for families, it surely followed they should be as unlike one’s own family as possible. But perfection could not be found in any single man, for perfection must suit all weathers. ‘I cannot find my man,’ he told Alick Schepeler, ‘ – hence I have to piece him together out of half a dozen – as best I can.’

Upon the construction of this composite friend Augustus spent much haphazard energy. A little less McEvoy, for example, was quickly balanced by more Epstein and the introduction of a new artist into his life, Henry Lamb. In his correspondence, Augustus sometimes has fun with Epstein. ‘Epstein called yesterday and I went back with him to see his figure which is nearly done,’ he wrote to Dorelia in 1907. ‘It is a monstrous thing – but of course it has its merits – he has now a baby to do. The scotch girl [Margaret Dunlop] was here – she is the one who poses for the mother – he might at least have got a real mother for his “Maternity”. He is going about borrowing babies. He suggested sending the group to the N.E.A.C.!! Imagine Tonks’ horror and Steer’s stupefaction!’

Augustus did some good etchings of Epstein. Most striking of all is a red-pencil drawing which Epstein himself much liked. By using the point of a very hard pencil Augustus gives this portrait a taut quality, a tightness of face and mouth indicating both intellect and temperamental force. The rhetorical pose of the head bends a little to the romantic conception of genius, but the drawing
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also emphasizes the ‘closed to criticism’ nature of Epstein’s personality.

He had much criticism to close his mind to. The ‘monstrous thing’ Epstein was working on in his studio in Cheyne Walk early in 1907 was almost certainly one of the eighteen figures, representing man and woman in their various stages between birth and death, that were to embellish
the new British Medical Association building in the Strand. These figures, mostly nudes, caused much outrage when, in the spring of 1908, they were first thrust upon the public gaze. ‘They are a form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man, his fiancée, to see,’ one newspaper informed its readers.
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Other experts, including clergymen, policemen, dustmen and the Secretary of the Vigilance Society, were soon adding their voices to this vituperative hymn. The statues were ‘rude’; they exerted a ‘demoralizing tendency’ and constituted ‘a gross offence’. In short, they would ‘convert London into a Fiji Island’. Who could doubt that these objects must become a focus for unwholesome talk, a meeting place for all the unchaste in the land?

Many artists defended Epstein. But Augustus, who privately did much to help him,
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saw clearly that artistic support was irrelevant to moral indignation and would never impress the public. ‘Epstein’s work must be defended by recognised moral experts,’ he wrote to the art critic Robert Ross. ‘The Art question is not raised. Of course they would stand the
moral
test as triumphantly as the artistic, or even more if possible. Do you know of an intelligent
Bishop
for example? To-morrow there is a meeting to decide whether the figures are to be destroyed or not. Much the best figures are behind the hoarding which they
refuse
to take down. Meanwhile Epstein is in debt and unable to pay the workmen.’

Augustus’s advice was quickly taken up, and the Bishop of Stepney, Cosmo Gordon Lang, later Archbishop of Canterbury, was persuaded to mount the ladders to the scaffolding, from where he inspected the figures intimately and, on descending, declared himself unshocked. His imperturbability did much to reassure the British public and soothe the Council of the British Medical Association, which instructed work to proceed.

Though Augustus admired Epstein’s sculpture, he was impatient with some aspects of his personality and shocked to discover that this milk-drinker from America excelled in blowing his own trumpet.
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‘I hope Epstein will find his wife a powerful reinforcement in his studio,’ Augustus wrote to Will Rothenstein (19 September 1906) on learning of the sculptor’s engagement to Margaret Dunlop. ‘Perhaps she will coax him out of some of his unduly democratic habits.’ As proud and touchy as Augustus was truculent, Epstein appeared determined to attract hostility. Augustus was able to oblige him here, and their friendship was often blown on the rocks.

But in these early days they got on well enough. Augustus’s extravagance in the middle of so much polite good taste was refreshing to Epstein, and he admired Augustus’s skill. Besides, Epstein needed encouragement and Augustus could afford to give it. Often they would be joined by
McEvoy in whose gentle company neither felt disposed to quarrel. Epstein also dropped round at the Chelsea Art School where he posed as a model for a shilling an hour, and afterwards there would be black periods of silence as he and Augustus leant against one of its walls: then a remark from Epstein – ‘At least you will admit that Wagner was a heaven-storming genius.’ Finally from Augustus an ambivalent grunt.

A witness to these exchanges, and much impressed by them, was Henry Lamb. Lamb had recently thrown up his medical studies in Manchester and, in a desperate bid to become an artist, turned up in London with an alluring wild girl called Nina Forrest whom, after Mantegna’s Saint, he rechristened ‘Euphemia’. While Lamb trained himself as an artist, Euphemia became an artist’s model and was soon posing for Epstein. She had a natural sense of theatre, and drama perpetually hovered in the air around her. She was also ‘a great romancer’ and would grow famous for her amorous anecdotes. How interesting ‘impure women are to the pure’, Virginia Woolf later meditated over her. ‘I see her as someone in mid-ocean, struggling, diving, while I pace my bank.’
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Early in 1906 Euphemia discovered she was pregnant and, on 10 May, Henry and she were married at the Chelsea Register Office with Augustus as one of their two witnesses – shortly after which she appears to have had a miscarriage.

For the time being Augustus was no more than a witness to Euphemia’s romances, but he involved himself quite seriously in Henry’s career. While Euphemia somehow seemed ‘always well supplied with money’, Henry was impecunious. Arriving in London with a modest stipend and working intermittently as an illustrator for the
Manchester Guardian,
he enrolled at the Chelsea Art School at the beginning of 1906 and would sometimes sleep there on the model’s throne. On coming in at night he would find a fresh cartoon done by Augustus during the evening – large works of many almost life-size figures that dazzled him. Occasionally Augustus, in his rumbling voice, would brood on these compositions: ‘I think of taking out that figure and introducing a waterfall.’ Lamb, wide-eyed, felt himself to be in the incalculable presence of genius.

Bernard Leach, the potter, remembered Lamb’s first day at the Chelsea Art School. ‘Augustus came in late straight from some party looking well groomed and remarkably handsome, picked up a drawing board, and instead of using it sat behind this new student and watched him for half an hour. They talked and Augustus invited Henry to his home.’
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Augustus had a powerful impact on Lamb, giving his draughtsmanship a technical fluency and professionalism, warming his rather clinical line, enriching it with new vitality. What Lamb lacked was confidence. ‘The sight of my recent products fills me with dejection,’ he wrote; ‘my pictures… deject me beyond sufferance.’ In Augustus’s company this
dejection lifted. He appeared ‘a heaven-sent star destined to light the way for a beginner’, wrote Lamb’s biographer Keith Clements.

It was a matter of style and also of lifestyle. Another art student, Nina Hamnett, saw Augustus as ‘a tall man with a reddish beard, in a velvet coat and brown trousers, striding along… a splendid-looking fellow and I followed him down the King’s Road.’
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Lamb too followed Augustus, modelling himself on his manner, his looks, his life. It was as if, for a time, Augustus imprinted his personality on him. ‘I should have been Augustus John,’ Bernard Leach recalled Lamb saying. Inevitably, Augustus was flattered by this talented follower. What could be more proper than a young man wishing to act apprentice to him? It was a concept he had always understood and needed to benefit from himself. He responded generously. ‘I hope you are doing designs lightheartedly,’ he wrote (24 October 1906). ‘ – What is so becoming as cheerfulness and a light heart? I think the old masters are apt to presume upon our reverence sometimes – one is always at a disadvantage in the society of the illustrious dead – perhaps it would be high time to bid them a reverent but cheerful adieu! since we have invented umbrellas let us use them – as ornaments at least.’

Lamb was not slow to respond to this message. He elected Augustus as a new master among the illustrious living. Confidence swelled within Augustus – confidence, but not conceit. If people believed in him, he believed in himself. He needed other people’s faith to fortify his own will. ‘Your letter thrills me somewhat,’ he replied to Lamb (5 November 1906). ‘I am not quite a Master – yet. I keep forgetting myself often. But I am learning loyalty. We must have no rivals – and no fickleness. I feel ashamed to go to sleep sometimes. I am learning to value my own loves and fancies and thought above all others. But Life has an infernal narcotic side to it – and one is caught napping and philandering – – – alas! alas! if one had some demon to whip one! I hardly believe you had faith in my possibilities – in my will. I am so glad.’

No friendship yet had begun in such promising style – none would lead to such complications or remain so long an embarrassment to both artists.

In London Augustus had found work and a few people to inspire him; in Paris entertainment and the promise of inspiration to come. Something of the awe and wonder that possessed him when he first went to the Slade now re-entered his life. Paris was ‘a queen of cities’ and ‘so beautiful – London can’t possibly be so nice’.
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No atmosphere, surely, was ever more favourable to the artist. On the terraces of the Nouvelle Athènes or the Rat Mort it was not difficult to conjure up the spectres of Manet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, Degas – figures from the last enchanted epoch, laughing and arguing across the marble tables. But the real heart of Paris
lay further back; it belonged to the Middle Ages. Malodorous, loud with bells, its architecture full of passion, of the cruelty and splendour of ancient superstition, Paris seemed more dangerous than London. It was closer to Nature, to the earth itself, to man and woman’s strange evolution from that earth. The murmur of the boulevards, deep and vibrant; the view of the city seen at dusk from Sacré-Coeur as the light receded to a pinpoint between the smoking of a thousand chimneys; the landscape of the Île de France with its opulent green as if depicted through medieval windows: such beauty seized him with a kind of anguish, confronted him with unanswerable questions: ‘What will become of us? What could all this mean?’

For hours he would sit in the rue de la Gaieté, watching, talking, drinking, listening to the infernal din of a mechanical orchestra, and never wishing to go home – never going home. There was more dreaming of painting than pictures painted.

‘They are playing in this café just now – so I expect I shall get rhetorical presently,’ he wrote to Alick Schepeler. ‘Yes, I shall paint yet: it is more like fighting than anything else for me now – it will be triumphant though… Civilization getting in my way and making a dreary hash of things – and wasting time. I’d like to be kept by a prince. It’s not safe to let me loose about the place in this way – and then send me bills to pay.’

The cosmopolitan world of Montparnasse was a literary world. The talk was of Flaubert and Baudelaire, of Turgenev and Nietzsche, the excellent heathen entertainment of Huysmans and the newest Dostoevsky in French. Almost the only painter, living or dead, who is mentioned in his correspondence is Puvis de Chavannes. Augustus’s Parisian friends were mostly writers, in particular the circle that gathered round the monocled, top-hatted figure of Jean Moréas at the Closerie des Lilas and which included Guillaume Apollinaire, Colette, Paul Fort, the wandering poet who, with his brother Robert, ran the journal
Vers et Prose
,
and André Salmon, the literary spokesman of ‘Les Jeunes’.

Of all this group his most valued friend was Maurice Cremnitz. Late at night, after the group had dispersed from the Closerie des Lilas, Cremnitz would lead Augustus off to louche areas of Paris and leave him with a Swedish lady famous for her exercises. At other times they would explore the old quarters of the city, ‘visiting the wine shops where the
vin blanc
was good – and cheap’;
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and they would go to the little Place du Tertre, to the Moulin de la Galette and the Bal Tabarin, where such delightful songs as ‘Petite Miette’ and ‘Viens pou-poule’ were all the rage and where Cremnitz would sing, in amazing cockney English, ‘Last Night Down our Alley Came a Toff’ ‘I observed the true gaieté
française last night,’ Augustus wrote after their first expedition, ‘a little femme de mauvaise vie had a new song she kept singing and teaching everybody else – no one could have been more innocently happy – and the song – !!’
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