The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Although Freud liked Sutherland’s work he was never excited by it. The Horizon letter struck him as oratorical ‘to an embarrassing degree. A bit of a little boy performing in front of the class, I felt; Graham’s reputation was enormous on the strength of the war things which were neck and neck with Piper.’ A few months earlier, in the summer of 1942, Sutherland had produced a suite of eight drawings for David Gascoyne’s Poems 1937–1942 published by Poetry London Press: ink-and-wash embellishments as high pitched as the lyricism of his Horizon letter – ‘steep roads which pinch the setting sun, mantling clouds against a black sky and the thunder, the flowers and the damp hollows’, which, consciously or not, echoed Maldoror digging his heels into ‘the steep road of terrestrial voyaging’.26

  ‘What was wonderful about him’, Craxton said, ‘was that he did not want to make one do Graham Sutherlands.’ Yet Craxton did.27 His landscapes had Sutherland escarpments and shadows, the only difference being that, where Sutherland did without figures, Craxton usually had a male Dora Maar dozing, as it were, within earshot of the Song of Maldoror: ‘In a flower embowered thicket the hermaphrodite sleeps, profoundly hushed upon the grass drenched in his tears.’28 Emblem books with their formal arrangements of attributes gave him ideas about repertoires of information and adornment, part heraldic, part tarot.

  Freud went along with Craxton’s foraging – anything for stimulus – but eventually diverged, aiming for intensity by dint of detail and singularity; not so much life studies in the conventional characterless sense, more portrait designs in a Renaissance manner, often on Ingres paper, brown and grey, from an album that he found on a book barrow in Bell Street off the Edgware Road. While aiming for competence – ‘to give all the information I can’ – he took in what others had made of the sort of objects that engaged attention. Dead creatures could be studied minutely, their fingernails examined, and the lack of reaction in their eyes. Plants could be similarly if not equally fascinating: gorse, sprigs of thistle raised, crab-like, on their points. Detail was a measure of integrity. ‘I didn’t think of it as detail, it was simply through my concentration a question of focus. I always felt that detail – where one was conscious of detail – was detrimental. I always liked Ingres.’ He may not have been aware then of Ingres having said, ‘line is drawing, it is everything,’ but he did see that precise delineation was worthwhile, that consistent focus gave a drawing coherence. ‘Freud is a mimic. He has to see continually what he has to paint,’ Craxton commented sixty years later.29

  The elegantly cavernous nostril of an Uccello horse or an Ingres neck smoothed to perfection could serve to stir him more than an actual neck or actual nostril, particularly as he had problems finding suitable necks and nostrils to draw. Who would sit for him? There was next to nothing in it for them, payment least of all. Like any other twenty-year-old beginner, he had to be opportunistically persuasive. ‘My things were completely unconsidered.’ Most drawings were scrapped. Craxton, he later claimed, often retrieved them. ‘He jolly well went through the bins.’

  Throughout this period there was emulation and overlap. Picking up on Craxton’s assured manner Freud’s drawing became more rounded and trim, sometimes nattily so, firm outlines plumped out with schematic shading. ‘Before we met up he was always using a mapping pen to draw with,’ Craxton pointedly remarked. ‘Under my “influence” he took to Conté crayon.’30

  Peter Watson wrote to Freud from Tickerage, commending the way that, since he had known him, his work had ‘improved in every respect, such as conviction and solidity of draughtsmanship, colour, all allied to an ever fertile imagination which I think will never flag’. He told him that he was ‘one of those people who must learn everything by trial, error and your own experience’.31

  10

  ‘A question of focus’

  The white feather in Man with a Feather, indicative of war avoidance or a lovelorn state, was a chicken feather brought from the country and given to Freud in the winter of 1943 by Lorna Wishart. Nearly twelve years older than him and married to Ernest Wishart, owner of the Marxist publishers Lawrence & Wishart, whom she had married at sixteen, by 1943 she was an undeniable femme fatale.

  ‘I used to stay at Glebe House, where Lorna and her husband and children were, and I was caught by Wish with Lorna. There was an awful scene in a field. She was concerned for me; he shouted and called her a whore, probably because of her being with a much younger boy. He was rather nice to me, feigned interest in painting. It’s hard for me to say, but I think he was a stiff, unemotional, sedentary man and she was very glamorous and capricious. I was very upset and didn’t go down there again.’

  Fanned by emotion, the involvement swiftly took hold. Lorna Wishart was used to acting on impulse while retaining a sense of social superiority. ‘She used to come to Abercorn Place and stay and she’d say about Johnny, “Is he a gentleman?”’ Being the youngest of a family of nine, she had an unusual number of siblings to learn from and outdo. Her brother Douglas had been involved with Peggy Guggenheim (who thought Lorna ‘the most beautiful creature’ she had ever seen)1 and her eldest sister, Kathleen, was Epstein’s mistress. Their mother was the illegitimate daughter of the statesman Lord Grey. All this impressed Freud. Smitten, he even took her to see his mother. ‘Everyone liked her. Including my mother.’

  ‘Their father was a doctor, who beat his children and sent them to German universities as he’d been educated there. They went wild when he died. Kathleen came to London and drove a horse and cart for Lyons, taking Welsh rarebits from Cadby Hall to the Lyons Corner Houses; she and her sister Mary saw this beautiful man lying in sick and blood, tall, thin and pale, and they picked him up and it was Roy Campbell, the poet, whom Mary married.’ By the time Freud became involved with Lorna she had a fifteen-year-old son, Michael, and ten-year-old Luke, also four-year-old Yasmin fathered by the poet Laurie Lee whom she had met six years before when holidaying with her family in Cornwall. She had a cottage at Binsted in Sussex and he stayed in a caravan near by; she also had a place in South Kensington, the Wisharts’ town house having been allotted to the Czech government in exile.

  Laurie Lee’s short story ‘Good Morning’, published in the March 1943 issue of Penguin New Writing, provides a telling description of the woman who became, for the following two years, Freud’s muse. ‘Just before noon Jenny came shivering into the house, her hair plastered with coconut oil for some reason I could not discover. She had on her blue suit with brass buttons, and brought a bottle of wine, a goose’s egg, a packet of porridge and a crumpled snowdrop.’ For ‘Jenny’ read Lorna. ‘We kissed each other and she looked at me slyly. “There,” she said, “you do love me only you pretend you don’t. Or you don’t love me and pretend you do.”’2

  Lorna Wishart c.1930

  Freud had been aware of Lorna before she took up with him. ‘She used to visit Cedric’s. She came down to see David Carr: he was terrifically keen on her. There was an awful lot of talk about her always.’ The Wisharts had holidayed in Southwold in 1939 and her glamour had attracted attention. ‘David Carr was lusting after her but I wasn’t really concerned then; she was sort of well off, wonderful looking, and was the first person I got keen on. (The first girl: I’d been very fond of the farmer at Dartington.)’ To Lee in 1943 the threat from this ‘dark, decayed-looking youth’3 was intolerable and – poetically speaking – lamentable. Lorna had made efforts to keep them apart but inevitably they met and clashed. ‘Lorna had a room in Bute Street and Laurie Lee attacked me, walking there; I didn’t know who he was. He slapped me.’

  By Lee’s account, set down in his diary, the encounter was a ghastly shock. It was a wet night and so, taking her coat, he had gone to meet Lorna returning to the flat from South Kensington tube station. He saw them walking along hand in hand, Freud’s head inclined towards hers. ‘That moment was the worst in my life,’ he wrote. Freud slipped away across the road to the bus stop and Lorna laughed. ‘What’s the matter? You are white with fury.’ She told
him not to be silly, but he went after Freud (‘I wanted to hit the boy hard’) and spoke to him. ‘He gave me a mumbling look and jumped on the bus.’4 Freud noticed that Lee seemed to be sweating with fury. ‘I went for him and beat him up … Well, I must have bashed him on the nose as I had his blood all over my hand from my great victory. His blood, or sweat, smelt revolting.’ Lee’s diary entry recorded the torment of being spurned yet failed to mention the bloodied nose. By Lorna’s account she called out to a passing soldier to stop them but he just said that he expected she was the trouble and walked on.

  Back in her room Lorna told Lee that they had been to see Cecil Day-Lewis and that Freud was falling for her. ‘It isn’t fair of me, I know.’ He reproached her for flaunting him. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I only wanted you to know so’s you shouldn’t worry.’ He watched over her while she slept, asking himself, ‘Is she a child or what?’ Waking, she said to him that she was going to keep on seeing Freud and going to nightclubs with him and that he had better lay off. ‘I see no mercy or solicitude in her,’ he wrote, picking over his humiliation. ‘Why should you tell me how to live?’ she said. ‘I won’t be bound down.’ He noted that things had gone missing from her handbag. ‘No surprise to me,’ he added.5 Freud in turn accused Lee of pilfering: ‘He broke into Abercorn Place and stole a lot of letters.’

  Freud had been aware of Lorna’s inclinations as self-proclaimed muse and promoter. ‘I knew she was concerned with Laurie Lee as she showed Stephen poems of his to publish in Horizon. There were pseudo-Lorca poems published, never much good. He was such a “simple fellow with his violin and quill”. He faked up things about the Spanish Civil War.6 That was a bit disgusting.’ Lee was to become famous for Cider with Rosie, published in 1959, his memoir of childhood in a bucolic Gloucestershire village; when he tangled with Freud that evening he was engaged in writing Land at War, morale-boosting tillage for the Ministry of Information. His The Sun My Monument, poems published in 1944, was dedicated to Lorna; appropriately so in that his reproaches (‘the peonies of my anger’) pervaded it. ‘I think at night my hands are mad, / for they follow the irritant texture of darkness / continually carving the sad leaf of your mouth’ (‘At Night’). And: ‘she has no honour and she has no fear.’ In 1941, when he was thirteen, her son Michael prepared a book of drawings in a Lawrence & Wishart dummy, provisionally and appropriately titled ‘YESNO’ and dedicated to his Bedales schoolmate, Thom Gunn, the future poet, consisting mainly of illustrations to the manuscript of The Sun My Monument in which he placed surrealistic images of his mother (‘mistress of scarves and painted skins’),7 her eyes and mouth and the crucifix at her throat.

  Yasmin Wishart told Laurie Lee’s biographer Valerie Grove that ‘Lorna was a dream for any creative artist because she got them going. She was a natural muse, a catalyst and an inspiration … She used to say she didn’t know what guilt meant.’8 She told Freud, for instance, that she had dismissed Laurie Lee with a quip, telling him that the Bute Street incident was the end of their affair, so: ‘That’s where you got the boot.’ Her son Michael talked about her ‘vast ultramarine eyes’;9 with these eyes (also remarked on by Peggy Guggenheim) and with eyebrows cleanly plucked she was a leftover from pre-war romantic thrillers, part Dornford Yates heroine, part Snow White’s stepmother, given to driving around in an open-top Bentley, until petrol became unobtainable. ‘She never stopped talking about it,’ Lucian remembered. ‘But then she had to put it on grass, and birds were living in it.’10

  In the autumn of 1943, when he was in the throes of rejection, Lee would sit and type ‘Lorna Lorna Lorna Lorna Lorna’.11 Years later he wrote in his notebook, ‘The betrayal & desertions she was capable of making in her passion for you never warned you that she would eventually do the same to you for another.’12

  Craxton considered Lucian a match for Lorna. ‘He was déraciné; he wasn’t bound by conventions. He was very free. And so was she. Lorna was the most wonderful company, frightfully amusing and ravishingly good-looking: she could turn you to stone with a look. And she had deep qualities; she was not fluttery, she wasn’t facile at all. She had a kind of mystery, a mystical inner quality. Any young man would have wanted her.’13

  It was probably Lorna that Freud was referring to at the end of his letter to Felicity written around Easter 1943: ‘I have asked a rather sinister woman to write a letter to the british council asking if I could be sent to spain to radiate british culture but I doubt if anything will come of it at all.’

  Nothing did. The Freud of Man with a Feather looks sharp yet tentative, hardly fitting Laurie Lee’s description of him as ‘a dark and sinister presence’. He could be a trainee Jehovah’s Witness. His feather, as exquisite as was possible in shiny Ripolin white, is a disarming attribute but one that might have been calculated to rile the spurned lover. Lorna went on to buy him a more imposing find: a stuffed zebra head. This came from Rowland Ward, the taxidermist in Piccadilly. It was to keep him company, she told him, and it was an improvement on the monkey corpses from Palmers Pet Stores in that it didn’t stink. The monkeys were pathetic, foetal yet aged looking, while the expressionless zebra head (‘a bit tiresome and quite heavy’) was bulky enough to be intrusive.

  Lucian Freud with zebra head, photo by Ian Gibson-Smith, reproduced in Penguin New Writing, 1943

  Darling Felicity here is an improved steer for you [Freud having defaced a dim little postcard reproduction of a Wilson Steer painting of girls on the coastal path at Walberswick] thank you for your Letter I am painting some quinces I am making some quince jam I will give you some of it if it comes off if! I am going off to Dorset on Saturday. I do long to see you! Lots of love Lucian14

  The zinc-topped table at Abercorn Place was shifted to one side; against the blue sky of a presumed Africa the zebra head enters the picture scenting a blemished quince. Its muzzle looms over the serrated mouth of a paper bag.

  Cumbersome in its dismounted state, the zebra head served as stage prop and surrogate, or so it appears in a photograph taken by Ian Gibson-Smith at Abercorn Place in 1943, around the time he shot stills for the Powell and Pressburger production A Canterbury Tale, a film riddled with emblematic teasers. Posed, zebra-like, in a striped jersey, Freud, connoisseur of the junk-shop find, strokes the inert head with the meditative air of a Saki character perfecting a trick.

  ‘If you haven’t turned my wife into a wolf,’ said Colonel Hampton, ‘will you kindly explain where she has disappeared to?’15

  The dandy – flâneur – character Freud affected was more Saki than Baudelaire, as were his associates. ‘Ian Gibson-Smith wanted to be part of things. He looked horrible: very old when he was young (a schoolfellow of Michael Wishart, though a few years older) and felt that money could overcome his ugliness. He had some money. The photograph wasn’t taken for any purpose.’ (It was reproduced, eventually, in Penguin New Writing (no. 35, 1948) as one of a series of images of promising young artists. Craxton also featured.) ‘He wanted friends; he wanted to be asked to stay. Jewish partly and not too happy at that, he had an unpleasant owlish look. I never felt comfortable with him. He had some rather spectacular naked poses, like Greek athletic things, that I did at Abercorn Place. He was certainly not interested in me, but he bought a number of things: he got a couple of Picasso drawings and he bought from my first two shows.’

  Those who sat for Freud in the mid-forties were generally content just to be paid attention. Big-eared ‘Bobo’ Russell, for example, whose father was the Arts and Crafts designer Gordon Russell, became more tiresomely affable than usual when being drawn. He had been a member of the Art Club at Bryanston, a painter of abstracts with a habit of playing the philosopher which involved, Freud said, shouting at the ceiling, ‘What does it mean? What is it meant to be?’ There had been a poem addressed to him by Spender in the Freud–Schuster Book and by 1943 – when Freud drew him, legs crossed, a novice pipe-smoker – he was painting vaguely, ‘all grey and tonality, like Sickert’. Nigel Macdonald, who used to stay at
Abercorn Place, posed as Tired Boy and Boy on a Balcony and Boy on a Bed, arms behind his head and then, in close-up, wanking; later, when he had a flat in Ladbroke Grove, he and Freud would fool around occasionally with his guns. His half-brother Ian was Boy with Pigeon, holding one of a number that Freud kept in a basket on the balcony at his next place, in Paddington. They came from Club Row market in the East End. ‘I once bought some homing pigeons. I asked the man about them and he said, “You can let them out and they’ll always come home,” so I did and they homed to him and were in the market again the next week. I was always excited by birds. If you touch wild birds, it’s a marvellous feeling.

  ‘I was always very conscious of the difficulty of everything and thought that by willpower and concentration I could somehow force my way, and depending simply on using my eye and my willpower overcome what I felt was my natural lack of ability. I thought that by staring at my subject matter and examining it closely I could get something from it that would nourish my work.’