Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  Spender’s biographer John Sutherland suggested that his relationships with young men followed a pattern. ‘There would be “interest”, followed – after whatever relationship – with a benign campaign to promote the career of the youth. This is what happened with Tony Hyndman (unsuccessfully), with Reynolds Price (successfully), and his last great homosexual love, Bryan Obst (successfully).’ In a sense his relationship with Lucian followed the same course.

  According to Spender’s son Matthew, from the time the older poet and the young painter met there was a sexual frisson between them. Stephen was clearly taken with Lucian – who he said ‘looked like Harpo Marx’ and was ‘the most intelligent person I have met since I first knew Auden at Oxford’.47 He was spectacularly ‘backward’ in a way that fascinated the narcissistic Spender. Before they fell out, Stephen was very helpful to Lucian, as he often was to gifted young men. For instance, he introduced him to Peter Watson, the wealthy connoisseur who funded the wartime magazine Horizon, and got him ‘placed’ in its pages. It was a notable career boost for the precocious seventeen-year-old artist, and became the launch pad for him artistically and intellectually. Horizon was edited by Cyril Connolly, and although it was a very amateur set-up, the running of it was executed with brilliant judgement. ‘The essential feature of Horizon was dual control,’ wrote Connolly, ‘As Hardy, I emulated his [Watson’s] despair; as Laurel, he financed my optimism.’48

  Matthew Spender confirmed that ‘Dad certainly fancied him [Lucian]. He was his physical type: curly hair, lithe, very insinuating and a brilliant talker. Lucian was very attracted to homosexuals and was very happy to cock-tease, if I can put it like that, because you have to deal with sadism when you are dealing with someone like Lucian – cruelty, as in wanting to make them suffer, if only to make them look up and be more alert as they were lying there waiting for the painting to be finished.’

  On whether Lucian and Spender had a physical relationship, Matthew said ‘I have no idea. Some of my father’s relationships with men were intense but not physical. You will have a fine time working out that part of Lucian’s attitude towards sex. A lot of his paintings are pretty cruel. This business of getting underneath somebody’s skin and being destructive with it is something you will have to pursue. It was never really clear what they were doing in Wales except that Lucian was drawing and Dad was writing. They shared a commonplace book in which Lucian drew and Dad wrote.’49 Virginia Woolf gave her rather acidic view on the Freud–Spender axis and suggested that in the wake of his marriage, Spender had ‘fallen into vice’ again and that he was ‘sentimentalising’ with Lucian.50

  Whatever happened, the month Lucian and Stephen spent together at the start of the war cemented a mutually beneficial friendship. Although the relationship eventually imploded, a high point came in 1957 when Lucian painted Stephen’s portrait, witnessed by Matthew in the artist’s studio. ‘I sat through various sittings next to my dad. Lucian would ask quite probing, interesting questions of his sitters. He had this cunning ability to ask the most shrewd questions, and I can remember my father getting quite excited about the conversation. The painting took a long time to get going and then when a deadline for a show approached it was suddenly finished. Dad then wanted to buy it for £500, a huge sum at that time. You could buy a house for that. Luckily, Michael Astor stepped in and bought it on behalf of Dad. The idea was that Dad would eventually be left it by Michael,’ he said.

  Both the portrait and the commonplace book were to play a part in the ending of their friendship. After Michael Astor’s death, the portrait was shown by his widow Judy to Lucian for him to authenticate, but Lucian instead abruptly accused Astor of having touched up the lower half of the picture and ruining it. Consequently he did not want to acknowledge it. Instead, he said he would buy it from Judy Astor, for a fraction of the price. ‘At that time Lucian’s reputation for being incredibly devious on the subject of his own work was well known, so no one took any notice. Lucian must have known an old story of a painting by another artist which Michael had retouched. When Lucian accused Michael it was plausible but not true as Michael would never have altered Lucian’s work. It was a sort of low blow,’ suggested Matthew. In the end the picture was put up for sale, but it never went back to Stephen’s ownership which had been the original intention of Astor stepping in to fund its purchase. The commonplace book also mysteriously disappeared, and Stephen was convinced it was stolen by Lucian after he visited him. The drawings were cut out and later sold by Lucian.

  There is little documentation of the Freud–Spender relationship, but some letters of an intimate nature from Lucian to Stephen have survived, according to two sources close to Lucian. ‘They include drawings and words and remain locked away. Stephen might have destroyed any further letters he was so angry with Lucian,’ said one source. As to the surviving secret correspondence: ‘they might be love letters but not of the sort saying “When can we meet again?” or “Longing to meet you”’, said one person who had read them but wished to remain anonymous.

  Through Lucian, Stephen came into contact with others in the Freud family, specifically Ernst. It was at times a friendship based on light-hearted playfulness as well as a serious appreciation of art and literature. For instance, Stephen and Lucian liked to playact being ‘two old Hebrews, Freud and Schuster [the maiden name of Spender’s mother, who was half Jewish]’.51

  In January 1942, at Lucian’s instigation, Stephen – by then married to Natasha and working for the National Fire Service – took up residence at Sigmund’s house at 20 Maresfield Gardens. Lucian used the largest room in their four-room upper-storey flat as a studio (‘full of dead birds’, Stephen later recalled). In Sutherland’s compelling biography there is a photograph of Stephen and Lucian on the roof, along with Tony Hyndman (at this time working at Horizon, on Stephen’s suggestion).

  All that Natasha would later ever say about Lucian to Sutherland was that he was ‘very complicated’. Lucian’s attitude was particularly hostile, telling me he absolutely loathed her. In turn, Natasha had no contact with him at all during the twelve years that John Sutherland knew her. Lucian vehemently rejected any suggestion by Natasha that since the notebook contained material by Stephen, the Spender estate had an interest in it. Natasha remained angry over the ownership of the portrait of Stephen by Lucian, now in the National Portrait Gallery, given that it had not been passed to the Spenders on Michael Astor’s death.

  The Spender–Freud friendship eventually petered out completely as Stephen in his final years avoided seeing Lucian at all costs. One of their disagreements stemmed from the disappearance of another of Lucian’s pictures that Stephen owned. It had hung gathering dust in Spender’s house for many years, and then after Lucian came to dinner one night it disappeared. ‘It was later sold for a great deal of money,’ said Matthew, who was sceptical of Lucian’s default-position defence that whatever he said or did was defensible because he was always only being truthful. ‘I can hear his disdain, of that feeling of being under the skin of Society, or in its thrall; him being in the clear while everyone else was common and conniving. That was his view. His scale of values was absolutely ruthless. He was longing to be independent of everyone and not tied down – all supposedly in the name of truth. But you can’t treat people like that. You can’t change rules halfway through.’

  Back at art school after the Wales holiday, Bettina, David and Lucian attended morning life classes, for which Lucian also modelled. Bettina’s drawing of a nervous-looking Lucian, near-naked and protective of his modesty, survives. ‘He was so embarrassed by the whole thing that he refused to take off his underpants,’ she said. Bettina remembered walking up the hill with him and meeting the local prostitute in her high heels on a man’s bicycle in search of clients.

  Lucian gave Bettina clothes vouchers, much sought-after because of wartime rationing. ‘I bought a lovely summer dress and some sandals. I wore them to the Freuds’ house where I stayed and ate tinned peaches. There was no
body there, his parents having gone away. There was nothing about it that wasn’t lovely. We were not in love but we were lovers, briefly. There was nothing to be ashamed of. We had this lovely barn at Benton End where we used to make love and then watch the dogfights in the sky.’

  Bettina’s romance with Lucian was further complicated when she fell for another boy, Nigel MacDonald, a teenager who had been taken in by Peter Watson. Nigel, Bettina and Lucian went on a trip to Scotland (funded by Watson) where Lucian produced one of his most memorable landscape drawings, Loch Ness Drumnadrochit, ‘an obsessional pen and ink one’, according to Bettina. It has a broad panorama in exquisite detail, but it was a cul-de-sac for his artistic development. ‘I am staying at a really hot-stuff tip-top hop-scotch luxury dive for old dames,’ he wrote to his friend Elsie Nicholson.52 The trio were quite a spectacle in the Drumnadrochit Hotel. Bettina wore a Ross tartan kilt and a red Tyrolean hat with two feathers, her hair in pigtails; Lucian wore tartan trousers, which he told Bettina he had obtained at the Ritz bar in exchange for his own from a soldier of a Scottish regiment; and Nigel was also in a kilt. Lucian was experimenting with the two things which obsessed him and defined the rest of his life: painting and women. It was a preparation for the most blistering affair of his life, which left him totally burnt out.

  Lorna Wishart photographed by Francis Goodman c. 1942

  CHAPTER FIVE Obsession

  Lucian fell in love for the first time in his life with Lorna Wishart. She was dark-haired, eleven years older than him and from a family with a reputation for licentiousness. She was more than a match for him, and it was an affair that scarred him. ‘I had never before fallen for someone – that is where a girl really meant something to me,’ he recalled over breakfast at Clarke’s almost seventy years after he met her. She was ‘very, very wild, without any inhibitions or social conventions, and I got really caught up with her’.

  In 1942 Lucian was nineteen years old, impecunious and seeking his way as an artist after a chequered education. She was thirty-one, married, rich, beautiful, sophisticated, adventurous, drove a Bentley, read T. S. Eliot and Rilke and, with a tolerant husband, was seemingly without moral restraint. He was bewitched by this siren with hypnotic eyes and he painted her twice, as Woman with a Tulip and Woman with a Daffodil, both finished in 1945. They are significant because with these paintings a sense of distress, discomfort and psychological unease was introduced into his work. He was on the threshold of his ‘disturbing’ or ‘hallucinatory’ period, which led Herbert Read, the critic and co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, to describe him as ‘the Ingres of existentialism’. It was a compliment that Lucian enjoyed, Ingres being one of the painters he most admired. The two pictures are defiantly primitive and direct, but the intensity of his feelings for Lorna is startlingly captured. Woman with a Daffodil is a tiny picture, almost pinched in size, and it is severe, even odd, in its depiction of Lorna with her brown slit-eyes looking askance at the flower lying on a blue surface. The palette is rather sickly apart from the yellow brightness of the cut flower. She looks slightly haggard and very different from the more flattering photographs that exist of her. More flattering is Woman with a Tulip, with her wider-eyed in an identical composition. ‘We Garman girls all have these eyes,’ Lorna’s niece Anna said. ‘They arrest people’s attention. They are very large: “Ils dévorent sa figure,” as a French woman said of mine. They seem to drive people (not only men) slightly dotty. I know this happened with Lorna.’53 Lorna’s presence in this painting is hauntingly intense.

  Woman with a Daffodil, 1945

  Looking back in old age, Lucian saw his time with Lorna as consequential to his inner life, as well as his painting. ‘I was more concerned with the subject than I had been before,’ he said.54 ‘I was always wanting to move forward and not feel trapped by what I was doing. I would never consciously say here is a new style, but I was aware that what I was doing always needed to feel new to me.’ In these early paintings his art seemed Germanic in origin, with critics pointing to the influence of Otto Dix or the painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit, such as Christian Schad. Lucian downplayed anything German; he was fast immersing himself in English life, and Lorna was a major staging post.

  Born on 11 January 1911, the youngest of seven sisters, Lorna had two brothers who were equally fast and risqué. Her birth date, 11/1/11, was like a magic sequence to Lucian and she seemed to have powers of enchantment. ‘Magical’ was the word used over and over again by her contemporaries.55 The Garmans were evocatively described by their astute biographer Cressida Connolly as ‘licensed muses’. They were not part of the Bloomsbury set or the Bright Young Things; they were both in and outside of society, she argued, never easily definable, but very much rebels against middle-class morality; theirs was a crusade for art for art’s sake.

  The sisters blazed a trail through bohemia. Kathleen had three children by the sculptor Jacob Epstein; Mary wed the South African poet Roy Campbell and became the lover of Vita Sackville-West; Sylvia was a stick-thin lesbian who wore a pilot’s cap and had possibly been T. E. Lawrence’s only female lover; Helen was a resistance fighter in France during the Second World War and had been legendarily libidinous. The most beautiful was Lorna. According to her contemporaries, there was, a Hollywood glamour to this brown-eyed temptress who changed the lives of all who fell under her spell. The Garmans ‘created a magic that could sometimes be destructive,’ admitted her nephew Sebastian.56

  Woman with a Tulip, 1945

  Remarkably precocious, at sixteen Lorna had married Ernest Wishart, a rich twenty-five-year-old left-wing publisher, whom she had seduced in a hayrick when he came to stay with her family when she was just fourteen. He was a friend of her card-carrying Communist brother, Douglas, the party’s education secretary. Ernest became her ticket out of Herefordshire and into wealth. He owned Lawrence & Wishart, the anti-fascist publisher (of which Douglas was a director) which printed the literature of the Communist Party.

  Lorna’s older husband was devoted to her but seemed to accept she would have affairs because she had married him so young. Lucian, however, was far from being her first lover. Five years earlier on 23 August 1937, she had spotted a young man standing alone with a violin on the beach at Gunwalloe on the Cornish coast and commanded him, ‘Boy, come play for me.’ It was the start of a shattering love affair with Laurie Lee, with whom she then had a child who lived with her and her ever-generous, exceedingly tolerant husband.

  Lorna was truly exotic; she drank Guinness in the hairdresser’s, painted landscapes by moonlight, and rode out at dead of night muffling the sound of her horse’s hooves with cloth tied to their feet, so as not to wake people in the village. Her favourite horse was also given stout to drink. She gathered glow-worms and placed them in wine glasses covered with vine leaves to make lanterns. She dived naked into lakes, making others join her. She was a muse who defied definition: a cricket lover, voracious reader and a figure of ethereal beauty.

  In some ways she was an unlikely temptress. Her father, Walter Garman, had been a devoutly Christian doctor, as had her grandfather. Walter had studied medicine in Edinburgh and Heidelberg and was a respected figure in Wednesbury, Staffordshire, remembered, amongst other things, for introducing flushing lavatories to the local area, which saved many people from cholera and typhoid. He rode to hounds, and lived at Oakeswell Hall, a Jacobean country house, and stayed faithfully married to his wife, Marjorie, who bore him his nine children between 1898 and 1911. He had hoped that his daughters would marry into the clergy, but instead they were trouble. And that appealed to Lucian.

  Her disregard for the conventional codes of behaviour entranced him. ‘When Lorna discovered her powers a floodgate opened. She was wild; she was rampant,’ said her daughter Yasmin many years later.57 Woman with a Tulip shows Lorna’s large almond eyes. Lucian became obsessed with her. ‘In every way I was taken. It was very exciting,’ he remembered. But she was no innocent and both of them would end up hurt.
‘She was amoral really, but everyone forgave her because she was such a life-giver,’ remembered her daughter Yasmin.58

  Lucian first met Lorna in 1942 at Southwold in Suffolk, where his parents had a summer house not far from where the Wisharts took a wooden beach house each year. (It is the setting for the novel Sea House by his daughter Esther.) Even then he was impossible to ignore. ‘People who met Freud in his teens recognised his force: fly, perceptive, lithe, with a hint of menace,’ recalled the art critic Lawrence Gowing.59

  David Carr, his ‘accomplice’ in the burning of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing and a fellow student, had also been a lover of Lorna’s. He had taken Lucian on a visit to Suffolk for a few days. When Lorna started her affair with Lucian in 1943, she simply swapped one lover for another. John Craxton vividly recalled their affair:

  Lucian was a real star turn, very, very good-looking, witty, amusing, clever, fun to be with. He was neither English nor German; he found English very exotic. He was déraciné, he wasn’t bound by conventions. He was very free. And so was she. Lorna was the most wonderful company, frightfully amusing and ravishingly good-looking: she could turn you to stone with a look. And she had deep qualities; she was not fluttery, she wasn’t facile at all. She had a kind of mystery, a mystical inner quality. Any young man would have wanted her.60

  Lucian Freud by John Deakin, for Vogue (unpublished), 1952

  During their affair, Lucian was renting a flat in Delamere Terrace in Paddington, very close to the Regent’s Canal. It was ‘north of the park’, a phrase Lucian remembered, with its snobbish inference that anywhere north of Hyde Park was social Siberia. It was a poor, rundown neighbourhood but with beautiful Georgian houses. It suited Lucian. There was a mood to grab what happiness arose as the war cut short so many lives. ‘Delamere was extreme and I was conscious of this. There was a sort of anarchic element of no one working for anyone,’ he said.61