The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Early in 1947 the Attlee government was getting round to telling the Americans that the British could no longer afford to maintain their presence in Greece, Britain itself being a Distressed Object. However in February Freud succeeded in borrowing from Lady Norton the cost of a ticket to Marseilles. ‘I never gave the money back. I just thought she was horrible. I had a note once from someone saying that I “owed Greece a lot”. That must have been her.’ He gave his hosts, the family downstairs, a little painting of a pigeon. When this came up for auction at Christie’s nearly sixty years later he dismissed it as a ‘souvenir’, hinting that Craxton had got it off the family and sold it on.

  Freud owed more to Greece, in the short term, than he did to Paris. Greece gave him light and air. The elemental qualities of Poros, white walls and icons, the hovering falcons, sweet lemons and sour, represented astringency tempered if not mellowed by acquaintance, frugality and generosity intermixed. The paintings he brought back with him reflect, besides the blue and white of the islands, the virtues of insularity. Before Greece his still lives had been tinged with Surrealism. Greece reduced him to essentials. The reality, there on the table in his upstairs room, concentrated him for a while. He took back to England a clutch of distinctive work. ‘Ten things, mostly tiny, strapped together: lemons, portrait of boy, little head of Johnny Craxton, tangerines, lots of drawings, little self-portrait head half cut off. The drawings were in a book. Craxton stole some of those. Lots of fig trees.

  ‘We came back on an Albanian ship or something. There were two merchant seamen travelling back DBS, their passports confiscated. They complained about the fish heads we were given to eat. I said I knew a café in Marseilles and I would treat them to eggs and bacon there. So I did, but they didn’t like it at all as the eggs were done in butter instead of the hair oil they were used to in England. One of them said, “I don’t like food with all them flavours.”’

  In Paris Craxton (‘just pushing in anywhere’) rang up Christian Zervos, saying he was a friend of Peter Watson’s. They went to his gallery where they saw Night Fishing at Antibes. ‘In came Picasso, looking like famous Picasso, and Johnny had his catalogue from the British Council in Athens with copied Picasso goats on the cover. “J’ai quelque chose pour vous,” he said and gave it to him. Picasso put it under his arm. And he looked at me and said, “Who’s that by? Who’s that man?” It was rather sad: the three things he asked about were by Calder and someone else.’ The following year Craxton painted a six foot by eight foot Pastoral for P[eter] W[atson] in which goats and goatherd foregather in a hilly landscape based on formulae developed by Ghika and Yannis Tsarouchis, the Hellenic Cocteau. ‘I wanted to safeguard a world of private mystery,’ Craxton explained,27 and did so by screening out direct observation. To Freud, who initially was to have been featured in the picture in the guise of a goat alongside further goats based on Watson and Lady Norton, such arrangements were too easy on the eye. ‘Johnny did compositions, which I didn’t.’ This painting, so sleekly organised, marked a parting of the ways.

  14

  ‘Free spirits like me’

  After what was to prove to be the longest spell abroad in his entire life, apart from his Berlin childhood, Freud returned to England and the worst London winter in living memory. ‘When you’re young you don’t notice the cold. The excitement of coming back was incredible after Greece.’ There had been developments in Delamere Terrace. Charlie Lumley was in reform school. ‘I couldn’t get him out. (But I did manage to stop him getting in once or twice. I was a sort of dodgy guardian to him.) In the reform school he became head boy; he looked after the people inside; it was outside he got into trouble.’ Part of the trouble was that Charlie began carrying knives and razor blades; alarmed at this, Freud took them off him only to regret it when he came home beaten up. ‘It was like Genet. Charlie was always stealing: from me, from his parents. Nothing much though. A gang in Clarendon Crescent – just up the road – were doing cars, stealing, etc., and they gave him advice. Charlie was known to be a good fighter and Georgie Day said to him, when he was twelve or so, “It’s stupid, fighting. If you do have to have a fight, maim ’em, then they won’t do it again.” They used to use him to get through windows or as a lookout.’

  In and around Soho Freud now felt that he had the savoir-faire of a traveller returned. ‘When I got back from Greece I found that one of the men from the Cypriot dive under the Coffee An’ had opened a café in Charlotte Street.’ He tried demonstrating his familiarity with taverna language. ‘I went into the café and ordered something in Greek and this man I’d known and was just about put-up-with-by started shouting at everyone else there: “Why don’t you lot learn Greek?” I could order certain things. I knew phrases like “He’s the best priest in Athens.”’ Having let it be known that he had, of course, met Picasso he was invited by Roland Penrose and Sonia Brownell to take part in a staging at the London Gallery (which had space for this sort of thing) of Desire Caught by the Tail, Picasso’s playlet involving a gaggle of Ubuesque characters, Big Foot, Tart and Thin Anxiety. ‘Picasso did it as a joke in cold evenings in the war. “And then we all blew up in the air”: that sort of thing.’ The play had been presented in Michel Leiris’ flat in 1944: a reading directed by Camus with Dora Maar as Thin Anxiety. Would he, they asked, design costumes and decor? He said no. ‘I didn’t do it, or see it, because I couldn’t. It would have been ridiculous for anyone but Picasso to do it. Roland and Sonia were a bit put out.’

  Around this time Lucie Freud’s erstwhile admirer Ernst Heilbrun reappeared. ‘He always called when he was in London. He lived in Switzerland, I think; he was blond and German and refined and educated and stupid: younger than my mother, a rich man writing poetry. His arrogance and stupidity were not of a Jewish kind; he seemed very insensitive. My mother showed him some Olivier Larronde poems, which I illustrated for Horizon, and he thought they were rubbish. Mother said couldn’t I take him out to cafés where students went? I thought he was an ass.’ Given that being back in London meant the resumption of amorous pursuits, Freud had no time to spare for the ‘Swabian Nightingale’. ‘I went out, slightly, with a niece of George Barker’s (who George “married”: it didn’t last); I went into the park with her, into a bushy hiding place; she was very young and a bit mental as she had the curse and didn’t know what it was; it was really full on, blood on my hands. “Gosh how odd,” she said.’

  Distractions apart, Freud had in mind more of a relationship. ‘I came back from Greece with Kitty in my head. I knew her a bit, just a bit, before and because of Greece being segregated I was very much thinking of girls. When I was in Greece I thought about her and thought I’d see her. Well, I came back. Hooray!’

  Kitty (Kathleen) was the daughter of Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman, Lorna Wishart’s sister. Like Lorna, she had been involved with Laurie Lee. Freud told me that he wasn’t aware of this (‘I never ask anyone anything’) until later on when Lee, having moved on from Kitty, took up with her cousin Cathy, then aged fourteen, whom he married in 1950. Kitty had been highly thought of by Bernard Meninsky when she was a student at the Central. She worked at a bookshop in Newport Court off the Charing Cross Road. ‘She was working for this insidious, sinister man, so low he was uncrushable; I bought Daumier prints from him (the colours had been varnished, so they were curiosities rather than valuables) and he was vaguely to do with abortions as well. Sordid, but kind of clever, careful about false tax returns and against free spirits like me. He was a strong case for anti-Semitism. He got killed in France in a car crash.

  ‘The shop was “The Book Worm” and Kitty was upstairs, she made tea and drew and was paid thirty shillings a week. She was very timid but spirited in a funny way, hair all over her face. When she was thirteen or fourteen she was told by her horrible mother: “How horrible: growing those breasts.” So she hunched her shoulders and she had no clothes except her mother’s evening-dress cast-offs. She was farmed out to her grandmother, who brought her up in a nice way i
n Sussex, and so she had young lady’s pursuits and could cook. And then she was taken to London and didn’t know what was going on: Epstein kept Kathleen, her mother, on an allowance from 1928 and never put it up because he was ignorant and selfish. Six pounds a week. So she went out and did jobs.’ By Kitty’s account the ‘three most alluring and striking of the Garman sisters – Mary, Kathleen and Lorna – were sadistic towards their children, always streaked with a deep love: a bad mixture.’1

  Kitty Epstein became Freud’s Aphrodite for 1947: his Girl in a Dark Jacket clad in an over-large, heavy-duty London Transport bus conductor’s jacket. ‘With Kitty in the busman’s coat I felt incredibly daring as I started over-painting. It was almost how some people must feel when they break laws: something between daring and dangerous.’ He painted it on an old canvas, a junk-shop picture of the Acropolis. An amateur view of ancient Athens obliterated by a full-face neo-Byzantine portrait could be regarded as inspired coincidence. Then came the more assured Girl with a Kitten (a title imposed by Mesens in preference to Kitty with Kitten) to which, though the paws are relaxed, Auden’s line ‘after the kiss come[s]; the impulse to throttle’2 could apply. Initially Freud considered painting Kitty with a pigeon, putting it to her lips, but that would have made a Neo-Pre-Raphaelite wan heroine of her, which was not in her character. The drama critic Kenneth Tynan, who relished impropriety, wrote that, when asked at a dinner party in the mid-fifties what three things she most loved in the world, Kitty said ‘with trembling candour: “Travel, birthday parties, good food, and being spanked on my bottom with a hairbrush”’.3

  Freud’s involvement with Kitty Epstein was something of a surrogate reconnection, though in no way a rapprochement, with her Aunt Lorna (and indeed her cousin Michael Wishart) and some maintained that his substitution of niece for aunt was a sort of sideswipe; but from his point of view he was simply moving on through the eccentric and extended family circle. He had first come across the Epstein household during the war. ‘It was before I knew Kitty, through working at Horizon addressing envelopes: a bust had to be collected from Epstein and I went to collect it. I rang the doorbell at Hyde Park Gate. A dusty-clothed butler answered. “Come for the bust.” He took a bunch of keys out of his pocket and unlocked the sitting-room door on the left, to get the bust, and there in a chair was sitting Mrs Epstein, in a daze, under lock and key. Talking was out of the question and I was shocked and naturally curious, as Epstein was very famous. “Do you do that Epsteeen stuff or do you do that Picasso stuff?” they would say in Paddington.’ Epstein was notorious. His Genesis had been exhibited in Blackpool alongside the disgraced Rector of Stiffkey and the popular press fanned the fame: ‘Disgusting, says Bishop, is Epstein Mad?’ was the Daily Mirror headline. Jacob and the Angel was shown in an amusement arcade in Oxford Street with a gramophone playing ‘What is The Master Thinking Of?’ His name (like Freud’s) was a buzzword.

  Kathleen Garman had known Epstein since 1921 and, having survived being shot by Mrs Epstein in 1923, had three children by him. ‘He got angry – very peasanty – when people stared at Kathleen,’ Freud remembered. ‘She had huge gaps, missing teeth, and looked amazing. Lorna was incredibly beautiful, I thought, and her other sister, Ruth in Hereford, was very striking – I love the idea of a loose woman in Hereford – and Douglas Garman, the brother, was very nice looking.’ Kathleen didn’t move to Hyde Park Gate from her house in the King’s Road when Mrs Epstein died – ‘Mrs Epstein’s Mystery Fall’ as a headline put it – in March 1947. ‘Before, she was the Mystery Woman, but Kitty thinks she only moved when Epstein was ennobled. When she went to the station to go to her palazzo in Italy she would send herself a huge bunch of white lilies. An announcement would be made, “Would she please collect them,” and she’d rush through the crowd and clutch them to her with surprise.’ She was, her granddaughter Annie Freud remembered, brusque, impatient and with little time for children. ‘Kath went out on her own and I would go and talk to Ep as he was mostly alone. I found him rather nice. He talked about women he’d known and strange things. He had been to school in the Bronx with Edward G. Robinson.’4

  The first time Freud met Epstein, at 18 Hyde Park Gate, he took him along a corridor of chequered lino into a downstairs room. ‘He showed me his collection in his bedroom: African statues arranged higher and higher on the wall, and as we left I looked up the huge stairs. “What goes on up there?” I asked. “How should I know? I work and sleep down here,” he said.’ He used his Gabon figures as prompts for his big stone carvings, the works that had brought him the reputation of being provocative. He liked them for their barbaric sophistication, as he saw it. Where Sigmund Freud cherished his antiquities for the myths associated with them and the significance that he could attach to them, Epstein was the hunter-gatherer amassing finds. ‘These primitive statues he had, rows and rows of them: when Kitty was staying there she became ill and a Negro doctor was called and before he came Epstein cleared out the statues. She asked why and he said, “He’s a nigger: I didn’t want to rub it in.” How Jewish.’

  Though famous enough to be a household word Epstein was no longer the most celebrated modern sculptor. ‘He had gradually faded. In the sitting room there were lots of magazines: the Illustrated London News from 1914–17. Looking through them he said, “[Augustus] John’s getting a lot of attention.” And that was in ’47. He was lonely and minded about not being in the public eye, and terribly minded about Henry Moore.’ While Moore, boosted by Kenneth Clark (‘Moore seems to have created a credible alternative to the human race’),5 was the safest pair of hands in modern sculpture, Epstein was eminent but disregarded, his reputation beached. ‘From about 1910 to 1930 Jacob Epstein was the best artist working in England,’ Clark said in 1980, more or less dismissing his work thereafter.6 Seemingly it was his fate to be caught wanting to carve on a monumental scale and having to oblige by modelling portrait busts. ‘Churchill, who lived across the road, sat for Epstein in 1946. Churchill said, “Where do you find these awful-looking women?” Epstein was annoyed and said, “They are my friends; I like them as they are.” “You’re alone there,” Churchill said and Ep said, “They’d never have anything to do with you anyway.” One thing they had in common: though Epstein was simple, they both had an enormous sense of themselves.’

  Kathleen Garman used to spot potential sitters and secure them for him. ‘Every Saturday evening they went to the Caprice. I went sometimes with Kitty, and then, embarrassingly, Kathleen would say, “Oh Epstein, isn’t that rather an interesting-looking woman?” It was awful.’ At one of these dinners Freud met Anne Cavendish, the Duke of Devonshire’s daughter, who married Michael Tree (amateur painter and celebrated gossip, nicknamed ‘Radio Belgravia’) in 1949; he later painted both of them but not before ‘Ep did Anne Tree, then Michael. “I didn’t know how to do his moustache,” he said, “then I thought of Frans Hals” …

  ‘Kathleen was glorying in it, being the mysterious woman with eyes and earrings and a Mona Lisa smile and missing teeth with black behind. She had an instinct though: I made a date with Kitty, in the Station Hotel in Paddington, and Kathleen said it was a bad place to meet a girl, thinking, obviously, of [assignations during] the First World War. When I lost my key at Delamere I stayed there; it was an absolutely dead place. Ipswich or Iceland it was like.’

  Freud himself posed for Epstein, who wrote to him asking if he would. ‘I spoke to Kitty on Thursday and asked her if you could pose for me tomorrow (Monday). I am not sure that she has mentioned it and so leave this note hoping that that will be all right.’7 He made Freud faunlike, a tense creature unused to scrutiny. Head, shoulders and chest were rapidly modelled and only the head survived to be cast. ‘I was on this stool which turned and I could see him working, snorting and breathing … I felt I was watching a bit of a recipe.

  ‘When I sat, Kathleen put ten-shilling notes in my hand. I never asked for money.’

  Once when he called for Kitty at Mary (Garman) and Roy Campbell’s house i
n Campden Grove, off Kensington Church Street, Campbell – notorious right-wing, anti-Semitic South African poet – came to the door. ‘He tried to hit me, as I was a Jew, and I knocked him down; he was drunk, a huge man lying very drunk on the doorstep, pleased I wasn’t such a cissy after all: he loathed Stephen for being a filthy cissy communist Jew in a beret.’

  Freud liked, and used to quote, Campbell’s poem ‘The Sisters’:

  Two sisters rise and strip. Out from the night

  Their horses run to their low-whistled pleas –

  Vast phantom shapes with eyeballs rolling white,

  That sneeze a fiery steam about their knees …

  Soon after he returned to London, Freud placed his first adult bet, not counting the Greek travelling roulette. ‘It was in the Old England pub near Delamere. Caughoo was the horse and an old man said, “Give your money to so and so” (betting was illegal; only gentlemen with serious money could do it); so I backed Caughoo £1 each way on the Grand National and he won at 100 to 1.’ Eighteen had finished out of a field of fifty-seven and, phenomenally, Caughoo won by twenty lengths. ‘Mist spoilt the visibility,’ the Times racing correspondent reported, adding, ‘I do not think I have ever seen a Grand National winner finish so fresh in soft going before.’ There was controversy, particularly among the bookies. ‘I went to collect but was told not even to try getting it all. The Grand National was run in a terrific fog. People swore that Caughoo, which was an Irish horse, the first Irish in the National, missed out a whole circuit in the fog. The jockey was beaten up by the second jockey and never rode again.’

  It was a period suffused with discontent. Through the winter of 1947 and into a late spring there were power cuts and dire shortages. Even potatoes and bread were rationed for a while. Peter Watson, returning to Britain from America, talked about ‘this dying country’. George Orwell, in worsening health on the Isle of Barra, was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four with its projection of contemporary circumstances forward to a time when Britain, in thrall to the United States, would become Airstrip One for the purposes of Oceania’s unending war against Eurasia. Government posters on hoardings on bombsites exhorted the public to bear in mind the greater good. ‘Extra Effort Now Means Better Living Sooner’. Spivvery was the spirit of free enterprise then. Spivs in camelhair coats were the bookies, the black-marketeers, suppliers of fake petrol coupons and hot motors to go with them. Spivs were among the celebrated murderers of the day; to them nothing was unobtainable or unfixable. Fictional spivs – Richard Attenborough as Pinky in the film of Brighton Rock, made in 1947, Orson Welles as Harry Lime haunting a disgraced Vienna in The Third Man – played the Dominion Cinema in the Harrow Road in the same ratio of romance to reality as existentialism to nylons off the back of a lorry. Dilys Powell of the Sunday Times, reviewing The Blue Lamp (1949), remarked that ‘It must be about three years since the British cinema, and Ealing Studios in particular, made the startling discovery that the streets of London were a perfect setting for the film of action.’ She described what could have been a manifesto of Freud’s growing identification with, and use of, his part of Paddington. ‘There has been a growing emphasis on background, not at the expense of but in relation to character; the figures in the foreground, the shifty and the natty, the sober, the savage, the ironic, the cosy, could belong only to that jungle of streets with their steam of fried fish, their hoarse voices, their flapping leaves of dirty newspaper and their bleak bomb-clearings.’8