Augustus John (27 page)

‘He is always an outsider, shunning the crowd, wandering off the beaten
track and dodging the official guide and the policeman. Perhaps in a dream he has caught a glimpse of the Golden Age and is in search of it; everywhere he hits on mysterious clues to a lost world; sometimes he hears low music which seems to issue from the hills; the trees confabulate, the waters murmur of a secret which the sky has not forgotten.’
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The Rothensteins had begun the habit of entertaining a small group of artists and writers at their house in Church Row, Hampstead, and it was here that Augustus met W. B. Yeats. ‘With his lank hair falling over his brow, his myopic eyes, his hieratic gestures,’ Augustus later wrote, ‘he looked every inch a poet of the twilight.’
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Policemen and official guides were no obstacles to him, and his poetic vision held steady while for Augustus, looking every inch a romantic painter, it became ‘a passing light… a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless.’
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Among the other visitors to the Rothensteins’ house were Max Beerbohm, with his immaculately tailored human nature, so amusing at a distance, so invisible near to; the naturalist W. H. Hudson, hopelessly and eternally in love with Alice Rothenstein; Robert Cunninghame Graham, the traveller, adventurer and friend of ‘Buffalo Bill’, delivering a string of improper stories clothed in impenetrable layers of Scottish dialect; Walter Sickert, decked out in a roaring check shirt and leggings, looking like some farmer from a comic opera; Jacob Epstein, as innocent and truculent as Augustus himself, smelling like a polecat; and William Nicholson and James Pryde, the dandified Castor and Pollux of poster art.

With Wyndham Lewis, to whom the Rothensteins had also introduced him, Augustus now struck up a long precarious friendship.
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Lewis had come from Rugby to the Slade, a good-looking, gloweringly ambitious young man, who drew with thick black contours resembling the lead in a stained glass window. In Tonks’s opinion, he had the finest sense of line of all his students. Rothenstein took him to Augustus’s top-floor flat (which he himself would later occupy), probably in the summer of 1902. ‘There was a noise of children’, Lewis afterwards recalled, ‘for this patriarch had already started upon his Biblical courses’.

For a time Lewis, made heady by the John atmosphere, became a formidable disciple. ‘I was with John a great deal in those early days in London,’ he wrote in
Rude Assignment.
‘…Unlike most painters, John was very intelligent. He read much and was of remarkable maturity.’ They stimulated and exasperated each other in equal measures. Lewis was much impressed by all that Augustus had so rapidly achieved. His success in art and with women appeared phenomenal, and by associating with him, Lewis seems to have felt, some of this success might fall his way. Augustus,
on his side, was flattered by Lewis’s veneration. Here was someone mysterious and remarkable, a poet hesitating between literature and painting, whose good opinion served to increase Augustus’s self-esteem. He seemed a valuable ally. For whatever else he felt, Augustus was never bored by Lewis, whose dynamic progress through life was conducted as if to outwit some invisible foe. This involved a series of aggressive retreats – to neutral Scandinavia for example, where he would find a letter from Augustus demanding: ‘Is Sweden safe?’ Such places were not only safe, Lewis would hint in his replies, but the arenas of unimaginable conquests.

‘Have patience with this literature of our misunderstanding,’ Lewis appealed.
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Aware of his friend’s superior education, Augustus strove to match Lewis’s ‘calligraphic obscurity’ by what he called ‘linguistic licence’ – that is, a fantastic prolixity which he considered the intellectual tenor of their relationship required. The result was an exchange of letters, part undiscoverable, part indecipherable, covering over fifty years, that is almost complete in its comic density. Both were flamboyantly secretive men with bombardier tempers, and their friendship, which somehow endured all its volcanic quarrels, kept being arrested by declarations that it was at an end – an event upon which they would with great warmth congratulate themselves. Yet such was the good feeling generated by these separations and congratulations that they quickly came together again, when all the damning-and-blasting of their complicated liaison would start up once more.
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Their correspondence is extremely generous with offensive advice which they attempt to make more palatable by adding the odd ‘mon vieux’ or ‘old fellow’. Augustus frequently intends to return Lewis’s letters by post in order to get him to ‘admit [that] no more offensive statement could be penned’; but almost always he mislays the letter or, in his first fit of uncontrollable fury, flings it irrecoverably into some fire or sea. Besides, Lewis is always offering to provide batches of duplicates by special courier. Augustus is constantly being dumbfounded by Lewis’s requests for money coupled with his forgetfulness in repaying it; and by his insistence that Augustus was influencing mutual friends to his discredit. Augustus’s style grows more and more convoluted in grappling with these charges. Then, suddenly, the clouds clear and in a succinct moment of retaliation he announces that Lewis’s drawings ‘lack
charm,
my dear fellow’.
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The whole relationship is bedevilled by ingenious dissension. Each credits the other with Machiavellian cunning. Lewis is amazed that Augustus never invites him for a drink; Augustus is perplexed that Lewis is never able to visit him – when he does so, Augustus is always out; while Lewis, on principle, never answers his doorbell. They make elaborate
plans to meet on neutral territory, but then something goes wrong – the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong mood. Lewis becomes increasingly irritated that Augustus so seldom writes. Augustus becomes irritated because when he does write his letters go astray, Lewis in the meantime having moved in darkest secrecy to some unknown address such as the Pall Mall Deposit. The letters which do arrive express very adequately this irritation fanned, in Lewis’s case, by eloquent invective, and in Augustus’s by a circumlocution that ingeniously avoids answering any of Lewis’s inquiries. It is a most stimulating exchange.

Life itself – beyond Fitzroy Street – was variously stimulating: but at home it was the old fruitful routine. On 11 March 1903 Ida’s second child was born. Gus had confidently predicted a girl, but ‘instead of Esther, a roaring boy has forced admittance to our household,’ he told Will Rothenstein. ‘…Ida welcomes him heartily. But what will David say?’ It was ‘
much
nicer’, Ida had told the Rani, ‘to have Gussie than the doctor, and a gamp twice a day than a hovering nurse in a starched cap. Lorenzo Paganini is quite lovely and so quiet.’ The boy, also referred to as ‘nice fat slug’ or ‘pig face’ (‘his face is like a pink pig’s,’ Ida boasted to Margaret Sampson), was eventually saddled with the name Caspar – nicknamed Capper (and occasionally ‘Caper Sauce’) – and a gate was fitted at the top of the stairs outside their flat to prevent the children from falling. Suddenly their home seemed very crowded. ‘I emerged into a melodramatic scene of human frailty,’ Caspar later wrote.
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In a highly oblique passage of
Finishing Touches,
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his posthumous and unfinished volume of memoirs, Augustus refers to himself under the pseudonym of ‘George’. George, a new recruit of Will Rothenstein’s and said to be on the threshold of a brilliant career, is ‘only just recovering from the nervous breakdown following his recent marriage’. At the informal parties in Will Rothenstein’s house, finding ‘an atmosphere no doubt very different from the climatic conditions of the home-life to which he was as yet uninured… he began to expand and blossom forth himself, in a style combining scholarship with an attractive diffidence and humour. He felt perhaps that here was a means of escape from the insidious encroachments of domesticity, and accordingly attached himself to Will Rothenstein with the desperate haste of a man caught in the quicksands.’

If he expanded here and at the Café Royal, he often contracted again when he got home. This concertina motion, to which Ida responded with a mixture of excitement and dread, had by 1903 produced a strange fragmentation of himself. He became subject to sudden withdrawals from human contact. It seemed baffling that someone of such intelligence and strong physique could at times be so will-less. The only Will he had,
apparently, was Rothenstein, whose remedy was to send him off on marathon walks round Hampstead Heath.

Yet Augustus was not indolent. He could work well if tactfully organized. But to organize him was an operation needing remorseless diplomacy. Will Rothenstein, for all his energy and enthusiasm, could not begin to do this, and even Ida, continually pregnant and fretted by domestic duties, was unable to manage such an extra task. It needed a team to organize Augustus, and a team was precisely what he was about to assemble round him: a team of exasperated patrons and art dealers and dedicated women. He did not know why he needed this entourage, only that he must have it. His first steps to get what he wanted imperilled his marriage and brought him to a state which, in his autobiographical synopsis, he described as ‘madness’.

‘What inconsiderate buggers we males are.’

Augustus John to Mary Dowdall

‘Gus is painting several Masterpieces,’ Ida notified Gwen John. ‘…We are as happy as larks.’ To the winter exhibition of the New English Art Club, late in 1902, he sent two major pictures. The first of these, ‘Merikli’,
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was a portrait of Ida holding a basket of flowers and fruit painted as if by an Old Master: Rembrandt, with a helping hand from Velasquez. Ida’s figure, touched by warm light, emerges enthusiastically from the dark shadows of the background. The colouring is sombre, the tone low; the handling is accomplished but conventional and the pose rather artificial. Yet there are a number of peculiar elements in the painting that give it a veil of mystery. In John Sampson’s
The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, merikli
is defined as: ‘Connected with the Sanscrit “pearl”, “gem” or “jewel” ie., ornament worn round the neck’. In the picture Ida is wearing a necklace of coral (not precious stone but a once-live substance). Then, from the plaited-straw basket, full of roses and cherries, she proffers a ‘daisy’ – probably a pun on the slang use of ‘daisy’ meaning a first-rate specimen of anything. Ida also wears a wedding ring on the right hand. Such unorthodoxes and
double entendres
suggest a less conventional set of values than the pastiche seventeenth-century manner first conveys, and also reveals the literary methods by which he was attempting to combine new ideas with old forms.

It was voted Picture of the Year at the exhibition.

His other portrait at the NEAC was of an Italian girl, Signorina Estella Cerutti. In the opinion of John Rothenstein, this picture ‘proclaimed him a master in the art of painting’,
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being ‘clearly stamped with that indefinable largeness of form characteristic of major paintings’. The major painter it brings to mind is Ingres, and its striking dissimilarity to ‘Merikli’ (which also recalls Hals) shows a painter still in search of his own idiom. Estella Cerutti is a splendidly buxom woman, whose creamy-golden silhouette is rendered more piquant by the ballooning curves of her ribbed muslin dress. Whereas Ida’s features were painted broadly and spontaneously and looked somewhat masculine in their strength, all is subordinate in the portrait of Estella Cerutti to sinuous contour and the mapping of the shadows. She is not held in the frame but seems to be moving past a window, a self-assured figure holding a handkerchief in her hands (perhaps a reference to
Othello
) and casting a languorous backward glance.

It was a glance that Augustus followed. ‘Esther’ Cerutti, as he called her – the very name he was to have given his second child had it been a daughter – lived below them at Fitzroy Street. In the spring and summer of 1903 he made numerous drawings of her and at least one etching.
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Two or three times a week she would come up to their flat, and he would sometimes descend to hers. ‘The Cerutti’s vices necessitate frequent purchases of Turkish cigarettes,’ Augustus explained to Michel Salaman, ‘which act as a sedative.’ They were a sedative for him rather than her. Ida admired, envied, and was irritated by Esther in the most confusing way. What style she had! She was an accomplished pianist, dressed superbly well and suffered from such appealing illnesses. It was almost impossible not to be provoked.

Augustus seemed held in tension between the two of them, motionlessly suspended within their opposing fields of attraction. ‘For days I have been inert and dejected,’ he confessed to the Rani in Liverpool.

‘I cannot account for the dejection except as the necessary complement of inanition, for my reasons to hope remain palpable and the same. Dearest Lady! How we married people need to cling and pull together and so make this holy state by union a force – for I begin now and then to suspect its weakening – or perhaps it is that I am a weak member, but then at least I am a link in the nuptial chain. But I think we ought to plan it so that we have the laugh on the others… As to Miss Esther I don’t know whether to be mühen [to exert himself] again or not to be mühen, both courses being fraught with problems distant and immediate. At present I slumber in the studio surrounded by my works.’

To escape these problems he went that summer on a ‘short but brilliant campaign in Wales with the admirable Sampson’. But when he returned, the problems were still waiting for him, so he immediately set off again, this time for Liverpool with his sister Winifred, who was sailing to join Thornton in North America. Once he had put her on board, he combed the town for old friends. ‘The Town proved most inhospitable,’ he complained to the Rani. ‘…I had hoped to see Sampson – but alas! his house proved nothing but a silent tomb of memories with those wonderful blinds drawn gloomily down.’ The Rani herself was away in the country, though her elusiveness, he admitted, was stimulating in a disappointing sort of way. ‘Curiously enough ’tis to a dream I owe my most vivid, most tender recollection of you. (And they call dreams vague… hazy...) It happened in Liverpool the last night I spent there. (Heaven knows how I spent the next!)’ Afterwards he ‘fled down Brownlow Hill to the station and so home again’.