The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  In the winter of 1944–5 Lorna found a dead heron on the marshes and brought it to Delamere Terrace; her gifts tended to be offerings, placed at his feet. So he painted it, laying down plumage like petals on a wreath, exquisitely inert. ‘I always had a horror of using materials that reminded me of art schools, and that’s why I used Ripolin. I didn’t like the idea of awful Winsor & Newton ready-made kit because I thought that tainted the idea of doing anything.’ Powder paint from the barge shop in the Harrow Road, mixed with oil or water, was closer to Renaissance practice than paint squeezed from tubes. The bedraggled heron is a legless device lopped from an Uccello helmet, cruciform on damp sand, graced with enamel shine. Neither commemorative nor symbolic, more magnificence brought low, it reminded Freud of the stuffed gull that had served as his albatross when he was the Young Mariner with the Dartington Eurythmic Players.

  In April 1945, shortly before the war in Europe ended, Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was exhibited at the Lefevre, along with paintings by Graham Sutherland, Matthew Smith, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Craxton, Colquhoun and others. Bacon had been harbouring the painting for quite some time and this was a sensational addition to the original selection: three bloated deformities on tufts and perches, gurning and gagging in an orange hell. Freud considered Three Studies a work of freakish audacity catapulted out of nowhere. ‘Francis was not only little known, he was almost completely unknown.’ Sutherland’s response was a small gouache, same orange field but instead of pilloried foetal forms a horned and nostrilled cow making eyes; and, as it happened, it was Sutherland who alerted Freud to Bacon. ‘I said, rather tactlessly, “Who do you think’s the best painter in England?” He said, “Oh, someone you’ve never heard of: he’s like a cross between Vuillard and Picasso; he’s never shown and he has the most extraordinary life: we sometimes go to dinner parties there.”’ Sutherland had come across him, Freud recalled a lifetime later, as ‘a quiet roulette-playing gent who lives in South Ken’. Not as a painter. He and Bacon first met, he thought, in late 1944 or early 1945. ‘I feel disinclined to push that I met him earlier than I did,’ he told me. ‘I arranged to meet him at the station to go down to Graham’s in Kent. Once I met him I saw him a lot. Francis said he hardly knew him.’

  That was two years after Freud wrote to Felicity Hellaby about the ‘wonderful’ book he had found on diseases of the skin (‘with amazing illustrations: you must come and see it’); his love of such books pre-dated the onset of Bacon’s influence on him; however, his appreciation of the diversion to be had, and the advantage to be gained, by flouting composure and outraging convention was largely provoked by Bacon’s flamboyance and scorn. The painter of Dead Heron and the perpetrator of Three Studies were immediately potentially complicit. The friendship was to spur Freud for the next thirty years. He talked of Lorna being ‘wild’ and that was high praise, but Bacon was, he said, the ‘wildest and wisest’ person he had ever encountered. His first sighting of Three Studies was when he went to Bacon’s studio in Cromwell Place, which had once belonged to Millais (and more recently to the photographer E. O. Hoppé whose portraiture props were still there, prompting Bacon imagery). Three Studies was already in the gold frames that Bacon favoured; for him with his poor rotting heron, Bacon’s three terrorised creatures of the imagination were utter spectacle. Poised like circus acts trained to rage, they were anything from horrors of war – blinded, deafened, crowing over Henry Moore’s shelter sleepers – to Fates assembled to spook the punters at the roulette sessions Bacon had been organising in his studio. Freud did not attend them – he was more attuned to the roll-a-penny arcades around Leicester Square – but he knew the set-up: large cars parked outside, all-night sessions, flagrant law-breaking in respectable South Kensington, classic George Grosz.

  ‘His nanny was the doorman. She was almost blind and she told him whom he must and mustn’t see. She was unkeen on MacBryde and Colquhoun. I was OK, she liked me, fortunately, and had rather marvellous natural tact: she appeared with tea and disappeared. Francis had scaffolding put up and bogus window-cleaners as lookout men, because it was illegal, quite an elaborate thing. Not hole-in-corner. He took a lot of trouble.’

  ‘My first show made some money and I was in a position to take out anyone, so I went out with Pauline Tennant. She was a pin-up for the forces, a glamour girl, a bit of a kind of star at the Gargoyle, which her father owned.’ David Tennant’s Gargoyle Club, on the top floor of a fine Georgian house, 69 Dean Street, was tiled with squares cut from antique mirrors on the advice of Matisse, whose Red Studio had been part of the decor when Freud first went there. ‘You went up in the lift then down Matisse’s stairs to a feeling of sub-basement.’ Its glamorous incongruity in the heart of Soho attracted the well-heeled and indefatigable of all ages; among its more opportunistic regulars were Brian Howard and Cyril Connolly, Dylan Thomas, Nina Hamnett and Bobby Newton. Also Freud. Driving back one night from the Q Theatre near Kew Bridge, the actor-director Esme Percy discovered him asleep in the back of his car and obligingly, on waking him, introduced him to his front-seat passenger: David Tennant’s daughter Pauline.

  Normally the Gargoyle was a place Freud could patronise only if someone else was paying, but once he knew Pauline Tennant he was well in. Her debut on the scene had been noted in a Picture Post feature in February 1941 under the headline ‘Mr Cochran’s Very Youngest Lady is a Schoolgirl’. ‘At fifteen,’ the magazine prattled, ‘Pauline has the looks of a young film star, the assurance of a society hostess, and all the coltish charm and restless enthusiasms of a schoolgirl, which makes an irresistible combination.’ Within a year she was a Picture Post cover girl. Photographs of Mr Cochran’s discovery showed her laughing and cavorting with her mother, the actress Hermione Baddeley. In reality, Freud maintained, mother and daughter didn’t get on. ‘Pauline envied her mother and longed to be the daughter of her aunt, Angela Baddeley.’ He acknowledged that the ructions could have been to do with a mother’s suspicion of him: a scrounging hanger-on from the Gargoyle. As Ida in the stage and film adaptations of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Hermione Baddeley was to be moral guidance personified, a blowsy saint attempting to save poor impressionable Rose from Pinky the juvenile thug; that didn’t stop him spending nights with Pauline at the maternal flat over Salmon & Gluckstein, tobacconists, in Piccadilly. ‘We slept between two armchairs and her mother used to bring us tea in the morning on a tray, naked. Under Pauline’s door once came a note: “I expect either a brilliant career or a dull marriage.”’

  Freud, Pauline Tennant, Johnny Craxton and Sonia Leon were a foursome for a while; there were evenings at the cinema down the Harrow Road and even a poetry-reading evening with Craxton’s parents in Hampstead where David Gascoyne read. ‘Very good but the audience full of long ladies with gloomy faces and enormous amber beads hanging down and clanking and deathly serious.’25 Pauline was impressed when, walking through Shepherd’s Market one evening, Freud addressed by name every tart they passed. The girls called him ‘Luce’, she noted. He remembered taking her brother David (‘drunk, Etonian, pompous at sixteen in a double-breasted suit’) to see Douglas Cooper, the virulent critic and collector. ‘He walked over to the radiogram and was sick into it: delicate mechanism completely covered in porridge and Douglas Cooper just laughed. Pauline was engaged to Julian Pitt-Rivers and she married a number of people. I drew her in Conté pencil, semi-profile, and a little picture, green and yellowy, her hair her crowning glory, long, blonde: a Veronica Lake look and “one’s mother was an actress” resentment.’ The drawing has her groomed to pin-up perfection, a single wrinkle, picked out in Conté white, traversing her forehead. The painting is little more than a haughty mask and brassy mane. It remained unfinished when in August 1946 she married Julian Pitt-Rivers in St George’s Hanover Square, then went off to Baghdad where Pitt-Rivers was employed as purser to the young Feisal II, King of Iraq. Her third marriage, in 1974, made her Lady Rumbold.

  Kitty Ep
stein once told Pauline Tennant that she was, for Freud, ‘the first step up the ladder’. She was also the most glaring cause of his break with Lorna Wishart.

  In the spring of 1945 Cousin Walter of the SOE was parachuted into southern Austria in a squad of six with orders to raise resistance and establish a British presence before the arrival of the Russians; this was to involve seizing an aerodrome at Zeltweg. He landed, however, fourteen miles off-target and finding himself alone spent some time in the mountains before acting on his own initiative and seizing the aerodrome. He then went to the local Nazi headquarters to negotiate surrender, successfully bluffing them and afterwards falling in with a group of Austrian army mutineers who handed over to the Americans. ‘Cousin Walter came back the hero and married the daughter of some Scandinavian ambassador. He became an inventor.’ As a major in charge of a War Crimes Investigation Unit at Bad Oeynhausen, he investigated Krupps and succeeded in identifying Dr Bruno Tesch, the man who developed the poison gas for Auschwitz; he went on to spend most of his working life as a chemical engineer at BP and died in 2004.26

  Freud, with no such involvements to vaunt, had given the war a miss as much as he could. However, he quite often dropped in to the news cinemas around Piccadilly Circus for the cartoons and the Fitzpatrick travelogues (‘And now we leave … where nothing has changed for the last two thousand years …’) and there one afternoon he saw something different. ‘I was in the cinema with Lorna and we saw the concentration camps and she burst into tears and I was amazed; I was affected by her being upset but it seemed completely like another world to me. I knew about it, but – something to do with the degree of being adult: young men see torture and suffering and think it’s stimulus or neutral – those pictures of skeletons and all that … I don’t know. It’s to do with feeling not being like that. My mother was concerned, but I think that she would have thought that I must be sheltered from something like that. Even though on the convoy things were pretty horrible: are bits of the body going to fall over us? People weren’t used to seeing horrors on films.’ The news that his four great-aunts had been deported and killed was something he was hardly aware of at the time. ‘I never knew them; I think my mother must have told me about them, but that was years later. She said they were placed in a concentration camp and one of them said, “We consider ourselves distinguished because our brother is very distinguished; instead of waiting here to die we’d like to die right away.” And they said, “Fine.” I didn’t know how close they were; my father would never talk about anything like that as it would upset him.’

  VE Day happened in May. Demobbed, Stephen Freud went back to Cambridge, paid for by his Aunt Anna, and Clement Freud came out of the Catering Corps (‘He served his country,’ his hostile brother remarked) to become a liaison officer at the Nuremberg Trials. For Lucian VE Day was memorable only for ‘trying to do what others did: head for Trafalgar Square to get lit up’. Peace meant a future and, with any luck, a livelihood as a painter. There was talk of restrictions lifting and horizons opening up, some time but not soon. Foreign travel remained impossible for non-service people except for those officially employed or able to plead urgent business. Mervyn Peake went to France immediately after VE Day, for Leader magazine, and on into Germany; his dazed drawings of Belsen were published at the end of June; Stephen Spender secured a commission to report on the attitudes of German intellectuals during the war; Cyril Connolly wangled authorisation to travel, being the editor of Horizon, and found Paris wanting. ‘The black market flourishes like a giant fungus, the Resistance is bitter and disillusioned.’ Flying back he saw, horrible below him, under ‘a vast thick cloud of sooty mucus, ring-worm circles of brick villas, grey and gloomy factories and towers’.27 This was London, not flattened but decrepit. Auden, who had been in America throughout the war, arrived in London as a major in the US army attached to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and, he boasted, ‘the first major poet to fly the Atlantic’.28 In the course of seeing again Spender and John Lehmann, Britten and Eliot and everyone else whom he thought mattered, he told Freud that he was the one person he really wanted to see.

  ‘Auden made lots of amorous propositions to me. Jimmy Stern the writer, whose wife Tania, a psychiatrist’s daughter, was my mother’s best friend, came over with him, which is how I got to know him.’ Auden harangued his friends on Britain’s impoverishment and loss of status and on the awful food and lack of heating. ‘London hasn’t really been bombed,’29 he said, not having seen as much damage as he had expected. ‘He felt that people in London didn’t want to know him and I saw him in a very concentrated way for a while.’ He urged Freud to read The Hobbit; J. R. R. Tolkein’s concept of a Nordic starter saga disguised as a children’s book and realised in pedantic detail appealed to his donnish schoolboy streak; Freud found it tiresome, marginally preferring Mervyn Peake’s labyrinthine Titus Groan, also recommended by Auden. Its excesses were more appropriate to the circumstances of being detained in England and longing to get away. ‘Auden was someone who decided everything beforehand. He had read Sigmund Freud at school and I think he decided that I was his new friend, which up to a point I was, but I think he also decided I was his boyfriend, or could be, which I wasn’t. And then he wrote from America: he had ideas about art, which were completely silly, but some of his ideas were very stimulating, absolutely brilliant, up to a point. He said, “Violence is such a bore.” His last words, he said to me, were going to be: “I’ve never done this before.”’

  During the hot summer of 1945 Freud often bathed in the canal. ‘I used to jump in off the bridge. There was an electric cable in the mud and a boy dived from the bridge and touched it and was killed and so they looked round for the oldest person to blame and I was tipped off to keep out of the way, so I stopped bathing there.’

  In June Neo-Romanticism was in full flourish with the first performance of Britten’s Peter Grimes, at Covent Garden, and the release of Powell and Pressburger’s jaunty Hebridean odyssey I Know Where I’m Going. That month Freud drew Peter Watson on Ingres paper, marmoreal, near Neo-Classical, hunched slightly, with dandyish diffidence, in his furrowed corduroy jacket. This drawing, lucid, restrained, intimate and above all responsive in character, marked the onset of Freud’s graphic finesse: since the comparable drawing of Craxton some months before (Young Man, 1944) there had been a sharpening of focus, a burnishing of perspicacity. Watson, still Freud’s most generous and undemanding patron, was seeing his prospects begin to open out after six years of cultural insularity. Once again, he was thinking, he could live in Paris.

  With beach defences dismantled and the more remote British Isles accessible once again, the Neo-Romantic impulse went island hopping, if only in fancy. ‘Perhaps we shall see islands again some day,’ wrote Wrey Gardiner in The Dark Thorn. ‘The Scillies, the Atlantic Islands of Madeira and the Azores, the West Indies: What an escapist dream they look like on the page. The island is a symbol.’30

  ‘Everything on the Scillies is in miniature, although once on the islands one seems to be walking up hills and down valleys; the Scillies form a little world complete in themselves,’ John Betjeman rhapsodised in his 1934 Shell Guide to Cornwall. English holidaymakers there in the immediate post-war years could imagine they were abroad. Palm trees flourished on at least one of the islands and, marooned on shore, figureheads salvaged from wrecks strained towards the sea. Besides cosy scale and shoreline surreality, the Scillies offered oceanic skies. As Geoffrey Grigson enthused in his 1948 Vision of England guide to the Scilly Isles: ‘Light is the energiser of the Isles of Scilly, a light sharper, clearer, giving more definition than the hazy light of the English mainland.’

  In this beguiling place, recommended to Craxton and him by EQ, Freud came as close as he ever would to slipping into Neo-Romantic idiom. But even in the Scillies, when Peter Watson paid for them to go there in the late summer of 1945, he drew plants, boats and black rocks on beaches roundly and singularly, as though Robinson Crusoe had just clapped eyes
on them. The Scillies, Freud’s first proper islands since childhood on Hiddensee, and as remote as one could be from London while remaining in England – ‘a tropic in a northern sea / where palm joins gorse’, the poet Anne Ridler wrote31 – were to be stepping stones, he hoped, to the continent. He and Craxton needed to get to Paris in time to see the exhibition ‘Picasso Libre’. ‘I longed to go to France and couldn’t so went to the Scilly Isles.’ Many refugees from France in 1940 had arrived in Britain by way of the Scillies. ‘I thought I could stow away on one of the Breton fishing boats to get to France. But they said we’re not taking you unless you have a bicycle – there were no bicycles in France – so I went back to London, got a bicycle, went all the way back to the Scillies, gave it to them and stowed away on the Breton boat, and then the harbour police came. Obviously tipped off by them.’

  They stayed first on St Mary’s, the largest island, then on Tresco. ‘A horrible family the Dorrien-Smiths owned it and made it very feudal: everyone was subservient to them.’ They took rooms in a fisherman’s cottage. ‘A slightly unusual fisherman: his wife was from Plymouth and made puppets.’ Meanwhile Major A. A. Dorrien-Smith, whose ancestor T. A. Dorrien-Smith had discovered that the Monterey Pine made the best windbreak and had initiated commercial flower-cultivation on Tresco, held sway. There were also the doctors: Dr John Wells, who had ambitions as a painter and was about to remove himself to Cornwall where he became part of the St Ives School, and ‘an Italian doctor – “The Count of San Remo” – he was rather old with a moustache and had been told that he’d better not move away while the war was on. His son, Giorgio, was very handsome and there weren’t many hostesses around in the islands so he had a nurse – who I rather liked; he used to go with this fat nurse into the rushes, which was very exciting: pink on Scillonian sand.’ Craxton dallied with Sonia Leon, sixteen years old and half-Jewish, whom he had met on the boat to the Scillies and who later married the writer Peter Quennell. (‘Fourth wife called Spider,’ Freud commented. ‘Maddening giggle.’) Freud struck up with another girl on the Scillonian. ‘She was being sick at the time, the boat pitched, and I went off her then. Her green face.’ She lived on the other side of the island and he watched out for her, using binoculars, only to find that he was being looked back at, through binoculars, by her father. Who, when they met, commented on the zoot suit he was wearing, made up for him by a Welsh tailor in the Marylebone Road for £3 10s: long jacket and trousers with wide knees and narrow ankles. ‘He was terrifically fascistic. “It’s a bit jewy,” he said.’ Freud used to lie around with the girl, not draw her; it was ‘a sort of holiday affair’ and Lorna Wishart found out.