The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  In the summer of 1943 Freud spent a week halfway along the northern shore of Loch Ness. ‘It was wild to go to Scotland in the war. Nothing but natives.’ He went with Nigel Macdonald and Betty Shaw-Lawrence from Benton End, who liked to think she was related to Bernard Shaw and T. E. Lawrence and was now Nigel Macdonald’s girlfriend. He had a photograph of the naked Betty on his mantelpiece but was also, Freud knew, involved with Peter Watson. ‘He was the same elegant shape as Peter Watson and wore Peter’s suits and I said once, “You’re the wolf in Pete’s clothing.” Peter Watson went to Wales with Johnny Craxton and I think it’s why Nigel and I and Betty were going to Scotland. He provided £50 for the three of us. He gave us the money and Nigel wanted to take Betty.’

  They took the overnight train to Inverness and asked at the tourist office where would be a good place to stay. Drumnadrochit, halfway down Loch Ness, was recommended. The Drumnadrochit Hotel, ‘very Scottish, solicitous, quiet’, thirty shillings a night. They took two rooms, one for the boys, the other for Betty. (‘In those days he couldn’t have taken the same room as her.’) Being in Scotland, and unaware of Highland touchiness, Freud wore his tartan trews. ‘No one would talk to me: it turned out that the trousers were Royal Stewart and it was as if there were only two left in the clan.’

  He had with him a yellow-covered sketchbook, the dummy for Spender’s novel The Backward Son. In it he had drawn his fellow passengers on the train north and now there were figures in kilts gazing out on to Loch Ness, a face in the ruins of picturesque Castle Urquhart, Nigel Macdonald asleep and – awake – naked and playing with himself. Hotel life proved irksome. There he was, in ‘a really hot stuff tip-top hop-scotch luxury dive for old dames’, as he described it in a postcard to EQ, isolated in countryside good only for travelogue. ‘It’s really a fit subject for a new Fitzpatrick the Voice of the Globe Traveltalks films in technicolour.’ He sat himself in the bedroom window seat and over three or four days drew the view: Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit. Out there was a landscape of bumpy complexities where the line of the far shore of the loch divided grazing from wilderness and where attention crept with mapping-pen precision over the rock and cement wall across field and graveyard to a hillside dotted with cattle and boulders, buoyant clouds above.

  ‘The two fences next to the tree are the only thing wrong,’ he commented. ‘They’re as straight as Loch Ness.’

  Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit, 1943

  Drumnadrochit, Freud’s furthest north, was not a place he ever wanted to revisit. Generally his excursions from London were weekends only; if not Dorset then Sussex with Lorna, staying with her in Binsted when circumstances allowed. Once they put up in a pub in Petersfield where he did drawings of a dentist pulling a tooth and of the house where Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty, was born. The reason for being there was that it was near Bedales, Michael Wishart’s school, and they went to see him, taking magazines. And cigarettes. A schoolfellow of Michael’s, Bruce Bernard, recalled the visit as being ‘camped up’ by Wishart, who boasted to his mother that he had this friend, Bruce, in dire need of ciggies. He was to become, decades later, a key sitter. They met again in the school holidays when Bruce, ‘very impressed by Lucian’s exotic and somewhat demonic aura’, as he later recalled,16 was warned by his mother that, being Sigmund Freud’s grandson, he might be dangerous to know. ‘Though this of course made me even more interested in him … I think that he regarded me and my family with only momentary curiosity and remember him calling me “Bryce” with a soft German “R”.’17 The interest was not entirely unreciprocated. They met again in the school holidays when Freud was rather shocked to see Bruce’s mother swipe him across the face.

  There was a trip to Cornwall where they stayed at Cadgwith on the Lizard and went from there to Tintagel Castle, worth seeing, Freud explained, because Freddie Ashton had asked him to design the setting for Picnic at Tintagel, a ballet based on Arnold Bax’s Tintagel Suite. ‘A ghastly piece of music,’ Freud was quick to say, but Ashton’s patronage was not to be spurned, for others, given the opportunity to do stage designs, had been conspicuously applauded; John Minton and Michael Ayrton for example had collaborated with great success on John Gielgud’s travelling production of Macbeth and Graham Sutherland had designed Ashton’s The Wanderer, producing small gouaches for enlargement into monumental backcloth cliffs and crevices. To see sketches transmuted into spectacle was an enticing prospect. Freud always found it stimulating to see his work put through the processes of being proofed or laid out on the page. ‘I got a kick when things were photographed.’ That was reproduction; this was transformation.

  Picnic at Tintagel promised to be as whimsical a mix as any Cocteau scenario. A picnic party visiting the castle ruins was to be plunged into the Tristan and Isolde era only to return to the present day for the final curtain. Freud quite enjoyed the recce, but the production fell through. When Ashton revived the project in 1950 he commissioned Cecil Beaton instead, who, conscious of ‘the competition on the one hand of Wagner and on the other of Cocteau’, proposed a skirtless Isolde and a Tristan modelled on Olivier’s Henry V. The Tintagel venture was not a complete waste of time. Either there or at Lyme Regis (where they stayed two nights, long enough for him to manage a small view out over rooftops and sea), he picked up a dead puffin. As was his habit, he worked from it until it had served his purpose, the sorry creature far gone, its bones protruding like umbrella ribs through the bedraggled plumage. He drew it twice in pen and ink, the pen strokes that trailed, contoured, dotted, nicked and hatched, the dishevelled plumage intricately cloaking the rotting body.

  During another brief jaunt with Lorna in Tenby in South Wales Freud occupied himself with a prospect of the town from across the bay, a picture-postcard view that, characteristically, he later regretted not having destroyed. He drew jetty and huts, fishing boats and castle ruins: visitor attractions set out as though for a mariner’s return from trauma, the sea silvery, the harbour bay as clear as glass and, moved inshore a little, the Horse Rock remodelled into a reminder of the three-legged sandstone horse on the mantelpiece at Walberswick. This was more an Alfred Wallis setting, a Toy Town on sea, than a Graham Sutherland Neo-Romantic haunt. ‘Tenby being so beautiful, Italian cafés were started there; not Deux Magots but nice, with Italian chips and quite cheap.’ No one was pretending that this was the real Mediterranean, but the taste was genuine enough. Whereas, Freud later observed, the Neo-Romanticism emanating from further along the coast with Graham Sutherland and John Piper seemed simultaneously sloppy and overwrought. ‘That rather horrible thing with greasy chalks and water, like washing up gone wrong’.

  In August 1944 he plunged briefly into this greasiness when lodging, with Craxton, at the Mariner’s Arms in Haverfordwest; Graham and Kathleen Sutherland planned to stay there too but, finding the pair too boisterous, they withdrew to a cottage at Sandy Haven, the setting of Sutherland’s 1939 Entrance to a Lane. Freud showed his disinclination to heed the prevailing genius loci by drawing in pencil on Ingres paper a Christmas cracker that he found in a box in the hotel attic. Gorse he liked too. It was the toughest plant around. He drew gnarled stems and barbed green baited with yellow. His gorse was specific, unlike Sutherland’s gorse – interchangeably aligned with thistle heads and crowns of thorns – and Craxton’s tusky specimens.

  As the war dragged on, Neo-Romanticism thrived, a manifestation of insular escapism proliferating quicker than willowherb on bombsites. Freud saw it as Symbolism gone haywire, ludicrously so. ‘One thing amazed me: Michael Ayrton wrote, “all but the very best people are affected by undergrowth and roots.”’ An equally trying alternative was Cubistic pastiche such as that of the Scots duo Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun who conflated Braque and Wyndham Lewis. Actually Freud preferred Colquhoun’s work to that of his big influence, Jankel Adler, who, discharged from the Polish army in 1941, painted initially in Glasgow, then in London. Freud went to his studio once to see his work and thought it too prearranged. ‘He w
as making Modern Art for “the stupid British who didn’t know”: boring angular things, all patterns. With Colquhoun there was a bit of talent, but Adler was working from Czech people I hated. Supposedly more intelligent than Josef Herman, who did those square peasants all the time, and I suppose he looked at Klee.’

  Sigmund Freud’s notion, pleasing to Neo-Romantics, that ‘the artist is an introvert on the edge of neurosis’, gave special credence to subjective moods, even those as topographically distrait as Graham Sutherland’s, whose ‘emotional feeling of being on the edge of some drama’ whenever he went to Pembrokeshire failed him in France where he was sent in late 1944 – his first time abroad – to draw wrecked railway yards. The critic Michael Middleton remarked that ‘painters who thought, a decade ago, that “child art” or abstracts were The Thing, now put their signatures to a formula of rugose and ecstatic tree-forms …’ Sutherland lived at Trottiscliffe in Kent, to the east of Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’, and gained inspiration from the ancient yews that grew along the Pilgrim’s Way under the North Downs. Signatories to the manner, John Craxton and Michael Ayrton, who talked of ‘the sensation of the unremitting war fought by trees’, were exceeded only by Charles Hawtrey in the character of Osbert the art student in the film Much Too Shy boasting his affinity to ‘a tree in agony … a tree who intimately lives with rain … a tree begging for mercy, crying out to be saved …’

  Glorifying affectations, Neo-Romantics such as Hawtrey’s Osbert expressed themselves like billy-o, homing in on secret places under waning moons. The style ranged from entanglement to turgid watercolour washes. Craxton saw potential here, but Freud regarded the vogue as platitudinous. ‘I just walked in on it. Keith Vaughan was the worst. A legal way to do men and he wanted to do something.’ Vaughan made a thing of deliberate generalisation, male figures blending with trees. There was, surely, more substance in the tangible, more purpose in concentration. Facts detailed, things realised, whether the intricacies of a wicker basket or the wrinkled paw of a dead monkey, could have a hard-to-define lingering quality, like the quick acrid whiff of one flint bashed against another.

  Portrait of a Young Man (John Craxton), 1944

  Differences between the exacting and the generalised widened into a divide when, in 1944, Craxton illustrated The Poet’s Eye, an anthology put together by Geoffrey Grigson, produced by Walter Neurath’s book package firm Adprint and published by Frederick Muller as one of a ‘New Excursions into English Poetry’ series that included Landscape Verse with darkling lithographs by John Piper and Poems of Death adorned by Michael Ayrton. Craxton’s lithographs, predominantly mustard yellow and blackout blue with white highlights, featured poets clasped in hollow tree trunks and a reconstituted Pembrokeshire where scything curves tidied every sandy cove. Craxton wrote to EQ that the proofs for these were ‘as hopeless as Auntie’s split bloomers only more skitso prenick’.18

  Darling Felicity I am sorry I have not written for so long to you though I have often meant to. I have been in Scotland and in Cornwall (last week) since I last saw you and I had a wonderful wavy bathe. Rushing about England nearly makes me feel quite different but not quite. My life is at a very crucial stage at the moment, one day I think I am beginning to make my work how I want it to be and then I feel so dissatisfied with it that I leave the house. I made a lithograph in Ipswich of a horse and jumping fish by the sea. I have bought a very large Zebra’s head it looks very strange on the wall with big glass eyes and mane going up. By far the best thing I have ever bought. Do come to London. Surely its your Autumn Holiday Lots of love to you from me.19

  As this letter suggests, by the autumn of 1944 Freud’s concerns and predilections, not least his involvement with Lorna, had distanced him from Felicity. (The pair of lipsticked lips collaged to the bottom of this letter was jokey over-compensation.) Now was the time for applying himself and launching out. ‘Johnny was doing The Poet’s Eye and I went to Cowell’s in Ipswich with him and they gave me a zinc plate.’ He drew a genial horse slithering on shingle and kicking out at a wicker basket filled with fish, sending them flying. He gave Peter Watson a print from this with the sea coloured in slightly and, provoked by Craxton’s efforts, set to work assembling drawings to go with The Glass Tower, a book of poems by Nicholas Moore. This was to be published by Editions Poetry London, an imprint now backed by Watson. He had known Moore, Tambimuttu’s assistant on Poetry London and son of G. E. Moore the Cambridge philosopher, for years on and off. He liked to compose his poems straight on to the typewriter using a red ribbon on yellow paper; he smoked scented tobacco or gold-tipped Russian cigarettes. ‘Will talk interminably about himself but diagonally, or in a roundabout way, by implication,’ wrote Charles Wrey Gardiner, the publisher for whom he sporadically worked,20 while Tambimuttu awarded him praise in the form of a backhander saying that there was ‘little pretentiousness’ in his poems.21 Even Stephen Spender dismissed him, referring to him in Horizon as ‘the prime example of what one might call the Little Jack Horner school of poets, who put in a thumb and pull out a plum and say, “what a good boy am I”’.22

  Dead Monkey, 1944

  The poems to be illustrated verged on the surreal with topical references cued in (‘Hitler is love’s taunting fable, the earth gone wrong’), so there was obvious imagery for Freud to pick up on. Not that he did. ‘I just used to read them and look for words I liked. Animals and so on. Definitely done for money: I got £40 cash.’ Two of his dead-monkey drawings qualified for inclusion thanks to the line ‘monkeys with sexes prevalently showing’, also the head of a toy monkey belonging to Moore’s baby daughter Juliet whom he had drawn with it not long before. A gull lifted from Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds stood in for ‘The Five Peculiar Gulls’ and his zebra head served again, fitted with a unicorn horn. Moore invoked ‘Max Ernst of the peculiar birds and people’, but Freud ignored that as too obvious a reference; and he resisted the lure of the line ‘The second egg was white, curved like woman’s thigh, virgin,’ making do with a nondescript egg lolling in the crumpled paper bag from Quince on a Blue Table. A drawing of EQ’s black cat asleep on a black and white cushion was submitted but not used.

  The Glass Tower became more Freud than Moore. ‘I designed it all: the jacket and the binding, yellow and black on the front and black on yellow in reverse on the back.’ The motif was a palm tree from the Loudon Road nursery, ghostly on the front cover, more elegant and effective than Craxton’s bleached eye socket for The Poet’s Eye. He toothed and feathered his lettering for the title page and placed in the centre a sad-eyed puffin viewed head on: the Poetry London colophon garlanded with barbs and bunting. Drowned birds and shells occurred at intervals, near-emblems gracing the page, rather like the fish and poppy tattoos that he was to apply later on (‘as tokens’) to favoured girlfriends.

  Some months before The Glass Tower was proofed and despatched to the printers in Bournemouth, Freud and Craxton were thrown out of Abercorn Place. For one reason or another, particularly the noise overhead and the crunching glass, Clinton Grange-Fiske in the ground-floor flat decided that he had had enough of the pair of them. He particularly resented girls ringing his doorbell late at night and asking for Lucian. ‘Being a grandee, the Rector of Stiffkey’s driver, he couldn’t stand it.’ Craxton returned to his parents’ house in Kidderpore Avenue and Freud found a house in Delamere Terrace, on the seamy side of Maida Vale.

  ‘I could have had the whole house for £2,000 or something and I said to my father, “It’s marvellous and not out of the question for me to get it,” but he said, “When the war is over there’ll be a housing shortage and you’ll have to let it to people who never get to pay the rent, or to friends, and it’ll be chaos.” He was sensible, being an architect and also a landlord a bit. So I didn’t.’ His father said he could get him a twenty- to thirty-year lease ‘for a small sum’ because everywhere was so cheap. ‘You’ll be turned out if you pay rent: I can get you a thirty-year lease.’ He didn’t. Freud took a fir
st-floor flat at number 20 for thirty shillings a week, the idea being that he would pay the rent from his share of the Sigmund Freud royalties.

  ‘It had a canal balustrade with columns like chess pieces, big balconies with the ironwork mostly gone, except where it was protecting basements. It was very broken down.’

  Delamere Terrace runs along the Grand Union Canal behind the Harrow Road, immediately west of the avenues around Paddington Basin or Little Venice, as Robert Browning, who had lived there in the 1860s, called it. In his day the Terrace had been quite grand, though unpaved, with its stucco fronts, gates at the end and a halfpenny toll to non-residents; he had walked along every afternoon to call on his sister-in-law, Arabel Barrett, who lived at number 7 and had been a dedicated supporter of ‘Ragged Schools’ for the poor and other such amenities in the surrounding area. Before the war the London County Council had bought up most of the district – twelve acres of decay from Delamere Terrace to Clarendon Street (renamed Crescent) – with the intention of redeveloping it. ‘Much of the Clarendon Street area of Paddington is insanitary,’ the Architect’s Journal reported, adding however, ‘it is a sociable, homelike place with a character of its own, and it is liked by the people who live there.’23

  The move could have counted as slumming, but for Freud it was more a venturesome plunge, like diving off to Liverpool three years before. ‘Delamere was extreme and I was very conscious of this: down the hill, down to the canal. It was through having been to sea that I moved to Paddington. There was a sort of anarchic element of no one working for anyone.’ He was now twenty-one; he had come of age.

  ‘I like the idea of hideouts but the real point is privacy.’

  Around this time Stephen Spender wrote a short introduction to the Air Raids volume in a pocketbook series ‘War Pictures by British Artists’; as a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service he was well placed to pronounce on the social impact of the London Blitz. A cultural easing had occurred thanks to the war, he suggested, slipping into Crown Film Unit commentary mode. ‘The gulf that has separated the man of imagination and creative power from the man-in-the-street has considerably narrowed. Both live now amongst the same grim realities.’24 He and Natasha had stayed on in the flat in Maresfield Gardens, two districts and a world away from the circumstances in which Freud now found himself. ‘Delamere Terrace was in a completely unresidential area, with violent neighbours. I felt very at ease.’ He was on his own now, he liked to think: lodged with a breed of people who got by on instinct and tribal habit.