The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Landscape with Birds invites assorted interpretations. The bird-scarer with blackened face and hands could be Hanns Head-in-Air from Der Struwwelpeter, or a mischievous evacuee, or Freud’s younger self: the long-jumper of Matthäikirchstrasse 4, the Agility pupil of Dartington. He could be Lautréamont’s Maldoror, ‘carried away upon the wings of youth’, or even Morgenstern’s Palmström (‘Can’t you turn yourself into a fish?’), but, if he has to be anyone at all, the leaping boy fits best into the role of the nursery rhymester in ‘I had a little nut-tree’ from The Poet’s Tongue:

  I skipp’d over water, I danced over sea

  And all the birds in the air couldn’t catch me.

  Freud was not only learning to use paint; he was also realising the elusive, showing by painting that he could be free-ranging and answerable to nobody. Broken walls, swollen waters and red-socked levity: as Spender had written when they left Capel Curig ‘Envy our happiness and laughter during a war even.’ And there was Cousin Walter being shipped away to Australia through U-boat infested waters.

  Horizon, namely Spender and Connolly and Connolly’s new girlfriend, ‘Diana’, together with Peter Watson footing the bills, had left London in June for the seclusion of Thurlestone Sands in South Devon. They rented Thatched Cottage, a bungalow belonging to Micky Nelson’s parents, and hired a cook. At Spender’s invitation, Nelson and Freud came down for a brief visit, calling in at Dartington on the way. Things didn’t go well: there was talk in the district of these arty types being German spies. Connolly, characteristically, turned sulky (‘I spend my time here reading French poetry and waiting for meals’), while Peter Watson fretted about the paintings that he had retrieved from Paris before France fell and sent to America in the care of his boyfriend Denham Fouts, knowing that he would probably sell them to buy drugs. By mid-August the flames and searchlights marking the first raids on Plymouth could be seen nightly across the bay. At the end of the month they gave up the cottage and all returned to London except for Spender, who went to teach for a term at Blundell’s School in Tiverton. Freud wrote to him on a sheet of flimsy paper adorned with formidable potential Miss Rights, festooned with tittle-tattle (‘Peter hopes that Athens will be bombed in his absence’) and touchline teases about the reluctant teacher ‘in cap and gown steering the heavy cane, wielding it with a horrible hand on the spotty behinds of the boys of School house’, Spender having told him that the Blundell’s boys were ghastly compared to their Bryanston counterparts. One of his rhyming newsletters (here described by its recipient as ‘the wonderful ballad of Blundells jail’) went:

  Dearest old Lucio

  As we all know

  We mustn’t worry

  How badly things go.

  The London Blitz began in September and continued for seventy-six nights. Hampstead was bombed on the night of the 8th/9th and within a week dozens of houses had been destroyed and people killed, all within a mile of Maresfield Gardens. Subsequently Freud produced what he described to me, thinking it had disappeared for good, as ‘a slightly war-ish thing of a town being bombed: a bit of a Bawden actually’. The mapping-pen drawing Man and Town, which re-emerged in 2011, shows a boy in a hat fashioned around a pre-existing blob of blue gouache set against a minutely elaborated townscape the architecture of which is construction-kit-modern with Germanic accents, sparsely occupied and detailed on a minute scale, down to a barely visible turd dropped by a flea-circus-scale dog. Bomb damage is minor but noticeable, rubble already cleared from pavements and neatly heaped. A distant hill, presumably Primrose Hill as seen from the highest window in Maresfield Gardens, appears unspoilt by enemy action. Above the streets, as though treading air, the boy displays a studied lack of reaction. Further drawings done around then about which Freud in retrospect had pronounced qualms, were attempts to animate the stress of being there, in North London, when the war, phoney no longer, suddenly arrived overhead. He tried stamping a potato cut of the word ‘WAR’ on skies swarming with Valkyries. He gave one of these essays in War Art – coils of barbed wire on a beach with ‘WAR WAR WAR’ stamped over it – to Michael Hamburger but reclaimed it forty years later and tore it up. Being less obviously topical, and thereafter less dated, Landscape with Birds survived. ‘When I re-found it I thought it was actually a proper picture.’

  In late 1940 invasion was likely. What then? New British passports would be no protection and émigré and refugee alike would have nowhere further to go. As David Low reminded readers in his introduction to a Penguin book of his war cartoons, put together that November and published the following February, Hitler had certain plans. ‘Politically, his work so far has been destructive rather than constructive, if one excepts the construction of new problems, such as the Jewish problem, for which he disdains to offer any solution but death.’

  An editorial in the Studio for November 1940 reported the experience of many, particularly in London: ‘To-day we arrive at our office to find it does not exist. It is buried beneath a heap of rubble, with all our London stocks.’ Piet Mondrian, after being almost hit by one of the bombs dropped on Hampstead in the September raid, left for America, spending two weeks on an open deck in a convoy before reaching New York. Peter Watson drove a Red Cross van, having been ruled too thin for active service; others joined up, Joan Warburton among them. By the end of the year Stephen Spender was wearing a fireman’s uniform. Anna Freud made a collection in a bowl in the front hall at 20 Maresfield Gardens of pieces of shrapnel raked off the lawn or picked off the roof.

  7

  ‘I used to always put secrets in. I still do’

  In 1940 Ernst Freud was commissioned to convert part of the Good Housekeeping Institute in Grosvenor Gardens into a British Restaurant, one of more than 2,000 set up under the auspices of the Ministry of Food ‘to secure minimum nutritional standards for members of the population hitherto unaccustomed to take substantial meals away from home’.1 Following on from that he was asked to design a test kitchen and laundry for the Cookery School. A mural was required for the shutter on the serving counter in the canteen and Ernst Freud got Lucian to submit a sketch for one. It was accepted. It was Landscape with Birds once again, this time with bats: ‘a fortnight’s hard work. I had a lot of bats flying around, and then I put in a man. It was horrible, they said, and Father sided against me. He said he’d had trouble enough persuading them to let him do it in the first place. They painted it out.’

  Later on he did another mural, for a club in Leicester Square (‘these clubs all had Caribbean names’) involving ‘sinister men sitting on horses glowering at the dancers’ in orange, yellow and black pastel on rough walls. ‘Payment was two weeks at the club but I had just one night: the club was closed down just before I finished. I’d been hoping to get free drinks there.’ He also painted a mural for ‘some coffee stall off Leicester Square: the Anglo-Russian Café. When Russia came into the war, suddenly all the people who had pretended to be English decided it was time to be ethnic a bit. A displaced person – the sort of person who taught or had a café and made sandwiches and wasn’t interned – asked me. I did one wall and Johnny Craxton did the other.’

  Freud first got to know Craxton towards the end of 1941. Two months older than him, and several inches taller, Craxton was musical (his father Harold was a pianist and professor at the Royal College of Music); he had been brought up in a crowded bohemian household in Hampstead. He was a sociable being, considerably better versed and connected in cultural matters than Freud. He had even seen Guernica in its original location, the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1938. In 1939 he had enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris to do life drawing. The Craxtons had been bombed out of their house in Hampstead in January 1941 and were living – all five of them – in a tiny flat in St John’s Wood. Craxton was exempt from military service: a history of pleurisy. Through the musician James Iliff, from Bryanston, Freud got to hear of the lively Johnny Craxton with his signature style (he liked to think of hims
elf, he used to say, ‘as a kind of Arcadian’) and he went to the Craxtons’ flat asking for him and, told that he was away in Dorset, left a note suggesting that they should meet.

  Another beginner, similarly declared prodigious and several phases ahead of Freud in 1942 in terms of self-promotion and recognised achievement, was Michael Ayrton, recently discharged from the RAF (he kept the greatcoat) and at twenty-one already a developed bohemian character with beard and shooting stick and hair slicked back. He and his art-school friend John Minton had exhibited together at the Lefevre Gallery in 1940, and in 1942 jointly designed a production of Macbeth for John Gielgud. Having studied in Paris, Ayrton boasted acquaintance with Berman, Bérard and Pavel Tchelitchew, the three founts of Neo-Romantic expression. The self-styled ‘suave little Ayrton’ invited Freud to come and see his paintings. He lived round the corner from Maresfield Gardens.

  ‘I went to the house, a big ugly house in Belsize Park, and handed my coat to a woman who turned out to be Ayrton’s mother. We went upstairs, he showed me the paintings and I said very little, just “I like that one best,” felt I had to go and as I went he leant over the banisters and shouted down, “Why don’t you like my pictures?” and I got out quick.

  ‘I was conscious of his superiority – knowing Tchelitchew, Berman and life in Paris – but because of the twisted way he worked I had some contempt for it. I didn’t get even a whiff, like from Cocteau or even from Miró’s Harlequin’s Carnival: he was much nearer to Arthur Rackham. His manner was so nauseating: a bogus insider talking. I can remember being rather touched at Johnny Minton’s being sort of in love with Ayrton. But he was odious.’ Minton wrote him a letter which, seeing that it was laudatory, Ayrton kept in his wallet for others to admire.

  ‘Unfortunately I had told him that I had this girlfriend, Lulu, and that I had had a dream that he was with her. But he drew himself up and said grandly, “Oh, you need have no worry on that score.”’

  Lulu was Lorenza Harris, another Coffee An’ girl. ‘A glamorous, dazzling blonde from Wimbledon; it was with her that I went into my first pub, with Iron Foot Jack. We went to the Fitzroy and as I had never been to a pub, when he said, “Have you got the admission fee?” I thought it must be like a club, but it was his genteel way of saying have you got enough for a drink. What would I have? “Whisky,” I said, as it was all I had heard of. Lulu was sulky and nice. I went out with her for some months, but I never had any money and she wanted to go to the cinema and restaurants. I wanted her to be completely devoted to all my wishes and decisions and she wasn’t at all.’ He was photographed with Lulu on the roof of 2 Maresfield Gardens. He had put a chair on the leads for sunbathing. ‘I quite liked the idea of a photo of me and her. I’d seen a still of Rudolph Valentino as the Sheik and thought I’d like her at my feet, so I asked Frankie Goodman to take some, in an appropriate film-noir style. Frankie had been one of the bright young things with the Tree sisters and Cecil Beaton. I met him I think in the Coffee An’, then he joined the army and wrote me some letters. One of them said something funny: “I feel I must write to the little friend at home and you are the only candidate.”’

  The Lulu affair soon waned. ‘I didn’t get on with her father, who was a great admirer of Sir Richard Acland.’ (Acland was an MP and the proponent of a liberal world order.) ‘He saw me at Roehampton swimming pool drawing and was deeply impressed; but I never had any money.’ The end came with a sudden spat. ‘We were walking down Piccadilly past the RA and she said weren’t the gates beautiful? I said they were horrible and pretentious and she got very het up and we parted and that was it.’

  The deep basement of the Coffee An’ gave shelter during air raids: ‘A sense of (probably false) security’, a showbiz journalist Peter Noble wrote in his memoirs Reflected Glory published in 1958. ‘Lucian Freud was a regular here. Pale, excitable, good-looking, he usually attracted a group of fellow-artists to his corner table, as well as several exotic-looking actresses and artists’ models (all of whom seemed to be in love with him!). Quarrels broke out around him, and occasional fights, but Freud remained imperturbable, a cigarette permanently in his mouth, his dark eyes glistening with amusement.’2

  Paper rationing and distribution problems shrank Horizon and prompted an appeal from Cyril Connolly, published in the February 1941 number, asking readers to reward individual contributors with tips. ‘Not more than One Hundred Pounds: that would be bad for his character. Not less than Half a Crown: that would be bad for yours.’ He went on to solicit, primarily on his own behalf, food boxes from the United States.

  The same issue carried an advertisement for the East Anglian School at Benton End offering ‘instruction in the new forms and their recent development’. This meant not War Art – too current a genre – but ‘landscape, head and figure from the model, birds, animals, flowers, design’. As it happened that month Freud won a competition set for the students by Allan Walton for a fabric design. His motif was horses. ‘Horse with a repeat of jumps; it was produced as a textile, but instead of my careful spacing they put a wiggle in the space.’ He spent the prize money on a ticket to Liverpool. Skip over water, dance over sea: since his eighteenth birthday in December he had been old enough for conscription, but that was not the reason he decided to try his luck in the Merchant Navy.

  John Masefield’s poem ‘Dauber’, screeds of which Freud had learnt by heart at school, tells of a sensitive lad, a would-be artist, ‘young for his years and not yet twenty-two’, who becomes the ship’s lamp man and painter. For Dauber the seafaring life was the attraction:

  The fo’c’sles with the men there, dripping wet:

  I know the subjects that I want to get.

  Freud did not enlist for artistic purposes. He had an urge. ‘I never asked myself why. I won the prize – Allan Walton gave £25 – so I went to Liverpool with the object of getting on a ship. Cedric and Lett knew Jack Barker, so I didn’t exactly scarper there. I think I wrote to Cedric.’ That he may have done, but he told his parents nothing except that he was going to Liverpool while telling others that he was off on an exploit. Looking back with seventy years’ hindsight Felicity Belfield wondered whether this was a sort of escape attempt. ‘That was a time when England was expecting to be invaded and his parents perhaps encouraged him to go abroad.’ Freud insisted that this was not what he had had in mind. Fear of remaining in Britain, prey to invaders, just didn’t come into it. He thought of it as something of an excursion, that’s to say a return trip: an epic jaunt.

  He got the idea from Jack Barker, a Suffolk friend, ‘a completely wild merchant seaman, amazing, mad, gave wild parties’. Barker had served on windjammers and later on was to open, the blurb of one of his books claimed, ‘the most successful fish and chip shop in the history of New York’; to Freud he was a figure of reckless charm, seven years older than him and in every way more experienced. There had been an affair with Stephen Spender in the summer of 1939 during which Spender wrote of him (‘Jack Tar on the slippery boards’) as ‘trim-waisted, cliff-chested’;3 a year later he had stopped off in New York, stayed in Brooklyn with W. H. Auden and began an affair with Auden’s lover Chester Kallman. Back in England he made it sound easy to cross the Atlantic regardless of the war simply by signing on. Freud was convinced. ‘He was completely available for either sex; Auden influenced his trying to get hold of everyone, he was pathetic really. Jack Barker had this idea, and so I had this crazy idea, to “meet Judy Garland” in New York.’ It was essentially a Wizard of Oz odyssey that he envisaged. Merchant seamen could get to Oz. Barker had contacts in New York, Peggy Guggenheim for one, and only by North Atlantic convoy could one hope to get there. With Michael Nelson and a friend of Barker, Tony Jacobi (‘queer, my parents knew him’), Freud went to Liverpool to find a ship.

  Barker’s father, Lieutenant-General Michael Barker, a Boer War veteran prominent in Dedham society (‘Lett-Haines loved saying “General Barker”’) had been relieved of command of I Corps of the British Expeditionary Force at
Dunkirk and in the spring of 1941 happened to be employed checking security in the Liverpool docks. ‘Through Jack he recommended me for a seaman’s card; Jack said a friend had lost it.’ Old hands in the Seamen’s Home advised him to say that he had been torpedoed and lost his papers, which would explain why he needed a card and had no kit.

  ‘I liked the idea of adventure – The Ancient Mariner – but I was soon pretty desperate. The man who ran the Seamen’s Home made it clear that you could go to bed with him and stay there free, so I went to Mrs Schwenter’s boarding house where the others were.’ This was an experience in itself. ‘I was very conscious, for the first time, of Catholic dirt: a poor boarding house with samplers and holy pictures and everything covered in bacon grease.’

  Tony Jacobi secured a berth immediately (‘Such a tart: could be used instead of the rubber blown-up girl the bo’sun had on the ship’), and after several rebuffs Freud managed to get a berth on a New Zealand vessel. He got tonsillitis, however – ‘I’d been rather ill, on and off’ – and the ship left without him. He later heard that it had been sunk.

  Having kitted himself out with a jersey and seaboots he returned to London for a few days and, keen to show off, went to the Ritz Bar. ‘I had my white gumboots on and was so proud, but I was barred. “I’m afraid we can’t let you in,” the man said, “as there’s royalty present.” It was King Zog of Albania and his seven sisters.’