Augustus John (61 page)

The explanation for Dorelia’s ‘false aspect’ tugging ‘in the wrong direction’ was another pregnancy. ‘So, you are in for another brat,’ Augustus
remarked. He needed all her devotion, faith, energy; he needed her as mother as well as mistress. But during pregnancy it was not possible for her to provide all this. By the end of the year they had come, somewhat hesitantly, to the conclusion that during the second or third month, she must have had a miscarriage. Augustus seemed rather mystified by this pregnancy (‘I can’t imagine what could be the cause of it’), and Henry Lamb, who had ended his affair with Ottoline, appeared as much concerned as he was.

The New Year promised new hope. Quinn, who attributed their matrimonial difficulties to bad dentistry, had nevertheless sent a Christmas cake to Dorelia and, to Augustus, his first cheque – a magic remedy. ‘I feel by no means dreary now,’ he replied (4 January 1910). ‘…Frank Harris has written me from near Naples
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asking me to come out for a spell – I think I may manage a few weeks off profitably.’

By the second week of January they had drawn up a plan. They would part – but only for a month or so. Augustus would plunge south to escape the winter darkness and, putting Quinn’s money to good uses, explore the French and Italian galleries. Dorelia’s sister Edie, whom Lamb was using as a model, would mind the children, and Dorelia herself, who was still not well, would have an eye kept on her by her friend, and Lamb’s ex-girlfriend, Helen Maitland. Then, once she felt better, Dorelia would leave with Helen and some children to join Augustus – while Edie, as a substitute for her sister, went to stay with Lamb. It seemed an obvious solution to all their problems.

*

Augustus set out by train in the middle of January to explore Provence. In bright sunlight he descended at Avignon and ‘as if in answer to the insistent call of far-off Roman trumpets… I found myself, still dreaming, under the ramparts of the city by the swift flowing Rhône.’
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To Dorelia he sent his first impressions of the place with an illustration of himself approaching a castle across a mountainous landscape (10 January 1910): ‘This is a wonderful country and a wonderful town Avignon. I’m beginning to feel better… The people are certainly a handsome lot on the whole. I see beautiful ones now and then… We could camp under the city walls here.’
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Everything delighted him. Across the Rhône the white town of Ville-neuve-lès-Avignon shone like an illumination from some missal; and in the distance, as if snow-covered, Le Ventoux unexpectedly raised its creamy head. Near by, like a noble phalanstery, stood the Popes’ Palace where Augustus went to admire the fragmentary frescoes of Simone Martini. But it was not the works of art that excited him most: it was the
country and its people. ‘I get tired of museums,’ he wrote to Dorelia (17 January 1910). ‘The sun of Provence is curing me of all my humours.’ Of wonderful naivety and charm were the gitano children. ‘I never saw such kids – one of them especially broke my heart he was so incredibly charming, so ceaselessly active and boiling over with high spirits. He was about Robin’s age, but a consummate artist. I went down first thing this morning to see them again but I fancy they have disappeared in the night for one of their hooded carts had gone. It’s so like them to vanish just as you think you’ve got at them.’

His travels took in more encampments than galleries. ‘Nothing so fills me with the love of life as the medieval –
antique –
life of camps,’ he had (2 October 1909) told Scott Macfie, ‘it seems to shame the specious permanence of cities, and tents will outlast pyramids.’ Already he was feeling miraculously restored. ‘I was in the last extremities of depression before getting here,’ he wrote to Arthur Symons (January 1910), ‘and now I begin to feel dangerously robust.’ From Avignon he advanced to Nîmes and then hurried on to Arles, celebrated for the special beauty of its girls, where he was detained longer. ‘The restaurant cafe where I am stopping here would not be a bad place for us to put up,’ he reported to Dorelia. He was missing her. ‘I can’t sleep alone,’ he complained, ‘and when I do I dream of Irish tinkers and Lord Mayors.’ Surely she would come to rescue him soon? ‘What do you think about coming down here with P[yramus] and R[omilly]? I would love it. We would be quite warm in bed here.’

He made Arles his headquarters for the rest of this month. ‘Arles is beautiful – Provence a lovely land,’ he wrote to Ottoline (18 January 1910). ‘…What a foetid plague spot London seems from this point of vantage. It takes only this divine sunlight to disperse the clouds and humours that settle round in England. I never want to stop there again for all the winter.’ But wherever he went in Provence he was tempted to stop – and would write to Dorelia telling her so. At Paradou he noticed ‘an excellent bit of land to stop on, but we must have light wooded carts and tents – no heavy wagons please.’ There were many such places in France. ‘There’s plenty of sand one could camp on all over the Camargue which is as flat as a pancake and mostly barren,’ he reported to Dorelia.
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‘I’ve been talking to a young man, a cocker, about getting a cart to move about in.’ Meanwhile he walked huge distances – ‘I have bought the largest pair of boots in the world’ – and sometimes, in bourgeois fashion, travelled by train.

One village that enchanted him was Les Baux – ‘an extraordinary place’, he wrote, ‘built among billows of rocks rather like Palestine as far as I remember. The people of Les Baux are pleasant simple folk – a little
inclined to apologise for their ridiculous situation. We could have a fine apartment there cheap. There are plenty of precipices for the boys to fall over.’
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It was at Les Baux that he met Alphonse Broule, ‘a superb fellow’ who claimed to be a friend of the great Provençal poet Mistral whose statue, overcoat on arm, reared itself at Arles – ‘a man singularly like Buffalo Bill’. Broule – ‘a poet’, Augustus first hazarded: ‘an absolute madman’, he later concluded – offered to introduce him to the master, and a few days later they met near Maillane.

‘The country I saw on the way made me wild,’ he wrote to Dorelia, ‘ – so beautiful – a chain of rocky hills quite barren except for olives here and there… finally we came to Mistral’s house; by this time my host was getting very nervous. But we found the master on the road, returning home with his wife… and he was so feeble as to receive us into his house. Mrs Mistral was careful to see that we wiped our feet well first. My companion talked a lot and wept before the master, a large snot hanging from his nose. Mistral listened to him with some patience. On leaving I asked him if he would care to sit two seconds for me to draw him when I passed that way again. He refused absolutely and recommended me to go and view his portrait at Marseilles. I… was enchanted with his answer which showed an intellect I was far from being prepared to meet.’
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Mistral later regretted having forbidden Augustus to do his portrait, he told Marie Mauron,
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but their meeting had horrified him. First there was this terrible man Broule; and then there was his forbidding companion. Let a man like this begin to draw you, he reflected, and you would find him living with you for the rest of your life.

‘I don’t see how Italy could be much better than this,’ Augustus wrote from Arles. Nevertheless he decided to push on to Marseilles, ‘and so to Italy and get through some of the galleries studiously’. The first stage of this journey was to yield a marvellous discovery. Leaving Arles for Marseilles, the railway skirts the northern shores of the vast blue Étang de Berre, bordered by far-off amethyst cliffs. As he travelled along this inland sea, through the pine and olive trees, the speckled aromatic hills, he saw from the window, in the distance, the spires of a town appear, built as it seemed upon the incredible waters. The sensation which this sight, now gliding slowly away, produced on him was like that of a vision. He made up his mind to find out what this mysterious city might be.

At Marseilles another surprise: the town was teeming with gypsies. From the
terrasse
of the Bar Augas he watched groups of Almerian gitanos lounging at the foot of the Porte d’Aix, staves in their hands, their jet-black hair brushed rigidly forward over the ears and there abruptly cut, like nuns from some obscure and brilliant order. One figure specially caught his attention – a tall bulky man of middle age wearing voluminous
high boots, baggy trousers decorated at the sides with insertions of green and red, a short braided coat garnished with huge silver pendants and chains, and a hat of less magnificence but greater antiquity upon his shaggy head, puffing at a great German pipe. Recognizing him as a Russian gypsy, Augustus accosted him in Romany. He had just received from Quinn another fifty pounds (equivalent to £2,350 in
1996) and with some of this he proposed celebrating their meeting, in return for which he was invited back to camp. They arrived, with a certain
éclat
,
in a cab, ate supper round an enormous bonfire and ended the evening amid songs and dances in the Russian style. Augustus, who had come for dinner, stayed a week at this camp. ‘I cannot tell you how they affect me,’ he wrote to Ottoline (February 1910). ‘…I have an idea of dyeing myself chocolate pour mieux poser à Gitano.’

‘Last night Milosch and Terka, my hosts, showed me all their wealth – unnumbered gold coins each worth at least 100 francs, jewels, corals, pearls. This morning came 3 young men, while we were still lying a-bed on the floor, bearing news of the death of a Romany. Terka wept and lamented wildly, beating her face and knotting her diklo [scarf] round her neck and calling upon God. At the station we found 20 or 30 Romanichels seated on the floor drinking tea from samovars. Beautiful people – amongst them a fantastic figure – the husband of the deceased – an old bearded man, refusing to be comforted.’
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Augustus did not draw much, feeling he gained more from watching. ‘I tried to draw some of them,’ he told Dorelia, ‘but they never look the same when they’re posing. All the same it’s worthwhile trying.’ What he hoped to do was to make very rapid sketches from which to work later. ‘When people notice they are being drawn,’ he explained to Ottoline, ‘they immediately change expression and look less intelligent.’

He was learning more Romany every hour, and sending copious word-lists and notes on songs in the direction of Liverpool. What he jotted down in a few hours was enough to keep the best gypsy brains there at work for months. Scott Macfie was gratified by the demoralizing effect of Augustus’s researches. ‘This new dialect seems pretty stiff stuff to work out,’ he wrote gleefully, ‘and it is a pleasure to see signs of exasperation in Winstedt’s remarks. He complains that in consequence of the strain his morals, his habits and his manners have become disgusting.’

Augustus too was happy – although Italy seemed as far off as ever. ‘I’m not particularly impatient to do Italy,’ he reminded Dorelia. ‘Already I’ve seen a good many sights, but no pictures it is true, except the Avignon
ones.’ It is possible he would never have crossed the border but for the fact that the gypsies had elected to go there themselves.

‘I may get off to-night to Genoa,’ he eventually informed Dorelia, ‘as the Gypsies are going to Milan I shall see them again. They also mean to come to London.
*5
They could give a good show in a theatre. Terka, the woman in whose room I am staying, has a baby 10 months old who I think may die to-night. We went to a doctor to-day who seemed anxious to get rid of us. The little creature bucked up a bit to-night but was very cold. I’m going back now with a little brandy, all I can think of… I might take a room in Milan for a few weeks and try and paint some of these folk.’
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He travelled by night to Genoa, his head still full of gypsies, his bearded and bedraggled appearance itself very gypsy-like. ‘Why was I not warned against coming here,’ he immediately complained to Dorelia. ‘…Wonderful things happened at Marseilles the last two days. I haven’t had my clothes off for a week… I’m sick of Italy.’ But it was really Genoa he disliked. Though it had
sounded
warm, it was a cold place – ‘a place to avoid’.
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The streets crawled with people, like lice, and ‘the pubs are horrid little places mostly art-nouveau’. Of course the country was better, and the Italian working classes had wonderful faces – virile, martial, keen as birds. But the bourgeois were not fit to be mentioned: and they swarmed everywhere. ‘I took a second class ticket – hoping to get along quicker,’ he told Ottoline (11 February 1910), ‘but I couldn’t put up with the second-class people (not to speak of the first). I had to take refuge in the third class – and was happy then. The 3rd class carriages have a hard simplicity about them which was infinitely comfortable.’ He aimed to ‘get through’ Italy as fast as he could – a week, he calculated, should do the job.

‘As to my handkerchiefs I have two with me, simply foul; socks I have given up; you could grow mushrooms in my vest,’ he wrote to Dorelia. All this contributed to his Italian difficulties. His whirlwind flight, pursued everywhere by Quinn’s venereal imprecations, lasted a full fortnight, but had an effect out of all proportion to this time. Though he disliked the big towns which, after the roughness of Marseilles, struck him as ‘overcultivated’, he loved the country. There were hillocks of brown earth on the way to Siena – ‘things one might invent’, he described them to Ottoline, ‘without ever expecting to see’. The Tuscan landscape seemed not to have changed since the fourteenth century. ‘You know those earthen mounds, gutted with the rains,’ he wrote to Arthur Symons, ‘ – and those
mountains, like women in bed, under quilts? What a lusty land it is!’ From Siena, where he was greatly attracted by the frescoes of Pietro Lorenzetti, he came to Orvieto – ‘do you know it?’ he asked Symons. ‘Splendid! The frescoes there break your heart – so beautiful, so magnificent.’ He sped on – to Perugia (‘no shape of a place… nothing but some Perugino frescoes, and Perugino… was rather a soft growth’), and then to Florence which, he told Ottoline (11 February 1910) was ‘magnificent and uncomfortable for a vagrant like myself – and too much to see – too many masterpieces to digest at one meal’. All the same, simply because of the rush, he was seeing things with an intensity that would keep these sights vividly before him.