In the late autumn of 1938 Peggy Guggenheim held an exhibition of children’s art at Guggenheim Jeune, her gallery in Cork Street. Dora Russell’s school and others contributed and at the last minute Lucie Freud, being a friend of Peggy Guggenheim’s younger sister Hazel King-Farlow (she had tried to seduce Lucian, he recalled, then gave him paints instead), brought in some drawings by her talented son. This was not the first time that she had entered his work in child art exhibitions and complained when they were not returned to her; the loss of a Landscape of Grasses, reminiscent of Dürer’s eternal tussock, was particularly resented. Looking back Peggy Guggenheim remembered a Freud painting of three naked men running upstairs, doubtless related to the old man scampering cross country, but she took it to be a portrait of grandfather Freud. Roland Penrose and E. L. T. Mesens (who had organised the New Burlington Galleries showing of Guernica) bought a few tasty pictures from the exhibition – to them child art was underage Surrealism – but nothing by Lucian, whose work failed to sell. Peggy Guggenheim scolded him for handling a Calder mobile in the gallery. She did not impress him. ‘She had a huge pockmark.’
Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, and having spectacularly exhausted the school’s tolerance, Lucian left Bryanston. According to Stephen Freud, the great bed revolt was the last straw: 150 boys being persuaded to object to the school wanting to save money by requiring them to make their own beds. Lucian therefore, being the most offensive, had to go. In fact, Lucian maintained, his expulsion was more to do with bringing the school’s name into disrepute in Bournemouth, the nearest seaside resort. The idea for this arose from a prank in Walberswick the previous summer. ‘There was a disused narrow-gauge railway bridge across the river: for trespassers the quickest way to Southwold. I made a film – actually a lot of snaps – of Jeans playing a vicar with trousers falling down and screaming on this terribly dangerous ruined, rusty bridge over the Blyth estuary.’ A more public sequel occurred to them, this time in ‘a most respectable place where parents took boys to tea and so on’. One afternoon, towards the end of the autumn term, they went into Bournemouth, walked on opposite pavements along the Bath Road until, at a prearranged moment, they simultaneously dropped their Bryanston shorts and shuffled down the street like hobbled colts.
‘The one who drew the biggest crowd won. Some treacherous person telephoned the school and informed on us.’ The headmaster, Thorold Coade, renowned for his godliness, was minded to overlook the prank and keep Freud on, if only for his name’s sake, but the housemaster saw it as the opportunity to rid the school of a nuisance and in the circumstances Coade felt he couldn’t overrule him. ‘He said, “Since Mr Cowley has sacked you, I won’t go against it, but I’d like to say that if you change your house, your clothes, your behaviour, your friends, your subjects, everything, you can come back next term.”’
Eager to leave, Lucian packed his horse sculpture in his suitcase, abandoning most of his other possessions to make room for it, and caught the train home.
A few days later Ernst Freud wrote to the headmaster:
Dear Mr Coade,
I have to thank you very much indeed for your letter of Dec 12th and your kind suggestion to allow Lux to return after the holiday. In the meantime we had the opportunity to think over the situation and to discuss it with him and ultimately we have decided to keep Lux at home and have him attending the Central School of Arts and Crafts. I do hope that his interest in the subject may tempt him to improve his work generally. I am very sorry that Lux carrier [sic] at Bryanston has ended so suddenly (actually I did not call him home before Mr Cowley asked me to do so) but I feel sure that it was his fault entirely.
Michael Jeans was not expelled. Lucian, however, almost scuttled that reprieve. ‘I did have the alternative of coming back but the conditions were difficult. I sent a letter to [him at] Bryanston and sealed it in the envelope with a photo of him on the railway bridge with his bottom showing and the letter was confiscated; Michael Jeans said that it was nothing to do with school, but Bryanston could not believe that there was a bottom that wasn’t at Bryanston. I think that Michael Jeans tried to be consciously good.’ Jeans worked for the BBC at one stage and then became a vicar. ‘Once I said to him, “Why is there a god?” “Look at nature,” he said. “Things are so varied and different there must be a god.” I said, “I think that’s one reason why there isn’t one.”’
Lucian went back to Bryanston once a few years later and, understandably, the headmaster asked him why he had come. Because, he said, he wanted to stay for a couple of days so as to have the pleasure of experiencing breaking up once again. Accepting that Lucian’s schooldays were over, his father took the three-legged horse to the Central School of Art (‘lugged it to the Central’), where cousin Jo Mosse was already a student, and persuaded the Principal to give Lucian a place for the following term. The horse was then installed on the mantelpiece at Walberswick: the one trophy of Lucian’s schooldays. ‘My parents, particularly my mother, admired it so much I gave it a great bash; my mother started worshipping it so I smashed it.’ His father, more puzzled than exasperated, introduced him to his friend the potter Lucie Rie around this time saying, ‘This wild animal is my son.’ He couldn’t quite grasp how venturesome this son of his had become. Once, at a sale with Rodin drawings in it, Lucian urged him to buy one but he said, ‘I don’t think that I want to have anything as good as that.’ As for Lucie Freud, she, Lucian said, was ‘so keen on my becoming an artist it made me feel sick. She used to make me give her drawing lessons.’
Ernst Freud had once discussed with his father the idea of becoming an artist. Don’t become one, he decided, if one isn’t ‘either very rich or very poor’. Lucian was to manage both. He began at the Central in January 1939. ‘My father compromised by making me do a general course – metalwork, composition, pottery and painting, when I wanted to do just painting.’ He carved an attractive frog – ‘I remember polishing his back of alabaster and the markings’ – considerably bigger than the fish that he had done in his last term at Bryanston. ‘I thought it was rather good and gave it – warm from the mallet – to my grandfather. Marie was with him and he said, “Much as I like it I’m sure you won’t mind my giving it to Princess Marie Bonaparte because, when you become an artist, she will be your first patron.” He made it a humorous ceremony.’
Marie Bonaparte had come to London on this occasion with Dr Lacassagne of the Institut Curie who was brought in to examine a new swelling in Freud’s mouth. Though not much of a patron to Lucian, as it turned out, Princess Marie was a useful connection. The great-granddaughter of Bonaparte’s brother Lucien, with a fortune derived on her mother’s side from the founder of the Casino at Monte Carlo, she had married into the Greek royal family and, as Princess George of Greece and Denmark, was the Duchess of Kent’s aunt. Having been a patient of Freud’s she had become a psychoanalyst herself and they were close. Freud wrote an introduction to her book on chows, the breed that he too cherished (his Topsy and Jofi displayed, he said, ‘affection without ambivalence’), and she paid for the re-establishing of his International Psychoanalytical Press with the poet-publisher John Rodker which, as the imprint Imago, published in 1948 her Myths of War, a short book that Lucian found perhaps unexpectedly readable. ‘A very interesting book; she writes as if it’s a thriller.’
Year after year Ernst Freud had tried to secure British passports for the family. In 1939 he was told that naturalisation for people from Germany was suspended indefinitely. Again, happily, Marie Bonaparte pulled strings. ‘Princess Marie was having lunch with the Duke of Kent and said, “My friend Professor Freud is so worried in this international situation about his family”; the Duke lifted the phone and that afternoon someone from Immigration came round.’ So they got their passports in the nick of time, receiving the papers at the end of August – 30 August – and these were actually signed on Monday 4 September 1939. ‘The only rule bent was that the suspension was unsuspended in our case.’ There was no mention
of how they had been favoured in this way – though having been resident in Britain for over five years they qualified for naturalisation, unlike those who had arrived more recently – but clearly the issue of passports had come through the Palace. Had he not got a passport, Lucian thought, he probably would have been interned a year later on the Isle of Man like his uncle or despatched to Australia like his cousin Walter.
Lucian learnt however that, though one’s surname could be open sesame at the Home Office, it was inadvisable to be too free with it. As his grandfather said, ‘Freud is not a name as rare as I would wish.’ It was ripe for exploitation. ‘I had people saying, “Any relation to the great Frood?” “No relation in any way,” I’d say.’ But there was always the temptation to flaunt it. In Regent Street once Lucian put his name to a protest in support of Republican Spain. Noticing the signature the boy behind the table asked if he was by any chance related to Professor Freud. ‘It would mean so much to us if you could get him to sign.’
‘So I went off to ask him but he said, “I really don’t believe in individuals’ names being used in order to press causes; but since you’ve promised that you’d get this signature, here you are.” It was the nearest thing to a telling-off. Being against the idea of using people is a principle that I endorse. You know: “We’ve got so and so on the petition … Stephen Spender …” Anyway, I went back to Regent Street, terribly proud. There was another person on the table by then and I said, “Um, er, this morning they asked me to get my grandfather’s signature for the cause,” and he said, “Oh, thanks very much,” and didn’t look at it. Obviously thinking everyone’s got a grandfather. Bloody fool, bringing his grandfather’s signature.’
4
‘To cut a terrific dash’
According to Lawrence Gowing, who first met him towards the end of 1938, ‘Lux’ Freud was ‘already spoken of as a boy-wonder’ in the pubs and cafés of Soho and Fitzrovia, making a name for himself or rather (the name being a given) a persona: ‘fly, perceptive, lithe, with a hint of menace’.1 Between leaving Bryanston and starting at the Central, he explored this new territory. ‘I felt curiously privileged and in a terrific position to experience things. I was excited about the life.’
Where better to start than at the Café Royal in Regent Street? Shabbily palatial with its mirrored red and gilt and marble-topped tables, ‘a resort of the lonely’, as the painter Matthew Smith said – he was a regular – it was where Whistler and Frank Harris had bantered, where H. G. Wells could still be sighted, where Jacob Epstein or rather his mistress Kathleen Garman scouted for portrait-bust commissions and where for many years Augustus John had looked so obviously a genius. Lucian took his Bryanston friends there because for bohemians, or fifteen-year-old would-be bohemians, it was the obvious rendezvous. ‘It seemed glamorous: I was a Londoner and we went to the Café Royal.’ It did not disappoint them, situated as it was on the frontier of Soho proper, the seedy but exotic Soho of the Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera), which his mother had seen again and again in Berlin, relishing its caustic lilt. Behind the Café Royal lay enticing narrow streets.
Near them as they larked around that December evening sat a man called Podbielski, a Polish exile not much older than them who, stuck for conversation, began surreptitiously kicking a drunk who had slumped within range until eventually the drunk got up and overturned the table so they had to leave. ‘We will now go somewhere really interesting,’ their new acquaintance announced and hailed a hansom cab – one of the few that still operated in Piccadilly Circus – which took them to an all-night café in Flitcroft Street, an alley off the Charing Cross Road.
‘This was where my life rather began. As a child I liked Van Gogh, The Night Café especially. The Coffee An’ was busier but it too had a broody atmosphere and porno pictures on the walls. Run by a Russian chess fanatic called Boris Watson: Boris served Russian tea with a slice of lemon and you could probably get a bun, crumpet or eggs, but I was never conscious of anything even vaguely commercial.’
There Lucian first encountered such Soho figures as Jack Neave, ‘Iron Foot Jack’ (said to have lost several inches off one leg railroading in America), who ran an occult sect in Charlotte Street, Napier ‘Napper’ Dean Paul, a toff-turned-dosser, Willy Acton, brother of the aesthete Harold Acton, and the painter John Banting (‘very charming, self-effacing, with a syphilitic nose’), whose opening remark to Lucian was ‘Have you read Decline and Fall? It’s all about people I know but Waugh got it completely wrong: we bright young things were much brighter and more amusing.’ Banting had spent time in Paris existing ‘Chattertonesquely in a garret’, according to the Daily Express, and practising Surrealism. ‘He had very little money and was so easy-going it was a long time after he got syphilis that he had it seen to.’
On a good night the Coffee An’ was a hellhole buzzing with gossip. ‘A savage fight broke out at least once a night. The noise was always deafening. The air was thick with smoke,’ wrote Peter Noble, a showbiz columnist.2 ‘The barman was rude, the waiters uncouth and the coffee undrinkable.’ Besides the halt and the lame (one-footed Mary Hunt and Iron Foot Jack), there were people with impressive connections, such as Isabel Delmer, later Rawsthorne. As one who had lived with Derain, sat for Giacometti and Epstein and was to marry the composers Constant Lambert and Alan Rawsthorne, she was a femme fatale to rival Alma Mahler.
Lucian took to the regulars once they took notice of him. ‘You didn’t have to be very grand or rich to cut a terrific dash in the Coffee An’; people talked to you.’ After a while he decided to treat some of the more shiftless regulars there to a show of compassion by taking them home to St John’s Wood Terrace. ‘I brought them back late at night, put them up on lilos in my father’s office which was across the garden, and came into the house at half past four. At a quarter to eight my father was walking up and down the garden and I thought oh Christ he’s going to go into the office, so I thought I’d better tell him. He was rather annoyed but not very. He said, “If you’re going to put up all the down-and-outs in London there’s not room in the office.”’
Lucian’s half a crown a week pocket money, when it was 9d for the cinema, wasn’t enough to meet his expenses. ‘As a child I used to lie and steal a lot. My mother minded that I didn’t mind when I confessed once to stealing a lot of things in Brittany, where we went on holiday: Hôtel de la Plage de la Mer, Saint Brieuc. Cakes I stole. I told her, as they were very good.’ He decided to cull his mother’s gramophone records. ‘I took records out of symphonies and Bach which she kept in a cupboard with her Lotte Lenyas. I had two and six a week pocket money and got five shillings for records: they went to the Gramophone Society at the Central.’ Emboldened, he helped himself to some of the gold that his father kept in a desk drawer. ‘A spectacular theft. Grandfather, when we were born, put gold down for each of us in gold coins in little sacks. He was paid by foreigners in gold. I took the lot, first mine then the others’ and the bags got thinner and thinner. I sold it at a pawnshop in Kensington Church Street, now an antique shop selling to Japanese. I was nervous and he gave me – obviously – a rotten deal. There was a five- or ten-dollar piece with a Red Indian head on it and father said, “What did you get for that?” He was surely fed up but, to me, the one interesting thing is: did my parents tell my brothers? I think not, because otherwise it would have come up in rows.’
He needed the money not so much for his immediate needs, more as a social boost. ‘I sort of gave it away. It made me a bit more dangerous, powerful. It wasn’t a straightforward “now I can have this”, more “now I might do anything now I have money in my pocket”. And it wasn’t just the money. My Aunt Anna said I stole books from my grandfather. But the only thing I had from his library was Some Limericks, edited by Norman Douglas, privately printed with “Some Limericks” in red letters, scholarly notes and a hideous yellow hessian binding. The flyleaf was inscribed “For … (just two initials): Please don’t show to Professor Freud” and gave the number of one of the
less good ones. It was obviously given to a patient or someone staying with my grandfather. I got it out and showed it to him. “It says, ‘Please don’t show to Professor Freud.’”
‘“Well,” he said, “in that case you’d better not. Please have it.” It was stolen from me later.’
Among the verses that Lucian memorised – ‘schoolboys love limericks’ – was one attributed to Tennyson, which began: ‘There was an old whore of Baroda, who kept an immoral pagoda’. The one not to be shown to his grandfather – ‘he loved limericks’ – was by Philip Heseltine (aka Peter Warlock the composer):
Young girls who frequent picture-palaces
Have no use for this psychoanalysis
And though Dr Freud
Is distinctly annoyed
They cling to their long-standing fallacies.
A more serious scrape, in that it could have landed him in trouble publicly, was when he got drunk one evening and went home on the night bus. ‘Rather a mad thing: I jumped off with the little tin box that the bus driver had on the bus. It was full of letters from him to his girlfriend to do with another woman; I didn’t read them but my mother did and thought that I was involved in some blackmail scheme.’ She told him he had to go to the police. ‘She said, “You must face the music and go to jail.” Not wanting to be La Speranza [i.e. Oscar Wilde’s mother, ‘La Speranza’, who had urged him to be as radical as she] but loving the idea that, “You may be my son but you’d better be a hero,” she wanted to sacrifice me.’ Instead he sacrificed the box.
The Lives of Lucian Freud Page 8
