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 167down 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 168minutes 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 169was 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 170“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 171them, 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 172cannot 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 173lives 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 174forth. 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.
