The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘Greece is rapidly becoming a fascist state,’ it was reported at this time. ‘British prestige and moral standing is falling rapidly in Greece.’2 Greece was isolated in 1946, plunged in civil war and lacking ready communication with the rest of Europe. The only regular service by sea was from Marseilles to Piraeus on the Corinthia. Freud sent Craxton a telegram telling him to expect him and took the train to Marseilles. Waiting several days to embark, he whiled away the time drawing from his hotel window moored boats and swimming races in the harbour. His attention wandered.

  ‘I was sitting in my hotel in the Vieux Port watching girls going with clients into houses and the clients coming out afterwards completely done in. A girl I talked to said her father or uncle was a painter and a girl with her said, “She’s lovely: why don’t you go with her?” I couldn’t fancy them but in the end I said, “OK,” and went with her to the hotel. And they were absolutely furious as I didn’t have a suite – as I had very little money – and she came to my single room. Because of my incapacity it took ages; but then she washed herself in the tin bidet, and that was rather nice, and in the end she left and her ponce was waiting outside the door and he beat her up – a frightful noise – because, he said, she had done more things than planned as she’d been so long doing them. And then there was a misuse-of-room row and would I pay extra to the hotel for not using their whores. I knew afterwards why she wasn’t busy. Why she had been available. She had clap.’

  In London a friend, Nanos Valaoritis, ‘from an ancient Greek family’, who worked at the Greek Embassy and knew his parents, had advised him to get a deck ticket. He had given him letters of introduction, including one to Nikos Kavvadias, a poet and womaniser nicknamed Marabou who worked as wireless operator on the Corinthia. ‘He didn’t speak English and my restaurant French didn’t get me very far but, anyway, we were walking up and down the deck and he said, “Lid ooze go goo then you and I”. It was Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. We talked Waste Land. Eliot is loved in Greece.’ Kavvadias had become a Greek John Masefield, though with greater sea-going experience, and claimed to be able to tell, blindfold, what country a woman came from by sniffing her skin.

  ‘I’d got clap. It’s a fever; it was very hot, and there was no medicine. Marabou commiserated and said he could give me the name of a doctor in Athens. He was the only one I told but whenever I passed the crew they put their hands to their parts and went Oooh Oooh.’ Living on deck he observed the other passengers and drew them: thirty or so drawings in a small sketchbook. Passing Stromboli (‘it had got lava dribbling down, and orange’) they went through the Strait of Messina into the Aegean and so to Piraeus, which had been devastated by bombing. ‘There were carts made of wood converted into prams to get passengers’ luggage off and I saw a boy lying asleep with his bottom in one of these carts and his mouth open and a thick web of flies that went up and descended on his face as he breathed in and out. Between Piraeus – a lovely shambles – and Athens there was a mile of land where people were living and camping, shouting and selling from impromptu bars and stalls. I saw a car without any tyres on its wheels, rattling along. Athens staggered me: such an oriental town. I was one of five non-Greeks in all Athens, it seemed; it was very much civil war. And no sign of Craxton, he didn’t meet me though he was staying in Athens; perhaps he didn’t want me there. I only had ten pounds – enough for the moment – and the doctor’s address.

  ‘I wandered round. In a strange square, Omonoia Square, I found a hotel and a man at the counter who was drugged, half asleep, took me up to a room with two beds and two mattresses on the floor. One of those mattresses was for me and I thought, God. I left my sack there and went off to the doctor in a shoddy first-floor room with bright maps on the wall of human insides, the liver scarlet. That was the waiting room, divided by a curtain from the surgery, from which I heard terrible screams and arguments. Victim left. I went in. The doctor was a monstrous little man, like Mr Punch, and he said, “I’ll give you an injection.” Obviously water. Penicillin? Never heard of it. “What money do you have?” “£10.” “I’ll have that. You’re a painter? Just give me your work for the other treatment.”’

  Fortunately a friend of Craxton’s appeared: ‘a queer, old-style, French-educated interior decorator. He had a furious argument with the doctors and I left with him and he gave me the name of a doctor who had penicillin. It wasn’t M&B [sulfapyridine] but penicillin that was needed. Those very strong strains [of VD] developed through GIs in Naples which was the absolute centre of VD in Europe: US soldiers were handed out M&B, took it and stopped and then got the very strong, tough little ice-cream-vending germs. Posters used to say Clean Living is the Only Safeguard.’ Successfully treated, Freud caught up with Craxton and went off to Poros with him.

  Before taking the boat to Poros Freud had attempted a currency exchange with Andreas Kambas, who had been in love with Matsie Hadjilazaros, an intellectual girl who had left him in Paris for Javier Vilató. The plan was that his parents, with whom he arranged for Kambas to stay, would give him pounds in London and Freud would go to the Kambas family for the Greek equivalent. He went to their mansion in Athens to collect it.

  ‘A portly merchant came down. “I’ve come from Andreas.” “We’ve not heard from him.” “Did he tell you?” “No, we’ve not heard from him.” So I said goodbye. It transpired he’d been turned out for having a girlfriend, or going with a married woman and getting her into trouble when discovered. It was very medieval. He was a real shit, big and never stopped eating. And he was staying with my parents. Naturally I didn’t write to them or tell them; equally naturally, when I got back to London and saw him in a café I tipped his chair over. I did sell a picture to Matsie, who had been married to Andreas Embirikos, a psychologist, who bought a drawing of a quince as I was skint and invited me to his wedding in Athens and when I went I was the only guest. Because he’d been married before nobody else went. I gave him one of the few oils I did in Greece: a pigeon.’ Freud told Nanos Valaoritis that Embirikos was the only analyst he had ever liked.

  Coming into Poros ‘gives the illusion of a deep dream’, Henry Miller wrote in The Colossus of Maroussi, his tale of holidaying in Greece in 1939–40. ‘Suddenly the land converges on all sides and the boat is squeezed into a narrow strait from which there seems to be no egress.’ Four or five hours from Athens by ferry, a summer resort for Athenians, Poros, famous for its pinewoods, lemon groves and domed clock tower, hugs the shoreline of the mainland. ‘The island revolves in cubistic planes, one of walls and windows, one of rocks and goats, one of stiff-blown trees and shrubs, and so on.’3

  Freud did not see Poros in quite such Jungian terms as Henry Miller. To him at first sight it seemed more a Greek Tenby, ‘curved away from the Peloponnese with the village spread along the water, and a naval station’. He and Craxton lodged with an Abyssinian Greek family called Maestro-Petro in a house with an iron gate, tangerine trees and chickens pecking around in the dirt. They had the two upstairs rooms, reached from outside up a flight of steps. Initially Freud painted Craxton (Man with a Moustache: open-necked shirt, blond hair, sunburnt forehead) and Craxton drew Freud. Both were barber’s shop Adonis heads, dissociated from Poros or indeed anywhere. Craxton’s mannerisms had become smoother with practice.

  Life on Poros was basic, startlingly so, even for someone used to the insufficiencies of post-war England, and increasingly so as winter approached. ‘It was very very hard.’ When the money came through and they could pay their rent there was enough food, otherwise they and their hosts went short. ‘I had to pay two or three pounds a week board and lodging. The family – a widow and children – were rather desperate and relied on us. There were three sons and the daughter, no father, and the woman had a moustache. The elder son was a gambler and sold the family pig to get money. I had to hold the pig for him to kill it and tried to cover my ears with my shoulders while it screamed and the mother was crying. People bought the bits of pig to eat. There was a good smell a
s it cooked.

  ‘We went round cafés on the island and maybe had a coffee but couldn’t sit down. This went on for a month. And then one day a little boat bobbed up with John Lehmann and a British Council consignment from Athens and they sat down and bought us some drinks. Then Johnny bought a round, a £1 round, of drinks. And we had been there a month on nothing, not even lemonade. He was so mean. This was an opportunity for him and he arranged to go back with them to Athens, being friendly with Lady Norton: he had done Christmas cards and stripped furniture for her.’ In October, scaling up from pomegranates and lemons, Freud had painted Petros, one of the sons of the house. ‘A gentle boy, he said to me after one of his arguments with his catlike sister, Maria: “I understand they voice their opinion in England.”’ In the painting, Greek Boy, he is on his dignity, very much the young head of the house, immaculate hair catching the light like a raven’s wing. ‘I was pleased with it. Brown and green: you could see I’d been to the Byzantine Museum.’ Later, in London, Craxton swapped one of his drawings for it.

  Guerrillas were operating in the mountains on the mainland. ‘I couldn’t work at night because of the lack of electric light insofar as bandits raided the island and broke the light plant. I had to read and draw by candlelight. There were suspected communists in the village and the police were horrible. They would go around dirty, smoking, and they would pick on people if they thought they were communists and would go and push their chairs over in the café. It was obvious the poor people were communists.’ He was told that women were seized by bandits. ‘I was amazed when they said it. I thought WHAT? But it wasn’t something you could ask about.’

  Over on the Peloponnese Freud had an encounter straight out of classical legend. ‘I went across and out of the village into the hills and met a shepherd with his goats and he tried to give me one of the kids and was terribly hurt that I didn’t accept. It took me ages and ages to persuade him. He never saw a stranger. “Stranger” and “guest” is the same to them. A stranger is a guest, and you give something to guests and he only had his herd.’

  He learnt that Demosthenes had poisoned himself on Poros at the temple of Poseidon. Island life could indeed seem ageless, or perennially archaic. ‘There was no tourism. After all, even in Athens it was fairly dangerous: you could walk out on to the hills in ten minutes and if they saw a stranger they threw stones. And in village life there were customs that refer back to ancient Greece. One thing stayed in my mind: Poros had sea on one side and on the other just the width of the Thames from the Peloponnese. Across the water there was a primitive village called Galata with one whore in it for the whole place. Sometimes she came across to Poros.

  Also a boat came once with a corpse and there were women wailing and crying; then as the boat approached, people started cheering and shouting and drinking. By the time they landed it got really lively. Not one of them went out to the boat though, they just turned up the volume.’ When he turned to locals for company he was charmed and beguiled. ‘I used to go to the lemon orchards and have conversations about religion with a friend I made. We talked about girls and religion. I said, “Do you believe?” “How do you mean?” he said, amazed. “He’s there, after all, whether you believe in him or not.” He was younger than me, rough, worked in the orchards. (His parents had farms outside Poros.) Gave rather nice presents. Sweet lemons. They were like grapefruit. When we went for walks a cripple who hadn’t got legs, only shinbones, came with us, on all fours, like a dog. He never went into Poros, as he was a freak. When it was dark he’d say, “There are birds in that tree. I’ll show you,” and he’d get a catapult out of his shirt front and shoot into the trees and there would be a terrible commotion. He could tell there were birds there as he lived outside; his parents wouldn’t let him sleep indoors. It was that primitive thing that, if people look bad enough, they are either hidden or kicked out. He was very lively, very limited, looked very intelligent and animal-like, a very interesting semi-wild animal. He had this life on the ground.

  ‘I’d draw in the cafés and people would come and watch and I’d put a bird on top of the head of the drawing of a man and they’d point to the man and say “You’ve got a bird on top of your head. Ha ha.” I noticed that on several occasions. They looked at a drawing and believed in it and accepted it. Not like the British.’

  Language was not much of a problem. ‘I could get along. A few words. It was so simple. My mother said that knowing ancient Greek, as she did, was a hindrance to learning modern Greek. I knew the nouns, never knew the tenses. Suddenly you’d hear a word and get a shock, coming upon a word like kleptomania. Gestures were odd too. When the gesture for “you come here” was a come-away gesture with a hand underneath. You got used to it. I used to play cards by candlelight. Conversations then were like in England, about sex, lamenting not having a sister and no girls. And wanking jokes. If one of the sisters was seduced by a man there was danger. They could do something with their older sister though: I think in fact it went on for a very long time.’ Ostensibly, segregation was strict, as was the dress code. ‘If a woman were wearing trousers in Athens, nuns would cross themselves as they passed by.

  ‘When I was in Greece I didn’t want to have a relief or anything. I wasn’t like Robert Colquhoun, who would wander round the streets saying, “I want me hole. I want to have me hole.” (What is it in Scottish? “I want me houle.”) I never wanted “me houle” at all. I mean, I longed to meet someone who I could actually like.

  ‘Once, when I went to Athens to try and get some money, I was so homesick for London I went into a place where the British army drank and danced. There were lots of Greek girls. I was with one and she said, “Would you like to stay?” “No money.” “You need only pay for the room.”

  ‘So we went to Plaka and a huge five-storey house. She was a number there, it was a rooming house for whores, and I stayed. A tiny bed. Quite nice. In the middle of the night her friend came in and sat on the bed, on me, and asked how she’d got on. I told her in Greek to fuck off and she was so impressed I was allowed to stay two nights extra.’

  On Poros hand to mouth was the means of existence; to those painting there the way of life was similarly primal in that hand-to-mouth necessity paralleled the constant practice of eye to hand, hand to eye. Craxton told Geoffrey Grigson, who was preparing an essay on him to be published as a Horizon monograph, that in Greece he found it ‘possible to feel a real person – real people, real elements, real windows – real sun above all. In a life of reality my mind really works.’4 Freud wouldn’t have said that: much too glib; he did, however, paint real elements by real windows. These were, Craxton was to remark many years later, ‘some of his most limpid and luminous paintings’.5 A tangerine, a pomegranate, sun-bleached bone and lemons with shadows bitten in like scorch marks glowed that autumn in the upstairs room, enhanced, Freud said, by ‘the idea of metamorphoses and the light’. This exposed the widening differences between the two. Freud painted Craxton factually – a friendly specimen in daylight exposure – whereas Craxton drew him plumped up into a curly-haired Adonis. Freud’s powers of concentration propelled him away from Craxton’s terms of idyllic arrangement and generality.

  Greek light denies distances. Everything, near or far, tends to appear evenly distinct. Freud’s lemons, the renowned Poros lemons, are Neo-Classical fruit, glossy as stoneware in the winter brightness. They are not symbolic, yet – just as the lemons of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (‘Little lemon, lemon tree … an oil lamp and a blanket on the floor’) relate to death – these painted lemons have a poetic singularity. Freud’s small Poros pictures turned out iconic, literally so in some cases in that occasionally, for want of canvas or panel, he resorted to using what pious souls would deem holy grounds. ‘All Greek houses have religious books and I did some paintings on the covers of books I stole. A reason why one of my lemons has eroded is that I tore a cover off one, to use, and glue stains have come through in the picture.’

  What Freud painted in Greece was not
unlike what he painted in London (lemons and fig tree substituting for quinces and potted palm), sanctified a little in the stronger light. He had brought sketchbooks with him from Paris. One in particular, oblong with a brown cover, he filled with chickens and pigeons, a pomegranate split open, the yard outside his lodgings, lounging village youths and the son of the house with incipient moustache, posing manfully. There were also thumbnail drawings – little more than doodles – for a self-portrait, working towards what became Still Life with Green Lemon: a lemon leaf posed like a sail against horizontal strips of shutter and sea as the artist’s eye and nose and a tuft of hair edge warily into view. He presented more of himself in a second self-portrait, Man with a Thistle, completed in the New Year. For this he had a canvas. Bleached out and baleful, the painting was an account of what it felt like to find mannerisms cramping one’s determination. Nanos Valaoritis described its bristling quizzicality in a diary published in Botteghe Oscure: ‘L. looking at L. looking at L. in the looking glass thinks he is L. looking at L. In fact he only sees L. looking at himself. He is a sort of mirror. L. invents a personality for people which he imposes upon them by the force of conviction and concentration like a distortion imposed on one by a crooked mirror.’6