Augustus John (63 page)

The pattern of life at the Villa Ste-Anne, though confused a little by good intentions, was straightforward. ‘I am installed in this little house with a batch of family and hard at work,’ Augustus promised Quinn (2 April 1910). ‘The weather has been glorious and we have been out of doors all day for weeks.’ They bought a boat and spent many days dreamily rowing across the glass-like surface of the lake. ‘From time to time, as with dread I looked down into the bottomless void beneath us,’ Romilly John recalled, ‘an enormous jellyfish of a yellowish grey colour sailed by, trailing in gentle curves long streamers decorated with overlapping purple fringe: it seemed to emphasize the spatial quality of the blue depths.’
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This was a good place for the children. There was a donkey, plenty of berries, the stretch of salt water and ‘a rock we play on’, Caspar explained in a letter to his aunt, Ursula Nettleship. For Caspar especially this was a magical holiday as, naked and starry-eyed, he watched the fanatical birdman skimming over the lagoon in his primitive machine, and dreamed of growing wings himself and flying. It was ‘the tender age of aerial experimentation’ and these pioneers, the Wright brothers ‘hopping like wounded birds among the sand dunes of North Carolina’,
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and Blériot the previous year making the first aeroplane crossing of the English Channel, and Bazin (‘a crank but he was not mad’), dedicating their lives to this dream of flight, were all heroes to Caspar who, during the 1930s, would be the top aviator of the Fleet Air Arm.

While Dorelia took the children off for water-picnics, Augustus would harness the donkey and go on long sketching expeditions. ‘One sees much more by these means,’ he told Quinn (2 April 1910), ‘and one doesn’t go to sleep.’ At night, while Dorelia cooked and the children eventually fell
into bed, Augustus would read: gypsy literature from Liverpool, Provençal masters such as Daudet and Mistral, poems from Symons and prose from Wyndham Lewis, the works of Léon Bloy, and old copies of the
New Age.

Gypsies would sometimes pass the door, be invited in for a drink and a talk, and stay several days. Somehow there was always enough food for them. ‘We had the house full of gypsies for about a week,’ Dorelia wrote to Ottoline (May 1910). ‘…It was great fun. They would dance and sing at any hour of the day.’

At intervals, when the supply of gypsies grew scarce, Augustus would take himself off to Marseilles and team up with ‘some Gitano pals’ who were teaching him to play the guitar. From here he could keep watch on a piece of waste ground outside the town over which passed a strange procession: bear-leaders from the Balkans; wagon-loads of women; Russians ‘fresh from Russia’; a pantalooned tribe of Turkish wanderers from Stamboul ‘in little brown tents of ragged sacking far from impervious to the rain’, waiting for a boat to Tangier; a band of mumpers from Alsace (‘a low unprofitable company’); Irish tinkers, Dutch nomads, French Romanichels, travellers from southern Spain, Bosnians, Belgians, Bohemians, Bessarabians – ‘the travelling population of France is enormous.’
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If only he could import some into Surrey, and let them breed!

His word-lists grew longer and his calligraphy more fevered. Of everyone he inquired about Sainte Sara and the gypsy pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. ‘This pilgrimage may be the last of the old pilgrim mysteries of the gypsies,’ he assured Scott Macfie (14 May 1910). He ransacked the library at Aix; he reverently inspected the bones of the Egyptian saint at Saintes-Maries. But beyond various stories of miraculous cures he could discover little. It did not matter. For though Sainte Sara was a problem to be solved by the Gypsy Lore Society, to Augustus she remained a symbol, and the annual fête at Saintes-Maries a renewed act of faith. As such, it presented itself to him as a picture by Puvis de Chavannes, and would dominate the last years of his life.

His letters to Scott Macfie intersperse gypsy scholarship with exploits among the ‘inveterate whores of Marseilles’
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whom he contemplated introducing into his decorations for Hugh Lane. They were everywhere, like an army of occupation. To run the gauntlet of what he called ‘this fine assortment of Mediterranean whores’,
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he resorted, Wyndham Lewis-style, to the protection of a voluminous cloak – ‘a cloak albeit of stout fabric’ – like a bandit. ‘Why does the employment of a prostitute cause one’s last neglected but unbroken
religious
chord to vibrate with such terrifying sonority?’ he suddenly demanded (16 March 1910). From Liverpool came little response to these Dostoevsky-like rumblings, and Augustus was left to ponder them alone.

‘As to whores and whoredom, considered from the purely practical point of view (never really pure) as a utility it is an abomination which stinks like anybody else’s shit,’ he volunteered (30 March 1910); ‘considered morally it is a foul blasphemy which must make Christ continually sweat blood: but without either point of view, there is an aspect of beauty to be discovered – which indeed jumps at one’s eye sometimes – whores, especially at 20 sous la pusse, have often something enigmatic, sacerdotal about them. It is as if one entered some temple of some strange God, and the “intimacy” really doesn’t exist except to reveal the untraversable gulfs which can isolate two souls.’

To ‘know’ someone in the biblical sense, and to know her otherwise not at all; to preserve the stranger-element in a physical union; this symbolized, without speech, the loneliness of human beings. No one said anything, and nothing was expected. The relationship was a single act with no descent into tedium, no clash of wills. It was the implications of the act rather than the act itself that lived in the imagination. A number of times this spring and summer Augustus took off for Marseilles, drank whisky, ‘misbehaved’, and returned to Martigues the better for it. But this was, he admitted to Scott Macfie (3 April 1910), ‘a dangerous subject’.

*

Henry Lamb had recently written to Ottoline Morrell suggesting a
ménage-à-six.
There would be the two of them, and of course her Philip and naturally his Helen Maitland. And then inevitably, for the sake of continuity, there would be Augustus and Dorelia. He illustrated the proposal with a diagram of himself as a bee, flitting round the circle. It was not the sort of joke that much amused Ottoline. Perhaps Henry, in his efforts to free himself of Augustus, was becoming too greatly influenced by Lytton Strachey.

Ever since they had settled into Martigues, Augustus and Dorelia had been inviting Ottoline to visit them in their new villa. But she remembered that damp meadow outside Cambridge. However, she did agree to meet them at Cézanne’s house in Aix-en-Provence.

Augustus and Dorelia travelled all day in their donkey cart. Ottoline found them sitting outside a café, Dorelia very beautiful in a striped cotton skirt, a yellow scarf covering her head; Augustus, his square-cut beard now pointed in the French manner, ‘which made him look like a dissipated Frenchman, as his eyes were bloodshot and yellow from brandy and rum’.
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Together they went to Cézanne’s house on the outskirts of Aix, which still contained a number of his pictures including the murals of the four seasons mysteriously inscribed ‘Ingres’; and the next day they
explored the town. Augustus, Ottoline observed, was a bored and weary sightseer.

‘In the afternoon when we returned we found him sitting outside a café drinking happily with the little untidy waiter from the hotel and a drunken box-maker from the street nearby. In his companions he requires only a reflecting glass for himself, and thus he generally chooses them from such inferiors. He seems curiously unaware of the world, too heavily laden and oppressed with boredom to break through and to realize life.’
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Ottoline left Aix with the secret conviction that she, rather than Dorelia, could have guided Augustus ‘into greatness such as Michelangelo, Cézanne or Van Gogh’.

His second expedition that summer could only have confirmed Ottoline in this conviction. It was to Nice – ‘a paradise invaded by bugs (human ones)’
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– and involved what he called ‘some mighty queer days’ with Frank Harris. He had first met Harris in Wellington Square, Chelsea, with Max Beerbohm, Conder, Will Rothenstein and others. With his booming voice and baleful eye, Harris imposed himself upon the company by sheer force of bad character – or so it appeared to Augustus, whose attention was taken up with the stately figure of Constance Collier, the flamboyant actress somewhat improbably engaged to Max Beerbohm. While Harris was holding the floor, Augustus suggested to this ‘large and handsome lady’ that she sit for him, adding, perhaps tactlessly, that he would have to find a bigger studio. ‘Why not take the Crystal Palace then?’ boomed Harris, suddenly exploding into their conversation: and everyone laughed. He was, Augustus rather sourly observed, very much the
pièce de résistance
of the party, a position Augustus preferred to occupy himself. Like Augustus, Harris presented a bold front to the world. ‘Stocky in build, his broad chest was protected by a formidable waistcoat heavily studded with brass knobs,’ Augustus wrote. ‘With his basilisk eyes and his rich booming voice he dominated the room. Hair of a suspicious blackness rose steeply from his moderate brow, and a luxuriant though well-trained moustache of the same coloration added a suggestion of Mephistopheles to the
ensemble.’
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Harris took an apparently flattering interest in Augustus, claiming in return that ‘he praised my stories beyond measure’ – the sort of high-flown approval he regretted being just unable to accord Augustus’s paintings. This was a preliminary exercise in psychological outmanoeuvring. In fact Augustus had not greatly admired Harris’s fiction, but praised
The Man Shakespeare
as ‘a wonderful book’, in what Harris called a ‘most astonishing letter’ which he would put with his ‘collection of letters
from Browning, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Coventry Patmore, Huxley, Swinburne and Wilde’. To this literary judgement Harris also responded with a burst of artistic criticism: ‘The quality of his [John’s] painting is poor – gloomy and harsh – reflecting, I think, a certain disdainful bitterness of character which does not go with the highest genius.’ Then, describing Augustus as ‘a draughtsman of the first rank, to be compared with Ingres, Dürer and Degas, one of the great masters’, he bought a drawing, persuaded Augustus fulsomely to inscribe it to him, then sold it for a nice profit to a dealer where, to his irritation, Augustus later stumbled across it.

In an unfair world, where it was always necessary to turn the tables on those who were over-gifted, Harris saw Augustus as a potentially superior version of himself – a deep lover of women, a lusty drinker, a creature of fantasy and talent, a rebel Celtic artist who disdained the social successes that Harris had coveted. Lunching at the Café Royal at the time
The Man Shakespeare
was published (autumn 1909), Harris was struck by Augustus’s height, beauty and ‘great manner’ which, he wrote, ‘swept aside argument and infected all his hearers. Everyone felt in the imperious manner, flaming eyes and eloquent cadenced voice the outward and visible signs of that demonic spiritual endowment we call genius.’
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Harris was then considering himself in the role of prosperous gallery owner. His blandishments, mixed in with pious references to Jesus Christ, continued to arrive by post that winter, first from Ravello, then from Nice. He believed Augustus might do worse than illustrate his story ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’, and urged him: ‘Don’t be afraid of telling me of any faults you may see’ in his books, however difficult this might be. Eventually in the spring of 1910 Augustus agreed to visit him. He arrived at Nice station dressed in corduroys and with his painting materials in a small handbag. On the platform he was met by Harris decked out in full evening dress, apparently disconcerted by his guest’s lack of chic, yet determined to carry him off to the Opera House where he had a box lent to him by the Princess of Monaco. Here his wife Nellie awaited them ‘attired for the occasion in somewhat faded and second-hand splendour’. The composer of ‘the infernal din’ to which they were subjected soon joined them and, taking a dislike to Augustus on sight, restricted his compliments to Harris. Augustus gathered that ‘I was assisting at a meeting between “the modern Wagner” and “the greatest intellect in Europe”.’
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What happened later that night and on subsequent nights back at Harris’s home was peculiar. ‘I was shown my room which, as Frank was careful to point out, adjoined Nelly’s, his own being at a certain distance, round the corner… Before many hours passed in the Villa, I decided I
was either mad or living in a mad-house. What I found most sinister was the behaviour of Nelly and the female secretary. These two, possessed as it seemed by a mixture of fright and merriment, clung together at my approach, while giggling hysterically as if some desperate mischief was afoot.’ Ten years later Nellie Harris hinted to the biographer Hesketh Pearson that she had repulsed Augustus’s advances during this visit.
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Whatever the facts, Augustus came to an opposite conclusion, sensing a deeply laid Harris plot.

What is so strange in testing for the truth of this episode is that Harris was extremely possessive of Nellie; while Augustus, though he often gets details wrong (such as Harris’s house at Nice) and embroiders facts, had little gift for invention. He had come to suspect that, by taking advantage of Nellie’s night-time propinquity, he would lay himself open to Harris’s ‘requests’ for money. That Harris was keen on raising funds is undeniable, yet Augustus’s interpretation of what was in his mind was probably wrong. Harris was, in the view of the artist J. D. Fergusson, a Robin Hood robbing the rich in order one day to reimburse the poor. His vendetta was carried on against the socially successful for the ostensible benefit of the writer and artist. That he himself was poor and a writer enabled him to begin and end many of these charitable exercises at home. Although Augustus could congratulate himself on having ‘failed’ Harris, it seems more likely that he played up perfectly. From Carlyle onwards, Harris sought to humiliate, usually in some sexual context, those he admired. Such men pointed the way to all that Harris prized – power and the love of women – but at their own risk, for Harris’s route was paved with their exposed lives. He resented that his own notoriety as a biographer should depend upon the fame of other men. Shakespeare was beyond his reach, if only in time; but his books on Shaw and Wilde, and his series of ‘Contemporary Portraits’, ring loud with this rival-complaint. His novels and short stories reveal Harris’s hopes of self-greatness. In
Undream’d of Shores
,
for example, there is an account of a great Mogul ruler, curiously similar to Harris, who tells the girl he loves that there are many men handsomer and stronger than he. But she denies this, asserting that he is the most splendid man in the Court, for ‘although he was only a little taller than the average’ there was, she reminds him, his ‘black eyes and hair and his loud deep voice’. Harris set up situations which allowed him to score off those who were publicly acknowledged to be handsome, talented, tall and romantic. Harris’s Contemporary Portrait of Augustus reveals his attraction and resentment unashamedly.