Augustus John (56 page)

Even before this portrait was finished, there came over him the absolute necessity to travel. Ever since the birth of Pyramus, the caravan which Augustus was buying from Salaman had lain gently disintegrating on Dartmoor. But recently he had moved it up and anchored it strategically at Wantage, where it was given a lick of fresh paint. A brilliant blue, it stood ready for adventurings. On his first expedition, he took along John Fothergill, architect and innkeeper, as companion. They trundled off on 1 April. ‘I called on [Roger] Fry at Guildford and found him in a state of great anxiety about his wife who had just had another attack,’
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Augustus reported to Ottoline (8 April 1909).

‘He sent off his children that day. I was sorry as I wanted to take them on the road a little. Fry came down and we sat in the caravan awhile. Next day I hired a big horse and proceeded on through Dorking and up to a divine Region called Ranmore Common… I called at the big house to ask for permission to stop on the common and was treated with scant courtesy by the menials who told me their man was out. So on again
through miles of wild country to Effingham where, after several attempts to overcome the suspicion attaching to a traveller with long hair and a van, I got a farmer to let me draw into one of his fields. At this time the horse was done up and my money at its last.’

So he left his van in the field, along with the sleeping horse and the sleeping Fothergill, and caught the milk train up to London. He had covered eighty miles on the road and it had been highly satisfactory. But this was a mere beginning, a mere flexing of muscles. The summer must be passed with all his family away from front doors and dining-rooms; with the wind in the night outside and the stars in the wind; with the sun and the rain on his cheek.

Ever since the market days at Haverfordwest, since his first visits to the circus and his sight, on the wasteland outside Tenby, of the gypsy encampment with its wagons and wild children, its population of hard high-cheekboned men and women with faces dark as earth, he had felt attracted to travellers and show people. Destiny had drawn him closer to them after meeting that ‘old maniac’ John Sampson when he had begun to pick up their language. Since leaving the art sheds at Liverpool, he had revisited Cabbage Hall on ‘affairs of Egypt’. Elsewhere, encounters with such people as W. B. Yeats, with his addiction to tinkers as well as countesses, and Lady Gregory, with her studies of local myth and dialect, had helped to widen his knowledge. But it was not until the summer of 1908 that he had begun to dream of living as one of them. Two happenings that summer had nourished this idea. While in Paris he had met the gypsy guitarist Fabian de Castro in the luxurious apartment of Royall Tyler. The two of them entered into a deal where Augustus taught the guitarist to paint, while de Castro passed on to Augustus some of the songs from his voluminous repertoire. During these reciprocal classes, de Castro told Augustus something of his background. Now forty, he had been born at Linares in the Province of Andalusia. While still very young he was seized with the
Wanderlust,
forsaking his respectable family to take up with
gâjos
and others in the roving line. His conviction that he was of noble descent from the Pharaohs grew fierce and unalterable. He had travelled alone and in strange company, by foot and on the carpet of his imagination, through many lands plying many trades and practising many arts, to which he now intended to add the art of painting. Augustus was enchanted by his stories told with that serious self-mocking gypsy humour which found fun in the most unexpected places. After a day spent in talk, song, paint and laughter, towards evening they would be joined by other dreamers and jokers and exorbitant cronies, ‘Dummer’ Howard, Tudor Castle, Horace de Vere Cole, and together they would set off to see
La Macarona and El Faico, the flamenco artists. This was Augustus’s introduction to the flamenco tradition of music and dancing. The intricate rhythms stirred undercurrents of anguish and regret that astonished him. The harsh outcry of the singers, rising convulsively and merging with the insistent humming of strings into an extraordinary ululation, sounded like the lamentations of beings thrust out of Heaven and debarred from all tenderness and hope. Yet the dancers themselves illustrated, with superb precision, the pride and glory of the human body.

After a week was up, Fabian de Castro left for Toledo where, having painted after Augustus’s prescription a huge and unorthodox Crucifixion, he was rewarded with imprisonment for committing an act of blasphemy. Augustus took something of a vicarious pride in his pupil’s accomplishment, though imprisonment in Spain, he admitted, like lunching in England, was a thing that might happen to anyone.

By this time Augustus, reaching Cherbourg, had fallen in with a raucous band of coppersmiths from Baku. ‘I was thrilled this morning – and my hand still trembles – by the spectacle of a company of Russian Gypsies coming down the street,’ he had illegibly informed Will Rothenstein. ‘We spoke together in their language – wonderful people with everyone’s hand against them – like artists in a world of petits bourgeois.’ At once he set about compiling word-lists of their vocabulary, and noting down their songs. This parcel of scholarship he dispatched to Liverpool. ‘It was a difficult job getting the songs down,’ he reported to Scott Macfie (11 August 1908), ‘ – everybody shouting them out, with numerous variations – but they showed the greatest satisfaction on my reading them out… I don’t like extracting words by force from Gypsies – it is too much like dentistry. I prefer to pick them up tout doucement.’

Back at Liverpool, a deep plot had been discovered to expel the gypsies from Europe. This hideous news, reaching Augustus, lodged in his imagination. He followed these children of nature because it seemed to him they had true freedom. ‘In no part of the world are they found engaged in the cultivation of the earth, or in the service of a regular master; but in all lands they are jockeys, or thieves or cheats,’ wrote George Borrow, who inspired a generation of late Victorians and Edwardians to leave their studies for the sunrise and the stars. These gypsies were the supreme anti-capitalists whose belongings were always burnt at death. Augustus’s urge to be closer to them stemmed from his preoccupation with the primitive world from which we all derive. In taking to the road he was not following an isolated whim. He was reacting, as others were beginning to, against the advance of industrialized society, with its inevitable shrinking of personal liberty, its frontiers barbed-wired by a rigmarole of passports and identity cards, by indecipherable rules, reparations, indemnities,
by the paraphernalia of permits and censuses. Living in a gypsy community, mastering their ancient tongues, penetrating behind the false glamour to join them round their camp fires in the night, Augustus was searching for a way of holding in equilibrium contradictory impulses in his temperament. His love of travelling people recalls the passion of Jacques Callot, but it was also finding a parallel in contemporary literature, from Arthur Ransome’s
Bohemia in London
(1907) to the pastoralism of the Georgian poets, the chunky anthologies in paperboards produced by the Poetry Society,
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and in the recovery of folk songs by Percy Grainger, who played a number of them to Augustus on his phonograph (‘he says that England is richer than the continent in folk music’). No wonder the chief ornament of the Georgians, Eddie Marsh, lost sleep wondering whether he could afford a second Augustus John for his collection; and Rupert Brooke, seeing an Augustus John picture at the New English Art Club (1909), felt ‘quite sick and faint with passion’.
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To such poets and impresarios, no less than to art students, Augustus, ‘with his long red beard, ear-rings, jersey, check-suit and standing six feet high, so that a cabman was once too nervous to drive him’, as Edward Thomas reported
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to Gordon Bottomley, seemed a natural leader. Their movement, which was to be shattered by the Great War, sought as if by some spell to freeze the tread of industry across the country. But the best they could hope to win was a little extra time:

Time, you old gipsy man,

Will you not stay,

Put up your caravan

Just for one day?
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‘They’re not Gypsies until they start moving.’ But already, with his comings and goings, Augustus had grown ‘so damned Gypsy like’, in the words of Scott Macfie, ‘that unless one writes at once one runs the risk of missing you’. On his return to London in the autumn of 1908, harried by gendarmes, an event occurred which persuaded him that he had penetrated to the body of the gypsy world.

‘This morning I find a parcel which opened – lo! the ear of a man with a ring in it and hair sprouting around lying in a box of throat pastilles,’ he wrote to Wyndham Lewis, ‘ – nothing to indicate its provenance but a scrawl in a mixture of thieves’ cant and bad Romany saying how it is the ear of a man murdered on the highroad and inviting me to take care of my Kâri=penis, but to beware of the dangers that lurk beneath a petticoat. So you see even in England, I cannot feel secure and in France
the Police are waiting for me, not to speak of armed civilians of my acquaintance.’

His broken collarbone that winter and removal to Church Street had enabled him to pursue his gypsy studies at a more bookish level.
The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society,
first born in 1888 and soon issuing songs transcribed by John Sampson ‘on the highroad between Knotty Ash and Prescot’, had died only three years later. But now, like some sleeping beauty, it was being reawakened by the kiss of scholarship and, what it had lacked before, the oxygen of money. They were, as the Devil is said to have remarked when he glanced down the Ten Commandments, ‘a rum lot’, these Edwardian gentlemen: a cosmopolitan band of madcaps and idealists led by the portly and pontificating Sampson and assisted by various willing girls indispensable, in Sampson’s view, to serious gypsy studies. Folklorists and philologists, Celtic lexicographers, Scottish phoneticians and bibliographers from the United States drew together to investigate the gypsy question. The tentacles of the society stretched out to reach anthropologists in Switzerland and linguists in India, embracing on the way such odd bards as Arthur Symons, expounder of French symbolism to the English, and (still at No. 2 The Pines) Theodore Watts-Dunton, author of the sultry bestseller
Aylwin
,
now, in his middle seventies, about to be released from tending the sexually blighted Swinburne and – a final brilliant touch – married to a girl of thirty. Most prominent among them was an intimidating vegetarian ‘Old Mother’ Winstedt, the finest scientific authority on gypsies’ poisons John Myers, and, from Lincolnshire, the Very Reverend George Hall, expert poacher and approver of plural marriages, whose sport was collecting pedigrees. Sampson had hoped that the presence of a parson might give a collar of respectability, so far absent, to the gang’s Borrovian escapades – instead of which, his tattered clerical coat, huge bandage over one eye and habit of smoking a short pipe while drinking beer, produced quite the reverse effect.

All this was made possible by the new honorary secretary of the Gypsy Lore Society, Robert Andrew Scott Macfie, in truth the most endearing of men: and rich. Now in the prime of life, tall, dark and modest, of rueful and compassionate charm, he displayed a chivalry counted upon by the others – and not in vain – to bring in more lady members. He possessed the talent for getting on with everyone, the qualities (much exercised by Augustus) of tact and patience. His interests were wide and his abilities various. A skilful musician, expert in typography and proven bibliographical scholar, he was also a fluent linguist and had soon learnt the Romany tongue. He also claimed authorship of an authoritative and absolutely unobtainable work on Golden Syrup and, after the Great
War (during which he served as a regimental quartermaster-sergeant), an inventory of military recipes.

Macfie had been the head of a firm of sugar refiners in Liverpool before being led by Sampson into his gypsy career. Boarding up his large house near the cathedral, he moved to 6 Hope Place, which became the headquarters of the society. Augustus, on his many trips to Liverpool, would often call on him there and was usually relieved of some frontispiece or article for the journal.
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Fired by Macfie’s enthusiasm, he was transformed into a vigorous recruiting officer. Patrons, dealers, Café Royalists and society hostesses who wished to preserve diplomatic relations with him were obliged, as an earnest of their goodwill, to keep up their gypsy subscriptions. All manner of Quinns and Rothensteins found themselves enrolled, and some, for extraordinary feats, were decorated in the field.
*2

By April 1909, having put his affairs in order, Augustus was more than ready, in Sampson’s words, to exchange ‘the flockbed of civilisation for the primitive couch of the earth’. He had made what passed for elaborate preparations, obtaining letters of introduction ‘from puissant personages to reassure timid and supercilious landowners, over-awe tyrannous and corrupt policemen and non-plus hostile and ignorant county people in general’.
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He had done more. To the sky-blue van still stationed at Effingham he added another of canary yellow and a light cart, a team of sturdy omnibus horses, a tent or two, and eventually Arthur, a disastrous groom. They mustered at Effingham – a full complement of six horses, two vans, one cart, six children, Arthur, a stray boy ‘for washing up’, Dorelia, and her virginal younger sister Edie. ‘We are really getting a step nearer my dream of the Nomadic life,’ Augustus told Ottoline. ‘The tent we have made is a perfect thing and the horses I bought are a very good bargain… I would like all the same a few little girls running about. Will you lend me Julian
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for one?’ Their camp was like a mumper’s, only, he boasted, more untidy. Undeterred by the scorn of the local gypsy, the convoy moved off to Epsom, where Augustus hit the headlines by protesting against the exclusion of gypsies from the racecourse on Derby Day. Then, the race lost, he set his black hunter’s head towards Harpenden which after many adventures they reached on 9 July. Augustus was exhilarated by their progress. ‘It’s great fun,’ he reassured his mother-in-law. ‘The boys have never looked better.’ And to Ottoline he wrote: ‘It’s
splendid… I ride sometimes by the side of the procession, but for the last two days I’ve been drawing the big van with two horses. It’s always a question of where to pull in for the night. Respectable people become indignant at the sight of us – and disrespectable ones behave charmingly… I’m acquiring still stronger views regarding landlords.’
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