Augustus John (32 page)

By the end of February 1904, Gwen’s pictures being for the time being finished, the two girls bundled their possessions on to their backs again, and made their way north in the direction of London. ‘What a surprise to hear from you in Paris,’ Augustus wrote at the end of March. ‘I suppose
you willed yourself there… I trust you are careful to pose only to good young artists. They must find you two quite épatant [dumbfounding].’
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He was overjoyed that they were on their way back. It could not be long now before they arrived in England. ‘I have ordered a mighty canvas against your coming,’ he wrote to Dorelia, ‘…so better go in for Ju-Jitsu at once, dear, for you will have to fill it spreadeagle wise.’ But when Gwen and Dorelia reached Paris, they stopped. The Rani, who was staying at Elm House in the last week of March, describes what the atmosphere was like in a letter to her husband (24 March 1904):

‘Mr Augustus’s habits are really remarkable. He came on Tuesday with a bad cold and all Wednesday morning he stayed in bed and played the concertina and we had to take turns to provide him with gossip. All afternoon he read Balzac – never moved from his chair – went out for a walk just before supper in piercing cold – read all evening including meals – said “I want to make some more sketches of you” and dropped the subject. All Thursday (yesterday) he stayed in bed and asked for no one – played the most melancholy tunes on his concertina and got up at tea time – very silent, read his book but as good as gold and ready to nail up bird cages or anything – after tea went out – at tea he said “Good God is it Thursday? – I thought of doing that sketch to-day.” At 6.15 he appeared with a block and some red chalk and began to draw me as I sat by the fire. I said “I hope you are not doing it unless you feel inclined” to which a growl and “I do feel inclined – that is I shan’t know if I do until I’ve done.” He drew furiously by firelight and the last glimmer from the window and fetched a lamp and drew by that until supper – 7 o’clock three sketches – I didn’t ask to see them knowing better – at supper we both took our life in our hands… and asked to see the sketches he had done. He produced them… each more charming than the other… He worked with the tension and rapidity of ten Shannons [Charles Shannon, lithographer and painter] rolled into one – scraped and tore away at it in the most marvellous way and did I should think fully six more of which I only saw one – too exquisitely squirrelly and funny for description but beautiful. They were mostly put in the coal scuttle as he did them but preserved all right. It must have been about 12 when he suddenly stopped, said “thank you for sitting” and went off to bed.’

The next day, 25 March, the Chelsea Art School officially ended its term, and Augustus began to spend more days at Matching Green. ‘The school is going on rather dully,’ he wrote to Gwen. ‘I’m trying to think of some startling innovation to buck people up, like having a family of boys & girls posing in groups now. But we need another studio for
portraits.’
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Time hung heavy. For a while he stayed mild and good, only half-aware, it seemed, of the terrible clamour of children, cats, canaries, chickens and other cattle that reverberated through Elm House.

‘Mrs John is beating the baby to sleep which always amuses me and appears to succeed very well – she is so earnest over it that the baby seems to gather that she means business,’ the Rani wrote to her husband a few days later (27 March 1904).

‘…The baby is simply roaring its head off and no one paying any attention – it is in another room… You would hate to be here. Mr Augustus looks sometimes at the baby and says “Well darling love – dirty little beast” at the same time. He is the sweetest natured person in the world. It is all indescribable and full of shades and contrasts and the whole is just like his pictures. He looks so beautiful and never takes a bath so far as I can make out. At least I know he is not three minutes dressing but always looks clean. He has cut his hair by the way a good deal – Ida likes it. I haven’t made up my mind yet – I think she must have sat on the baby – it has suddenly stopped crying.’

The sweetness slipped out of his nature on learning what Gwen and Dorelia were up to in Paris. They had settled into a single room at 19 boulevard Edgar-Quinet. ‘I am getting on with my painting, that makes me happy,’ Gwen wrote to Alice Rothenstein. She had been followed from Toulouse by a married woman who, falling under her spell, had abandoned her husband to be with Gwen. But in Paris Gwen, happy now with her painting and with Dorelia, would have nothing to do with the woman. ‘She [Gwen] was extremely queer and hard,’ Dorelia remembered,
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‘always attracted to the wrong people, for their beauty alone.’ In many ways she was as overpowering as Gus.

In their spare time the two girls made clothes. ‘The room is full of pieces of dresses – we are making new dresses,’ Gwen told Alice. ‘Dorelia’s is pink with a skirt of three flounces. She will look lovely in it. Our two painters will want her as a model I am sure when we go home.’ They had taken with them the address of the young artist they had met at La Réole who had offered them jobs as models in Paris. The news that agitated Augustus was that Dorelia was posing in the nude – something she had never consented to do for him. What were the two of them up to? ‘You tell me not to be alarmed,’ Ida had written to Dorelia. ‘ – I am not – only mystified.’ For weeks Gwen had been tantalizing Augustus with bulletins of Dorelia’s marvellous efflorescence. ‘Dora mustn’t grow any prettier or she will burst,’ Ida replied that spring. ‘…oh my dears – come back before it’s too late...’
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Suddenly Augustus could stand it no more. ‘Why the devil don’t I hear from you, you bad fat girl?’ he reprimanded Dorelia.

‘You sit in the nude for those devilish foreign people, but you do not want to sit for me when I asked you, wicked little bloody harlot [‘lũbni’] that you are. You exhibit your naked fat body for money, not for love. So much for you! How much do you show them for a franc? I am sorry that I never offered to give you a shilling or two for a look at your minj [middle part]. That was all you were waiting for. The devil knows I might have bought the minj and love together. I am sorry that I was so foolish to love you. Well if you are not a whore, truly tell me why not. Gustavus.’

Dorelia’s reply, when it arrived, was little more than a scribble. In the heat of the moment, Augustus had forgotten to enclose his usual word-list, so much of his Romany invective had gone astray. Certain phrases in his letter puzzled Dorelia. What, for example, did
lũbni
mean? But Augustus already felt rather ashamed of his outburst and refused to answer. All this letter-writing was getting him nowhere. He needed to
see
Dorelia. It was eight months since he had seen her. What was he to do? It was Ida who decided. ‘Paris is quite near,’ she reminded him. She would have liked to go herself, but it was better that he go – he could see the show of Primitives there at the same time. The idea was very appealing. ‘Do you see any Géricaults?’ he asked Gwen. ‘He was a very wonderful man and liked to use plenty of paint. Courbet also is a man that flies to my head when I think of France. I suppose there are no wonderful young painters in Paris… I want to see you and the
Primitiffs…
you and that pretty slut Dorelia, she who is too lazy to answer my frequent gracious and affectionate letters.’
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As soon as Ida had spoken, Augustus reacted. He was like a dynamo – one that needed someone else to turn the switch before it burst into life. A week before he came to Paris, Gwen had written to Alice Rothenstein: ‘We are getting homesick I think, we are always talking of beautiful places we know of beyond the suburbs of London and Fitzroy St and Howland St seem to me more than ever charming and interesting.’ They would soon, she added, be coming home.

This was their intention shortly before Augustus turned up in Paris in the second week of May. But afterwards they did something different. That another man might take his place in Dorelia’s life had not seriously occurred to Augustus. But this was what was happening in Paris while he lay lugubriously playing the concertina at Matching Green. His rival seems to have been a young artist – half artist and half farmer – possibly the man she and Gwen had met at La Réole. His name was Leonard, and
from Dorelia’s point of view he had some advantages over Augustus: he was not married; and life with him, while not contradicting her sense of destiny, might involve a farming background, which appealed to her.

Augustus arrived in Paris and a few days later Dorelia left boulevard Edgar-Quinet – not with Augustus back to England, but to Belgium with Leonard. She fled with him secretly, telling no one, leaving no address. She had gone, they discovered, to Bruges, was living with Leonard and for the time being could only be reached through a poste restante. She would stay with him three months – or a lifetime: it depended how things worked out. It was, she afterwards remarked, ‘one of my two discreditable episodes’.
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Exasperated, agitated, almost beside himself, Gus hung on in Paris, seeing Gwen, doing nothing. He was reduced once more to writing letters – not in prose this time, but page after page of poems, ballads and sonnets, odd rhymes running in his head which he stored up and subsequently sent Dorelia.

But for the woman I hold in my heart,

Whose body is a flame, whose soul a flower,

Whose smile beguiled me in the wood, the smart

Of kisses of her red lips every hour

Branding me lover anew, is she to be,

Being my Mistress, my Fatality?

In the stream of his passion there are already odd pebbles of pedantry. At one point, he interrupts an anguished appeal to instruct Dorelia that ‘the word “ardent” in the first sonnet I sent you should be changed to “nodding”. Kindly make that correction.’
*5

So numerous were these poems that there seems to have been one left over for Ida who, he now learnt, was pregnant again. Possibly on Gwen’s advice, he appears to have written little but verse to Dorelia at her poste restante. But to Ida he explained all that was happening, and so did Gwen. ‘Darling Gwen’, Ida answered, ‘Your letter was such a comfort and made things so much simpler. I get brooding here. I am inclined to agree that D[orelia] will turn up one day & oh how happy we might be.’
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Augustus’s letters revealed how Gwen herself was suffering over Dorelia’s disappearance. ‘Gussie tells me you do not eat,’ Ida wrote. ‘Little girl what is the matter? Poor little thing, it is really hardest on you that she went. It was a
shame.
Did you over-drive her? I know you are a beauty
once you start. But you are worth devoting yourself to, & she should not have given up.’
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Upon Ida’s reaction the whole course of their collective future hung. She found herself longing for Dorelia to come back. The last weeks at Matching Green had been miserable. She felt that she had even lost the ability of sitting to Augustus, and with it her last connection with art. Perhaps it was a temporary incapacity due to her new pregnancy but, she told Gwen, ‘I would rather lose a child than the power of sitting.’ For it
was
a power, this gift of inspiring painting, and Ida felt critical of Dorelia for abandoning it voluntarily, however difficult Gus and Gwen might be.

Ida herself had no intention of giving up. If Dorelia was added to their household, and Gwen herself returned, they could control these Johns, even in overdrive. Her confidence reaching a state of exaltation, she sent Gus and Gwen two letters that were dramatically to alter the course of events.

It was Gwen who put herself in charge of these events with a letter to Dorelia. ‘Dorelia, something has happened which takes my breath away so beautiful it is,’ she began. ‘Ida wants you to go to Gussy – not only wants it but desires it passionately. She has written to him and to me. She says “She [Dorelia] is ours and she knows it. By God I will haunt her till she comes back.”

‘She also said to Gussy, “I have discovered I love you and what you want I want passionately. She, Dorelia, shall have pleasure with you eh?” She said much more but you understand what she means.

Gus loves you in a much more noble way than you may think – he will not ask you now because he says perhaps you are happy with your artist and because of your worldly welfare – but he only says that last – because he knows you – we know you too and we do ask.

You are necessary for his development and for Ida’s, and he is necessary for yours – I have known that a long time – but I did not know how much. Dorelia you know I love you, you do not know how much. I should think it the greatest crime to take with intention anyone’s happiness away even for a little time – it is to me the only thing that would matter.

…I know of course from one point of view you will have to be brave and unselfish – but I have faith in you. Ida’s example makes me feel that some day I shall be unselfish too.

I would not write this if I knew you have no affection for Gussy. You are his aren’t you?

You might say I write this because I love you all – if you were strangers to me, I would try to write in the same way so much I feel in my heart that it [is] right what I say, and good.

I am sorry for Leonard, but he has had his happiness for a time what more can he expect? We do not expect more. And all the future is yours to do what you like. Do not think these are my thoughts only – they are my instincts and inspired by whatever we have in us divine. I know what I write is for the best, more than I have ever known anything. If you are perplexed, trust me.… Gussy is going home to-night. Come by the first train to me. I shall be at the gare to meet you. When you are here you will know what to do...

Do not put it off a minute simply because I shall then think you have not understood this letter – that it has not conveyed the truth to you. I fear that, because I know how weak words are sometimes – and yet it would be strange if the truth is not apparent here in every line.