The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  The blurb spoke of Nicholas Moore as seeing ‘with the clarity and innocence of childhood (the symbols are childhood symbols) or the cine-eyes of the modern sensitive’, adding that the drawings are ‘in the same mood’; a review in the Times Literary Supplement three months later talked of Moore as ‘a surprisingly unselfconscious poet’ and did not mention Freud.11 Our Time carried an advertisement in which misprints prevailed: ‘with drawings by Lucian Frewd, 8/6 net’. And the review (by Christopher Lee) was dismissive: ‘With rare exceptions they neither think nor feel sufficiently and they lack art. “Words are red as fire and twice as hot” – but these are not.’ Again the illustrations went unnoticed. Yet, alone among the illustrated books published by Editions Poetry London, The Glass Tower, by virtue of the drawings, has sparkle. Where David Gascoyne’s Poems was adorned with stifling Graham Sutherland vistas and where the Henry Moore Shelter Sketch Book was a reprocessing of common humanity into swaddled grubs and where the colour lithographs by Gerald Wilde in Poetry London Ten gave ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ a frenzied drubbing, The Glass Tower has unassuming lucidity. Freud eventually came round to recognising this. ‘It’s got an “I’ve got four hands and none of them work and only one eye and I nearly did it” sort of look. Not a luxury volume. And that’s what’s nice about it.’

  The poet-publisher Charles Wrey Gardiner, whose Grey Walls Press operated with diminishing success through the 1940s, recalled in his memoirs, The Dark Thorn, Craxton showing him his paintings, and Freud’s, at Abercorn Place. ‘You had to be careful not to step on a masterpiece if you were fascinated by a zebra’s head sticking out of the wall.’12 Consequently he had reproduced in his literary miscellany New Road 1944, Man with a Feather (then called Self-Portrait, Spring, 1943) and Still Life, Winter, 1943 (not yet Still Life with Chelsea Buns) together with a Craxton drawing called Tree Root in an Estuary, Wales. (‘“The sensitive are being killed gradually,” as Craxton remarked to me sadly over the immense chequered pattern of his jersey.’) Wrey Gardiner asked Freud to do a dust jacket for Franz Werfel’s play Paul Among the Jews, but what he came up with was no good, he decided: ‘The odd squat figure with the two right feet because the girl he was using for the drawing was too cold to take the stocking off her left one. It was unsuitable and I was wrong to allow it to go through.’13 He also commissioned a portrait, Freud remembered with a wince. ‘He asked me to paint Mimi, his girlfriend; usually they tried to stop me painting their girlfriends. I liked the idea, as it was the first that I’d been asked to do, but I couldn’t get on with it. She was giggling and nothing happened.’ Wrey Gardiner himself acknowledged, ‘Mimi bores me, too, as well, and knows it,’14 but he mentioned this with some resentment in The Dark Thorn: ‘Lucian has never finished Mimi’s portrait, blast him. Lucian no longer wears his postman’s trousers and solar topee. Living near the Regent Canal must have sobered him unnaturally.’ And there was more. ‘Lucian Freud’s portrait. Memory is a curved curtain. Let us lower it over the sore places. The platform of Maida Vale Tube station should perhaps be avoided.’15

  A man of resounding declarations (‘Let us dedicate ourselves to art for life’s sake, for art is the life blood of humanity’)16 Wrey Gardiner had Nicholas Moore as a partner and assistant for a while and an association with Tambimuttu that helped lead him, as dealings with Tambimuttu generally did, to insolvency. Projecting his own feelings, Wrey Gardiner surmised that Paddington life was getting Freud down.

  The dilapidated grandeur of the 1850-ish house now in a slum has its charm. But poor Lucian is not the same man we knew, jumping over posts in the street, laughing with Johnny Craxton. He is terribly changed and looks quite ill. Living a mad existence in the fungoid undergrowth of London night life hasn’t done him any good. I wonder whether he will ever finish the portrait of Mimi he has been doing so long. In the sun in the big airy room he has made into a studio I enjoy myself making acquaintance again with the odd objects with which he surrounds himself, the zebra’s head he is always painting and drawing, the broken wheel hanging on the wall, the striped rug on the bare boards of the floor. The green water of the canal ripples and sings its strange melody. Perspectives open before me of other lives …17

  Other lives. Freud knew how to make an entrance; he would appear in a crowded room evasively, with a diffident air, as though seeing himself as a mystery to others. He was seen, for example, to disappear into the bathroom at the Poetry London office in Manchester Square and emerge after a long time saying that he had been ‘thinking’. John Richardson, the future biographer of Picasso, saw him one evening in the Café Royal standing on one leg, looking at the floor. ‘Young Freud at it again,’ someone said. Affectation was a flexing of personality.

  ‘I was very very shy so I tried to overcome it by being exhibitionistic. I did things for that reason. To do with clothes quite a lot and to do with attitude.’

  The urge to startle masqueraded as the exercise of free will. There was dressing up. ‘I used to buy crazy old uniforms in Paddington Market. Boer War uniforms with piping on. Guardsmen’s trousers with red stripes down the side. I saw a kilt in the window of Bantoft & Haines and went in and said I’d like trousers. “We’ll build you some,” they said. I only wore them for best.’ He went to parties in them, plus a dinner jacket on smart occasions. (When years later Princess Margaret asked about the trousers it was explained to her, ‘An old Portuguese tartan ma’am.’)18

  ‘I was stimulated by extreme economic change, going about. I’ve tried to cultivate it. It’s to do with living in a dump and going out to somewhere palatial, not just physically but to do with people’s ideas and easy-going attitudes, the way English people live, in London anyway. In Germany, I feel, it would have been linked to some more specific social life or vice or sex.

  ‘The Caribbean Club in Dean Street: I used to live there, practically; it was the first place I ever saw Negroes. It had odd mixtures of people, Euan Drogheda and Ronnie Greville – George Melly was kept by him when he was in the navy – Joy Newton and Bobby and Pauline Newton, were there, undergraduate parties, Etonians and queer actors, and it had a sort of intellectual side – Gerald Berners and the Heber-Percys. Esme Percy, an educated actor with a small private income, was a friend; George Bernard Shaw used to cast him in his plays and he used to try and take me down to see him at Ayot St Lawrence. He said, “He’s fascinating. So mean. We’ll go for tea. There’ll be tea and only one cake and he’ll eat it.” So I didn’t go down.’

  Stephen Freud came home on leave. ‘He was an officer of sorts. When on leave he came to Delamere and I took him out to a pub in Maida Vale where they were playing billiards and things; they weren’t used to people in uniform and officers were rare. There were so many tricks people did. A real tough young thug was with this girl and he hit the girl and Stephen said, “I’m not standing for this,” and was very indignant, but I knew it was a put-up job to rob him, so I got him out.’

  While sex life had side effects, the show-off life had repercussions. In the Black Horse in Rathbone Street one evening in 1943 someone said to him that he would like him to meet this girl he was having a drink with as she was engaged to someone called Freud. He bristled. ‘I said, “I’d be careful: there are very few Freuds and there are a lot of fakes about.”’ This got back to the fiancé, who turned out to be Cousin Walter. Having arrived in England in 1938, too late as it turned out to be naturalised before war began, in the summer of 1940 Walter and his father, Martin Freud, had been interned on the Isle of Man as aliens. Walter was shipped to Australia on the Duneira but returned and, after a spell in the Pioneer Corps, joined the Parachute Regiment and then SOE. ‘Walter was dangerously active in the commandos,’ his cousin Lux observed. ‘He used to say to girls, “I’m going off to be killed; this is my one last night of love.” He used to get engaged a lot.’

  In his autobiography, Glory Reflected, Martin Freud confessed to ‘what today might be called a complex about “honour”’ in describing his humiliation, as a cavalr
y officer and ladies’ man who immediately on landing in England had taken to wearing an English-type blazer, at being issued with the overalls of an Alien Pioneer. To his nephew he was tragi-ludicrous. ‘It was like working on a slave ship being in the Pioneer Corps and, because of his imperious manner, Uncle Martin got very mucked about. He lived, as his book makes clear, as the eldest son of my grandfather. He had fought some duels in his military career and when the Nazis came he, naturally, didn’t stand for that and he was badly beaten up.’

  ‘We are very fond of your Uncle Martin,’ Virginia Woolf had said to Freud when Stephen Spender introduced him to her. (‘She was rather terrifying.’) But he himself was not impressed by his uncle’s disposition. ‘My mother felt he treated my father too cursorily and he tried to get money off my mother. He was known for being a bit wayward.’ Unable to practise as a lawyer, Uncle Martin had tried business. ‘He had these business ventures, in a way like a Balzac character reasoning: “How do you make money? Stupid people make money. I’m not stupid. Stupid people are very rich; they go into business and make lots of money. I’ve got it: toothpaste. Everyone has to use it. There’s nothing in it, anyone can make it, the great thing is to put it about.” So he started making this thing: Martin’s toothpaste. We were all instructed to go into the chemist’s to ask for Martin’s toothpaste.’ It was a failure. ‘There was a terrible bust-up with Timothy Whites & Taylors followed by completely non-speaks with Boots. By and by there wasn’t a tube even in the Museum of Patents, or Toothpaste.’ After his stint in the Pioneer Corps, Martin Freud worked as an auditor for the Dock Labour Board and later owned a tobacconist’s in Holborn. ‘He felt he was a grandee but found that the people running it had robbed him mercilessly of 6d a week.’ Hearing about the incident in the Black Horse, he wrote to his disgraceful nephew, this shameless wearer of uniforms off market stalls, who quoted the letter, from memory, as saying: ‘Your Cousin Walter has successfully learned the arts of destruction, and I know them of old, and should advise you to be very careful to keep out of our way.’

  ‘After the threatening letter I never got right with my uncle. Never saw him.’

  Poppy and Hand Puppet (1944), a painting exhibited at the Lefevre and bought by Freud’s parents, begs interpretation: why the disengaged glove puppet with a stocking face, the poppy head lying like a dropped rattle? The puppet was one of several given him some years before, when he was at the Central, by Inge von Schey with whom he had lunched on the steps of the British Museum. It had no particular significance. ‘I feel the composition is a bit haphazard.’ Just as the zebra head (‘full of life and hope’) had stretched over the crumpled paper bag, examining the quince by smell, the poppy and puppet, selected for shape and texture rather than for anything they may signify, are a play of contrast: limpness and husk. Inferences suggest themselves, most obviously the discarding of childish things.

  By 1945 Ernst Freud could see that in setting out to make a life for himself as a painter Lucian was doing what he had decided against at the same age when he told his own father that ‘One should either regard painting as a luxury, pursuing it as an amateur, or else take it very seriously and achieve something really great, since to be a mediocrity in this field would give no satisfaction.’19 This view he handed down to Lucian, who rather agreed. ‘It always seemed understood.’ Apart from the two years at Dartington, when his declared ambition was to spend a lifetime working with horses, he always saw himself as a painter. Painting was his only prospect. Having exhibited at the Lefevre he could regard himself as a professional. To that extent his parents could relax and, naturally, Freud was keen to discourage them from taking too close an interest in his activities. Particularly his mother, whose devotion to him and love of domestic order he found stifling. ‘I always avoided her when I grew up. She was so intuitive. I used to go to see my father, sometimes in Walberswick, to get money. He was trustee of the Sigmund Freud copyright and I was always in advance.’ (Royalties, which were to become sizeable, were divided among the five grandsons.) ‘He’d say, “Go and see your mother as you leave.” I’d say yes and go straight out. It was being forgiven I didn’t like. My mother always put nobler motives on my actions than those they were actually prompted by.’

  Michael Hamburger, released from the army and now a poet, called on Freud occasionally. ‘He told me about some homosexual experiences he had had in the Merchant Navy; I saw him paint and I remember him telling me he took glucose to give him energy.’20 Gabby Ullstein, who was sent to school in England in the later thirties and stayed on, also visited him in Delamere Terrace. ‘It was cosy but grotty. I liked him: funny and unexpected.’ Whereas Lucie Freud seemed, to her, ‘A great beauty being beautiful, a dramatic lady, always sitting or lying en odalisque. Intense. No jokes.’ Ernst Freud, whom she came across in Walberswick after the war, struck her as rather a rake. ‘Charming: a jolly scoundrel.’21 John Lehmann felt similarly.

  As Dick ‘Wolf’ Mosse said, ‘Ernst would make his own rules, write his own passport.’22 He set up odd unrealised business ventures such as Pasta Resin Products, for which Anthony Froshaug designed labels and letter headings and developed an involvement with the man who produced Kangol berets (‘smart at every angle’) who built a factory in Tottenham Court Road. John Lehmann found Ernst Freud ‘Not only an extremely able architect, but a man full of ideas and enterprise’. In 1945 Lehmann wanted to buy a house in London and Ernst Freud went round with him and provided ‘eager and persuasive arguments’ to ‘grab one of the many excellent properties still going cheap before everyone else joined the hunt’. Lehmann liked the way he threw himself into the search, ‘sniffing for dry rot, pulling at peeling wallpaper, shifting piles of rubble-litter with his foot, calculating with lightning speed the cost of mending a roof damaged by incendiaries or a stairway shaken by explosions next door, remodelling interiors to my liking with a conjurer’s dazzling patter – and dismissing the whole vision at once with a slightly diabolical laugh, when he saw me reluctant.’23

  ‘I lacked family feeling, a sense of being in a family,’ Freud concluded in distant retrospect. ‘I never made any gesture where, anything I did, I felt this was my family. I accepted things as they were. I didn’t feel a unity. Not adverse, but not strings.’

  Lorna Wishart was still his muse. The older woman – by almost twelve years – she remained a passionate attachment. When he had first drawn her, three years before, in an ocelot coat of dramatic splendour, Freud had been more exercised over the markings than the face. He gave her the drawing. It was damaged slightly when Laurie Lee smashed the glass, which gave her the opportunity (Freud later claimed) to alter the mouth. The drawing shows her huge-lipped, wide-shouldered, eyes staring beyond the unseen artist, bead necklace embracing the throat, an innocent Amazonian, an unsmiling femme fatale. He drew for her (‘For Lorna Wishart’) an emblematic device of pierced hands, feet and heart: his heart or hers, with a nod to the faith towards which she was now turning. At the same time Laurie Lee, racked with jealousy, couldn’t but regard the liaison as sordid. ‘This mad unpleasant youth appeals to a sort of craving she has for corruption. She doesn’t know how long it will last. She would like to be free of it but can’t … She goes to him when I long for her, and finds him in bed with a boyfriend. She is disgusted but still goes to see him. And tonight she says she is going to Cornwall with him.’24 That boy, Lorna said, was Charlie. When I questioned Freud about this he denied it out of hand. ‘This is fiction; I wouldn’t have; this was made up. Can’t be right.’

  On trips together he and she had enjoyed feeling complicit and carefree in the spirit of ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ like the happy ending for the two little pigs in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Pigling Bland. At other times the strains showed, as in Woman with a Daffodil, on canvas, and Woman with a Tulip, on panel, painted in the spring of 1945. Fixated and shrunken, they convey, as rarely – if ever – before in Freud’s work, an apprehension of another person’s susceptibilities. ‘The first perso
n I got keen on,’ as he said, the Lorna of Woman with a Daffodil is sickly pale, sunk in grief and grievance, her hair lank with coconut oil, her look matching the sour yellow of the cut daffodil. Woman with a Tulip is head on but thoughts elsewhere, ignoring both the painter and the lopped tulip. The two paintings monitor a faltering relationship. ‘In a way they’re devised. I was more concerned with the subject – she was very wild – than I had been before, so it was a more immediate thing.’ The fifteenth-century look (like a head of Christ by Antonello da Messina in the National Gallery) is weary and resigned; which of course goes with the process of sitting after sitting, mind a blank or simmering with resentment.

  Lorna often stayed for weekdays at Delamere Terrace (where these two little paintings were done), returning to Sussex at the weekends; occasionally she brought sixteen-year-old Michael with her; he would sleep on the floor and overhear them in the night. At one stage there had been a plan, initially more Lorna’s than his, for Freud to move into an estate cottage at Binsted but that didn’t work out; Ernest Wishart objected and anyway the set-up wouldn’t have suited him. The cottage was near where Mervyn and Maeve Peake were living. Theirs, he gathered from Lorna, was a rural slum existence. Rather them than him. ‘In an earth dwelling: no rent, no water. Very poor, but they were the sort of people who would give money to a beggar, quiet, modest, and the opposite of Michael Ayrton.’