Augustus John (34 page)

He kept on writing letters – what else could he do? But ‘have you taken the trouble to go to the Post Office for them?’ he asked. Once, to his dismay, he forgot to go to the post office himself and found his letter still in his pocket two days later – then posted it out of sequence. But his outpourings had no sequence. They all said the same thing. ‘Why did you desert me before – why, I cannot think. Don’t trouble to find an impossible answer. If anyone can understand you I can. Love, I know you – Know me. Know me.’
127

Dorelia did not trouble to find an answer. In a sense Augustus’s letters
were complete in themselves. During the whole of this episode while Gwen, Ida and Gus were discharging their emotions on to paper, Dorelia confined herself to little more than the odd postcard – a time, a place, a piece of luggage, some weather, part of a dream, sometimes simply nothing at all but the picture on one side, her signature on the other. Augustus dashed from place to place – Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent – endeavouring to catch these elusive cards, endeavouring to discover in them some clue as to what was going on. ‘I hope you haven’t sent word to Antwerp now that I have left,’ he wrote from Ghent. But how would he know without travelling back to Antwerp?

It appears that Dorelia had consented to see him, but only outside Bruges. ‘I can come then on Tuesday morning?’ he asked, perplexed, exasperated. ‘Why come here, this isn’t the way home, at least not the shortest. Beloved tell me where to find you – but if you can come here before
come in the name of all the Gods –
wait for me here opposite the station.’
128
They met, almost by accident it seemed, certainly by good luck, but even now nothing was fixed. Dorelia needed more time: a week. Allowing her to return was a torture to Augustus. ‘What am I to do these last days?’ he demanded. She did not reply. ‘The time is nearly up – Ardor,’ he wrote again. ‘Gand [the French spelling of Ghent] is very near Bruges. I am to rejoin you on Tuesday morning. So be it.’
129

They set off on their return journey from Bruges station on 1 August 1904. They were to travel, not via Paris, but direct to London. Before leaving, Augustus wrote to Gwen arranging for Dorelia’s belongings in the boulevard Edgar-Quinet to be sent to the studio in Flood Street. On the platform, waiting for their train, Dorelia also wrote to Gwen. Her postcard reads: ‘How is the cat? Dorelia.’
130

Whether Leonard understood, until after she left, that Dorelia had ‘given in’ and chosen Augustus, is unclear. He returned to Paris, imagining perhaps he was following her. But he only saw Gwen, who told him nothing. His name does not appear in their correspondence again: except once at the end of the summer. ‘Leonard came up to me a few days ago,’ Gwen wrote to Dorelia. ‘I should write him a nice letter if I were you. He will get very ill otherwise I think.’
131
After this he vanishes, his identity lost, with the unsettling echo of his words to Gwen: ‘I will not live without her.’

Gwen’s letter to Dorelia passes on to details of a skirt Dorelia has promised to make for her and a request for some more ‘earrings like Gussie’s’ which she has lost. Also there is news of four ‘Toulousians with umbrellas’ whom they had met on their uncompleted walk to Rome. They had turned up in Paris and Gwen had been able to take them to Rodin’s
studio, ‘a great favour, as he does not see students now.’ As a result, they were growing ‘so enthusiastic that they are almost unintelligible’.

*

‘Why not call on Rodin?’ Augustus had asked Gwen on hearing at the end of March that she and Dorelia had reached Paris. ‘He loves English young ladies.’
132

While Dorelia was at Leonard’s Paris studio, Gwen had taken Gus’s advice and gone to see Rodin. ‘I am at Rodin’s nearly every day now,’
133
she informed Ursula Tyrwhitt a little later. The extraordinary assurance of her letters to Dorelia in Bruges and her resolute attitude to Leonard may well have sprung from her elation over Rodin. Dorelia had observed that she had written in an ‘ecstasy’ and though she later denied this (‘I haven’t been in one for ages’), it was certainly true.

Auguste Rodin was sixty-three when they became lovers that summer, more than six years older than Gwen’s father. For a decade he would be everything to her that her father had not been and everything that she had failed to find in Ambrose McEvoy. She became his model, his pupil, his mistress, his little girl. The loving care over her work and welfare that Edwin John had never shown, and Augustus only intermittently (‘I must urge you to eat generously… Do do some drawings of nudes. Goodbye and a kiss from Gustavus’),
134
was now assumed by Rodin, who found himself urging her to eat, wash, work, brush her hair, tidy her room; who made timetables for her and (‘wasn’t it kind of him?’ Gwen asked Ursula Tyrwhitt) paid for the rent of her new lodgings. She was in such an excited state, she could not keep it wholly secret. Gus watched what was happening with a mixture of admiration, envy and concern. ‘How delightful to have a drawing given you by Rodin – does he give all his sitters drawings?’ he asked on arriving back at Matching Green. ‘…When you have exhausted Rodin’s resources let me know.’
135

Augustus felt grateful to Gwen for all she had done to reclaim Dorelia. He understood that Rodin might develop his sister’s talent as she believed Dorelia would develop his – indeed, this was the sort of master-and-student arrangement from which he himself would have liked to benefit. ‘Give my homage to dear master Rodin. I salute him and wish I could serve him as you do,’ he wrote to Gwen that autumn. ‘…You are evidently becoming indispensable to Auguste Rodin. It must indeed be a pleasure to be of service to such a man.’
136

It was a startling coincidence, this fact that Rodin’s Christian name should be the same as his own. Gwen would use episodes from their adolescence to stir Rodin’s sympathy and protection. ‘J’étais pensant avant de dormir de mon frère,’ she wrote to him, ‘…et comment j’étais
misérable en Angleterre.’
137
Sometimes, when she waited for Rodin and he did not come, morbid dreams would rise from her childhood involving Gus’s ‘méchanceté’ (wickedness). ‘I torment myself… because of my brother – and if I had seen my
Maitre
these last few days I wouldn’t have had these feelings, for they are feelings rather than thoughts,’ she noted in a draft letter for Rodin. ‘…I suffered a long time ago because of him [Augustus], it’s like certain illnesses which recur in time. When they return I believe that my brother is my evil Genius and that he will do me harm – perhaps, without wishing to – if I do not avoid him...’
138

Though Augustus sincerely wished Gwen well, she did not want to accept money from him. She wanted to be free, rather than caught up, as her sister Winifred found herself in relation to Thornton. All four of them experienced great difficulties forming loving relationships outside the family. Gwen had lent Winifred some money the previous year when she joined Thornton in North America, and Winifred had recently written to her about a young man called Philip. ‘Thornton must guess Philip is in love with me & I really must tell him soon. I keep putting it off. I hate to tell him. I’d rather tell Papa a thing like that.’
139
A little later, when Philip left and Paul arrived, it was the same story (‘he said he wished it was Papa he had to tell instead of Thornton’).
140
Eventually Paul disappeared and ‘I don’t want to ever “fall in love again”,’ Winifred informed Gwen. ‘Don’t be soft on the subject of R[odin] be firm – sacrifice all to work. I am going to...’ Thornton, she added, was ‘rather lonely’.
141

Gwen’s love for Rodin – like Gus’s for Ida and Dorelia, and Winifred’s marriage later on to one of her violin pupils – was part of the intimacy of her work. She elected him her good genius, learning from him how to concentrate her powers of observation by the repetition of images and how to simplify her work with strong contours. She had ‘un corps admirable’, Rodin told her, and it was appropriate that he should use her as a model for his unfinished monument to Whistler. For Gwen’s painting technique in France, almost the opposite of her English work, relied on her own version of what she had learnt at the Académie Carmen about Whistler’s preparation of paint mixtures.

‘Je vous aime et je vous désire heureuse,’
142
Rodin assured Gwen. In London she had been ‘shy as a sheep’; in Paris she grew, in Augustus’s words, ‘amorous and proud’. The Jane Eyre governess of her self-portrait was replaced by a rather brazen female speaking of ‘things I never thought of before’.
143
Under Rodin’s spell she spent hours on her appearance, buying new clothes, pinching her breasts to ensure they did not grow smaller, and commanding Rodin to save his energy for their next love-making.

But their lovemaking, which rejuvenated her, aged him. Her passion,
like that of Augustus, was a compulsive and demanding force that grew from the aridity of their upbringing. ‘Love is my illness,’ Gwen told Rodin, ‘and there is no cure till you come.’
144
She wore him out with her obsession, haunting the café opposite his studio, camping in the bushes outside his fence at night, and writing hundreds of adoring letters in a handwriting that became pathetically schoolgirlish. ‘Vous avez de grandes facultés de sentir et de penser,’ he replied. ‘Courage, petite amie, moi je suis si fatigué et vieux… mais j’aime votre petit coeur si devoué, patience et pas de violence.’
145

‘I don’t think we change but we disappear sometimes,’
146
Gwen was to tell Michel Salaman. Before meeting Rodin she had confessed to getting rather homesick for London. ‘We shall be going home in the Autumn I think if not before,’ she had written earlier in the year to Alice Rothenstein. Rodin changed her plans. She anchored herself in Paris which became her new home, a home in exile, and so escaped from ‘not only the overpowering influence of Augustus’, wrote Mary Taubman, ‘but also from the curiously vapid atmosphere of the English art world...’
147

*

‘Maintenant il faut travailler un peu,’
148
Augustus wrote to Gwen after arriving back in England with Dorelia. He had been inspired by the precision and simplicity of L’Exposition des Primitifs Français he had seen at the Palais du Louvre and Bibliothèque Nationale – ‘a magnificent exhibition’, Gwen had called it. ‘I’ve been leading a reckless life in the Louvre, & so am on the brink of ruin,’
149
she told Dorelia. Augustus felt similarly – in his fashion. ‘Oh yes I am going to do the Louvre,’ he had written to Gwen, ‘but I must have air air air! Studios are sickening.’
150

From some letters he wrote to Charles Rutherston, it seems that in the autumn of 1904 Augustus took a studio on the other side of the King’s Road from the Chelsea Art School – No. 4 Garden Studios in Manresa Road. Dorelia spent some of her time there (‘Dorelia is practising Chopin in the Studio in London’) and some time at Elm House, as Ida had desired. ‘They are putting up a hen run in the garden here,’ Ida wrote to welcome the returning couple. ‘…The hammock is up and there are some canvas chairs and we are becoming quite like a “country house” – and now the rain has come.’

Ida was anxious for Gwen to ‘come & pay us a little visit & go back again’, but instead of Gwen, Edwin John arrived. He had been searching Paris for Gwen, but she had not sent him her new address. He became convinced she was back in England. ‘Father called yesterday & received a great shock on not finding you here,’ Augustus notified Gwen that September. ‘He suspected some dark plot but I assured him there was none,
impossible as it appeared. He is a strange unique little man, all silver pink & black. He is unparalleled in simplicity and only needs a good deal more of another sort to be quite perfect.’
151
Having inspected the household in Dorelia’s absence, Edwin reported to Winifred that the two boys, David and Caspar, ‘are completely spoilt by over indulgence’, and then returned to Wales.

Ida had welcomed Gus and Dorelia at Matching Green. ‘Gus came back so well from Paris,’ she wrote to Gwen. ‘…It goes without saying he loves Dorelia – but then he always did.’
152
All of them appeared happy. Augustus’s happiness shines through the letters he wrote that late summer. ‘The country here is like a new America to discover every evening on a walk at sundown,’ he wrote to Gwen on 29 August. ‘Sometimes I come to the conclusion that nothing could be near so beautiful as our poultry run – it seems so marvellous, so removed from human interestedness, so remote & magical – the fowls, carrying with them ever the stigma of the Orient, move about their concerns under the slanting golden rays of the sun and are golden & soft & dappled under the gilded green of alders. I am painting of course. Dorelia’s face is a mystery – just like others perhaps.’
153

But Dorelia’s mysteriousness was sometimes provoking. ‘You keep your movements & impressions enveloped in mystery – why?’ Gwen demanded that August. ‘…
What is London like after France?
& how do you like being in the bosom of your family?’
154
Those were complicated, almost impossible, questions. Ida had desired Dorelia to come back, but now that she was back, clouds of anxiety were already forming. After the strain of the past months, Ida felt exhausted. That autumn she seems to have come near a breakdown. ‘Ida has her moments of défaillance [weakness],’ Augustus admitted to Gwen, ‘but the burden she carries [her pregnancy] accounts for them.’
155
Worried by the tone of Ida’s letters, and perhaps curious about Dorelia too, Gwen did come over to Matching Green for three days in September.

But what Ida really wanted was to come out and join Gwen in Paris – as Gwen Salmond had done in July, and Ursula Tyrwhitt was planning to do later in the year. ‘How I wish I were with you,’ she wrote to Gwen. ‘Aurevoir my darling.’
156
She seemed to be saying goodbye to freedom; to be cutting herself off from the life Dorelia enjoyed with Gus in London and Gwen in Paris. ‘You have Rodin & work & streets & museums,’ she told Gwen. ‘…The children are back tomorrow & nous voilà pour tout l’hiver. Cela me donne des frissons d’ennui.’
157