The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  From Wales David Kentish (characterised by Freud as ‘rugger playing, caught TB at school and still suffered from it, smoked a pipe and copied his father’) wrote with thumping jocularity (‘just a month before Christ’s birthday’) to Joan Warburton, nicknamed ‘Maudie’ by Cedric Morris as she was a colonel’s daughter. Kentish urged her to come and join them. ‘Costs a pretty penny to get here, actually about 360 or 364, work it out for yourself.’2 She didn’t take his invitation seriously; however she did keep the letters that he and Freud sent her during their stay.

  There was the misfortune, Kentish told her, of leaving his gramophone behind on the train. ‘The lost gramophone is serious, since we have masses of, hundreds of, records which we are unable to play even with the fire tongs, though we have tried hard, and dust is slowly accumulating on the tops of the cases, measuring our despondency.’

  Writing to Lett-Haines, Freud told him that he had done a lot of work and that ‘the paint is much more interesting than it used to be.’3 Then, writing to Cedric Morris, he asked if the rumour ‘started by Lett through David’s father’ was true: was he going to start a school in London after Christmas? ‘Or is it just Letticia up to her old tricks again?’ He mentioned that they’d had visitors for the weekend: ‘Tony [Hyndman] and Stephen [Spender] and another man’.4 On the Sunday they had all been over to Bangor to see David’s sister. By the end of November the shed became too cold to work in. Days grew shorter. The isolation got on their nerves.

  They went home for Christmas, thinking of not returning as Snowdonia had become insufferably wintry, but in the New Year they did go back after all, train to Bangor, bus to Capel Curig. Freud wrote urgently to his mother in Walberswick asking her to get his father, who was at home in London, to send his skates to him. She complied, saying in her letter to Ernst that unfortunately Lux and David had gone off with a thriller, and that she feared Lux had started reading the Marquis de Sade.

  For their second stint in Wales they were better equipped and more in the mood. ‘Christmas frolics’, as Stephen Spender put it when he suggested joining them, rather to Freud’s surprise. ‘He said could he come, I think: slightly odd having this adult with us.’ Almost twice Freud’s age, Spender was a noted and busy literary figure with a taste for art, particularly for being drawn and painted. He had sat for William Coldstream, Henry Moore, Wyndham Lewis and, most recently, Robert Buhler whom, characteristically, he had helped out. ‘Bobby’s hobby was cycling to aerodromes but because he was not properly English – his mother was Swiss – he was always being arrested and Stephen, who was sort of in love with him, got him out.’ Spender shared a weekend house with his brother Humphrey at Lavenham and had been over to Pound Farm to see his boyfriend Tony Hyndman, an ex-guardsman, working as a life model, which is how Freud came to know him. ‘I’d quite wanted to meet him because I liked some of his poems and there were all those jokes. By Betjeman for example: Friends of Stephen Spender at ease / Eating lumps of bread and cheese.’

  That Christmas Spender had found himself rather at a loss, Inez his wife having gone off with Charles Madge, the poet of Mass-Observation, the sociological reportage project, a few months before, leaving him not so much bereft as perplexed. The marriage breakdown was precipitated, partly at least, by his having gone to Spain to pluck Tony Hyndman from jail following his desertion from the International Brigade. William Coldstream, who had painted Inez in 1938 and Spender before that, told Freud, years later, that he never really forgave Spender as he himself had made such an effort not to make up to Inez when working from her. ‘Spender said afterwards “Did you go with her?” in a friendly way, as if he expected it. If he’d known what I was suffering …’5 Spender was puzzling, a curious mix of candour and disingenuity. Coldstream thought of his poems as ‘full of slightly embarrassing & very strong feelings, very personal, very big & over life size in emotion but very original and striking’, and, as John Lehmann waspishly remarked in his New Writing in Europe, a Pelican Book published in 1940, ‘One may feel it must be extraordinarily painful to be Stephen Spender at times …’ Virtually uninvited, newly divorced, he arrived at Haulfryn laden with a typewriter and about forty books.

  ‘Stephen was desperate to get married. He kept saying, “Will you introduce me to any girls that you know as I so much want to get married again? Anyone who may be Miss Right.” I think he wanted someone about whom people would say, “Ahhh, Stephen was out last night with someone noticeable.” Not someone from the Coffee An’ like Mary [Keene] say.’ A conjectural possibility was Honor Frost from the Central whom Freud had found ‘friendly, old-maidish’ and who, despite being struck at the time by his lack of natural talent and his anxiety to overcome it, had even been prepared to illustrate Spender’s poems. ‘I introduced Stephen to Honor Frost and he said to me the next day, “I took her out. She was so like a goldfish I took her to a department store and got her a goldfish.”’

  ‘Do you think we can make a comic poet of him?’ W. H. Auden asked Freud, no doubt for effect, some years later. Fat chance but, Freud commented, ‘in a way he was right. That was where Stephen’s true talent lay. Stephen could do genuine embarrassment. For example: “My parents kept me from children who were rough …” And those pylons: “bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret”. Lay off!’

  Freud’s first inkling of Spender had been when he read ‘The Pylons’ in Auden’s The Poet’s Tongue anthology, a fitting poem for Capel Curig:

  The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages

  Of that stone made.

  Since that October Spender had been involved with Cyril Connolly in setting up the literary magazine Horizon, the first number of which appeared a week before Christmas; it was, as Freud recalled, a phase when ‘Stephen did reviewing and wrote to Eliot’. The back room of Spender’s flat in Lansdowne Terrace served as the office and, as it happened, Spender had been in correspondence with Joan Warburton, one of the 200 initial subscribers and another potential Miss Right. He had also been trying his hand at painting, with Lawrence Gowing as tutor, finding respite from getting started on his first novel, he said, in ‘a sensuous activity with tangible material’. Freud took to him. ‘There was something about his ridiculousness and snobbery which was somehow sympathetic; I was very fond of him, and one forgets what it was like at seventeen.’ Certainly he dazzled Spender. ‘Lucian is the most intelligent person I have met since I first knew Auden at Oxford, I think,’ he wrote to a friend, Mary Elliott. ‘He looks like Harpo Marx and is amazingly talented, and also wise, I think.’6 By his account, he told T. S. Eliot that he was in love with Lucian and Eliot’s response was ‘There’s nothing I understand more.’7

  The skates arrived. And a thank-you note to his father, sent (or possibly not sent after all) was written: ‘Lebe Pap Vielen Dank fur die schlittschuhen. Here there is 2 feet of snow. How can one get out of the house? Working very hard Love Lux’.

  Spender, the size of whose daily postbag impressed Mrs Pritchard, wrote all day, Freud painted and Kentish, who had acquired a new EMG gramophone and Lucia di Lammermoor spread over many records, also painted but began to fret. ‘We live in a sort of perpetual musical aroma,’ he wrote. ‘It is rather a nuisance because we have no electricity and have to wind it.’8 The days passed, turning to darkness by mid-afternoon. In a long letter to Joan Warburton, written one evening in front of the fire in the intervals between cranking up the gramophone, Kentish described the situation. He had just closed the curtains and tea, a tuckbox spread, was about to be cleared away. (‘It was rather exciting as we had sardines and Stilton cheese with strawberry jam but it made an awful mess on the table because we were only meant to have a cup of tea so there were no plates.’)9 Having completed a page or so more of The Backward Son Spender was playing patience and Freud was doing ‘lovely drawings: I was only seventeen and I very much prided myself on my drawing’, in the publisher’s dummy that Spender had given him as a slightly belated birthday present. Initially Spender was the motif: readi
ng, typing or just looking at him like a well-meaning head of house. The blank pages were being filled with mapping-pen revue: horses dancing, horses snogging their riders, figures transformed when (harking back to the graphic antics of cousin Tom Seidmann-Freud) overlapping pages were turned, drawings of skating and of Mr and Mrs Pritchard in bed with a stash of their guests’ missing socks, cod operatic drawings provoked by the impassioned Lucia, drawings of the oil lamp and feet in front of the fire, and one or two of Kentish, who nonetheless felt cold-shouldered, seeing that Freud had drawn Spender about a dozen times by then. The situation was getting to him.

  Stephen Spender in Wales, photograph taken by Lucian Freud, January 1940

  ‘We have just finished tea,’ Kentish continued and, after describing the stars outside, the dark, the cold, the frozen lakes, he got to the point:

  Lucian and Stephen have a sort of fantastic business relationship known as Freud & Schuster. [Schuster had been Stephen’s German Jewish family name.] This is terribly strange, it is rather difficult to describe, but I feel as if I were staying with two people who are married or living together as I suppose their minds actually are. And sometimes I must say I feel terribly alone and rather bitter, but I don’t want you to get a wrong idea, because I certainly am not jealous (I don’t see how I could be, or of what) and I like them both enormously, but they manage to give me (only at times) a kind of feeling of inferiority, a feeling that I cannot possibly live up to their standard and make their kind of remark, and then I try to and fail and I feel more miserable than ever. I suppose it is rather silly to tell you this but I felt I should tell someone, because I am ashamed of these feelings and am annoyed with myself.10

  According to Freud, Kentish was apt to wrestle on the floor with Spender when the mood took him. ‘He was hysterical. He used to try and strangle himself, which you just can’t do successfully. Something to do with jealousy: he’d go very scarlet, tears pouring down his face, retching.’

  To Kentish the ‘Freud & Schuster’ notion seemed calculatedly exclusive. To Freud it was a lark. ‘Our association was of the most platonic nature: like Walt Whitman’s idea of camaraderie.’ It was, in Spender’s view, a manifestation of Freundschaft on the German model, the business of ‘Freud & Schuster’ being not unlike Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward’s fantasy realm of Mortmere, though less sustained – the conceit lasted so briefly – and mainly graphic, consisting as it did of doodles and teases (‘Old David Kentish who has been with the firm 65 years’), most of them no more meaningful than scribbly outcomes of parlour games. The mentions, for example, of Freud having designs on Schuster’s sixteen-year-old granddaughter were parlour banter. ‘Stephen and I had jokes: slightly semi-German, semi-Jewish jokes.’

  A Freud couplet established the partnership in formal rigmarole:

  If Freud catches the rooster

  Half of it belongs to Schuster.11

  Before giving the dummy to Freud in the first place, Spender/Schuster had penned an apostrophic preface:

  O Lucien Freud, if you will

  This red bound blank dummy fill

  With pictures of that dreadful IT.

  By which we shall be finally hit,

  And writings from that unknown HOUR

  When we’re at the height of POWER,

  Tracing the image of MISS RIGHT

  As she appears shining at night,

  Then the book’s fame will increase

  Though Freud and Schuster both decease.12

  That ‘dreadful IT’ was world events; there was no wireless at Haulfryn so they relied on the News Chronicle for reports on what was being declared the Phoney War. Bottles of ink, red, green, blue, black, cluttered the parlour table as Freud filled the pages with whatever occurred to him, one notion sparking another. ‘The drawings are very high-spirited. Absolutely not to do with the war,’ he insisted. They were Audenesque: ‘A private language’. Louis MacNeice’s ‘Crisis’ in the January issue of Horizon: ‘Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars … hanging like bats in a world of inverted values’ prompted flights of fancy, body parts spewing out of a drainpipe (‘Probably from a newspaper story. I was quite stump conscious: Iron Foot Jack’), visions of wrinkly midriffs, a big-game hunter or two and grinning fish. (‘I always liked aquariums. Always keen. I had one or two: used to go to Palmer’s in Parkway and buy fish. Father may have had a few too.’) A man posed with hat and pipe beside grand Egyptian columns: ‘I had these ideas about the ridiculousness of tourism. Ridiculous, the thing that adults do, which is to go and look at the ruins.’

  The Freud–Schuster Book, clothbound in dulled terracotta, was a Freud sketchbook with occasional Spender insertions such as ‘To a Reviewer in The Tablet, Martin Turnell’ (‘crabbed and obsolescent / You choose to call me adolescent’), to that extent a Snowdonia variation on Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland of 1937, with its flow of doggerel and diary, skits, maps and private jokes. As the pages filled they took on something of Auden’s clipped schoolmasterly manner, the matter-of-fact ragged by the ridiculous. Looking through them Freud thought back to how it had been in 1940.

  ‘The whole climate is so odd. Audenish. The mystification in his early things appealed to me. I suppose it came from Kafka. Fears and injustice. It’s so marvellous the way he leaves emotion out of it. That poem “To a Writer on his Birthday”: “Your squat spruce body and enormous head”.13 It’s specific and full of feeling and humour and tenderness where “Lay your sleeping head” is beautiful and a bit banal: that’s the one I don’t like.’

  There were also art references. He drew stilted versions of El Greco’s Portrait of Don Juan de Avila, his St Paul and St Philip were copied from his Phaidon book on El Greco with its velvety photogravure close-ups of demonstrative hands, skulls, Byzantine eyes, looks of rapture and concentration, lambent flickers, keys, buttons, spectacles and writing desks.

  ‘I grew up with the Phaidon El Greco and even made a special cover with potato cuts. I used to love the woman in a fur coat.’14 He drew Stephen Spender in El Greco foreshortening, his face a cut-out photograph, a halo above and a celestial birdman: Spender as a sainted boy scout. ‘Others came out of some song or revues. I went very early in the war with Michael Redgrave and Tony Hyndman to see revues by Coward done by Bea Lillie and some came out of that.’

  Miss Right was a theme: Honor Frost, a drawing of whom was the frontispiece. ‘It went on a lot about getting Miss Right; but all I knew was a lot of scrubbers in the Coffee An’.’

  Leering Man from the Freud–Schuster Book, 1940

  As the inconsequentialities accumulated, the book became a trawl of Freud’s mental landscape, birds cavorting over hills, female nudes, facetious archaeology, drawings sprouting from moment to moment, each a quote or quip, some like Spender’s ‘the pale unshaven stare of shuttered plants’,15 some as flippant as Harry Graham’s Couplet:

  When Baby’s cries grew hard to bear

  I popped him in the Frigidaire.

  ‘I used to dwell on phrases rather.’

  Above them, as they worked on it in front of the parlour fire, was a sampler. It read:

  Work Done by Anne Jones

  Jesus Wept

  Freud produced a painting (‘sort of Freud–Schuster’) of a man in a painting being stronger than the person depicted. ‘It came out of a Russian short story I read, Leninish-looking man with a beard and a red garment and grey/blue-looking people and a splendid man above. It was done on a home-made stretcher, like Memory of London.’ A few years later he swapped this and another picture for Lugers: spoils of war. Kentish meanwhile began a double portrait of Freud and Spender but completed the Spender half only. As for Spender, he sent a postcard to Joan Warburton: ‘We are deep in snow ice etc. D & L skate and take photographs in the snow, we are all enjoying ourselves very much.’ Kentish photographed Freud: ‘Me hanging upside down in the snow in a strange fur coat. Quite a lot of snowballing. Nice atmosphere.’ Freud photographed Spender and Kentish squaring
up to one another in the snow.

  He too wrote to Joan Warburton, a letter done in brush and ink on a large sheet of paper, the words augmented with a figure carrying a banner and a weeping snake head.

  Darling Moud

  At it again are Ye? Well, well, well. This is a ‘Foranzeige’ (whip out the little Germans Dictionary) for a lengthy apistle. Thanks terribly for your last letter. Hey Ho Moud and let the Nordic Banners fly! Please write me a little note to 32 St John’s Wood Terrace NW8, Londinium.

  At the end he stuck a newspaper cutting of a smiling debutante: ‘This is my fiancee. Like her?’ and an arrow: ‘pretty hat bought her last Saturday’. ‘Hoping this finds you as it leaves me if it leaves me arf arf arf.’16

  Kentish then wrote to her on 25 January:

  Lucian sends his love thank you for the pc so does Stephen … Do you know when the East Anglian School is reopening, and if so is it at Hadleigh as Lett said last time that I saw him? Most of the snow has gone and it has been raining the last 24 hours.17

  A day or two later:

  Since my last letter I have decided to go back to London or rather my home in about a fortnight. This is because firstly I am finding it so difficult to work as it is so cold and the studio so damp and uninviting and secondly because I am terrified of being alone with Lucian again for any length of time.

  It is filthy outside and dark and murky … I have been playing a few games of patience that simply won’t come out I feel more than a little dreary … Everything outside is encased with ice and the telegraph wires are all broken.18

  Spender returned to London at the end of the month. ‘I had a marvellous time in Wales with Lucian and David,’ he wrote to Joan Warburton. ‘They were delightful, we did a lot of work, the lakes were frozen and the mountains covered with snow. For almost a fortnight it was exceedingly fine.’19 Before leaving he wrote verses for the visitors’ book addressed to ‘strangers who came after’ and beginning: