According to Lawrence Gowing, who first met him towards the end of 1938, ‘Lux’ Freud was ‘already spoken of as a boy-wonder’ in the pubs and cafés of Soho and Fitzrovia, making a name for himself or rather (the name being a given) a persona: ‘fly, perceptive, lithe, with a hint of menace’.1 Between leaving Bryanston and starting at the Central, he explored this new territory. ‘I felt curiously privileged and in a terrific position to experience things. I was excited about the life.’
Where better to start than at the Café Royal in Regent Street? Shabbily palatial with its mirrored red and gilt and marble-topped tables, ‘a resort of the lonely’, as the painter Matthew Smith said – he was a regular – it was where Whistler and Frank Harris had bantered, where H. G. Wells could still be sighted, where Jacob Epstein or rather his mistress Kathleen Garman scouted for portrait-bust commissions and where for many years Augustus John had looked so obviously a genius. Lucian took his Bryanston friends there because for bohemians, or fifteen-year-old would-be bohemians, it was the obvious rendezvous. ‘It seemed glamorous: I was a Londoner and we went to the Café Royal.’ It did not disappoint them, situated as it was on the frontier of Soho proper, the seedy but exotic Soho of the Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera), which his mother had seen again and again in Berlin, relishing its caustic lilt. Behind the Café Royal lay enticing narrow streets.
Near them as they larked around that December evening sat a man called Podbielski, a Polish exile not much older than them who, stuck for conversation, began surreptitiously kicking a drunk who had slumped within range until eventually the drunk got up and overturned the table so they had to leave. ‘We will now go somewhere really interesting,’ their new acquaintance announced and hailed a hansom cab – one of the few that still operated in Piccadilly Circus – which took them to an all-night café in Flitcroft Street, an alley off the Charing Cross Road.
‘This was where my life rather began. As a child I liked Van Gogh, The Night Café especially. The Coffee An’ was busier but it too had a broody atmosphere and porno pictures on the walls. Run by a Russian chess fanatic called Boris Watson: Boris served Russian tea with a slice of lemon and you could probably get a bun, crumpet or eggs, but I was never conscious of anything even vaguely commercial.’
There Lucian first encountered such Soho figures as Jack Neave, ‘Iron Foot Jack’ (said to have lost several inches off one leg railroading in America), who ran an occult sect in Charlotte Street, Napier ‘Napper’ Dean Paul, a toff-turned-dosser, Willy Acton, brother of the aesthete Harold Acton, and the painter John Banting (‘very charming, self-effacing, with a syphilitic nose’), whose opening remark to Lucian was ‘Have you read Decline and Fall? It’s all about people I know but Waugh got it completely wrong: we bright young things were much brighter and more amusing.’ Banting had spent time in Paris existing ‘Chattertonesquely in a garret’, according to the Daily Express, and practising Surrealism. ‘He had very little money and was so easy-going it was a long time after he got syphilis that he had it seen to.’
On a good night the Coffee An’ was a hellhole buzzing with gossip. ‘A savage fight broke out at least once a night. The noise was always deafening. The air was thick with smoke,’ wrote Peter Noble, a showbiz columnist.2 ‘The barman was rude, the waiters uncouth and the coffee undrinkable.’ Besides the halt and the lame (one-footed Mary Hunt and Iron Foot Jack), there were people with impressive connections, such as Isabel Delmer, later Rawsthorne. As one who had lived with Derain, sat for Giacometti and Epstein and was to marry the composers Constant Lambert and Alan Rawsthorne, she was a femme fatale to rival Alma Mahler.
Lucian took to the regulars once they took notice of him. ‘You didn’t have to be very grand or rich to cut a terrific dash in the Coffee An’; people talked to you.’ After a while he decided to treat some of the more shiftless regulars there to a show of compassion by taking them home to St John’s Wood Terrace. ‘I brought them back late at night, put them up on lilos in my father’s office which was across the garden, and came into the house at half past four. At a quarter to eight my father was walking up and down the garden and I thought oh Christ he’s going to go into the office, so I thought I’d better tell him. He was rather annoyed but not very. He said, “If you’re going to put up all the down-and-outs in London there’s not room in the office.”’
Lucian’s half a crown a week pocket money, when it was 9d for the cinema, wasn’t enough to meet his expenses. ‘As a child I used to lie and steal a lot. My mother minded that I didn’t mind when I confessed once to stealing a lot of things in Brittany, where we went on holiday: Hôtel de la Plage de la Mer, Saint Brieuc. Cakes I stole. I told her, as they were very good.’ He decided to cull his mother’s gramophone records. ‘I took records out of symphonies and Bach which she kept in a cupboard with her Lotte Lenyas. I had two and six a week pocket money and got five shillings for records: they went to the Gramophone Society at the Central.’ Emboldened, he helped himself to some of the gold that his father kept in a desk drawer. ‘A spectacular theft. Grandfather, when we were born, put gold down for each of us in gold coins in little sacks. He was paid by foreigners in gold. I took the lot, first mine then the others’ and the bags got thinner and thinner. I sold it at a pawnshop in Kensington Church Street, now an antique shop selling to Japanese. I was nervous and he gave me – obviously – a rotten deal. There was a five- or ten-dollar piece with a Red Indian head on it and father said, “What did you get for that?” He was surely fed up but, to me, the one interesting thing is: did my parents tell my brothers? I think not, because otherwise it would have come up in rows.’
He needed the money not so much for his immediate needs, more as a social boost. ‘I sort of gave it away. It made me a bit more dangerous, powerful. It wasn’t a straightforward “now I can have this”, more “now I might do anything now I have money in my pocket”. And it wasn’t just the money. My Aunt Anna said I stole books from my grandfather. But the only thing I had from his library was Some Limericks, edited by Norman Douglas, privately printed with “Some Limericks” in red letters, scholarly notes and a hideous yellow hessian binding. The flyleaf was inscribed “For … (just two initials): Please don’t show to Professor Freud” and gave the number of one of the less good ones. It was obviously given to a patient or someone staying with my grandfather. I got it out and showed it to him. “It says, ‘Please don’t show to Professor Freud.’”
‘“Well,” he said, “in that case you’d better not. Please have it.” It was stolen from me later.’
Among the verses that Lucian memorised – ‘schoolboys love limericks’ – was one attributed to Tennyson, which began: ‘There was an old whore of Baroda, who kept an immoral pagoda’. The one not to be shown to his grandfather – ‘he loved limericks’ – was by Philip Heseltine (aka Peter Warlock the composer):
Young girls who frequent picture-palaces
Have no use for this psychoanalysis
Is distinctly annoyed
They cling to their long-standing fallacies.
A more serious scrape, in that it could have landed him in trouble publicly, was when he got drunk one evening and went home on the night bus. ‘Rather a mad thing: I jumped off with the little tin box that the bus driver had on the bus. It was full of letters from him to his girlfriend to do with another woman; I didn’t read them but my mother did and thought that I was involved in some blackmail scheme.’ She told him he had to go to the police. ‘She said, “You must face the music and go to jail.” Not wanting to be La Speranza [i.e. Oscar Wilde’s mother, ‘La Speranza’, who had urged him to be as radical as she] but loving the idea that, “You may be my son but you’d better be a hero,” she wanted to sacrifice me.’ Instead he sacrificed the box.
‘I threw it in the canal.’
Consequently – there seemed to be no other choice – Lucian was sent to see Dr Willi Hoffer, formerly of Vienna who had arrived in London in 1938. A warm and popular figure in Freudian circles, a great believer in clinical observation, he was to be involved in Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s Hampstead War Nurseries. The sessions were put to Lucian as being friendly chats only: ‘No question of an analysis but to have preliminary discussions. My father said, “You don’t deserve to be a painter,” which hadn’t struck me that way before. So it affected my life. I went five times or so to Dr Hoffer, a great friend of Aunt Anna. We chatted and he said he thought I was queer and I said, “Why? I don’t think I am.” And he said, “Because of the shape of your father’s hat.” Not being circumcised, I didn’t know it could be seen as an emblem: my father had a pork-pie hat and Dr Hoffer thought that must have made me prick-conscious. “How interesting,” I said. “I don’t think I am.” He went on: “Are you heterosexual? Have you ever had sex with a woman?” I always wanted to know what happens so I said, “What do you mean?” At that time I hadn’t learnt the facts of life so he started explaining it in semi-Latin terms and I said, “Oh, in that case, I haven’t.” Dr Hoffer was nice, he was tactful, and when I left he gave me a bottle of whisky and then a few years later he bought a Scillonian picture of mine.’
Lucian told his friend Frank Auerbach that he had been amazingly uninformed about sex. ‘He actually said something to the effect that he didn’t really know the way women worked until fairly late on and he did say that he didn’t know the facts of life until he was sixteen or seventeen.’3 That Dr Hoffer had said he was gay did not surprise Auerbach. ‘I think there was something happening, but, then again, when Lucian made a decision he made a decision.’ For the time being there was, Lucian acknowledged, confusion to some degree. ‘At the Central, when I went there, there was a naked girl in the life room and I got Michael Hamburger and others and I said, “Come and see this naked girl. My God, look at this.” I didn’t have any girlfriends until awfully late by modern standards, though I did about a month later. David Kentish, who fell for really unsuitable people, fell in love with someone known as the Whore of Babylon, a huge man with a pitch near Piccadilly, and he sent flowers and presents to him, but he also had a girl he was in love with – he didn’t really know her – called “German Lily”, in trousers, in the Coffee An’. I took her back to my parents’ house when they were away. I was in my parents’ bed with her and afterwards didn’t want to go on so she went down to my room, where David Brown was staying the night. David, whose father was an MP, was keen on girls and he had a go. After a bit I thought, “That wasn’t so bad,” so I thought I’d have another go, so I went downstairs. Too late.’
Analysis could not compete with the escapism available on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road on Lucian’s route to the art school. ‘I went to the Dominion Cinema a lot where there was a double feature and a stage show for less than a shilling if you got there by mid-day.’ Westerns – ‘anything with horses in’ – pleased him best. And Mae West being suggestive or Will Hay films with staccato puns and overgrown schoolboys. Afterwards came the stage show. ‘It was girls from the Midlands or girls from Wales who won the Eisteddfod and were brought in to sing, and Sandy MacPherson on his organ, and comedians. Then back for a last half-hour at the Central. The beautiful Valerie Hamilton I played ping-pong with; I’d hit the ping-pong ball a vicious swipe, hit her in the stomach and she’d double up.’
Free tickets to the theatre were supplied by Michael Jeans with whom, in March 1939, Lucian saw T. S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion at the Westminster Theatre managed at the time by Michael’s father. In this first production it was the Furies coming through the French windows (later to become a much exercised motif for Francis Bacon) and ‘the low conversation of triumphant aunts’ that he particularly enjoyed. ‘A marvellous woman as Aunt Agatha, and Lady Monchensey saying to the doctor that she is worried about the younger son and he says “You have trusted me a good many years, Lady Monchensey; this is not the time to begin to doubt me.”’ Much of what was said on stage had a familiar ring to him. ‘Your mother’s hopes are all centred on you.’ And ‘Mother never punished us but made us feel guilty.’ He made no connections then – ‘never thought of it’ – for to him the play was not Freudian delving but a comedy of manners, like Saki short stories with their perverse twists.
A standard Saki tactic was to get to girls through the brother. Lucian’s Bryanston friend Clemens von Schey had a sister. ‘I went to have lunch on the steps of the British Museum with sister Inge, big, fat, maternal. She gave me some puppets.’ He tried again, more amorously, with Michael Jeans’ sister, Angie. ‘She was wonderful and I wrote to her and asked her out. I took her to anarchist meetings, crazy anarchist groups in London, which I knew of from the Central. I was longing to find out more but she snubbed me. “When you are further from the egg”, she wrote, she might consider it. But she let me wash her hair once with foam; she was quite amused, and I tried to do pictures of her. Angie was very attractive and pretty promiscuous. Kitty [Garman], who knew her, told me that she said to her, “The lift men at Selfridges are awfully good.”’
Years later, when his mother fell into a depression after his father died, Freud found lots of his own letters that she had kept in a drawer. ‘Something I felt shocked by: going through mother’s things, when she was ill, I came across all these letters I’d written to Angie. Mother, seeing her in Walberswick – she had a place there – must have wanted them.’
Being his mother’s object of pride and devotion, Lucian felt he had to pull away from her. He needed grounds for resentment but couldn’t think of many and even those he taxed her with were slight. ‘For example, when we came to London, being non-English, she installed a pale-green bidet in the bathroom. I asked her what it was for and she said, “It’s a foot bath.” And she cut her hand once and washed it and left blood in the water. I’m not analytically disposed, but surely it was a thing of wanting me to see, of saying: “I’ve given you so much already and now this.” No wonder I didn’t go near her if I could help it until she was as good as dead. She never reproached me.’
Theatre, cinema and Coffee An’ were ready distractions from the Central but parts of the course were enjoyable. ‘It was very exciting to be out of school in another sort of school. I liked metalwork best. Mr Bradley taught it. Working on the lathe I made a sharp metal spike in brass, which – and people rather found significance in this – I gave to my mother. I liked working on lathes and girls working on them too. I thought I was a good potter after Dartington and Bryanston, but I had to sandpaper to make the pottery look like porcelain. I never got anything fired at the Central. In Composition, Mr Cooper, raving mad, talked about Paris and Braque and so on and draped red handkerchiefs and fruit about. A very depressing sub-academician taught painting. “If you can’t draw hands, indicate them,” he said, which even then I thought wrong.’
In the painting studio, where he worked fairly regularly, he saw William Roberts, the one-time Vorticist, now a painter of rounded figures, all of a breed: deliberate, as though sandpapered into shape, yet impressive. ‘He would draw something on the side of a student drawing and they would keep them. Quite exciting. But I never really talked to him. I got always a strong feeling he had a system.’ Roberts practically always painted from squared-up drawings. ‘When I was there once Bernard Meninsky came in – he was teaching drawing – and I was painting, and he said, “You’re enjoying yourself; why don’t you come and learn drawing with me? I guarantee to teach you to draw.” I thought that was a threat which I didn’t want to give in to.’ Though unaware then of Picasso’s maxim ‘above all develop your faults’,4 he realised that what he needed was not the bearing rein of formal instruction but a basic grasp. ‘The one thing that can be taught is the one thing that can be learnt, like riding a bicycle, which is a certain discipline relating to proportion.’
The model in the sculpture room was called Joan Rhodes. She was about the same age as Lucian. ‘She posed and I would be flicking tiny balls of clay at her shapely form and I’d do that schoolboy thing of looking up at the ceiling to pretend it wasn’t me. I knew her from the Coffee An’. She’d been kicked out by her parents in Scotland when she was twelve or thirteen and was taken up by a rough old busker. There must have been something very nice about him: nowadays she would have been molested, but he taught her everything and she became a strong woman on the music halls.’
John Skeaping, ‘charming, encouraging, glamorous, really’, taught sculpture. He had been married to Barbara Hepworth, but by 1939 that was well in the past, she having gone on to marry Ben Nicholson. ‘Skeaping was a family man and quite exhibitionistic, liked admiration and it naturally came to him, on the whole. He had a job at Peter Jones as art manager. One night I was crossing Sloane Square. Quiet and empty, apart from a bullfighter with a cape being charged by girls: John Skeaping. He did have this amazing effect on girls. A frail, beautiful one ran up an eight-foot Christ in concrete or teak under his influence. He seemed very generous and lively and not phoney. He did those animal sculptures, very slick, and he did smudges-with-the-finger drawings of deer. But then there was an unfortunate How to Draw Studio book: how to draw horses in three lines.’
In this little book, published in 1941 and much reprinted, Skeaping confessed to having a ‘point of view biased in favour of animals’; it was of course just how Lucian felt. ‘My one wish was to be a jockey,’ Skeaping wrote. ‘I was so obsessed with this idea that I spent most of my time pretending to be a horse or drawing them. I felt every effort in my own body and muscles. I imagined the bit in my mouth and could feel the tug of the reins in my cheeks.’ His exhortation to ‘get all the vitality possible in your work’ was tastier than any Meninsky guarantee of future prowess.
Skeaping had the idea, attractive to Lucian, that ‘we were people who should get back to primitive things.’ Primitive art, like child art and some psychotic art, had a directness that suggested anyone could try it. Primitives managed without the strictures and bodybuilding courses of art-school training; their freshness looked well at Guggenheim Jeune. Primitivism was as heady as anarchism and as stimulating as Surrealism, to which, by descent, it was related.
Lucian took up with Toni del Renzio, a young designer, Russian-born, an avowed cosmopolitan and the only painter, besides John Banting, that he met in the Coffee An’. Del Renzio claimed to have an elaborate past. This was myth, Freud said, dismissing the obituaries that appeared in 2007. He had been born in the East End, father unknown, and the stories of his youth (conscripted into Mussolini’s Tripolitan cavalry and posted to the war in Abyssinia; escaped across the desert disguised as a Bedouin, fought against Franco in Barcelona and Aragon and then worked as a designer in Paris) were essentially surreal, fiction. During the years Lucian knew him del Renzio was mainly homeless. Women took pity on him and in 1939 he was living in plausible poverty in a Charlotte Street attic with a model called Sally (he later married, briefly, the painter Ithell Colquhoun). Being a Surrealist with proper Parisian connections, del Renzio was good to know and indeed imposing enough to be taken home for Sunday lunch. Lucian wanted his parents to appreciate that his new friend was a bit older than him; however, they were more concerned by his smelliness and lack of socks. He was, Lucian remembered, camp with his hands, fluttering them as he talked. They decided to start a magazine, to be called Bheuaau (pronounced Boo), but fell out over a phrase. Del Renzio said, ‘Horses are thicker than water,’ and Lucian disagreed. ‘I said, “Horses are thinner than water.”’ Reconciliation proved impossible and Bheuaau failed to appear.
Surrealism, Lucian discovered, generally meant Dalí or Breton rather than Picasso and that, he thought, was reason enough for not getting involved. His grandfather, who had been quite taken with Dalí when he came to tea, had remained sceptical about Surrealism’s irrationale. ‘I may have been inclined to regard the surrealists, who have apparently adopted me as their patron saint, as complete fools (let us say 95 per cent, as with alcohol),’ he wrote. Lucian learnt to avoid casual art entanglements. Even then he considered himself a painter and, despite distractions, nothing but a painter. ‘It always seemed understood. At the Central I didn’t want to use cheap “students’ colours” because I thought I’m not a student, I’m a painter.’
Although he painted quite a bit at home in St John’s Wood Terrace this was mainly to declare and demonstrate his calling. ‘I hadn’t got into the habit of working; I was showing off all the time at the Central. I did some figures and a portrait of Cle (Stephen had his own room but I shared with Cle); I did a self-portrait on board and went out and got some white for eyes and a smock. It was the first I did. It seemed brilliant.’
The trouble was that he found the course at the Central neither demanding enough nor easy-going. It was too much like school. His social life on the other hand was promising. One fellow student, Margaret Levetus, remembered him as ‘Lutz Freud, a rather frail-looking youth, but he proved to be a demon at ping-pong.’ She beat him twice only. Lucian was quick to strike up acquaintances. ‘I talked to people and looked at people like Honor Frost, who had the next easel to me and was friendly, and Natalie Newhouse, who had been a dental assistant, very pretty and very very funny, but she had no time for me: to do with money.’ Many of those he first met that term were to reappear in his life, among them Lawrence Gowing and Stephen Spender (both of whom attended the rigorously figurative Euston Road School run by William Coldstream, Claude Rogers and Victor Pasmore), V. W. (Peter) Watson, margarine heir and patron of the arts, and Denis (Smutty) Wirth-Miller, a window-dresser for Tootals at £15 a week. ‘No one else had any money. Denis was doing Weimar Republic paintings, like those Germans who copied Van Gogh: Schmidt-Rottluff Wirth-Millers.’ His friend Dicky Chopping had a rich mother and did flower paintings, ‘rather nice, quite fresh and very like’. ‘They were generous and hospitable, had parties and were friendly – that I was a boy probably helped a bit – in a flat in Charlotte Street. Better than all the little dumps there, like Toni del Renzio’s attic and the terrible John Constable house, which Joan Rayner had. Very quiet and well-behaved parties, mildly naughty; the Queen’s hat maker would be there.’
One night at the Coffee An’ Lucian met Smutty Miller’s half-sister Annie Goossens, daughter of the oboist Eugene Goossens and an impressive jitterbugger. How bored he was at the Central, he told her and she said she’d heard of somewhere that might suit him. A friend of hers, Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, was at a different sort of art school not too far from London. ‘Annie said, “Oh you must go and study at Cedric’s, it’s the only place.”’ She was referring to the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Dedham in Essex, an art school with few constraints. It sounded attractive, compared to the Central or for that matter the Euston Road School, concentrated as it was on life drawing and about to close down anyway. And so in the spring of 1939 he moved there. ‘I wasn’t really looking round for an art school. I wouldn’t have thought of it. It was a jump to go there, done on impulse.’
Founded in 1937 by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, the East Anglian School was a glorified summer school (‘largely for old women’, Lucian discovered), offering tuition (twenty-six guineas a year, down to two guineas a week: enough to cause Ernst Freud to seek a reduction) in ‘Landscape, Life, Flowers, Still Life, Animals, Design’ in agreeable surroundings. Stiflingly agreeable in that Dedham church tower – tall and distant in Constable’s pictures of Dedham Vale – stood over the village, a reminder to students that the entire place had been consigned through art into English Heritage.
‘The Constable country was rather sickening. Ghastly women went there and did watercolours of the Stour and I thought it was his fault.’ To leave the Central in High Holborn for the heartlands of East Anglia was to risk being sucked into seemliness. Yet for all its brick and flint and half-timbering Dedham was ‘on the right side of pretty’, Lucian soon decided, though it was quite a while before he came to regard Constable as a great and daring artist. ‘It was through Francis [Bacon] I got keen on Constable, because he was so keen on The Leaping Horse; I think early on that I thought he was a bit soppy.’ Even so he tried emulating him. ‘I remember plonking my easel in front of a tree at Dedham – I’d seen the Constable tree at the V&A – and thought I can’t do it. I didn’t know where to start. It just seemed impossible. There has to be some correlation between me and the picture.’
According to Felicity Hellaby (later Belfield), a fellow student who was to become a friend, Lucian arrived at the school very much a juvenile. ‘He was sixteen. I’d never heard of the Freuds and this chap turned up and people said he’s got a very famous grandfather. He and I were probably the youngest.’5 He already had friends and acquaintances there, among them David Kentish, ex-Bryanston. John Banting was often around and John Skeaping was a Dedham legend, for he had stayed at Pound Farm, where Morris and Lett-Haines lived, with Barbara Hepworth and after the break-up of their marriage he had both worked there – teaching Agatha Christie to paint, briefly – and remarried there in 1934. ‘His wife, Morwenna, was daughter of the vicar of Langham, the local parish, and people said he seduced her on the altar. Maybe he did: the fact that everyone knew it meant something, surely?’ The whiff of scandal lingered. ‘Cedric said he, and Christopher Wood, who had stayed too, were smoking opium and he wouldn’t have them there. There is often a puritanical side to queerness and Cedric was a Welsh nationalist. “I really couldn’t allow it,” he said; it was a school, after all, and word would have got around. Though opium was considered odd and exotic, not druggy: no one ever says, “Do you like opium?”’
Morris was a painter known for his colourful spreads, the aesthetic of the matted rag rug blended with the sensibilities of Christopher Wood and Edward Burra, Pissarro and Utrillo. His work had a disarming quality that suited Guggenheim Jeune and the Wertheim Gallery where it fitted in with the taste for child art, ‘unprofessional’ art and free-range Surrealism. A decade earlier he had been considered quite the leading figure; indeed in 1928 the critic T. W. Earp wrote that ‘the paintings of Cedric Morris are the happiest event which has occurred during the last few years in the annals of English painting,’ especially happy in that he had never bothered to get himself skilled in ‘the mechanical redundancies of the art school’.6 He and Lett-Haines had quite a past as players in the travelling avant-garde of the twenties, associated then with Jean Cocteau in Villefranche, with the Paris crowd, the big names – Hemingway, Man Ray, Picabia – and others besides, ranging from Nancy Cunard to Nina Hamnett. They had thrown memorable parties. Morris – who was to become Sir Cedric in 1947 when he inherited a baronetcy – told Lucian that the thing to do before such parties was to ‘toss yourself off in the taxi to make your eyes shine’. ‘He was so quirky and odd. But he wasn’t bitter.’
Morris had taken to speaking of London as ‘that evil place’ and, exercising his social conscience, became involved in schemes to alleviate distress in his native South Wales through art, serving as trustee of an arts centre in Dowlais (where unemployment was 73 per cent) and inviting people from there to work at Dedham with the aim of enlarging their experience without subjecting them to academic routine. He advocated ‘sincere painting’, unvarnished, unmodulated, robust. He said of his pupils that he could, ‘by making them peg away at it, sometimes turn their weakness into their strongest feature’.7
Lucian liked Morris’ relaxed attitude. ‘No teaching much, but there were models and you could work in your own room.’ An arc of easels would be set up on the lawn around a model in swimming trunks. Morris’ love of plants and animals, louche schoolboy humour (tireless innuendo concerning Constable’s Flatford Mill neighbour Willy Lott and his cottage) and even his persistent giggle were more appealing than the courses that Lucian could have tried in London, whether draughtsmanship with Bernard Meninsky or the subdued tones of the Euston Road School. He was self-taught but not naive, still less faux-naif. ‘His tag at the beginning was “Cézanne from Newlyn”: a bit unfortunate.’ His drawings, veering between suave and waspish, impressed Lucian. As did his practical tips: how to stretch and prime a canvas and how to economise with turps bought by the gallon from the oil merchant, not ‘pure turps’ from the art shop. Not that he ever acted on these. He was never one for chores.
‘Concerning Plant Painting’, an article by Morris in the Studio for May 1942, could have been written with his restless pupil in mind. ‘The first reaction of the painter to the suggestion that he should write about painting is a retort that he should mind his own business and that you should look at the pictures,’ it began. Delving into his subject on a rising note of waspish glee, he mocked any idea of floral prettiness. ‘The aspect of belles et jolies fleures, or charming, gay, lovely, etc., mean no more to me than such qualities do in natural reaction to life in general; it is more the attributes of grimness, ruthlessness, lust and arrogance that I find, and, above all, the absence of fear in their kingdom.’ This led him to pose flowers as living creatures endowed with human values and characteristics. ‘Be he able to express the blowzey [sic] fugitiveness of the poppy as could Jan van Huysum, the slightly sinister quality of fritillarias as Breughel the Elder, or the downright evil of some arums, the elegance, pride and delicacy of irises, the strident quality of delphiniums, the vulgarity of some double peonies, chrysanthemums, roses, and most dahlia … all this and much more the flower painter has to do.’
The notion of evil in an arum lily may be questionable but the idea that portraiture covers everything, that it’s the life that matters more than the likeness – a sense of life made sharper and more immediate – was an inspiration after the cautionary procedures of the Central. ‘I thought Cedric was a real painter. Dense and extraordinary. Terrific limitations. I remember him showing David Kentish how to do Welsh tiles on a roof with a knife and I sort of smiled to myself.’ He began to feel proficient and in good company, compared to the Central. ‘There were people working seriously. You could talk to Lett-Haines – who actually ran the place – and he’d tell you about what it was like in Paris. I liked the whole thing there. There was a very strong atmosphere.’ At the Marlborough Head pub, where he had a room, a fellow lodger Ralph Banbury, a former accountant and admirer of Morris (with whom he had had an affair), would greet him every day with a ‘Hello, boy’, telling him that what he really wanted in life was to be presented with a crisp new five-pound note every morning. ‘There were certain undertones. When the war started he went into the Guards almost at once and was killed.’
Having settled into an agreeable routine, suddenly, on the morning of Thursday 28 July, Lucian was awakened by crackle and glare. Across the street from his bedroom window the art school was ablaze. A Chinese medical student who had been acting as a model and was the only person sleeping in the building jumped in his pyjamas from an upstairs window. The excitement was terrific, for after the Colchester Fire Brigade arrived it took an hour to get the blaze under control and another six hours to extinguish it completely. Since he and a friend, David Carr, had been smoking in the school until late Lucian thought that he could have been responsible. ‘The Chief Constable of Essex came and looked and said it was a fuse, but I knew it wasn’t. I just wondered.’
During the damping down, Alfred Munnings the horse painter and a future President of the Royal Academy, who lived just outside the village, drove up and down the street in his Rolls-Royce braying with delight. ‘He shouted, “Modern Art is burning down,” and “Hooray: now you’ll never be able to paint except out of doors.”’ Munnings was famously reactionary. ‘Wore one black and one brown shoe. Once he was at Waldorf Astor’s, drawing the horses, and Astor asked him what Brighton was like. “Lots of Jews on the beach buggering each other,” he said. Being a grandee, with a park, he had hunters and when war broke out he shot them all as in the First War they had been called up. He was impulsive: must have felt terrible about it.’ By then it was rumoured locally that the Home Guard had him down as a fascist to be disposed of were invasion to occur. He decamped to Exmoor.
The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing the morning after the fire, East Anglian Daily Times, 1939
The fire was dramatic enough to fill a page in the East Anglian Daily Times. Photographs showed students searching through the debris, among them Daphne Bousfield cuddling a Buddha that she had borrowed from her father, a retired major in the village, and recovered miraculously undamaged. The Daily Mirror ran one of these photographs and identified the youth in linen suit and sandals holding a charred sketchbook as ‘Lucien [sic] Freud a grandson of the famous psychologist’. It was a sort of debut. The cause of the fire was put down to a cigarette dropped on paint rags. Whose cigarette it could have been was not established. Morris set the smouldering wreckage as a subject for everyone, including himself, to work from. ‘The students’, Lett-Haines told the local reporter, ‘propose to rebuild the school for themselves, but I don’t see how they are going to do it.’ For the time being tuition continued in the billiard room of the pub and two miles away in the stables at Pound Farm, Higham, where Lett-Haines and Morris lived.
‘Pound Farm was lovely. It had a brick paved yard, which Cedric had made himself. There weren’t animals about, lots of evidence of them – cages and so on – but not even a dog. Stuffed birds he did have, which I drew.’ Lucian worked in the stables and on a low hillside beyond, painting a box of apples among other things, and was photographed with the others in the garden relaxing in a deckchair in shorts and sandals and borrowed sombrero. He served as a model too, and was paid for it. Morris himself drew from him: ‘an acrobatic pose, just a minute or so though’.
Around the same time he became briefly involved with his cousin Jo Mosse. ‘My nice dumpy cousin. I was staying with her mother and my cousin Wolf and Michael Hamburger near Dunmow in Essex. I was impressed with her, as at the Central she had been having an affair with John Skeaping. Jo and I had hardly any sexual encounters until I sort of seduced her. Or she seduced me, actually. They were playing games downstairs with my aunt and Jo said, “Come upstairs.” Romance it wasn’t and it endeared her to me. It was just after the Central. We went on a bit and were always friendly.’
By September 1939 Sigmund Freud was, he told Marie Bonaparte, ‘a small island of pain floating in an ocean of indifference’.8 Lucian was aware of this. ‘I was commuting to London some days. Grandfather was dying. He kept on having things cut away.’ He had already seen him a while before, through a glass panel in the door of his hospital room. ‘I didn’t go in. There was a sort of hole in his cheek, like a brown apple: that was why there was no death mask made, I imagine. I felt upset.’
After asking his doctors to administer extra morphine Freud died on 23 September. Unlike the rest of the family, Lucian did not go to the funeral at Golders Green cemetery. ‘I did write to my aunt that it was not out of disrespect.’ He could have reminded her that, opposed as he was to religious rites, Freud himself had not attended his mother’s burial nine years earlier. His ashes were placed in a Greek urn presented to him some years before by Marie Bonaparte.
That autumn Lucian tinkered with illustrations for what he and Micky Nelson from Bryanston conceived as the Black Book, a dark reflection, they imagined, of The Yellow Book in that it was filled with drawings influenced by Aubrey Beardsley in his Lysistrata vein, all rumps and smirks and pen-and-ink stippling. ‘It was in a black folder. It was juvenile but lively.’ They also had in mind Verlaine and Rimbaud escaping to London.
In that devil-may-care spirit Lucian went to Oxford one day with Peter Watson – patron of young artists and prospective backer of a new literary review to be called Horizon – accompanying him on a return to old haunts. ‘He had been sent down because he gave a cocktail party and the street outside was blocked with so much traffic: Gerald Berners wrote a novel about him giving motorcars to everybody. Cecil Beaton was envious of his Rolls in beautiful colours and when Peter became fed up with Beaton he gave him a Rolls and never saw him again. He liked Oxford. We’d go to Oxford for the parties of boys I’d been at Bryanston with. A flashback: I remember coming into the foyer of the Randolph Hotel with Peter when the war began and a drunk man in evening dress singing:
Mademoiselle from Armentières
Parlez-vous,
Hasn’t been fucked in twenty years …’
Twenty-one years on from the Armistice and naturalised British in the nick of time, the Freuds were in no risk of being interned, but for Ernst Freud, as for most architects, prospects dwindled once the war began. He decided to rent out the house in St John’s Wood Terrace and take a flat in Maresfield Gardens, cheaper and safer once he had reinforced the ground-floor rooms against air raids. Lucian – who, with his grandfather dead and adulthood in prospect, I will refer to from now on as Freud – was more concerned with the prospects of the East Anglian School and what Morris had to teach him.
Invariably, whether painting people, landscapes, birds or flowers (he was becoming a revered cultivator of irises), Morris bunched forms and wadded patterns and colours, giving portraits especially a conspiratorial if not mildly ridiculed look. Freud appreciated this (‘His Alison Debenham is pretty good; Mary Butts is amazing, and Frances Hodgkins, and I loved the one of Paul Crosse’) but, being far from assured as to what he wanted to achieve, he felt his way by drawing primarily and using paint for gloss only and elaboration. Here Morris was a force for good, setting an example of sustained application. ‘Paint the background and the eyes and work down in one go. It was great to watch: a feeling of sureness. He used to start at the top, as if he was undoing something, with roof, sky, chimneys all along, and go down, like a tapestry maker (except that they work from the bottom up).’ Morris taught him by example, encouraging him to step up production to, ideally, a picture a day. Painting excursions were arranged. ‘We went to Ipswich docks in Lett-Haines’ car. I did a brilliant, rather big, two foot by two and a half there, using linseed oil in the paint to make it more glistening. Ugh. I learnt to work properly, to work hard. I got the feeling of excitement working.’ He even sold one of them, to one of his father’s friends.
Freud’s 1939 paintings are naive in that they appear untouched by, indeed oblivious to, academic discipline. His self-portrait from that pre-war summer is a face flattened, as it were, behind picture glass, spread like a pelt and barely more animated than a mask. It could be his version of a funerary portrait – such as the one given to his father by Hans Calmann, or those belonging to his grandfather and displayed in the study at Maresfield Gardens – posthumously painted and set into the wrappings of an embalmed head covering the actual face. Horses and Figure, a brown study of masked head and horse heads thinly painted on a sheet of tin, combines menace and alarm with affectionately observed hindquarters, muzzles and necks. Similarly Woman with Rejected Suitors is mock psychic, with intimate touches such as the crease in the elbow and curve of a nostril: details that make her more than a figure of fun. The woman was Denise Broadley from Dedham, a student contemplating becoming a nun. ‘Cedric and I had a joke about her: no one would ever take her to anything and these were her rejected suitors.’ Jammed together like skittles the imagined lovers haunt her. In that Freud had been reading Ulysses, she could be a dejected Molly Bloom. ‘I did some huge imaginary women’s heads. It was then that I realised how people change the air. It’s what haloes do … “He has that air about him, people say.”’ An essay in character, Woman with Rejected Suitors struggles for air. Poor Denise Broadley, sagging in her rayon blouse, was herself a Cedric Morris reject and Freud was being knowing at her expense. Eventually she decided against the convent life and went into the Land Army.
In the mind’s eye sensations could be readily exacerbated. The newspaper seller in Memory of London standing hand in pocket on the lookout for punters was based on a man Freud used to see at the end of St John’s Wood Terrace, here transferred to a narrower and more sinister pitch – more like Flitcroft Street – and worked up into a likely pimp. In the autumn of 1939 blackout was a novelty and moonlight, or the lack of it, became appreciable suddenly after half a century of uninterrupted street lighting. Freud’s memory here is of night in the city, of the unheimlich or uncanny, the fear and thrill of back-alley encounters and the sound of footsteps in the dark, ‘Footsteps coming nearer’, as the caption read to a similar scene in Bill Brandt’s A Night in London, published in 1938, and in his photo essay ‘Unchanging London’, published in Lilliput magazine in May 1939 in which images from Gustave Doré’s London of 1872 were aligned with his: shots of men conferring on street corners in Jack the Ripper or Mack the Knife neighbourhoods with policemen near by, waiting to nab them. Freud had been reading Henry Miller’s Black Spring. This, he said, ‘is quite a bit in the picture’, not least Miller’s ‘gutters running with sperm and brandy’.
‘I borrowed a suit from my friend Michael Jeans that belonged to his father, dark-grey flannel, horrible pinstriped. We called it “The Suit”. I usen’t to be let into places. There was a pub in Shepherd’s Market that I was turned out of; I asked the man why. “No reason given,” he said. That’s why I wore The Suit. Anyway, I took Lys Lubbock out and we were walking along Piccadilly when I saw somebody to chase, or exercise my headfirst dive on, and I dashed across the road to where the Green Park railings had been taken down for the war effort, and dived over a barbed-wire fence and the brand-new suit got torn to bits. Lys said, “You’re really mad.” Really really mad, she meant.’