Augustus John (46 page)

Dorelia moved in with Pyramus and Romilly immediately. But Augustus was not wholly pleased. It had all happened so fast and while he was away. He signed the agreement, since women were not allowed to make agreements for such large sums, but he did not want Dorelia disappearing. She had started modelling again – though there was no mention of Leonard since her return to Paris. She also had a woman to mind the children during the afternoons. ‘I think she is enjoying herself a bit in leaving the babies,’ Ida told Gus. He did not know what to think. After all, it was not impossible that he had exaggerated Alick Schepeler’s importance. There was certainly nothing exclusive about it. Besides, it was easy to exaggerate the significance of what he called his ‘physical limitations’. At Matching Green when Ida had been suicidal over Dorelia, Augustus had explained his behaviour in a letter to the Rani – and in essence nothing had changed now that Dorelia was angry over Alick.

‘One [i.e. Ida] must grow accustomed to the recurrence of these perhaps congenital weaknesses – which you must remember have not appeared with Dorelia’s arrival only but date in my experience from the first moment of meeting Ida – which are indeed included in her system as a mark of mortality in one otherwise divinely rational. Don’t please ever think of me as a playful eccentric who thinks it necessary to épater les bourgeois; things take place quite naturally and inevitably – one cannot however arrest the invisible hand – with all the best intentions – to attempt that is pure folly.’

But Dorelia was less tractable than Ida – and she had entered less deeply into the web. She saw no folly in his attempting to ‘arrest the invisible hand’ – everyone had to do that. She doubted his best intentions; she doubted his motives in writing to her now. Augustus was quick to protest. ‘My beloved Relia, I don’t write to you without loving you or wanting to write. Believe this and don’t suspect me of constant humbuggery. Who the Devil do you think I’m in love with? If you think I’m a mere liar, out goes the sun. I’ve been thinking strongly sometimes of clearing back over the Channel to get at you, you won’t believe how strongly or how often.’

And it was true: she didn’t. But at Christmas he arrived and Ida gave a great party in the rue Dareau, ‘immodestly’ hanging up a big bunch of mistletoe in the middle of the room. Gwen John turned up and Wyndham Lewis and Dorelia with her children, and Ida’s boys wrote a Christmas letter to Grandpa John in Tenby. They ate ‘dinde aux marrons’, plum pudding and ‘wonderful little cakes’; and they drank quantities of ‘punch au kirsch’. For the six children, instead of a plodding white-bearded
Father Christmas, they had ‘le petit noël’ who, though he descended the chimney, had ‘a delicacy of his own entirely French’.
79
It was a happy time. ‘The shops are
full
of dolls dolls dolls – it is so French and ridiculous and
painted,
and yet it doesn’t lie heavy on the chest like English “good cheer”,’ Ida wrote to the Rani (December 1906). ‘One can look at it through the window quite pleasantly instead of having to mix in or be a misanthrope as at home. Perhaps because one is foreign. It is delightful to be foreign – unless one is in the country of one’s birth – when it becomes gênant [inconvenient].’

The holiday was delightful, but it solved no problems: it was simply a holiday. After all was over, Augustus returned to finish his portrait of Alick Schepeler; and Dorelia went back to her
logement.
Gradually she was growing more independent. Her sister Jessie came for a few weeks to help with the children; she began dressmaking; got one of Tiger’s kittens from Gwen John; went on modelling. ‘Dodo has just been to déjeuner, washed herself (1st time in 3 days) and gone off to sit at “Trinity Lodge”,’ Ida wrote to Gus. ‘I’m afraid she’s forgotten to take her prayer book. She says for her last pose she didn’t have to wash – it was such a comfort. But for Trinity Lodge the outside of the platter must be clean.’ Soon Dorelia had established her own routine of life. ‘Dodo has only been once to déjeuner since she left,’ Ida sadly observed. ‘She is quite 20 minutes away.’

By March 1907 it seemed as if Dorelia had achieved her independence.

*

‘I am alone again – and alone – and alone.’ From Augustus, with his agreement, Ida was content to live apart – ‘it is so easy to love at a distance,’ she reminded him. And from a distance she still worshipped him. ‘I say Mackay is 2nd rate,’ she had written to the Rani in Liverpool.

‘…I have always known it, but the other day it flashed on me. So is Sampson. There is no harm in being 2nd rate any more than being a postman. It is just a creation… Augustus has not that quality – he is essentially 1st rate… As to a woman, I know only one first and that is Gwen John. You and I, dear, are puddings – with plums in perhaps – and good suet – but puddings. Well perhaps you are a butterfly or an ice cream – yes, that
is
more suitable – but we are scarcely human… This sounds tragic, but I have been living with exhausting emotions lately and am – queer – Yours in a garden Ida.’

In all aspects of her life, it seemed to her, she had failed. She had failed as an artist – even as a musician; she had failed as a friend – she seldom
saw her friends now; that she had failed with Gus was obvious; and, what was perhaps as painful, her relationship with Dorelia had failed – they were still friendly, but that sweet intimacy had gone. She had failed too – was in the very process of failing – as a mother. Her sister Ethel came to stay and they ‘did nothing but alternately scratch out each others eyes and “die of laughing”’. She was reading Balzac’s
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
and told Gus she would love to have a book about the Empress of China ‘or, above all, a biography’. He was still her ‘Darling G’ or ‘Dear Oggie’, and she felt a sudden pang over him: ‘Oh dear, do take care of yourself, cheer up...’

If Augustus that winter stood at the top of a great mixed metaphor, Ida seemed to be sinking into a huge bowl of cough mixture, dill water, cod-liver oil, milk of magnesia. The eldest children were getting to an age when they wanted more attention but she had no more to give them. Their future seemed bleak with such a mother. David, she told Margaret Sampson, was ‘such a queer twisted many-sided kid. Horrid an[d] lovely – plucky and cowardly – cruel and kind – thoughtful and stupid, many times a day. He needs a firm wise hand to guide him, instead of a bad tempered lump like me.’ She had begun to arrange their education, sending David and Caspar to the École Maternelle of the Communal School – ‘there are about 300 all under 6’, she told Gus, ‘and they do nothing but shriek little ditties with their earless voices, and march about in double file’. But both boys were so unhappy there she had to remove them: another failure.

She was imprisoned during the children’s pleasure, for so long as the mind could tell, the eye could see. ‘Life here is so curious – not interesting as you might imagine,’ she wrote to the Rani.

‘I crave for a time when the children are grown up and I can ride about on the tops of omnibuses as of yore in a luxury of vague observation. Never now do I have time for any luxury, and at times I feel a stubborn head on me – wooden – resentful – slowly being petrified. And another extraordinary thing that has happened to me is that my spirit – my lady, my light and help – has gone – not tragically – just in the order of things – and now I am not sure if I am making an entrance into the world – or an exit from it!… As a matter of plain fact I believe my raison d’être has ended, and I am no more the inspired one I was. It seems so strange to write all this quite calmly. Tell me what you can make of it when you have time. My life has been so mysterious. I long for someone to talk to. I can’t write now – another strange symptom!’

It was a sickness of living from which she suffered – quite different
from the suicidal troughs of Matching Green. Then there had been rising waves of jealousy; now, though she often dreamed of Augustus and Alick Schepeler, they were absurd dreams, never tortured. ‘Last night you were teaching her [Alick] french in the little dining-room here while I kept passing through to David who had toothache and putting stuff on his tooth.’ It was as if she was too tired to feel anything more. On hearing that Augustus was coming over at Christmas, she had remarked to the Rani: ‘Funny – I haven’t been alone with him for 2½ years – wonder what it will be like – boring probably.’ Yet she had not been bored at all. She had been happy.

In Ida’s letters, especially to the Rani, there is a fatalistic flirting with death: ‘Oh Rani – Are you in a state when the future seems hopeless? I suppose things are never hopeless really are they? There is always death isn’t there?’ Except for death, there seemed no new thing under the sun. She lived in a pale stupor. ‘The only way to be happy is to be ignorant and lie under the trees in the evening,’ she had told the Rani. But she could not regain such green ignorance.

She had not counted on Augustus. Now that he had finished his portrait of Alick, now that Dorelia had inexplicably melted away, he suddenly proposed returning to live with Ida. Why not? They had come through so much. What else was there for them? Ida was dismayed. She hardly knew what to answer. Even if he was temporarily feeling dissatisfied with the present arrangement, surely he would not regret it later on. Had he considered the implications of living with her? What about the children – ‘Can you really want to see them again?’ she asked. ‘You know they worry you to death.’ But Augustus had no home. He could find nowhere to live in London, and he could not work. Was his request really so unsatisfactory? After all, they still loved each other in their fashion; why should they not settle down in London and be happy? Besides, he had given her scheme a long trial. What he said, and the troubled way he said it, did not sound unreasonable. She told him he would be happier alone, but some men were helpless when left to themselves. ‘It may be I should come back to London,’ Ida reluctantly agreed. ‘You must tell me. I will come – only we get on so much better apart. But I understand you need a home. Dis moi et j’y cours. As to the love old chap we all have our hearts full of love for someone at sometime or other and if it isn’t this one it’s the other one over there.’

Her real feeling at the prospect of returning comes out in a letter she sent the Rani: ‘Gus seems to hanker after a home in London, and I feel duties beating little hammers about me, and probably shall find myself padding about London in another ½
year – Damn it all.’

One factor that tied her to Augustus, as she had explained at Ste-Honorine-des-Perthes,
was financial dependence. Throughout the autumn and winter she had saved exorbitantly. To Augustus she represented such thrift as an art, parodying his own: ‘Am still trying to take care of the pence with great pleasure in the feeling of beauty it gives – like simplifying an already beautiful, but careless and clumsy, work of art.’ The impetus behind this economic activity was her desire to build some independence in the future. But the little hammers of duty were destroying this last dream. She had complained in the past of her own selfishness, but she was not selfish enough.

In a letter to Alice Rothenstein, Ida wrote: ‘It chills my marrow to think of living back in England.’ The Rothensteins were growing increasingly worried about her life with and without Augustus, and wrote to inquire, complain, praise and comfort her.

‘My only treasure is myself,’ she insisted to Will, ‘and that I give you, as I give it to all men who need it… as to Gussie, he is our great child artist: let him snap his jaws. What does he matter? It is
you
who matters, and you dare not be frightened except at your own self. I am glad to have your letter: it is such a comfort to hear a voice. Life is a bit solemn and silent in the forest where I live, and the world outside a bit grotesque and difficult. Certainly there are always the gay ribbons you talk of but they are only sewn on and are there to break the intolerable monotony, for which purpose, darling Will, they are
quite inadequate...
’

Such gloomy letters worried the Rothensteins, who blamed Augustus. But this was too simple, and Ida would not allow it. Gus never treated women as if they were children or inferior to men. He treated them as adults, fully capable of looking after themselves in a difficult world. Nor did he lie to them or seriously mislead them. He was transparent. The advantages and disadvantages he offered were immediately obvious. ‘I must write to say it is not so,’ she firmly answered Will. The devil, she explained, was in herself – ‘and as soon as you wound it, it heals up and you have to keep on always trying to find its heart.’ This devil had so many names: it was jealousy (which had driven Dorelia away); a vanity which masqueraded as duty; finally sloth. Would she ever kill it? ‘When one fights a devil does one not fight it for the whole world? It is the most enchanting creature, it is everywhere. God, it seems to spread itself out every minute. Sometimes I do find its miserable fat heart and I give it a good stab. But it is chained to me. I cannot run away.’

*

All of them were in Paris during February: Augustus moving into his new studio, and Gwen in hers; Dorelia in her
logement
;
Ida
still at the rue Dareau. ‘Let’s go up the Volga in the sun,’ Augustus entreated Alick. But
it was no more than a gesture: he could not run away now from Ida. At moments he might have liked to. Paris that winter seemed crowded with the bourgeoisie, and he blamed them for his ill thoughts. ‘I am much depressed to-day by the aspect of civilization – never was human society so foully ugly, so abysmally ignoble – and I have also had a cold which doesn’t improve matters.’ He revisited all the places which had so delighted him less than a year ago – the Louvre, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Panthéon (‘to encourage myself with a view of Puvis’s decorations’) – but everywhere seethed with masses of people which ‘brought my nausea to a climax’. The whole French nation oppressed him. ‘I went into the morgue and saw 4 dead men,’ he told Alick; ‘they looked
awfully well
really – the only thing impressive I found today… These four unknown dead men, all different, seemed enlarged by death to monumental size, and lacking life seemed divested only of its trivialities.’