CHELSEA AND AUGUSTUS JOHN
There is a prevalent opinion that Chelsea is the British counterpart of
the Quartier Latin, but the resemblance each bears to the other is only
superficial. The Quartier Latin and respectability are poles asunder;
its population does not only never think of respectability, but it does
not know what it is. Parisian Bohemians have no use for it. They do not
condemn it, for it may suit others; for themselves, it is as useless as
yesterday’s dinner.
Chelsea is not in revolt against morals or anything else; for the
most part, it is quiet, law-abiding and hard-working. Very little is
demanded of new-comers; in order to obtain entrance to that magic land,
you must be a “good fellow,” you must have personality and a real love
of the arts, and you must be a democrat through and through. One thing
is never forgiven—a reference, however remote, to your own success. You
may be as successful as you like without creating the slightest envy,
but you must not thrust your success down other people’s throats.
My own introduction to Chelsea was rather of a wholesale kind; indeed,
it would be truer to say that Chelsea was introduced to me. One evening
Ivan Heald and I finished a rather strenuous day’s work at the same
time. I had just finished my daily column of chat for _The Daily
Citizen_ when the telephone rang. “Is that you, Gerald? ... Yes, Ivan
speaking.... Finished? ... Cheshire Cheese? Right-o! It’s now thirteen
minutes past seven; we’ll meet at sixteen minutes past.” So while he
ran down Shoe Lane, I ran up Bouverie Street and we met at the door
of that caravanserai where, sooner or later, one comes across all the
bright spirits of Fleet Street and every American sightseer who sets
his foot on our shores. We feasted and, replete, adjourned to the bar
for gossip. But there was no one there to gossip with and, presently,
Ivan said:
“Come to my flat and play Irish songs.”
“But your piano’s such a poor one. Much better come to my place and
listen to Wagner.”
So we jumped into a taxi and were soon racing through Sloane Square
for Chelsea Bridge on the way to my flat in Prince of Wales’s Road,
opposite Battersea Park. At the Bridge Heald tapped the window, and,
the taxi having stopped, he jumped out on to the pathway and promptly
closed the door upon me inside.
“And now,” said Ivan, “do you know what you are going to do?”
“Whatever you tell me, I suppose. What is it?”
“You’re going home in this cab to prepare your wife for a lot of
visitors. Tell her there will be ten or maybe twenty. We sha’n’t want
any food; we’ll bring that with us. All we shall want is coffee. Ask
her if she’ll make gallons of coffee, Gerald. For the women, you know.
There’ll be whisky for us, won’t there?” he added rather wistfully.
“Now trot along. I sha’n’t be a quarter of an hour behind you.”
“But, Ivan——”
“But me not a single but,” he said, grinning, and turned away.
Half-an-hour later a taxi-cab full of strangers carrying parcels
arrived at my flat. Heald was not with them. In answer to their ring,
my wife and I went to open the door to welcome them.
“Come right in,” we said. And then they told us who they were and we
told them who we were. A couple of minutes later another taxi full of
strangers arrived. Still no Ivan Heald. It was now about ten o’clock,
and during the following hour Chelsea people still kept arriving,
some in cabs, some on foot. It appeared that Heald had routed up half
the people he knew in Chelsea and told them that he had found someone
“new,” that we were just “it,” and that the sooner we all got to know
each other the better.
This “surprise party”—so dear to Americans—turned out a complete
success, though half the people had to sit on the floor. Norman Morrow,
away in a corner behind a pile of books, sang Irish songs, Herbert
Hughes played the piano in his brilliant way, and Harry Low and Eddie
Morrow, with two clever girl-models, acted plays that they invented on
the spur of the moment. Heald came in late, armed with loaves, butter,
cakes and fruit. Not until dawn (the month was June) did we separate.
I was to meet these delightful people many, many times later, but so
casual yet intimate was our relationship that I never heard—or, if I
heard, I soon forgot—the surnames of a few of them. We called each
other by our Christian names or by nicknames.
Perhaps of all the Chelsea people Augustus John is the most
interesting. We became acquainted at the Six Bells, the famous King’s
Road hostelry, and he took me to his studio near at hand. It was a big
barn-like place with a ridiculous little stove that burned fussily
somewhere near the entrance and from which you never felt any heat
unless, absent-mindedly, you sat on the stove itself. The studio was
crowded with work of all kinds, the most conspicuous canvas being
a huge crayon drawing of a group of gipsies. Augustus John planted
me in a chair in front of this, seated himself on another chair and
stared—not at the picture, but—at me! Now, I had been told that John
does not suffer fools gladly, and I suspected from his inquisitorial
glance that he was waiting to see if I was of the detested brood.
Sooner or later I should have to speak, and I groped despairingly in
my mind for something sensible yet not obvious to say about his bold,
vivid and arresting picture. Through sheer apprehensiveness I found
nothing, so, after gazing at the canvas for a few minutes, I rose and
passed on to the next picture. John’s large, luminous eyes followed me.
“You don’t like it,” he said, softly but decisively.
“Oh yes, I do,” I answered, “or, rather—what I mean is that ‘like’ is
not the right word. It attracts me and repels me at the same time. It
makes me curious—curious about the gipsies themselves, but more curious
still about the man who has drawn them. But you didn’t make it for
anyone to ‘like,’ did you?”
“No; I don’t suppose I thought of anyone at all. There the thing is, to
be taken or left, to be accepted by the onlooker or rejected.”
“Quite. But to me it is not a passive kind of picture at all. It
thrusts itself on to you very violently, I think, and it rather demands
to be ‘taken,’ as you put it. It is not like your _Smiling Woman_,
for instance, who mysteriously glides into one’s mind, wheedling her
way as she goes. Your gipsies assault the mind. Your picture is quite
contemptuous of opinion.”
He appeared to be satisfied, for he smiled; if I had proved myself a
fool, it was clear I was not the kind of fool he detested.
We met often after that. I would see him two or three times a week in
the Six Bells. He used to drink beer, and he would talk in his slow
way, or listen to me, nodding occasionally and saying just a word now
and again. But John is the least loquacious of men. His presence makes
you feel comfortable, not only because his personality is tolerant
and roomy, but because you know that if you are boring him he will
not think twice about edging away to the billiard-room or telling you
abruptly that he must be “off.” Like so many very hard workers, he
appears to be an accomplished loafer. I have never seen him at work; I
don’t know anybody who has. I have never heard anybody say: “John can’t
come to-night because he’s busy.” I expect that when the fever is on
him, he keeps at his easel night and day.
But perhaps you are wondering what Augustus John looks like? Have
you seen Epstein’s bust of him? Wonderfully good, of course;
extraordinarily good; but it is rather solemn—heavy, I mean. John is
not ponderous, and he does not wear the air of a prophet, and I have
never seen him look precisely like _that_. His hair is long.... Of
course, most of you will feel disposed to sneer at that; so should
I if it were anybody but John.... But he carries it off splendidly.
You know, even Liszt (at all events in his photographs) looked
frightfully conscious of his locks, but though John’s hair makes him
conspicuous, he does not appear conscious of his conspicuousness. He is
tall, deliberate in his movements, deep-voiced, very self-contained.
His shortish beard is red, and he has large eyes that, in some
extraordinary way, seem separate from his face; I mean, they belie it.
His features are so composed that one might think them expressionless;
but his eyes are brooding and deep and quiet. He has not the noisy,
fussy little eyes of the “trained observer,” the man who notices
everything and remembers nothing; he notices only what is essential to
him, the things that are necessary for him to notice.... Of course, I
haven’t described him in the least; I might have known I could not when
I began to try.... But it seems to me that the essential thing about
Augustus John is the quiet, lazy exterior which, in some peculiar way,
contrives to suggest hidden fires and volcanic energies. A Celt, of
course, and the mystery of the Celt hangs about him.
I think John loves few things so much as simply sitting back in a chair
and looking at people: ruminating upon them, as it were; chewing the
cud of his thoughts. I remember his coming to my flat on one occasion
at one o’clock in the morning when he knew there was a party there.
His eyes were very bright and he came in rather eagerly, and rather
eagerly also he sat and watched us, sipping cold coffee as he did so
and occasionally raising his voice into a half-shout when something
happened that amused him. But though he sat until nearly all our guests
had departed, he scarcely spoke at all.
And yet another evening I remember very vividly, an evening at Herbert
Hughes’s studio where, by candle-light, we used to have music every
Sunday evening and where, in the half darkness at the far end of that
long room, one could, if one wished, just sit and look on and perhaps
talk a little to one’s neighbour. There John sat in the dark, like a
Velasquez painting, his limbs thrown carelessly about, his head turned
gently towards a sparkling Irish girl who seemed to be teasing him.
It is only now, when I have set myself to write about him, that I
realise how little, after all, I know about Augustus John, though I
have met him so often. He reveals himself most generously in his work,
though even there he keeps back more than he discloses. But I think
that even to his closest friends he reveals very little, and that
perhaps is why so many legendary stories about him are afloat. He has
the mystery of Leonardo. One feels that his personality hides a great
and important secret, but one feels also that that secret will remain
hidden for ever. Sombre he is, sombre yet vital, sombre and full of
humour.
* * * * *
Allusion to the impression that Augustus John gives of habitually
loafing reminds me that this characteristic is typical of Chelsea. They
are the most casual people in the world, and it is their casualness
that the worker-by-rote cannot understand. I know a score of studios
where one could walk in at any time of the day and be welcomed or, if
not welcomed, treated with most disarming frankness. If the owner of
the studio were busy on some work that had to be finished, he would
say: “There’s a drink there on the table and a smoke. Do what you like
but, for God’s sake, don’t talk!” Or: “Go round to the Bells, Old
Thing. I like you very much and all that sort of nonsense, but even you
can be a bit of a nuisance at ten in the morning. It’s like drinking
Benedictine before breakfast.” But receptions such as this latter are
very rare, and most artists—because they _are_ artists, I suppose—are
ready enough to throw down their work and play for half-an-hour.
I always think of Norman and Edwin Morrow as typical artists. Norman,
who died almost in harness a short time ago, was absolutely disdainful
of success, or perhaps it would be truer to say that he was disdainful
of the means by which success is usually won. I imagine him looking
upon certain successful men and their work and saying to himself: “Only
the distinguished nowadays are unknown.” But he would say this with his
tongue in his cheek, laughing at himself, and knowing that the dictum
is only half true. He liked admiration—what artist does not?—but people
who liked things of his that he himself did not approve of made him
“tired.”
Of course, those people who worship success—or, at all events, admire
it—are very difficult to bring to the belief that many artists are
almost indifferent to it. “Artists may _pretend_ to care nothing for
success, especially those who have failed to achieve it,” they say,
“but surely it is a case of sour grapes?” No man except a fool, it is
true, is wholly indifferent to money, but the type of artist of whom I
am now writing is tremendously casual about it. If money comes his way,
as it has in John’s case, well and good; if not, it can very well be
done without. The artist lives almost entirely for the moment, for the
moment is the only thing of which he is certain. Yesterday has gone and
has melted into yesterday’s Seven Thousand Years; to-morrow is not yet
here and may never arrive; therefore, _carpe diem_.
Norman Morrow had the kind of subtlety and refinement that one finds
in the work of Henry James. I very rarely came away from his studio
without feeling that I had given myself “away,” that he had seen
through all my insincerities, that he was aware of the precise motives
of my acts even when I was not aware of them myself. But, being a swift
analyst of his own emotions and a constant diver after the real motive
in himself, he was tolerant of others and very slow to condemn.
* * * * *
It is incorrect to assume, as many people do, that there is in Chelsea
anything of the atmosphere of Henri Murger’s Bohemia. Nowadays, in
London artistic and literary circles, only the idle and incompetent
starve. Murger’s young artists, moreover, are absurdly self-conscious
and flabby and childish. Chelsea men and women are keen-witted,
level-headed, and experienced people of the world.
* * * * *
All the faddists, of course, go to live at Letchworth, but there are
in Chelsea a few groups of young “intellectuals” who are good enough
to supply comic relief in the “between” days when one is bored. One
Saturday evening, having been to the Chelsea Palace of Varieties and
feeling restless and disinclined for bed, I remembered that I had a
standing invitation to go to a certain studio where, I was told, I
should be welcomed whenever I cared to go. I went and discovered a
handful of young men sitting round the fire and directing the affairs
of the Empire.
The little group of intellectuals (all from Cambridge—or was it
Oxford?) hailed me and fell to talking about politics, socialism,
Fabianism, Sidney Webbism, and so forth. All very bright and clever,
and all very promising, but the wonderful conceit of it all! Some of
them were men with brilliant university honours, but they had not even
the wisdom, the sense of proportion, of children. They idolised Bernard
Shaw and spoke of H. G. Wells in terms of contempt. They really thought
that the destinies of our Empire were directed by the universities, and
their priggish little minds were eager to “control” the poor, to direct
their work, even to fix the size of their families....
I sat silent, wondering if these men represented the best—or even the
average—that our universities produced in immediately pre-war days. I
looked at their long, white fingers, their longish hair, their long
noses, and I listened to their drawl which was not quite a drawl, and
I thought that their conversation was, what Keats would have called
it, “a little noiseless noise.” They had brains, of course; they were
smartish and “clever.” But what are brains without experience and what
is cleverness without judgment? These men, I felt, would never gain
experience, for they saw in life only what they wished to see, denying
the rest. Life to them was a vast disorder which Oxford and Cambridge,
as represented by them, was about to put right. I imagine Mrs Sidney
Webb and Mr Beatrice Webb (as _The New Age_ once so happily called
them) walking over from Grosvenor Road to Chelsea and smiling blandly,
and with huge satisfaction, at their ridiculous disciples.
I have described these people because, though they do not represent
Chelsea, they are to be met with there in considerable numbers. They
have flats and studios full of knick-knacks, flats in which you will
find art curtains, studios in which there is ascetic severity and where
one has triscuits for breakfast.