The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  “I’m the part-time visiting assistant lecturer.” “Well, I suggest you fuck off then.”’

  Had the situation been reversed, Freud added, it was what he would have felt. The student was called Norman Norris and his reported remark (‘Oh, fuck off, Freud,’ it was said) became Slade legend, according to a later painting student, the cartoonist Nicholas Garland. ‘What courage. What aplomb! The story would not have been told about Mr Townsend or Mr Rogers or anyone else because to speak to anyone else like that would have been simply rude and stupid.’10

  Duties at the Slade were undemanding in that, having no particular desire to teach, Freud felt that his involvement could only be marginal. ‘I was surprised how much it was for a day. £50? It wasn’t that it wasn’t useful, but I’ve never had a proper economic structure.’ Earning regular pay was a novelty. As for actually earning it, others who taught there found him hard to take. Claude Rogers, worthy co-founder of the Euston Road School, went up to him one day when he was sitting in the common room reading the newspaper, whipped it from him and sat down to read it. ‘He just took it out of my hands. And newspapers mean quite a lot to me. Enough to get out your gat and shoot ’em in the balls.’

  ‘It is worth trying for a moment putting oneself in the position of a foreign observer new to England but unprejudiced,’ George Orwell wrote in his 1947 essay The English People. An outsider, he suggested, would find ‘artistic insensibility’ characteristically English, also ‘gentleness, respect for legality, suspicion of foreigners, sentimentality about animals, hypocrisy, exaggerated class distinctions and an obsession with sport’.11 In Camera in London published in 1948, Bill Brandt talked of an imagined photographer of London – obviously himself, formerly of Hamburg – who had ‘something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveller who enters a strange country’.12 Freud could still remember coming to England flush with just having read Black Beauty and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Restless, nervous, unsettled, he had spent what was left of his childhood being the Young Mariner venturing and floundering in a strange, in many ways baffling, intriguingly stratified society.

  ‘If one likes Paris one tends to think that the Parisian will not like London,’ Stephen Spender suggested in a Horizon editorial published shortly before VE Day.13 After the war London with its bombsites and general dilapidation took longer to recover than Paris; among the attractions of Paris were its denial of the immediate past and the verve with which its cultural pre-eminence was reasserted. Rationing soon died out there and licensing hours did not exist. Freud went to Paris whenever he could; Paddington however was where he worked, mostly, and carried on. The poet William Plomer wrote of it as a near-ghetto: ‘Long been favoured by the Jews and the Greeks as a quarter to live in … Its population has a grubby fringe, a fluid margin in which sink or swim the small-time spiv, the failed commercial artist turned receiver, the tubercular middle-aged harlot.’14 Given his passport to Paddington Freud felt he was armed against class distinction. The Slade in Gower Street was a weekly fixture, on and off (‘more often off than on’, he added); Soho was for seeing friends, St John’s Wood for intermittent domesticity. ‘My LIFE was at Delamere, and I’d sometimes go back to Clifton Hill. It was partly a class thing. I always felt that extreme social change gave me what travelling gives other people. My travelling is downwards, rather than outwards.’

  Popular belief had it that the rents of Paddington brothels went to the Bishop of London while across the canal lay respectability. Along the canal, towards Paddington Green, the populace was more mixed. ‘The Warwick Arms where I drank a bit, the Williams-Ellis bookshop and a café opposite run by a mad Polish woman; Feliks Topolski used to go there and he told me that she used to think people were wanking and she’d say, “You can’t have pleasure in my café”; the Jewish fish and chip shop, really horrible, trying to make people more anti-Semitic.’ The bargee pubs by the canal had been busy until the war, but no longer. ‘The Old England, round the corner, had couples fighting and extraordinary old boys, twenty pints of beer in an evening, singing “I never been done, never been interfered with.” They couldn’t make me out. They thought I was some kind of either prince or foreigner. They’d got awfully good manners though. “Do you do, like, photographs?” they’d ask.’

  ‘Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders,’ says Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘Crime is to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.’15 To an outsider, Paddington ways were stimulating, not to say Nietzschean, and risky. The first time Freud took Frank Auerbach into the Old England he declined an offered drink and Freud had to explain to him that you didn’t actually have to drink the drink but it was unacceptable to say no. Having taken to being something of a local character, Freud showed off his social gumption.

  ‘I liked going to dice games, especially clubs where Charlie’s friends met. Charlie was good with girls. I used to envy him because we’d be walking down the street and there’d be girls and Charlie would say, “Hey, what yer doing later? Come and have a drink.” “Oh we’re busy,” they’d say. “See you,” he’d say. I felt too tense to do that, too excited seeing girls; he was very good with them. We were generally known as friends. We got on very well. Sometimes things that I didn’t understand Charlie would explain to me: the harsh ways and laws of the life there, such as the things people were respected and despised for. I went a lot to the Met in the Edgware Road and Charlie would go in the circle at the very top and fight, like in Sickert pictures: always fighting and shouting and making passes at each other. Max Miller used to slip out and drink in the bar at the back where he could watch the audience and stage. Marvellous jokes. “If those five hundred dancers won’t be allowed to dance with their brassieres off it’ll be a thousand pities.”’ Clocking his audiences from behind, Max Miller saw them as bawdy livestock.

  ‘Charlie was in reform school quite a lot. I heard this clinking in his jacket; it was a knuckleduster and I took it out; next day he came back with an eye almost out and I felt bad. He and another boy had had a fight. I went to Humphrey Razzall, who was Johnny Minton’s solicitor, to brief him about Charlie and he said, “You’re living in a dream world. This is an attempt at a salvage job.” Razzall got to question the other boy, though; Charlie had hurt him rather badly and he said, “What would you have done to Charlie if you’d caught him?” and what he said got Charlie probation, not jail.’

  Charlie Lumley – ‘Your Little Genie’ as Douglas Cooper referred to him when taunting Freud – made Paddington seem at times almost a Guys and Dolls neighbourhood. Charlie was incorrigible, Anne Dunn felt: ‘I always remember Charlie Lumley stealing a watch belonging to a friend that I had undertaken to have mended. Lucian eventually forced him to give it back. There were serious raids on the Spenders’ house when L was in his “Genet” mode with Charlie.’16

  ‘In a way that’s rather bad-mouthing,’ Freud commented. ‘I looked after Charlie. I made his life much easier: money and comfort. He was good company. He seemed to get into trouble more when I went away. I went round one of the Borstals he was in and there was a room without windows, with a concrete floor; they said, “When they feel wild we let them in here to relax.” I got really nice letters from him in prison. He was very bright and quick-minded and he very much went about with me. Kitty quite liked him. He stayed at Clifton Hill a lot.’

  Frank Auerbach, who met Freud first in 1955, suspected that there was rather more involved than Charlie just tagging along. ‘One sometimes wondered about his relationship with Charlie because Francis told me that Lucian had told him that sometimes he woke up – and it’s not entirely rare in Lucian’s life – in the same bed as Charlie and thought, oh yes, it was only Charlie, and turned over. That was Lucian’s story.’17

  Comprehensive Development Plan Area 13, Freud’s part of Paddington, was itself a strange country in which, behind the stucco façades of Bayswater and the stews
of Clarendon Street and Westbourne Grove, notoriety was more likely than fame. In November 1949, at 10 Rillington Place, less than a mile away from Delamere Terrace, Reg Christie the necrophiliac had to decide where to conceal the bodies of his latest victims: in the washhouse or under the floorboards? He was pushed for space.

  ‘Strange lives,’ as Kenneth Clark had said. Strange but true: one of Freud’s neighbours claimed to be a descendant of Anthony Trollope who, of all Victorian novelists, was the one who harped most on the contours of class. Freud came upon Mr Milton shortly after he moved into Delamere Terrace: ‘They’d taken the railings for the war effort, leaving patches of earth in front of the houses, and the coal man next door, George Nightingale (who fed his horse on pineapple, as he had worked in a circus and knew a thing or two, and who dyed his hair, and children teased him as they can tell when people are vain), had a huge pile of manure with straw in his front patch. I came out one day and there was this gent, bald and in tweeds with a malacca cane, looking for something in the dung heap.

  ‘“Good morning,” he said, poking at the straw. “I wonder if you’ve seen my false teeth anywhere? Of course you wouldn’t. Silly of me.” He was sort of crazy. “I’ve been thinking recently of going back to the United States,” he said. “When were you there?” I asked him. “I haven’t been,” he said. He was a draughtsman and a gentleman, incredibly poor because he was too disorganised to get the dole.’

  In 1949, Henry ‘Bo’ Milton found himself posing with his daughter for Freud, much as Balthus had arranged Miró and his Daughter in 1938: same restraining hand and a similar baffled look as he parts the bead curtains (bought by Freud at the Galeries Lafayette in Nice) with his knees. Well turned out in hat and cravat, he radiates tension. He knows that he is a gentleman, but does the painter appreciate this? Milton’s pale eyes look less observant than his daughter’s dark eyes, inherited from Ruby, her mother, who used to come and clean Freud’s rooms. The Miltons lived chaotically but had a phone and Freud used to climb across the balcony divide to use it.

  ‘Ruby had been in Soho and around a lot, at the Coffee An’. She was Italian, from Glasgow, and had obviously been very attractive.’ He had drawn her as La Voisine and painted her in 1949 as Woman with Carnation in a velvet-collared coat. ‘Her eyes were a bit mannered, I thought.’

  Over the years portraits acquire resonance. People ask who the subjects were, and what became of them. Ownership adds associations. Father and Daughter was bought by Richard Addinsell, composer of the pastiche Rachmaninov Warsaw Concerto for the film Dangerous Moonlight, a wartime hit. He hung it, this faintly hostile picture, over his grand piano. Sitters live on for a while but their portraits generally outlast them; yet what happened later to the sitter may become part of the picture’s hold on the imagination. Bo Milton’s daughter Paula grew up to be a friend of Christine Keeler, the call girl at the heart of the Profumo scandal in the early sixties, an affair that unfolded like a twelve-part Trollope serial. (Her brother John dabbled in antiques and was involved with Stephen Ward; he burgled, widely, and killed himself in 1984.) ‘Things that are relevant and true are worth having,’ Freud argued. ‘Gossip is only interesting because it’s all there is about anyone.’ A portrait defies the gossip. Father and Daughter is the moment before the beads lap together again and the figures separate.

  When Bo Milton died a few years later, the family were moved to a council house opposite Freud’s parents in St John’s Wood Terrace. There was a burglary. A number of figurines –‘some Cycladic, very small, some good things’ – mostly given to Ernst by his father were stolen and Freud had his suspicions. ‘I told my Aunt Gerda, not necessarily to tell the police, and she said she didn’t want to do anything as they were about to get the insurance money.’

  To most of his neighbours in Delamere Terrace, Freud was not the bearer of a famous surname but the young bloke who used taxis and received telegrams and had posh visitors. Some called him Lu the Painter, like ‘Hot Horse Herbie’ or ‘Benny the Blond Jew’ in Damon Runyon or the London types in the Gulliver column in Lilliput magazine. When they referred to ‘saucepans’ (i.e. saucepan lids/yids/Jews) he said that he replied, ‘“None of that: I’m a saucepan,” and they said, “No you’re not: you’re a gentleman.”

  ‘In Delamere they used to say to me, “’Ere, Lu, do you do that Epsteen stuff? That Picasso stuff?” There was a sort of anarchic element of no one working for anyone.’ Colin MacInnes dubbed the district ‘London’s Napoli’: a place that ‘the Welfare State and the Property Owning Democracy equally passed by’.18

  ‘Charlie’s family of seven were living next door while I had a whole floor to myself – kitchen and bathroom in one room – so I was considered rich.’ Certainly Charlie thought so. The bank in Maida Vale called Freud in and told him: ‘Try writing your cheques properly, it’s in pencil and pen, all over the place.’ Seeing that it was only a £4 cheque that Charlie had cashed, he explained that it was a friend of his who had done his signature so there was no need to take the matter further. ‘He had amazing awareness and quickness and liveliness. In a store he’d say, “Look what I’ve got,” and there would be something under his coat.’

  In George Orwell’s Prole London of the late forties, projected into Nineteen Eighty-Four, boarded-up houses mark the divide between the salaried – with whom Freud could not identify – and the proles, a warm and feckless breed, swarming in their condemned dwellings. The ways of the proles, carrying on a world away from St John’s Wood Terrace and Clifton Hill, were pleasing because, Freud found, they never presumed, living hand to mouth as they did with close horizons and reckless etiquette.

  ‘The Page family, neighbours, had costers’ stalls in the Bell Street, Church Street, Broadley Street markets, veg and fruit stalls, so there were barrows sometimes outside the house. They didn’t have shops because of their waywardness and what went on drink.’

  One of the Pages, the head of the family, died. He had been a regular at the pub and Freud, being ‘known a bit’, he said, in the street, was expected to go down the road and pay his respects. ‘There were all these different generations – I was a little bit older than the young ones – standing in the front room and there was silence. And then one of them suddenly shouted, “He was a great man.” Then it was quiet again. Black leather chairs round the walls and a terrible discomfort and this oak coffin at the window, which probably belonged to the undertaker.’ He was urged to view the corpse. It had been embalmed, the face thickly painted. ‘Very heavy brushwork, lots of impasto: it looked as though it had been laid on with one of those wooden spoonish things you do butter with. The work that went into it, amazing.’ He stared into the coffin, fascinated by this death-defying form of indulgence. The face reminded him of one of those Romano-Egyptian Faiyum funerary portraits his grandfather had collected. He stared and stared. Then suddenly he realised that he had been engrossed for perhaps ten minutes. Embarrassed, he tried to think of an appropriate remark. Eventually he broke the silence. ‘I said, “You couldn’t have done more for him.” It was the right thing to say because it had cost a packet.’

  A Delamere neighbour who knew a thing or two about court appearances offered advice. ‘It’s when you’re in the right, Lu, that you need a good witness.’ Acting on this, Freud asked Cyril Connolly, Sonia Brownell, Peter Watson and Cecil Beaton to testify that he would never have said what had been asserted in Time magazine only to learn, when the case came up in the summer of 1949, that not more than one witness was allowed. The magazine did not – as Wilfred Evill, his solicitor, had expected – settle out of court. Henry Luce, who owned Time Life, had a policy of fighting every case against his publications, deeming them as he did above criticism and beyond complaint. In August that year Life was to demonstrate its myth-making powers when it published a photograph of Jackson Pollock posed – as Freud had been posed – in front of a painting. The headline alone ‘Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’ was enough to project Pollock into not
oriety. Time had labelled him ‘the darling of a highbrow cult’ and dubbed him ‘Jack the Dripper’. Legitimate wordplay: he couldn’t sue. Reacting to a later review he sent a telegram to Time, ‘no chaos damn it’, but his lawyers advised that no libel had occurred. Compared to Time Life’s handling of Pollock, Freud’s case was an obscure affair. Artistic reputation was not involved and the hearing was over in a day. There was, however, a real grievance. Freud resented being made out to be an alienated ingrate. And there was the possibility of damages.

  Gerald Gardiner, representing the plaintiff, described him as ‘this young man who had been to an English public school’ and drew attention to his ‘war service’; he also sought to establish that Time magazine had been pursuing a policy of disparaging the British, Freud remembered. ‘It was at a very anti-British moment in American relations so, to give some idea of what this was, Gerald Gardiner started reading something very rude about the Queen and said, “I think I will spare the judge and jury from hearing more.”’ The judge thanked him.