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The Lives of Lucian Freud

Page 28

by William Feaver


  Man with a Thistle, 1946

  ‘I felt more dissatisfied than daring. I set certain rules for myself and I suppose those rules were exclusive. Never putting paint on top of paint. Never touching anything twice; and I didn’t want things to look arty (which I thought of as hand-made), I wanted them to look as if they had come about on their own. Working in this way and not wanting there to be a mark or guideline, I went wrong through lack of composition. In the way that people go wrong who make up the story as they go along.’ And he had to eke out the paint. ‘I’d taken tubes and I was very careful and used very little and painted thinly. I was very careful and then I got my mother to send some paint. Quite a lot of it was German paint, with wax in. It could be used more easily working in the sun.’

  Lieb Mutt,

  I have a horrible feeling that you did not get my last letter, which included an urgent request for money and also my front door key. Thank you very much for the clothes. I hoped to find a letter in the pockets but then I remembered about how law-abiding you are. Please write. I have had and have no money for over a month and although I have almost no expenses I owe my rent to the family with whom I live.7

  The rent for Delamere was to go to Mrs Harte, who lived downstairs at number 20. ‘The rent man would come round and she’d pay for me while I was away. The lesson is that neighbours must never be asked.’

  In the first week of November a yacht appeared and anchored in a secluded bay. It was the two-masted converted lugger Truant owned by George Millar, one-time chief reporter for the Beaverbrook press in Paris. ‘Amazingly good-looking he was,’ Freud remembered. ‘Time magazine said of him “the face of a fanatic without dogma”. Rather pretty first wife worked on Horizon and went off.’ Millar, who was thirty-six, had distinguished himself by escaping from a train taking him to a German prisoner-of-war camp and had then joined the SOE to become a liaison officer in the French Resistance, eventfully so, hence his book Maquis, published in 1945, which paid for the Truant in which he and his new wife Isabel made their way through French canals and along the Mediterranean from Marseilles. Their arrival off Poros caused a stir in that it was the first time an English vessel had been seen in those waters since before the war; and as Millar describes it in Isabel and the Sea, his account of the voyage published a year or so later, he and Isabel were in turn surprised by the sudden arrival on board of ‘a lanky youth in a faded blue shirt’ who ‘drank two glasses of ouzo carelessly, with the speed of a rooster’s seduction’. This was Craxton, who rapidly established, Millar later wrote, that they had ‘mutual acquaintances in London, Paris and Hampshire’.8 Millar knew EQ (Kit Nicholson had been his supervisor in the Architecture School in Cambridge) and he too had frequented the Gargoyle. The following day a boy showed the Millars where Craxton was staying. ‘Craxton thundered down an exterior wooden staircase which trembled to his weight, and Lucian Freud followed him diffidently, a heavily built young man with a habit of carrying his head forward and glancing up through his eyebrows. He wore a football jersey marked with one thick maroon horizontal stripe on an off-white ground and, below that awesome garment, khaki-drill trousers.’ Craxton’s room was the untidier of the two and Millar noticed pinned up beside his bed the photograph of Freud in the football jersey holding the stuffed zebra head. ‘Freud’s room, like his painting, was neater, harder, and more self-conscious than Craxton’s … Freud was working on a self-portrait. Only the chestnut hair, one enraged eye, a long nose, had been minutely and exquisitely painted. Down in a corner of the canvas the outline of a tall Greek thistle had been pencilled in.’9

  At first, Millar found, Freud was less forthcoming than Craxton. ‘The type of young man who is highly strung, yet who flings himself impetuously at certain types of physical discomfort and even danger.’10 His instinct had been to shy away when the Truant first dropped anchor. ‘But the Maestro-Petros were excited that we knew strangers on a boat – the civil war was going on so there was nobody else foreign around – and they bagged some things for us to take out there.’ To the Millars, returning Craxton’s call, it seemed that they were starved of company. ‘They appeared to be delighted to see us, eager to drown us in impetuous descriptions of Poros and Greece,’ Millar wrote. ‘Freud talked fluently with a larger vocabulary than the average young Englishman, with more tendency to exclaim and to reiterate, and with only a hint of throat guttural in the r’s. Craxton, pleasingly unselfish, was often prepared to listen to his companion.’11

  ‘My memory is retentive of faces, mannerisms, even long stretches of dialogue,’ Millar assured his readers in the preface to Horned Pigeon, his newly published prequel to Maquis.12 Freud and Craxton were the most mannered perhaps, certainly among the most memorable characters he encountered on his four-month odyssey, and accordingly he assigned them prominent roles in Chapter 28. Craxton had a ‘wispy moustache growing outwards from the division of his upper lip, as though the besiegers had managed to land a feeble airborne force’, and kept saying things were ‘delicious’. Having retained his flair for perky detail (ever the Beaverbrook journalist), Millar continued: ‘his favourite adjective at that time was “wonderful” and while we talked with them we reeled under enfilades of wonderfuls and deliciouses.’ As for first impressions, he recalled Freud saying to him that when he first saw Truant he feared the worst: ‘I feared that some purple-faced yachting cap, or some frightful lawyer from London, would leap out at me.’13 He rated Millar worth getting to know: a pretty good gossip. ‘George Millar was a taller, more athletic, more handsome, non-queer Bruce Chatwin; Isabel his wife was chickeny and asleep a lot. He was a hero and couldn’t stop being heroic and that was the point. He was interesting about Beaverbrook, about his stable of women he used to fuck, including his son’s.’

  Craxton wrote to EQ reminding her that she had told them to look out for Millar. (A letter, Millar noted, written ‘in characters one inch high on a blood-coloured piece of paper measuring three feet by two’.)14 And there he was, providentially well equipped at that: ‘Their little cabin is delicious white with all the nicest books.’15 He went on to report ‘dough crisis as usual’ and that he had run out of materials. ‘Lucian is about a month and a half behind with his payments here and things are a bit restless – still he paints all day & at work now on a wonder[ful] large self portrait of himself looking through a shuttered window … Looch sends his love and congratulates you on discovering Miller … It was pure chance that drove them to shelter in Poros.’ Claiming later on that he had done ‘well over 60 pictures’ and that it rained a lot he added: ‘Loochie and I still bath with pleasure and my swimming gets more and more mermanly.’16 With winter setting in they discussed how they might manage to return to England. ‘Craxton thought he might be able to prevail on some friend in Athens to send him back by air,’ Millar heard. ‘While Freud had been given the idea that he might return to England by reporting himself to a British consulate as a “Distressed British Subject”.’17

  Boat moored off Poros, 1946

  Freud succeeded in selling a few of the smaller paintings. ‘I did once have the money to get back. Fifteen or twelve pounds or something: just not enough.’ And even that he lost. ‘The travelling roulette table came round so I didn’t have any again.’

  Being more or less stranded in Greece, Freud was unaware of an article by Michael Ayrton in the third number of Orion arguing that ‘one or more facets of a single tradition’ were the dominant concern in British art18 and that Lucian Freud (‘his paintings … show a steady development’) and John Minton represented those two facets. There they were, two of a kind but contrastingly so: Freud wintering on Poros painting lemons and consorting with misfits, and six months later Minton on Corsica illustrating Time was Away, Alan Ross’s travel book commissioned by John Lehmann, his Corsica proving to be Treasure Island alleviated with café-bars. Currency-restricted ration-book holders in late forties Britain were to regard Minton’s drawings of superabundant produce in Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean
Food as visions of plenty to come and, meanwhile, plenty elsewhere to be had. Even on Poros there was good food to be had, provided one’s rent money arrived.

  Towards the end of the year Craxton exhibited at the British Council in Athens where Ghika had been given a retrospective (aged forty) a few months before. Craxton, who had met Ghika in London a year before, was to derive from his take on the Byzantine every element of style: ‘colour used emotionally rather than descriptively’ as he put it fifty years later in his obituary of Ghika, his lifelong exemplar.19 Freud went too and took the opportunity to go to the Byzantine Museum. ‘I went quite a few times. It affected me, trying to do simple forms. I hadn’t seen [Byzantine] things as part of the life. The portraits, and the trees and so on, seemed so robust and subtle.’ He had been told that when his grandfather went to Athens in 1904 he made a point of putting on his best shirt before going to see the Acropolis.

  ‘Craxton was friendly with a man in the Canadian Embassy. He had a boat and we went out from Athens around the harbour and Greek soldiers started shouting something and then bullets were coming at us and I was lying down saying this is the most boring thing that ever happened to me in my life. They were shooting in dirty uniforms and the man from the Embassy said, “I may have to report this.”’

  Freud returned to Poros with Lady Norton and others in a motor launch belonging to the British commander-in-chief in Greece. ‘We shot across from Athens,’ he told George Millar. ‘It was wonderful. We only took an hour and a half and spray was breaking like mad over the thing.’20 He and Craxton entertained the party, taking them to a taverna and inviting them to breakfast in their lodgings the next morning. Craxton then returned with them to Athens, intending to go on to Crete, having wangled a lift on a naval vessel. ‘I think if there was something he thought worthwhile I doubt if I’d have gone: he never wanted any of the special treatment to go to anyone else so he’d make arrangements and be off. Not only that: he very much didn’t want me to come as I think he thought sponging doesn’t work so well if it’s joint.’

  Watching the boat dwindle to a jolting dot, Freud was downcast. ‘I remember being alone.’ He and the Millars were conscious of the sudden silence. Christmas loomed. ‘We all felt a little depressed,’ Millar wrote. ‘Particularly Freud, who talked, as he accompanied us to Truant, of the impermanence of life and the probability of early, sudden, violent, and tragic death.’21

  ‘I had no money and occasionally – to do with hospitality – I had to barter to buy something. I had fancy shirts from the Charing Cross Road and swapped a checked shirt for a chicken. And then, soon after, a boat arrived and there was my red-and-blue-checked shirt on a sailor: a shirt from Cecil Gee’s. It made me think of the world of Ovid.’ The Millars invited him to lunch so he took the bartered chicken to them, its claws tied with yellow ribbon. He asked Millar how a chicken should be killed and, told that the thing to do was to wring its neck, he pulled hard and the head came off in his hand. Millar plucked and cleaned the remains and Freud ‘after the usual wriggles and grimaces, drew drawing materials from his bosom and set to work’. He had decided to draw Truant, or rather they asked him to draw it for a Christmas card (‘he said he only did that to get me off the boat’) and he asked to borrow the dinghy to go ashore with his sketchbook and find a good spot. Millar was intrigued by his habit of carrying his drawing things inside his shirt and would shove a hand in and feel around to find his inkbottle. ‘He had another, equally disconcerting habit of glaring at you, and then looking swiftly down in sudden shyness. There were signs of greatness in him, and I wish that I had been as brave as he at the age of twenty-three.’22

  Freud took them to meet Giorgios Seferiades (pen name George Seferis) and ‘banged on all the doors and windows while we stood shyly before the house’ until the poet appeared on the balcony above. Seferis was the leading figure in an article by Nanos Valaoritis on modern Greek poetry in the March issue of Horizon: an exile returned to a land of maddening wind, ‘a wind laying naked the bone from the flesh’, ‘constantly haunted’, Valaoritis wrote, ‘by the vision of a world and a happiness lost for ever’.23 Seferis, Freud knew, was ‘very grand, distinguished, elderly – aged forty-six – the T. S. Eliot of Greece’. Indeed, he had translated The Waste Land into Greek and was spending a two-month holiday on Poros, ‘cleansed progressively by such a life’, he said. Millar was surprised ‘that good poetry could issue from a man with such fleshy hams and thighs’. Freud, on the other hand, wondered at the classical restraint of another guest.24

  ‘A man who was there said, “I was swimming today in the sea, I went far out and, twelve or fourteen feet down, I saw an archaic Greek statue lying there. I stayed and looked and looked.” “But didn’t you think of getting it?” “No. It looked so beautiful there,” he said.’

  To Craxton such inhibition was plain silly, according to Freud, who confessed to having been a lookout for him when he snaffled icons. ‘I was fortunate enough to witness some of his more daring acquisitions. On Poros there were wayside shrines, small, hollowed out, open air. I used to watch outside. My father loved old things: antiques and statues that he got from his father. These icons were perfectly nice, very old, kissed away, and Johnny said, “Do you think your father would like one?” The icons were “odds and ends of little solemn gods”, as Hilaire Belloc wrote. It was pilferage, and that was why later on he was kicked out of Greece, barred for four or five years; he was just light-fingered, always pinched.’

  Winter set in. There had been the sirocco and then suddenly it snowed. There was hunger on the island, not the starvation that there had been during the war, but bad enough. ‘When it was Christmas I really minded being there: I was upstairs and they were below having a Greek Christmas, and because of being a paying guest …… I just felt a bit bereft.’ He and the Millars were invited to dinner at the big house belonging to a man called Christos Diamantopoulos. They had Christmas pudding made with the help of a German cookery book from the 1820s. Their host had two heart attacks that night. A few days later the Millars left. It rained and rained and they called in at Freud’s lodgings to say goodbye and tell him that they knew that they would meet him again. ‘Freud was in his small, cold room, concentrating on an exquisite painting of a lemon.’25

  The Millars sold the Truant to a British general they met in Piraeus who told them he fancied sailing it back to England.

  ‘What George Millar didn’t know was that Lady Norton had said to me, “I’m going skiing in Italy: I can give you a lift as far as there.” But she then met George and gave him the seat on the aeroplane because he was tall and blond and she fancied him. Simply disgusting; especially as when I went to Athens to get a visa for going on the plane and said I was going with her, I got those looks, as she was a well-known nymphomaniac.’

  Darling Felicity [December 1946]

  I hope you like this card it seems the best I have seen for very long [the card shows an old maid muzzled and clamped]. Where are you? and doing what? I am on the most amazing Island but I think I will soon come to London. A very happy and lucky new year and I hope to see you soon. Write me c/o Lady Norton, British Embassy Athens Greece. Johnny Craxton is here but has dissapeaed I hope the Bandits have (not got him).26

  When Craxton returned they went by ferry to other islands. ‘I saw Ghika’s amazing palace on Hydra, one of the merchant palaces. His family had been one of the few to resist the blockade against Napoleon. And I saw the Tombazes’ palace with brand-new-looking, 1815, gilt Empire furniture. The Greeks didn’t make furniture so they were paid in furniture. The hideousness of it: green striped silks and bright gold. You were allowed to go in and look; Craxton got in, anyway; he always knew somebody. He didn’t notice he wasn’t welcome. I hate that.’ The palace was to become an art school. ‘Craxton borrowed a house on Spetsai for a week, from a fashionable woman in Athens, Dora Morchetti, Nanos Valaoritis’ aunt; he’d pressed on as usual and she’d said very well then. She lent the house to Johnny but the kitchen was
locked. The servants – this was not unusual there – were poor relations (rather like the maids of whores in Shepherd’s Market are often their mothers) and one of them was a rather tragic niece or cousin: a beautiful girl.’ Nothing developed between Freud and the girl. ‘The word in Greek is gestinos? Which means “Miss” which means “Virgin”. I didn’t feel at all forward in a country where I couldn’t speak the language, had no money and had colitis from the greasy food. There’s no forcing anyone when you are a dodgy mixture between tourist and spiv and don’t feel very well. I was fairly ill all the time.’

  Anxious to buy a ticket home he wrote to his mother trying to arrange for her to give twenty pounds to Nanos Valaoritis, who would then ask his mother in Athens to forward him the equivalent. ‘I’m sorry that all my worries are money,’ he said. ‘But what is the use of a lot of saleable pictures on a Greek island?’ The alternative possibility of being shipped back to Britain as a DBS (Distressed British Subject) proved impracticable. ‘I was in Greece as a perfectly ordinary tourist, so I couldn’t have been a DBS, as it was for if you had been in the services. It was to do with the Merchant Navy; if you deserted and were caught you were sent back, but I knew that they took your passport away and only gave it back if you repaid them, and I must have known that was impossible.’

 

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