The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  David and Lucian and Stephen,

  Envy our happiness and laughter,

  During a war even.20

  Many years later Freud deleted the Spender poems, deeming them superfluous. The Freud–Schuster Book thereupon became his 1940 sketchbook and was exhibited and dispersed. The images were reshuffled for publication and drawings done elsewhere, of his mother, Cyril Connolly, Robert Buhler and his wife Eve, were added. This, Freud then insisted, was true to the spirit of the book’s inception, it being a sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old’s effusion all the better for being divested of Spender verbiage. Yet at the time, writing from Benton End, Hadleigh, the new school premises, he maintained the ‘F. S.’ (Freud–Schuster) relationship, conducting it partly in pidgin German. ‘Mein Lieber Schuster, Spionscollege’ received several enormous straggling letters on flimsy paper, letters enclosing the bills for his stay (‘which is a terrible lot’). He mentioned adding some self-portraits plus ‘a picture of an undertaker taking somebody under’.

  Determined to dispel what he saw as ‘the false idea of my relation to Stephen’ he edited the volume – some time in the late fifties – to suit his view of it. ‘I didn’t think that anything removed was worth keeping. The Stephen things made it into a historical sentimental thing instead of a book of drawings. Maybe selfish and rather vain, but I didn’t want these conjectures to do with if I had a romance. Which I did not. I was one of a number of people Stephen made amorous propositions to. I was fond of and influenced by him certainly.’

  The months in Wales were for Freud a first experience of living away from home and school for any length of time. That he got on David Kentish’s nerves was predictable. After Wales he hardly saw him. ‘It was rather the end.’ In later life Kentish was a stage manager for Laurence Olivier. ‘He modelled himself on him and talked like him. He was odd. Very operatic. When I ran into him once he based the whole conversation on how Olivier talked. “I still do the odd picture now and then. And the occasional drawing.”’ Vivien Leigh, sitting next to Freud at dinner years later, said what a pity it was that Kentish got married.

  As for Spender, that they had had such a good time together was from his point of view unsurprising. Virginia Woolf referred to it in her diary (7 February 1940) as Spender ‘sentimentalising’ with Freud, who, looking back after fifty years of intermittent friendship, quietly remarked that ‘It was when he had a life which he quite liked: that’s the thing.’ Spender’s final lines in the Haulfryn visitors’ book went:

  Rich loved and lovely though you (may) be

  Yet you will never be like us happy and free

  6

  ‘Born naughty’

  Freud returned to London in February with quite a few paintings, several of which (given the lack of space in St John’s Wood Terrace) he left with Spender. ‘I gave him what I thought were the best ones and he lost them all. He wasn’t very interested in the sketchbook.’ Others he stored in a house in Richmond Green where Betty Shaw-Lawrence, from the East Anglian School and a girlfriend of David Kentish for a while, lived with her mother (‘With this lecherous mother. “Oh fuck, excuse my French,” she’d say’). Those went on a bonfire eventually, to her subsequent regret.

  Through the late winter of 1940, waiting for Morris and Lett-Haines to reopen the School, Freud nosed around Fitzrovia and Soho. ‘It was very important to me to make friends or otherwise enemies. I didn’t want anything neutral at all. I never minded if my friends liked me or not. And I showed off. This was pre-amorous adventures. The Café Royal played quite a part.’ His attendance there won him the acquaintance, friendship too in some cases, of well-connected people: Cyril Connolly, Clarissa Churchill, niece of Winston Churchill (‘Horrid Clemmie made her go and work in a factory’), Lord Berners, the young writer James Pope-Hennessy and Donald Maclean of the Foreign Office and, it later emerged, the KGB. At the other extreme, in the Coffee An’, he came across Harry Diamond, who worked in the Ferodo brake-block factory and complained of not being tall enough to attract girls. ‘I always thought he was very curious; same sort of age as me.’ Diamond was to become one of his key sitters, his stocky boxer body and aggressively bewildered air stimulating yet exasperating.

  The seventeen-year-old Freud on the loose in London wanted to live the life, as Baudelaire defined it, of a flâneur or dandy at large: ‘to be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world’.1 The basement of the Coffee An’, he discovered, was a dive run by Cypriots, ‘really scruffy, violent old Cypriots, a place where people were asleep, old women, tramps, all-night drivers and some ponces. I went sometimes, but you were definitely “English” when you went down. Once there was an attractive girl in a nightdress. She would have been a working-class girl trained by them to get her clothes off. Exciting, near-bedtime. Anyway, the stairs were really steep and I found myself suddenly at the top again: the owner had thrown me upstairs. I just felt hit by an enormous wave. I don’t think I would have been quite so easy to knock about later on.’

  The urge to lurk yielded to the desire to win attention, some of which he resented. ‘Opinion was divided as to whether he would have a career comparable to that of the young Rimbaud, or whether he would turn out to be one of the doomed youths who cross the firmament of British art like rockets soon to be spent,’ the critic John Russell recollected. ‘Everything was expected of him.’ That March Disney’s Pinocchio opened in London; this, the most colourful spectacle in town, was, for Freud, analogous to his own disentanglement from parental ties. ‘Jiminy Cricket saying, “What’s an actor want with a conscience?” It’s not in the book, which I read in Germany before I was ten. My mother sort of thought I was doing good works or something; my father tried not to notice.’

  Rimbaud or Pinocchio? John Russell heard Freud spoken of as ‘the equivalent of Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the magnetic adolescent who, to his admirer, seemed by his very presence to keep the plague at bay’.2 In war, as in plague, any diversion was alluring. One of the clubs that Freud liked was called Careless Talk; the pianist there was Francis Bacon’s future lover Peter Lacy. At the Gargoyle one night he met Graham Bell, South African painter and one of the initiators of the Euston Road School, with Lawrence Gowing (‘a terrific groupie’) in tow. ‘He said, “When I was your age I was doing everything, I was so tough.” A he-man. He got killed.’ The Rockingham, where he also went a few times, was males only, though women were to be seen there occasionally. ‘Toby Rowe who ran it was very gentle. His club basement in Soho was done up in stripes like Covent Garden and he had this illusion that all queers were debutantes and that he was one of those ladies that gives balls. He liked being shat on and Francis [Bacon] told me that it was tragic: he had to put panes of glass over himself because he couldn’t get his clothes cleaned.’ Another attraction was the Music Box in Leicester Square run by Muriel Belcher, a ‘Miss Dolly’ and another woman. The pianist there was called Hugh Wade. ‘He made up irreverent songs about Lady Redesdale and her daughter [Unity Mitford who had a crush on Hitler]. “Don’t send your daughter to the Reich, Lady Redesdale”. I used to go in and shout and turn off the lights.’ Though banned from the Music Box, in March 1940 Freud was the subject of a flattering paragraph in the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary probably placed by ‘Napper’ Dean Paul, a supplier of gossip items (and a future sitter) indicating Freud as a name to watch out for rather than already world famous. ‘The seventeen-year-old promises to be a remarkable painter, intelligent and imaginative, with an instinctive rather than a scientific psychological sense.’ Following that, six months after his grandfather’s death, Freud had the greater satisfaction of seeing a self-portrait drawing – his most Düreresque Haulfryn one – published in Horizon. When asked, years later, what started him off as an artist Freud liked to say that he used to go around saying he was a painter and that after a time he had to do something about it. The image had to be substanti
ated.

  Cyril Connolly, 1940

  With most galleries closed, art schools evacuated to safer places, internationalism suspended and patronage in abeyance, it was becoming less possible than ever for young artists to make an impact, let alone sell anything. To have one’s work placed in Horizon, which sold 8,000 copies that month – its largest-ever circulation – was a heady boost, especially in mid-1940 when almost all the other literary magazines had closed down. There was resentment. ‘Subra, the Indian poet-around-Soho, got very annoyed. “You have no culture,” he’d say. “Is it true that Horizon has sold 10,000 copies?”’

  Freud’s success with Horizon was not fortuitous, for Stephen Spender’s flat, where the magazine was initially housed, was one of his haunts. He had a key to the flat, enabling him to stay away from home more. The writer Ruthven Todd, ‘unemployable, persistent, rather squalid-looking’,3 as the disobliging critic Geoffrey Grigson described him (‘Poor Ruthven Todd,’ Freud said of him, many years later, ‘a kind of non-phoney Johnny Craxton’), stayed overnight there once and remembered getting up in the morning to find ‘Lucian still luxuriating in bed’. As they got breakfast Spender (‘absolutely no sense of humour’) looked over at him and said, ‘“Do you know, Ruthven? I’m afraid that so far as Lucian is concerned his grandfather lived in vain.” Too good a remark to be lost.’4

  Among the four or five paintings Freud gave to Spender on their return from Wales there was one that he particularly liked; it was, he said, ‘influenced by a poem about a room across the square and people lying in the square’:

  The light in the window seemed perpetual

  Where you stayed in the high room for me.5

  ‘That thing of people lying near each other in a square. These were two men’:

  Now I climb alone to the dark room

  Which hangs above the square

  Where among stones and roots the other

  Peaceful lovers are.6

  ‘Stephen never kept anything. “What are we going to do about your work?” he would say. He never believed in my work.

  ‘I remember when I worked at Horizon. Well, not worked: I hung around, making a nuisance of myself. Sonia [Brownell] being a crass character, liking the loud whisper behind the hand, was incredibly generous to me. I drew quite a lot there as I wasn’t set up and I hadn’t got anywhere proper to work. I used to borrow the flat sometimes from Stephen because he didn’t really live there; and I helped address envelopes which, unfortunately, had to be readdressed afterwards because of my handwriting.’

  The Horizon office, fussed over by Sonia Brownell and staffed by other admirers of Connolly and Watson, attracted would-be poets and writers offering their services free. Among them was Michael ‘Micky’ Nelson from Bryanston in whose 1958 novel A Room in Chelsea Square the setting up of Horizon (there called Eleven) was lampooned, with Peter Watson and Cyril Connolly as the two most guyed characters.

  Horizon’s backer, Peter Watson (£33 – and more – a month, ostensibly to subsidise the sale of 1,000 copies), had become a backer of Freud too. ‘He helped me very much, looked at my pictures and bought things and gave me money and books. He had pictures that I liked and learnt from, very good things. And he worked quite hard at Horizon. Dalí was bitchy about him. “Peter Watson only likes Picasso because it reminds him of Pre-Raphaelites,” he said.’

  Watson had established himself in Paris at 44 rue du Bac, where most of his paintings (Picasso, Miró, Klee, Rouault, Poussin) were lost when he retreated to England leaving them with a Romanian friend. He had returned from Paris the week war broke out. To him, London was journey’s end for a reluctant cultural evacuee. While there, Horizon was to be his war effort. He built up a more insular replacement collection in London and moved from a flat off Piccadilly to a Wells Coates block in Kensington’s Palace Gate where his drawings by Paul Klee, a Juan Gris, a de Chirico (‘one with a statue and row of houses and a girl with a hoop and a long shadow’), Picasso’s Metamorphoses, a monograph on Altdorfer and the art magazines Verve, Minotaure, Revue Blanche were available to his protégés and indeed to all well-disposed callers.

  ‘Peter Watson had an extraordinary kind of taste, amazingly free and open. One week he came back and he’d bought a Poussin, a small one, he just saw something so modern in it, but when he got jaundice he sold it because he couldn’t bear anything with yellow in it. He had a marvellous kind of abandon. His queerness didn’t affect me; the gay world was more assimilated then, I mean for me: it wasn’t something people made a feature of. Anyway, he wasn’t a night bird. Too fragile.’

  Separated by the fall of France from the bulk of his collection, Watson restocked locally. In May 1940 he bought Sutherland’s Entrance to a Lane: a transplant of de Chirico sundial shadows to the hollow lanes of Pembrokeshire. The fat root and stem in his Sutherland Gorse on a Sea Wall became a talismanic beckoning arm or honking tuba, diverting impressionable young painters into Neo-Romantic locales, that rhetorical consolation of English landscape art in wartime.

  Watson had inherited a fortune derived from margarine. ‘Money was secondary to him; he was tremendously generous.’ He gave Freud contacts, travel opportunities and rooms to work in. His patronage was unique, not to say quixotic. ‘The best possible relationship with him’, Stephen Spender said, ‘was to be taken up very intensively for a few weeks and then remain on his waiting-list.’

  Freud remained high on Watson’s list for ten years. ‘Early on, when I went down to Cedric’s in 1939, Peter wrote to my parents and said he would like to pay fees for my being there. My father was a bit put out and said it was very nice of your friend but …’ Watson wrote to Freud saying he believed in his work and ending with ‘All my ripest and my finest for you’. That was, Freud commented, ‘quite bold for then’. But then, as Michael Wishart, a later protégé, remarked: ‘Peter’s cure for boredom was to interest the young. No one was better at it.’7

  Tall and diffident, the heir to the Maypole Dairies margarine fortune was an open-handed self-effacing patron, supportive when opportunities for young artists were dwindling and when for many the temptation to embrace dolorous self-expression was irresistible. ‘He knew very poor people: boy friends that he spent time with. One evening when the doorbell rang and he was being pestered he said, “I want to be treated as a newly married couple.” Which was sophisticated in the best possible way. He giggled a lot.’

  ‘My horrible Uncle Calmann obviously thought I was queer and he asked me and Peter Watson to lunch at his gallery and told my father I was mixing with very disreputable and dangerous people. So disgusting: I never talked to him again. The other guest was this very unlikely person, a grandee called Sir Campbell Mitchell-Cotts, a very queer baronet who played butlers in touring repertory companies and collected old china. He was only a customer my uncle asked because he thought what other poof can I ask with my nephew and this rich dilettante?’

  The East Anglian School reopened shortly after Freud and Kentish got back from Wales, initially in rooms behind the Sun Hotel in Dedham, then at Benton End, a sixteenth-century farmhouse in four acres of orchard (thereafter mostly garden) bought for Morris by Paul Crosse, the Crosse & Blackwell soups heir. ‘Paul Crosse had been photographed by Man Ray as a beautiful hermaphroditic; he used to come over; he had an affair with Cedric which broke up his romance with Lett and his name used to come up in rows.’

  The house, a few miles over the Suffolk border, above the meandering River Brett between Layham and Hadleigh, had been unoccupied for more than ten years. At first Freud was not allowed to stay in the house (why risk him smoking in bed?), so he lodged at the Shoulder of Mutton in the village. He faced the inconvenience of sharing a bed with Kentish. ‘I was having an affair – quite out of devilment – with his girlfriend, Betty Shaw-Lawrence, and in the night he turned over, shouted her name and felt an arm and thought I was her. And I thought he was her. It went nowhere.’

  Before long, and none too soon, he thought, he was given an attic room
to himself and a stall in the stables beside the house to use as a studio. Hadleigh was within walking distance of Walberswick; proving this, he found once, took all night.

  Freud’s Lyrebird, paraded in a drawing done soon after the move to Benton End to serve as a cover illustration for the Indian poet Tambimuttu’s magazine Poetry London, looks cocky enough to advertise the new establishment. Elevated to phoenix status, it flaunts itself in front of an old ‘Suffolk pink’ colour-washed building with a smoking chimney and a necklace of spotty onlookers strung beneath it. Emblematic perhaps, certainly exotic, it is art, or the artist, come to strut in Hadleigh and facing local resentment of the arty London weekend types who flocked there, albeit in small numbers.

  Freud wrote to his mother a letter mostly in English and primarily thanking her for ‘delicious socks’ and demanding sheets, blankets and pillow cases for his Benton End bedroom (‘schnell! schnell! schnell!’), adding, ‘Please for your own sake not for mein geh in eins von den Charingcrossroad Bookshops.’ He urged her to buy:

  the magazine POETRY (LONDON) for which I designed the drawing on the cover. I enclose a few circulars for it which would you please give to some of your richer intelligent friends Marjorie Gill etc. Who I am sure would be interested.

  Ernst Freud meanwhile responded with special pleading to a letter from Lett-Haines concerning school fees. His prospects were poor, he stressed. ‘I’m not doing very well as an Architect just now and unfortunately there is not much hope that things will improve soon.’8 Three months later, by which time the Battle of Britain was well under way, he wrote again: