The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  We are both very glad to hear from you and from Lucian directly as well that he is working hard and with success. [Then to the nub:] I had to write to him a few days ago asking him to economise and to try and find some means of earning at least part of his living. Owing to the war my work has stopped and Lucian is only one of eight people for whom I have to provide. On the other hand I do not want him to stop with the work at your school as long as it can be avoided. I hope he will do something about it. I am enclosing a cheque for the materials [covering] 18 April and 19 July 1940.9

  Lax in many ways, careless over keeping curtains closed in the blackout (thereby prompting suspicions in the village of Benton End about the school being a hotbed of fifth-column activity or foreign intrigue), Morris had never really bothered to impose discipline or restraint in what his prospectus described as ‘an oasis of decency for artists outside the system’. His knowingness comes across in the portraits of one another that he and Freud produced in the early days at Benton End. Freud’s Morris looks sharp, pukka, teeth clamped on a ridiculously small pipe (‘A penny pipe: I used to smoke tea in them when I was fifteen’) and a well-used thumb suggestively cocked. Conversely, Morris’ blue-eyed Freud looks uneasy, all too aware that a portrait could be – maybe should be – ‘revealing in a way that was almost improper’. He described it in a letter to Spender: ‘My face is green. It is a marvellous picture.’10 Morris was bringing him on as a painter by force of example and that in itself made him uneasy. ‘You can’t really teach painting but you can certainly encourage the talent, if any, that is there.’11 Later on Freud thought the painting ‘rather quick, a bit soppy, hair made a bit much of’.

  Sir Cedric Morris, 1940

  ‘I used to watch him work. He never said much. I got the feeling of excitement. He worked in a very odd way. Rolled from top to bottom as if he was unrolling something that was actually there. And even when he was painting a portrait he’d do the eyes – put the background and the eyes and then the whole thing in one go and not touch it again. Great to watch: gave a feeling of sureness. I got quite fascinated watching him.’ Morris’ aversion to medium and over-painting, wet on wet, impressed him; he was to abstain similarly many years later.

  Freud gave his portrait of Cedric Morris as a swap to another student, Barbara Gilligan, who was to marry David Carr, the Peek Frean biscuit heir, a couple of years later.

  Carr lived with his mother in Walberswick. ‘Once he gave me a lift in his little car to Walberswick and as we went he reached over and started to undo my trousers. I told him to lay off.

  ‘“Your friend Michael Jeans doesn’t mind,” he said.

  ‘“You’re wasting your time.”

  ‘“I hope you show that kind of sincerity in your paintings,” he said. I wasn’t a fragile flower: no “leave me alone”.

  ‘“Thanks, awfully, I can undo my own flies,” I said. I was never queer. At school I had odd moments. A boy, Humphrey King: I used to put out my arm as I went by – like sailors and girls – but if he’d responded, I wouldn’t have.’

  Usually, during the week, Freud would be at Benton End, then at weekends he would come up to London for the night life, going to clubs: the Boogey-Woogey and the Swing Out in Denman Street off Piccadilly, the Shim-Sham or Frisco’s in Sackville Street. ‘I’d do anything to get in. I’d go to the Café Royal and some queer would take me along there and I’d disappear. There were bottle parties: cost ten shillings and your bottle to get in and the bottles were marked to show how much you had drunk. I was quite popular there among those “waiting expensively for miracles to happen” (that Auden poem).’12

  One weekend Freud went with Spender to stay with Rosamond Lehmann and Wogan Philipps, her estranged husband and communist peer of the realm. The visit to this ‘domed hall near Reading decorated by John Banting’ was not a success. ‘Cecil Day-Lewis was Rosamond’s lover, living there, and he asked me to do drawings for his translation of Virgil’s Georgics, on agriculture, but I looked and felt I couldn’t. Wogan took me to his studio (he was a keen amateur painter) and there were several hundred portraits of Rosamond and this lover. She, deeply understanding, put me in a bedroom next to Stephen and I had to put a chair under the door handle.’

  In a letter to Spender he surrounded an image of himself weeping huge mock tears with rollicking banter.

  Life for me is no longer the monotony of waking up in a cold room to find myself with Clap, D.Ts, Syph or perhaps a poisoned foot or ear! No Schuster, those happy and carefree days are gone. The phrase “Freud and Schuster” no longer calls to mind happy scenes such as two old Hebrews hand in hand in a wood or a bathroom in Athenaeum Court or pension day in the Freud–Schuster building but now the people think of Freud and Schuster in bath chairs, Freud’s ear being amputated in a private nursing home and puss running out of his horn. Schuster in an epileptic fit with artificial funny bones. When I look at all my minor and major complaints and deseases [sic] I feel the disgust which I experience when I come across intimate passages in letters not written to me.13

  With that, he assumed, the game of pretence was ended.

  Among those who came down to Hadleigh was Tony Hyndman, whom Freud drew finger in mouth in the back pages of the Freud–Schuster Book. ‘Tony had been Stephen’s great friend; he had taken up with Michael Redgrave who was always a schoolmaster: he had “M. Redgrave” printed in red letters on his writing paper, which we thought vulgar. Stephen used to write news poems to me. One of them went:

  Tony’s gone to Scotland

  In special sleeping car

  Michael’s gone with him;

  You’ll remember he’s a star.

  At Benton End he painted Spender, awarding him a face twisty with concern and concentration. Peter Watson also visited, bringing books. ‘One was Histoire de l’art contemporain and I remember David Carr walking round declaiming the title “Historie de l’art contemporain, Historie de l’art contemporain”, on and on. David had circus good looks, camp and hysterical, easily frightened, anti-foreigner, anti-Semitic. He was furious when I had my first show.’ (In fact Carr bought a drawing from the show but then developed a more lasting admiration for L. S. Lowry.)

  The book passed on to him by Watson that most appealed to Freud was The Lay of Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, alias the Comte de Lautréamont: the edition published by the Casanova Society, translated by John Rodker – who described it as ‘the last magnificent flare up of Byronism in Europe’14 – and embellished with Odilon Redon images, among them the eye suspended from a parachute.

  Freud liked imagining himself caught up with Maldoror in magnificent tempests and the thought of being wooed by a female shark. He plunged into the spume of words dashed luxuriantly together: ‘perfumed sores, the thighs of camellias, the guilt of a writer who rolls down the slope of annihilation and despises himself with joyful cries’.15 The Lay of Maldoror served Surrealists as the gospel of automatic writing, their very own Pentateuch. In his Short Survey of Surrealism, written when he was seventeen, the poet David Gascoyne hailed it as ‘a debauch of the imagination’.16

  Maldoror had enjoyed a happy childhood. ‘Afterwards he became aware he had been born naughty,’ Freud said whereupon his instinct was to seize the passing fancy – ‘Fleas are not capable of doing all the evil they meditate’ – with disregard for inner meaning, aphorisms spitting and ricocheting like hot fat in a wetted pan. ‘Hatred is stronger than you think, its behaviour is inexplicable, like the shattered appearance of a stick in water.’ Excited by such talk, Freud added doodles to the folder of material for the Black Book. ‘Micky [Nelson] had written a lot, anarchic writing, and I did drawings, influenced by Maldoror. Things like the terrible waves and someone clambers on to a rock with one last effort and a man on the dunes picks him up.’ Reading Maldoror encouraged in him the hope that feelings ardently expressed could more than offset any lack of facility. ‘It was when my idea of ultimate artistic sophistication was not being too artistic: to draw a line and then do dot do
t dot for what I couldn’t. Most people thought then that my work was rotten.’

  What others may have assumed to be a disregard for accomplishment was actually Freud’s literal interpretation. To him the perils of Maldoror were validation through metaphor. Things said could be things done in drawing. ‘The spar of flesh was washed ashore’: he could draw that. Maldoror as Symbolist jetsam was salvageable, but in line rather than tone, in black and white rather than colour. Any art-school-approved ‘form in the mass’ exercise would have been pointless and, at this stage, beyond his capability.

  ‘I found the actual putting on of paint extremely difficult but drawing I always liked and had an idea I could do it and so didn’t value it. I think my system came through an obsessive way of working. I don’t know where it came from. It’s a crazy way. I sort of still work like that.’ The sketchbooks that Freud had used in Wales still had blank pages among the many studies of skating and horses and dogs and Stephen Spender. Drawings of Cyril Connolly (‘He hated it – it was very like – and didn’t speak to me for six months’), of Tony Hyndman and of the painter Robert Buhler were added, also three of his mother done at different times: an unsmiling face.

  By the summer of 1940 the Phoney War was over and Heinkels were overhead, en route from the Hook of Holland to targets in southern England. Few resident students remained at Benton End. Morris devoted himself to reclaiming the walled gardens and began the cultivation of irises; Lett-Haines did most of the cooking and talking. ‘It was all very makeshift. We had models quite often but days revolved around meals, which were delicious. Dicky [Chopping, whose father had been Mayor of Colchester], and Denis [Wirth-Miller] were maid and cook in exchange for tuition. It didn’t work out very well as Denis made some remark about old people and Cedric was very touchy. Dicky took care of the fetish side of things. An eccentric woman who ran out of happiness and marriages said to him, “I’d like to show you my buggery.” She collected bugs, the sort of thing he drew. Dicky had this idea of “Histoire Naturelle of Penises” and Denis wouldn’t let him.’ Chopping in striped shirt and duffel coat sat for both Morris and Freud: same clothes, similar pose, but in Freud’s painting his eyes narrowed and he lacked elegance. ‘The painting came quite near,’ Freud said, meaning that it was as close to the Cedric Morris manner as he ever went.

  Visitors still came to Benton End: Algernon ‘Algy’ Newton, painter of wooded landscapes theatrically side-lit and preternatural calm on urban stretches of the Regent’s Canal, who lived in Suffolk; the textile designer Allan Walton from Shotley near the mouth of the Orwell and the Stour; and Katie Hale – Kathleen Hale, Mrs Maclean – the author of the Orlando the Marmalade Cat books, who stayed for weekends occasionally. ‘She had a sort of affair with Lett, and Cedric was fairly sour, even though he never spoke to Lett, as he didn’t like having women in the house. “Moggy” she was known as, for obvious reasons.’ She put recognisable people in her drawings such as Augustus John, her first lover. Lett was Monsieur Pied-à-Terre the dancing master, and Benton End became one of her settings. Orlando (named after the Benton End cat) went camping on the riverbank below the house, and the farmyard also featured. She bought two pen drawings by Freud, one of a woman, possibly Denise Broadley: ‘A woman playing an instrument, rather nice; it relates to my later things. Denise was spiritual so I made her slightly like an angel. A wing-ish look. Moggy got in a fury and I had a flaming row as she asked me to sign them and I said my signature would be worth something.’ Freud himself did not feature in any Orlando book; in her memoirs, however (A Slender Reputation, 1994), she described him as ‘a strange lad, sharp as a needle and sophisticated beyond his years’ and included a snapshot of him in the garden at Benton End wearing his fez. He was, she said, ‘like a being from another world and his presence at the school had a galvanising effect on the other students’. Her graphic style, bold but ornate with double spreads sprawling over quarto pages and laced with gossipy innuendo, was a cheerful reflection of life at Benton End. And Freud’s work was not entirely excluded. The bedroom of Judge Wiggins in Orlando the Judge (1950) was a parody of The Painter’s Room (1944), Freud’s prized zebra head transformed into a rhinoceros head and his potted palm into hat-peg antlers.

  Benton End bubbled with intrigue. Cedric and Lett would communicate only by notes stuffed in coat pockets and when friends came visiting relationships were endlessly speculated on and tut-tutted over. A Welsh couple, Tom and Marion, were brought in to help around the place. ‘It was awkward when Cedric had them there – job creation – as they didn’t have enough to do. Tom did many practical things, and bullying too; he was a bit of a bastard, incredibly stimulated and not knowing whether to be excited or disapproving that there was some sex going on.’

  Girls featured. ‘A girl called Lorenza Harris there was a row about. There were twin girls – piggish and nice – people thought them marvellous identical twins, but I could tell them apart.’ A silo tower in a field above the house became a rendezvous, handy for a bit of privacy. Betty Shaw-Lawrence (‘ugly, plum in her mouth’) was up for going there with Freud but she refused to go to London with him. ‘She was quite exciting, sort of corrupt in a tiny way. Priggish. I was eighteen and I liked the idea of glamorous older women.’ He did a drawing of himself in the silo tower draped coltishly over a demure girl in high heels, his face peppered with pen and ink stippling, her hands touching and the hay tinted yellow. The girl was Felicity Hellaby and the scene was a daydream: some lines as heavy as the leading in a stained-glass window design, others going dot dot dot for what he couldn’t be clear about. Her parents lived in the area and were friends of the Munningses, therefore wary of Cedric Morris and his crowd.

  Mary Hunt, the Coffee An’ acquaintance with a metal foot and married to a film-maker, came to model (his idea) at Benton End. She became his first buyer – ahead of Kathleen Hale – when she paid £5 for Stable at Benton End (1940), a picture of a wary girl minding a shrunk and stretched horse (‘I made up the horse’) below a portrait hanging beside the painter’s jacket on the part whitewashed, painstakingly detailed brickwork enclosing his loose-box studio space. Painted shortly after Stable at Benton End and the portrait of Cedric Morris, The Refugees (1941) is a set of characters straight off the boat, ‘(friendly) enemy aliens’ as Freud put it, oddly clad with awkward hats; not arrivals as his own family had been: immigrants with possessions and opportunities and potential for assimilation. The central figure in dark glasses with a dozen hairs trained across his baldness was modelled on the Freuds’ dentist in the Finchley Road. His wife and son link arms with him, steadying him and towering over the more lively youngsters. Behind them a yacht and other vessels, recalled from holidays on Hiddensee, sail by. For some reason (why, Freud couldn’t remember) he rather liked implanting curious wee details in certain paintings and drawings, like the drolleries in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. ‘Guilty but insane’, he said. There are tiny faces in the woman’s skirt, scratched in like lice. As a group, laced together – hands on shoulder, arms linked, fingers crossed – they are suspicious of England but, with their backs to the sea, they have nowhere else to go. Forgetting her manners, the little girl in a pixie hood sticks her tongue out. Different expressions, direct, averted, abstracted, obscured by dark glasses, were tried. ‘I did a kind of joke refugees group; the composition was supposed to be like a banal photograph you line up (No, I can’t see you … No …); the children in the first row and second row and so on.’ They resemble the people in Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Refugees’, published in March 1941:

  With prune-dark eyes, thick lips, jostling each other

  These, disinterred from Europe, throng the deck …

  Thinking …

  … we do not want any more to be prominent or rich

  Only to be ourselves …

  ‘Refugees were terrified when they came, and demoralised. So many there were, Jews in Golders Green and Hampstead, and they gathered in those terrible restaurants in Finchley Road: horrible a
nd Germanic and only a bit better than concentration camp food. And they’d sit there. Just sit there. There was a joke. The word “miete” means rent and “mieter” is lodger. A man knocks on a door and says, “I’ve come to read the meter.” “I am the mieter,” the woman says.’

  Landscape with Birds, dated July 1940, was painted, with the board resting on his knees, in the ground-floor flat in 2 Maresfield Gardens where the Freuds moved – ‘just a Jewish panic, you know’ – to be in a more substantial building come the anticipated bombing. Its tumbled bricks, artificial flowers and withered trees rendered in household paint make it a throwback to the shiny daylight of a Dulac illustration and, more immediately, Freud the cinema-goer’s touchdown on the Land of Oz. ‘Since I remember nearly everything I’ve done, actually doing it, I remember doing the sky in Landscape with Birds, and then the birds on it. I realised that painting in house paint over house paint would be a disaster, so the birds were ordinary paint. Learning to paint is literally learning to use paint.’ For the boy launching a paper boat the setting has to be Hiddensee remembered, the Hiddensee of holiday drawings from ten years before: same flowers, same building-blocks, same quirky birds. ‘My idea of birds was this body, like a fishing float between two wings. I don’t know where it came from.’

  The Studio magazine in June 1940 reproduced St Christopher, by Konrad Witz, in which comparable birds fly over similar land and water and two months earlier the magazine carried a reproduction of the tumbler angels in Giotto’s Pietà in the Arena Chapel in Padua. Freud admired quattrocento assurance: ‘I used to look with marvelling wonder at that kind of thing.’ Whatever their origin – possibly not Giotto but the heraldic eagles on old German banknotes – the birds have sprung into the air, alarmed by the bogey boy leaping a spit of land.

  In July leaflets publicising Hitler’s ‘last appeal to reason’ were dropped over southern England as a preliminary to what was to become the Battle of Britain. That month Uncle Martin was interned as an enemy alien and his son, Walter Freud, was deported to Australia on the SS Duneira, as was Podbielski, Freud’s Café Royal acquaintance. Anna Freud, up the road at 20 Maresfield Gardens, had her radio confiscated. ‘They took it away because I am an alien,’ she explained to a visiting American newspaper owner, Ralph Ingersoll. Freud was conscious that, had Marie Bonaparte not intervened the year before, he too might have been sent away on the Duneira. ‘It was where I would have been without the Duke of Kent.’