Fourteen Abercorn Place, tall and stuccoed, with a flight of steps up to a front door flanked by Ionic columns, became a bohemian abode with surreal trimmings. Craxton remembered it as an idyllic sort of squat. ‘There were these huge, spiky plants Lucian had growing all over the place at the top. I didn’t sleep there. Lucian used to sleep upstairs.’ The place grew on them. ‘We lived and painted happily there for two years,’ he said. ‘We were inseparable at that point, like brothers. He was very unlike me and that’s why we got on so well, because there was no clashing of styles.’1
Freud worked on the first floor, Craxton on the second, and in the entrance hall they hung caps, hats and helmets acquired during nights out. This, Freud recalled, was one of the many aspects of their occupancy that infuriated the sitting tenant. ‘On the ground floor was a man called Clinton Grange-Fiske: he was a music critic for the Ham & High or Hampstead Weekly Examiner or something. Johnny’s mother was shocked by us being there with him. She said, “Clinton Grange-Fiske isn’t as white as driven snow.” He had been rejected as a music student by Craxton père and harboured resentment; he’d been the driver for the Rector of Stiffkey when he was displaying himself in circuses.’ This connection with the notorious Rector, defrocked for socialising with prostitutes in the West End on the pretext of reforming them, intrigued Freud. The unfortunate Rector had been reduced to exhibiting himself in a barrel in Blackpool alongside Genesis – Epstein’s graven hymn to pregnancy – and being prodded with forks in a burlesque hell; he died in 1938 when, having been demoted to Skegness, a pretty girl in the audience caused his concentration to lapse and Freddie the lion who shared his cage got him by the throat, a fate that reminded Freud of young Albert who met a similar end in ‘The Lion and Albert’, one of Stanley Holloway’s cautionary music-hall monologues.2 ‘Real social history’, he commented, adding ‘Grange-Fiske complained about the mice.’ These came for the croissants that Craxton liked to draw.3
Freud’s room enabled him to work more consistently than had been his habit. He took to using plywood panels – architect’s samples – passed on to him by his father and concentrated on clarity. For want of ordinary oil paint – costly and scarce – he started using barge paint from a shop in the Harrow Road and Ripolin, the French brand of enamel paint advertised as ‘Perfection in Paint, Dedicated to the Service of the Craft’. He had heard that Picasso had taken to it. ‘What I didn’t hear was that he drained off the surface oil, so I stirred it and then used it.’ The discovery of Ripolin came about through the Craxton family doctor who happened to know the manager of the Ripolin factory and passed on the news that there were shelfloads of old sample tins going begging in the firm’s Drury Lane office. Craxton pounced. ‘I went off with bags and bags of tins and Lucian got in on the act too. The idea is you put on masses of undercoat and then Ripolin on top, which doesn’t discolour. We mixed tube colours with the Ripolin and they have retained a luminosity where other paintings of that period have not.’4
Turned loose in their part of the house Craxton and Freud littered it with finds such as job lots of old pictures for ten shillings a bundle, some of which were intact enough to be painted over. ‘I used to buy a lot of old picture frames and smash the glass to use as carpet. I used to put new sheets of it down in the entrance hall so there was a nice crunch. One of the things I liked about bombing was the glass breaking in the shop windows.’ One morning Freud was roused by Ernest Brown of the Leicester Galleries foraging for his latest show of ‘Artists of Fame and Promise’, referred to by Freud and Craxton as ‘Artists of Shame and Compromise’. According to Craxton, ‘a naked Lucian, walking on this broken glass with bare feet, opened the door, to his amazement’. Brown made a point of telling Freud that he was not used to dealing with ‘foreign artists’.5
Prompted by Peter Watson, Kenneth and Jane Clark came to tea. Craxton maintained – and Freud disputed this – that their intention was to see him only but that Freud hung around on the stairs waiting to be introduced. Craxton told Clark that Freud was the nephew of Hans Calmann the dealer. ‘I can’t stand these Middle Europeans,’ Clark said, but undeterred Craxton called to Freud to come down and meet their guests. Clark was in a tweed suit; the reason for this being that a visit to bohemians involved a degree of informality, much like dressing for the country. Lady Clark struck Freud as being ‘a gym mistress who never got over meeting this extraordinary person. Curtsied her way out of any possible social difficulty.’ She (‘very shockable’) insisted on going into the kitchen to make tea (Lucie Freud having provided a flan) and opened the oven door to discover two dead monkeys.
The visit was in keeping with Clark’s magisterially stated belief voiced in the Listener: ‘I have often thought that ideally it needs two people to make a picture: one to commission it and the other to carry it out.’6
‘Kenneth Clark would come and, as it were, read the pictures; his advice was sort of good; I suppose he had belief. He was oddly helpful on sides that I didn’t consider: Italian values. In an indirect way what he said was interesting; he said that if you want to help a painter – he was talking to himself of course – buy all their best work and give it to provincial art galleries. Were they going to turn down gifts of very odd-looking artists from a very highly thought of, aesthete, millionaire benefactor? I was only about twenty or so and it seemed an amazing thing to say to someone of that age. When you’re very young, you’re very alive to fame.’ As National Gallery directors go, Clark was remarkably stimulating and a good judge of audience. ‘Raphael became a museum bore,’ he remarked (not to Freud but to readers of the New Statesman) ‘until rediscovered by Picasso.’7 Once, after he had called, Freud walked with him along Abercorn Place to Abbey Road in search of a taxi. ‘In Abbey Road, opposite the recording studios, he looked up at a block of flats where you could see kitchen taps through windows above one another, floor by floor. “Aah,” he said. “Strange lives.”’
Clark’s powers of patronage, extending as they did from the National Gallery to the Ministry of Information and beyond, gave rise to an attitude of benign hauteur. He regarded young Freud as a prodigy with a name to savour. Patrician in outlook and practised at discretion, he kept a flat in Dover Street for trysts, Freud later learnt, and conducted his business affairs with a similarly compartmented poise. ‘He told me odd things about people’s ludicrous behaviour. Willie Maugham, for example, asked him to smuggle pictures from Switzerland to France for him.’ He knew simply everyone.
‘There was this thing called the Churchill Club. Soirées. Gatherings. I’ve got an idea that it was at the Clarks’ on Thursdays.’ It was primarily at Ashburnham House in Little Dean’s Yard, part of Westminster School, which had been evacuated. The headmaster, John Christie, had wanted the premises put to use: ‘Theoretically,’ his daughter Catherine Porteous remembered, ‘it was for officers from other countries, for their rest and recreation, but it was staffed by elegant hostesses: Pamela Harriman and Jane Clark were prime movers, so grand people went there.’8 Prompted by Craxton, Freud found this a good place to go and be seen in. ‘Eliot sometimes went, Spender – before his later rather admirable ridiculousness – David Cecil, Isaiah Berlin, Freddie Ashton. John Sparrow [a future warden of All Souls] was there, I’d just been to sea and he said, “I’m a sailor”; he was a non-acting commander: what he really liked was policemen. There were outings and concerts. It seemed very heightened in an exciting sort of way.’ There was the opportunity to hear K. Clark, for example, lecturing on ‘Looking at Drawings’. Being in the right place at the right time had its appeal as a form of luck: coincidence yielding opportunity, gossip triggering insights, disparate lives by chance connecting.
‘After the war my father did some work for Philip Hendy in a large house that he had round the corner from Abercorn Place; this was just after Clark left the National Gallery and Hendy had been appointed Director. My father did the interior conversion. He said to me, “He’s got an awful problem now he’s Director of the National Gallery: nothing he’s got is good enough to hang in the house except Henry Moore drawings.” Hendy was known as “the Bootlace” at the National Gallery. An odd coincidence: his daughter married – as second wife, my parents told me – Bob Woods, the farmer at Dartington that I had worshipped so.’ Such coincidence had potential. Ernst Freud’s clients were useful contacts for Lucian the aspirant who could now aim to draw well enough to match up to, if not better, drawings by Henry Moore, who happened to be K. Clark’s most favoured artist.
Both sensible and idealistic, Clark’s programme of exhibitions at the National Gallery – which included in 1940 a display of more than 300 examples of ‘British Painting Since Whistler’ – and lunchtime concerts, principally piano recitals by the redoubtable Myra Hess, preserved the emptied building from requisition by a wartime ministry. Besides regular shows of war art, amateur and professional, there were exhibitions more to the Director’s taste: in 1942, for instance, contrasting paintings by William Nicholson and Jack B. Yeats. At the time Freud saw nothing in Yeats’ impasto. ‘I went round K.’s house with somebody and K. showed us a Jack B. Yeats of a flower in a washbasin. “It really has a quality, don’t you think?” he said. Being young, I said, “No.” And he said to the man I was with, “Now we’ve been told.”’
Halfway through Much Too Shy, a film shot in the summer of 1942, George Formby, the toothy Lancashire comic, enters an art school seeking tips on how to draw bodies, given that he can already do heads. The camera follows him as he gawps at students engaged in producing cloven faces and other Surrealistic derivatives. So this is Modern Art.
As in all his screen roles, Formby playing Andy the Handyman is an eager ukulele-strumming mock innocent, gormless yet canny. Sidling through the easels he comes across the character actor Charles Hawtrey, Soho layabout and future regular in the Carry On films but here the voice of student pretension, loudly echoing Isidore Ducasse. ‘Anyone can do the external!’ he cries. ‘We see inside a man! We see his soul, his thoughts, his fears and his worries.’
Barely seen, glimpsed as a profile and head of hair in a corner of the studio is Freud the film extra. Though referred to by the Hawtrey character as a ‘brother brush’ (who, off screen, he said, ‘pursued me very much’), the director, Marcel Varnel, thought Freud pretty useless for he didn’t even know that artists’ palettes have to be held at a cocky angle in the left hand. ‘“Haven’t you ever”, he demanded, “seen a painter paint a picture before?”’ Freud thought it pointless explaining that he was left-handed. ‘The director said this is how you do it, so I said thank you and did it.’
After two days at thirty shillings a day on Much Too Shy, which he did not go and see in the cinema (‘I felt a bit disdainful once I got my sixty shillings’), Freud had three further days at the Elstree Studios wearing a beret in a French Resistance drama that he remembered as being called The Private Life of Jacqueline, confusing it possibly with Talking About Jacqueline, in which there is no trace of a Frenchman in a Basque beret. Here he was required to pray in a cathedral during an air-raid scene and sit in an outdoor café. The film proved to be a stinker. ‘Incredibly crappy it was and a flop. The star a few years later was a doorman in a nightclub.’
The suggestion that he might try getting work as an extra by signing up with United Castings had come from the actor James Donald, ‘quiet and sort of puritanical, very unqueer: just below being a top star’. He was to make a career of playing admirable officers, culminating in the leading pretty decent one in Bridge on the River Kwai. In 1942 he was captain in Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve, shot at Denham at the same time as Much Too Shy; Freud spent a day on the set and painted a mural for the bathroom of Donald’s newly acquired flat in Primrose Hill, staying there for a while before Donald moved in. ‘It was a scene by the shore with slightly Russian opera girls looking out and a ship coming into harbour, from The Threepenny Opera, and a woman suckling a dog. Mixed materials: I used chalk and all sorts of stuff and he was really upset by it. He got a bit interested in art, especially Feliks Topolski, because he was a great admirer of Bernard Shaw who made that remark about Picasso and Topolski, that both, when they started a painting, it’s an absolute mess, and when Topolski finished it’s absolutely brilliant.’ No one going along with that, let alone baulking at the mural, could be regarded as a friend.
The Anglo-Soviet Treaty signed in May 1942 prompted shows of solidarity. The red flag flew over Selfridges and the following month, just ahead of an officially ordained exhibition at the Wallace Collection (‘Artists Aid Russia for Mrs Winston Churchill’s Aid to Russia Fund’), the architect Ernő Goldfinger hosted ‘Aid to Russia’ in his modernist house in 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, with a display of works by Epstein, Hepworth, Moore, Nicholson, Schwitters, Klee, Sutherland and others, among them Craxton. Peter Watson was on the organising committee. A collector, Hugh Willoughby, formerly of Wildenstein’s, whom Freud remembered as leading ‘a very ordinary retired person’s life in Brighton’, lent one of his Picassos (‘he talked all the time about what they might be worth’) and Craxton went down to collect it. The painting was La Niçoise, a larky portrait of Nusch Éluard, wife of Paul Éluard, the bulk of whose collection had been acquired not long before by Roland Penrose, most notably Picasso’s Weeping Woman.
When the exhibition closed Freud was asked to take a Picasso to Brighton, where Hugh Willoughby had temporarily converted his flat into a gallery. It was a sunny day and having placed the picture on the opposite seat in the railway carriage he marvelled at it. ‘I was so amazed that the bright sunlight in no way made it any worse or more garish or weaker or more painty. It was as powerful and strong as possible.’ He always maintained that the painting was Weeping Woman, but it was possibly the portrait of Nusch Éluard that he was returning to Hugh Willoughby. Whichever, it was the blazing panache that so appealed.
‘You can use your intent to make anything seem like anything: Picasso’s a master at being able to make a face feel like a foot.’
Undated: typed on his father’s headed notepaper with the ‘Ernst’ of ‘Ernst L. Freud’ obliterated:
I would love to come down this weekend. thanks very much for your letter I went to Brighton last Monday to see some wonderful Picasso pictures that a man has. I went too the opening of that enormous exebition for Russia in portman sqare [actually the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square] wich is rather awful, and saw many familiar faces including moudie, allan waltan, algy newton and two old ladies of ninety, who said to one another ‘what I REALLY like is pure spontaneous enjoyment’!
I have finished my piture of those birds and men [Landscape with Birds] I might bring it down to show you. Jonnie craxton and I are thinking of opening a new Russian barbers shop where you can get a timoshenko haircut sitting in one of timo’s saddles with cotton wool from turkistan in your ears, chewing some licorice roots from siberia. I bought some lovely postcards from victorian times where you pull leavers and people start doing acrobatics or change their clothes disrobe and change into witches flowers start sprowting babies and couples start having champagne dinners behind the hedge … Lots of love LUCIAN.9
In September 1942 the Lefevre Gallery included Landscape with Birds in ‘Contemporary British Paintings’. ‘Newish-comers worth marking,’ the Studio commented: among them were Denis Wirth-Miller, Betty Shaw-Lawrence, John Minton and Michael Ayrton. To Freud’s amazement the painting sold. ‘I heard it was someone French or foreign and the only person I knew to do with the Foreign Office was Donald Maclean – the Russian agent – so I got him to do some spying and he found out that a man in the French Embassy had bought it.’ He remembered his reaction to being told that a complete stranger, a Free Frenchman indeed, had bought it. What a boost. He was up and running. As the nursery rhyme said:
All the birds in the air couldn’t catch me.
Saturday [late 1942]:
Darling Felicity thank you so much for the bugle it is delishious so are you I find I can play many a strange note on it. I got you a very old scarlet and dark blue coat with brass buttons and white cord and strange decorations and R.M.F. written on the shoulders its lined with white wool and red silk and its very warm but I can not send it to you now because its being painted in a picture but I will when its finished
There is comlete chaos here and I have just managed to recover an aluminium frying pan which I left in the garden a month ago …10
Sitters were hard to find and harder to retain, Freud found. Gerald Wilde, who stayed at Abercorn Place at Peter Watson’s behest towards the end of 1942, seemed well placed to do so; having been discharged from the army as ‘psychologically unfit’ he was presumed available but, being more squatter than guest, he felt no obligation to sit. Wilde, who was a spasmodic painter with a volcanic talent and temperament, had been taught, a little, at Chelsea School of Art by Graham Sutherland who, he maintained, had then stolen his ideas and a stack of paintings besides. Initially Freud was impressed by the little man’s lively rancour. ‘He rebelled against his teaching and set himself up in the art school and Graham minded that. K. Clark went to see him and bought four or five things: he had a room of things he bought just to help the artist.’ This was, surely, a sitter in a million, providentially arrived at number 14.
Stories about Wilde abounded, mostly apocryphal but sufficient to make him legendary in Soho and beyond. Was he the sole survivor of a bomb-disposal squad? Certainly he had been in the Pioneer Corps for a while during the Blitz, working on demolition, but there was no record of any such incident. After his discharge he had done labouring jobs. Drunk or sober but mainly drunk, he had it in for policemen and would shout at them in the street; again, Freud liked the sound of that and his ability to paint profusely from time to time, not diligently but on the hop. Naturally, when Joyce Cary’s novel The Horse’s Mouth appeared in 1944, word went round that his Gulley Jimson, a rogue genius of a painter, just had to be him, though in fact Cary would not meet him until 1949. Yet Wilde assured Cary that he was the original.11 Similarly, though not related to Oscar Wilde, he had succeeded earlier on, by virtue of his surname alone, in being taken up by Lord and Lady Alfred Douglas. Nifty opportunist that he was, no sooner was he settled in at Abercorn Place than he took to foraging locally: too close to home, where Freud was concerned. ‘He went round to my mother – he sensibly got her address, it was in the phone book – touching her for money, and telling Lady Alfred stories. My mother had this side of being a very good person and suddenly had a bit of scope. (Stephen and Cle weren’t going to bring in degenerates.) But my father came in. “This can’t go on,” he said, seeing Gerald, with his wall-eye and everything. My mother said afterwards, “I’m afraid your father shouted at him.”’
Freud couldn’t get Wilde to settle. ‘It was difficult. He was difficult. Insensate rages in the mornings.’ A painting on panel – an architect’s sample scrounged from home – was begun and developed to a point where the incompletion reflected the sitter’s character: Wilde as a toby-jug head in three-quarters profile, the skin translucent (thinned Ripolin), a curve of mirror frame lodged behind him like a broken halo, he who had just seen fit to shrug off the offer of a stipend from Sir Kenneth Clark. Why take money, Wilde reasoned, from the man who paid for the upkeep of that unforgivable Graham Sutherland? The marked discrepancy between the eyes was evidence of Freud’s growing exactitude. His left eye had been damaged, Wilde said, when his mother threw a flatiron at him. Or was it, he mused, an accident with a knitting needle?
Darling Felicity, Wednesday night [late 1942]
Do lets meet at Hadleigh next weekend or the one after. Let me know if you can and when? Ive just seen a play called ‘a month in the country’ with Michael Redgrave which very good. Ive finished painting your coat so you can have it now Ill bring it down when we meet. I bought some red flannel today the man in the shop said that lots of doctors and Medical Men come in to buy it as there is a certain something in the die that does something to the eye, really most mysterious!
My Wales trip has been postponed till March. Weve had a crazy boy staying here who kept on eating the crescents off Jonnies still life which he had procured with immense difficulty I am beginning to be able to play some quite eerie noises on the bugle write soon best love from Lucian12
The sightless two-faced Janus head, a plaster cast belonging to Craxton lugged upstairs for Still Life with Chelsea Buns, was a good substitute for the irksome Wilde. Freud balanced it on the table edge like a chess king checkmated, poised to topple. The cracks in the bust, the hairline branches against the leaden sky, the faceted lumps of coal (‘I was very keen on coal’), the rounded edge of the zinc-covered table (‘partly Ripolin there’), the folds of the red jacket – Boer War period, bought from Bell Street market – and the raisins embedded around the navels of the buns from the Fitzroy Road bakery, are near-animate; the materials – dough, flannel, plaster, metal, coal – swap characteristics. The bust seems as rumpled as the cloth, as fossilised as the coal; the buns are sticky ammonites. Even the floorboards have individuality. Freud was pleased with these. ‘I’m really laying them, I thought.’ Surreality plays no part here, for this is a clear account of actual things to hand enabling the imagination to take hold.
The Leicester Galleries New Year Exhibition for 1943 included a drawing by Craxton, Landscape with Rocks, which was reproduced in the Listener (‘one of Jonnie’s pictures did you see it?’ Freud asked Felicity)13 where, moreover, the critic R. H. Wilenski singled it out for comment: ‘Craxton gives us formal inventions conducive to some mood.’ The mood was elaborately wistful and the style over-exercised in that a prophet or shepherd was posed among crystalline rocks against a backdrop of pointy mountains. Wilenski went on to commend a number of ‘attractive works’ by, among others, Paul Nash, Allan Walton, William Scott, Ivon Hitchens and Lucien (sic) Freud. In the pursuit of recognition any mention was better than nothing but, clearly, Craxton was establishing a lead.
In Freud’s experience ‘You couldn’t go out in the blackout without getting the clap.’ Adrian Ryan, a painter acquaintance, recommended a doctor, ‘Dr Freumann, who became one of the Dr Feelgoods in New York and was doctor to the Turkish Embassy; he lived in a modern block of flats in Bayswater Road with his mother in great style. I said, “How much is it?” “I’d have thought you need money,” he said and gave me some. And then I went back to him. “Where do you find all these beauties?” he said. He [Adrian Ryan] had a luxurious flat in Maida Vale with Soutines – his uncle had money – and had deliberately made himself into something based on a photograph of Modigliani: how exciting, for someone very young – in his early twenties – to live with Soutines.’ Ryan bought Man Wheeling Picture and Freud gave him the drawing Chicken in a Bucket, which Ryan then copied. ‘He moved to Cornwall and never looked back; wrote two or three books, one on “Still Life Painting”. Say no more.’
Freud also got to know Dylan Thomas, then working for the BBC. ‘He was quite sneery and was rude to me, to do with making assumptions re my friendship with Stephen. Once he came away from Peter Watson’s flat, having gone there to raise money, pulled a wad out of his pocket and said, “Done well.” I thought that was a despicable attitude. I’ve never been alive much to repercussions.’
After nearly ten years in England Freud was alert to social distinctions and attuned to the culture of understatement. He still spoke (and would do so for the rest of his life) with traces of German accent, syntax and intonation, but decidedly less so than his parents. His demeanour was obviously to some extent his own invention; he liked to appear elusive, partly out of shyness.
Postmark 24 February 1943 on a pre-First World War postcard of Japanese soldiers:
Darling Felicity Do lets go this weekend to Benton End I have not yet written to Lett but I will try and phone him at the pub but even if I don’t get hold of him I am sure its OK anyway they like surprises also I feel that if I rang he might billet you with Lucy which would be a bore. Gee its foggy here! Note the smart and handsome japs love Lucian.14
In wartime London, with its battered, spiv-ridden shabbiness and intensified nightlife, Freud liked to see himself as a zoot-suit flâneur. Opportunity came for those like himself who, whether relative newcomers (‘gee its foggy here!’) or non-combatant go-getters, hadn’t the inhibitions of the born British, brought up to stick to their own and know their place.
Moreover, being a naturalised subject of the King he was in no danger of being shoved into the Pioneer Corps or, worse, interned. Getting by was his preoccupation, spelt out in the table-top parades of his still lives. The red jacket, the Janus head and glinting lumps of coal could be regarded as emblematic in time of war; however, they perform more convincingly as disparate objects brought together for no other reason than that they were there because they were there because they were there: things that served, things interestingly arrayed. Freud now knew the need to focus exclusively, to concentrate. The drawing habit that had been essentially an urge to doodle and adorn had developed into sustained impulse. Now that he had his own room to paint in he could regard himself as an assured painter, and now that he could achieve intensity there was more likelihood of his being able to move from graphic rhyme, as it were, into poetic risk.
An article by Kenneth Clark on ‘Ornament in Modern Architecture’, published in the Architectural Review, expressed disapproval for new ways in complication. ‘Every line of modern poetry labours with meaning and imagery till we long to throw the floundering poet some empty, buoyant convention on which, for a few seconds, he could rest and recover breath. But conventions no longer sustain; they sink, deflated, and drag down the poem or musical composition with them.’15 Freud’s Man with a Feather, painted at Abercorn Place in early 1943 and devised to mystify a little, is a portrait in questing mode examining the idea that conventionality is sustaining. In it the young man’s dilemma, whether to be surreal or metaphysical, is resolved into a show of attitude. As pensive as a Memling youth, as impassively composed as Giovanni Arnolfini in the Van Eyck marriage portrait (which had just been restored at the National Gallery), Freud presents himself coolly, collar askew, tie awry, hands placed just so. The contrivances in pose and setting are actuality rejigged. Calculatedly puzzling, the set-up creates pit-a-pat intrigue with blank windows blanking the mirror image and every element itemised: black tie, black jacket (‘keeping it all black’), black bird, black mannikin, black sky; pale face, pale fingernails, pale leaves, white feather. The artist’s painting hand – his left hand, that is – stretches across his body in a studied measuring gesture indicating that this is a picture of consequence, not to be dismissed as merely School of Cedric Morris but rather to be seen, and admired, as an apprentice masterpiece.
Ambitious yet cautious, Man with a Feather exudes Maldoror dolour: ‘He waits for the twilight of morning to bring with its change of surroundings a derisory relief to his overburdened heart.’ Posed with ‘this imaginary house behind, with this imaginary man in the window’, Freud’s image of himself begs questions and proffers hints. ‘Slight Dreigroschenoper,’ he conceded: ‘the chambermaid’s song about the hotel by the harbour, which I also used in the mural for the actor. The bird on the window sill flew in from early things.’ The leaf-shaped stepping-stones trail back to the North Atlantic (‘I always loved the idea of icebergs; though when I went to Newfoundland I never saw any’) and refer back to the shattered glass underfoot in the hall at Abercorn Place. They were also (this being an elaborated conceit) a childhood mealtime memory. ‘We used to have cold vanilla soup, a German dish, and it had islands of egg white in it. To me, islands meant that a bit: Hiddensee. I always liked the early Auden poems that had islands in them, the thing about leaving islands: “The little steamer with its hoot / You have gone away”.’
Characteristically, Freud’s recollection was briefer than the original lines from the 1st Mad Lady in The Dog Beneath the Skin:
The tiny steamer in the bay
Startling summer with its hoot.
You have gone away.
While Freud was still working on the painting, his most ambitious so far, Peter Watson slipped him £25 in fivers. ‘It wasn’t terribly much but I thought: this is it, I’m going to start living.’ In the Coffee An’ he picked up a red-haired girl (‘Sort of whore: not a real one as she wouldn’t have come back with me if she was’) and took her to his room where she stayed a night or two. She was impressed by the fivers, astonished at the picture and puzzled about Freud. ‘He’s absolutely mad,’ she told her friends back in the Coffee An’. ‘You know what he does? He does tiny yellow bricks; he just paints yellow bricks; fucking mad.’ He decided he rather liked being traduced. ‘I felt slightly proud at this; like it always says in the newspapers: “My wife doesn’t understand me.”’
The large pencil drawing Cacti and Stuffed Bird, a still life assembled on Cedric Morris’s window ledge and completed during one of his last brief stays at Benton End, was reproduced in the May 1943 number of Horizon. Various breeds of cacti, some young and squirmy, others with lumps missing from their lobes, crowd the dead-and-alive sandpiper paraded in its glass case. Pleased with its edginess and complexity and the touches of Conté colour, Freud came to regard it as a sort of graduation piece, a parting view of the prickliness and parochialism of East Anglian School weekends.
Undated postcard early 1943:
Darling Felicity thanks for your letter I have been to Cambridge for a week. I did a picture of a baby there. Do come to London for easter I have bought an enormous stuffed fish. I sold that cactus picture I did in Hadleigh I am doing a very large self portrait I bought a book called ‘LONDON’ with engravings by Gustave Dore for a shilling in Cambridge I had always wanted it. I am overjoyed tonight as I have just found a tube of Francis Foxes analeptic herbal ointment for the scalp which I had lost for weeks. I quite agree with what you said about C and L [Cedric and Lett]. Im afraid there will be a great catastrophe there one of these days. I have found a shop where all the garments are as interesting as your red coat. You must come to us when you are in London lots of love Lucian16
Rummaging through junk shops and street markets in search of things to draw or wear or brag about was reliably stimulating, never more so than when Craxton came upon a hand-embellished print by William Blake: Satan Exulting over Eve. At a shilling Doré’s London was less of a bargain than the £15 Blake, but its scenes of the metropolis a century earlier, alternately fogged and benighted, elegance contrasted with grizzled poverty, backed Freud’s notion of being, like Doré, a graphic adventurer, slipping freely from posh to desolate to rakish: ‘so free, so free, so free’.
‘I’ve always liked buying things. At Bryanston the terrible picture by David Barker. Craxton knew a bit about china and dealt in it and I got to like things. Early imitation Chinese, as Bristolians liked it: pottery imitation porcelain. I used to collect Bristol plates, an early Queen Anne one, a Delft bowl, an early one with flowers on. Ian Phillips borrowed it and broke it and felt terrible and gave me a piece of furniture. I had a passion for Spanish rugs made in prisons and monasteries: traditional Spanish birds and fish designs, very vigorous, marvellous colours, blue and white and sometimes red and black. Miró colours.’
Social rummaging was a parallel pursuit and, again, Craxton had the greater initiative. He introduced Freud to Tom Kendrick, Curator of Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum, who took them to the Savile Club where the pre-eminent Robert Donat gave them tickets for plays. ‘Craxton was a tremendous crasher. If he was in the country he would just go to a house and ring the bell. “The back door is always open,” Jane Clark said to him.’
In the spring of 1943 Peter Watson rented Tickerage Mill in Sussex for a year from Dick Wyndham, known as ‘Whips’ Wyndham on account of his keen interest in chastising young women. Isolated in woods up a long private track with its own pond (where the ashes of Vivien Leigh, a later tenant, were to be scattered), Tickerage served as a weekend resort for Watson’s friends and protégés. Freud and Craxton were among the first, and the Horizon hangers-on, notably David Gascoyne, a literary prodigy six years older than Freud, who had gone to Paris aged seventeen and there gained admission to Surrealist circles. He sat for Freud, eyes closed, pondering a phrase or savouring the Christian mysticism that was already superseding Surrealism in his philosophy. ‘At night,’ he had confided to his journal five years earlier, ‘I lie tormented on the yellow eiderdown, a prey to acute mental conflicts and disintegrating doubts. A sort of dialogue goes on inside my head.’17 During Gascoyne’s fortnight at Tickerage Freud drew him awake and sleeping, his brow consistently furrowed.18 Gascoyne’s talk of ‘the velvet crater of the ear’19 was too poetic for Freud to stomach; he did however design a bookplate for him: ‘David Emery Gascoyne’, the poet rejuvenated in a school cap topped off with a leering dog, and with an assortment of fur, flesh and fowl plus four-legged fish trailing around the label’s edges. An animal garland for one who described himself as a ‘Poet-Seer’ and, in later drawings, looked blinded with despair.
Darling Felicity [spring 1943]
I am sorry I have not written before I enjoyed the Sunday of that weekend very much I was forced to stay on till Tuesday as I wanted to finish that cactus picture which I did. Cedric wrote a letter to my mother asking her to persuade me not to come down again as I was too destructive and unscrupulous. It does not surprise me really as he was unusually friendly over the weekend. I think they must have found out that I don’t come down to Hadleigh entirely to see them. Here is a proof of David [Gascoyne]’s bookplate. I have bought an enormous mirror shaped thus [an arched frame] the painting with your coat in it is finished at last Is it not getting rather near your easter holiday/vacation? I have asked a rather sinister woman to write a letter to the british council asking if I could be sent to spain to radiate british culture but I doubt if anything will come of it at all lots of love Lucian20
Though invited by Watson to stay at Tickerage, Michael Hamburger, emerging poet and translator, did not go. ‘Probably I couldn’t get leave from the army; I didn’t want to go because I knew he was homosexual and that put me off.’ Freud thought Hamburger – a living reminder, for him, of the Tiergarten and the next-door sandpit in Berlin – was too ready with his aspersions. He drew Watson, sharp yet diffident, as did Craxton: similar drawings, three-quarter face, but differing apprehension. ‘Peter Watson had the most immaculate manners and would never have tried anything.’ He and Watson cycled over to Berwick, near Firle, where Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell had supplied fresco-like wall paintings for the church on sheets of plasterboard. All too typical Bloomsbury with their mildly cloistered air, they had been installed and dedicated a few months before. ‘They were not as bad as I thought, but no impact.’ Back at Tickerage, where Bloomsbury creativity was held to be exclusive stodge, there was every chance of drama: if not in the Mill itself, then on its doorstep.
‘In the mill house, across from it, Natalie and Robert [Newton, the actor, son of Algernon Newton] lived. Natalie went off with Dick Wyndham. She was extraordinarily funny and witty; she escaped from a loony bin and they rang up Hermione Baddeley and said, “She’s heading your way.” I saw her once in the Gargoyle: screams of agony from the corner where she was with Jocelyn Baines (who wrote about Conrad) and I heard her say, “I couldn’t help it, darling, your eyes are so like little ashtrays.”’
Little Shelford [May 1943]
Darling Felicity, How are you? Thank you for your letter. I’ve just spilt a bottle of Indian ink over my sheets. I did enjoy seeing you in London even though I did not really get a chance to talk to you, which I had wanted to probably because of the cold and everything being rather chaotic. I thought you were looking teriffically glamerous. Do come up and stay for whitsun if you would like to. I am staying at a very creamy place. Every morning many parcels arrive each one contains a dead animal mostly chickens and Roosters gamecocks sometimes a rabbit once a baby Pig. I have been making pictures of them. I did one of a gamecock in a bucket of hot scummy water and the fumes and smell of decay was so overwhelming that it sent me into a coma. These animals attract a special kind of fat blue and green fly they are terribly depraved and eat so much of the carcas that they go mad, buss slowly through the air in a dizzy manner and dive with a splash into my paint water where they die.
Ive bought a stuffed deap sea fish with a beak and spikes all over it like a Cactus of which Ive done a picture. Allso I got a wonderfull book about Deseases of the skin with amazing illustrations you must come and see it. Have you seen the Horizon with my things?
I have been riding a great deal here it really is one of the most exiting things there is it makes me feel about three times more alive and powerfull than I do otherwise. I put some money on a horse in the two thousand Guinnies next Tuesday called ‘Pink Flower’ I may go to Newmarket to see it run I wish you could come along as well. Do write soon to No 14 as I shall be back there soon lots lots of love lucian21
Kingsway (18:1) won by a short head from Pink Flower (100:9) in the Two Thousand Guineas at Newmarket on 25 May 1943. If horse riding made Freud feel about three times more alive and powerful than normal, it beat betting by only a short head. The risks differed but, being related, were in the short run equally compelling.
Craxton and Freud went down to Dorset together a number of times visiting Craxton’s friend Elsie Queen Nicholson, known to her circle as EQ, who was then thirty-five and whose husband the architect Kit Nicholson was serving in the Fleet Air Arm. She had left London with her three children to avoid the Blitz and was living at Alderholt Mill in Cranborne Chase, near Fordingbridge, a house of Regency and Aalto furniture and an Aga, Satie, Kurt Weill and jazz records and paintings by William, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, her father-in-law, brother-in-law and ex-sister-in-law respectively. She designed for Edinburgh Weavers and had a drawing of cabbage leaves reproduced in Horizon in April 1943. Craxton had known EQ since 1940 and the area of Cranborne Chase since childhood, so much so that it furnished him with his formulaic landscape of curvaceous hills. Freud suspected, unconvincingly, that Craxton had had an affair with EQ: they had been to Wales together in 1942 and ‘something happened; she was twice his age.’ The real attraction was her liveliness and hospitality and the busy disorder of family life.
The three of them went once to Swanage, where Craxton and Freud clashed on the dodgem cars by the harbour, so much so that the operator gave them each a ten-shilling note to desist. ‘We were completely alone, taking the cars in the morning, driving straight at each other,’ Craxton remembered.22 ‘Lucian bought a lobster and drew it until it stank too high; it was thrown on to a roof where it broke in pieces and fell to the ground.’ They painted outdoors at Alderholt Mill and drew indoors, companionably and competitively; it was, Freud felt, a bit like Capel Curig all over again but more entertaining with Craxton as opposed to David Kentish. ‘Its very wintry here and luxurious,’ he told Felicity. EQ’s children being there brought out the childishness in the pair of them. Her son Tim had a distinct memory – he was four or five at the time – of Freud and Craxton horseplay: fighting over a newspaper. There were parlour-game drawings in which everyone had a hand. Later, as fortunes changed, there was to be dispute over who did what and when, in which Freud was responsible, probably, for a man, a dog and a horse but not for the higgledy-piggledy setting coloured in by someone else, which reappeared decades later as Man and Dog by a Tree and lawyers became involved.
Fantasy was required, or stretched truth, and Freud responded. ‘I was very keen on doing tapirs. I did a picture, which I gave to David Gascoyne and which he immediately lost, and then I was in Dorset and started drawing these little tapirs and I thought they are too little and too silly, so I drew a canvas around them and then I thought what shall I do with it? So I put a barrow underneath and myself wheeling the barrow and wearing the cap that I got in Canada, which had flaps and was made of crinkly leather: a real memento.’ Freud suspected, in retrospect, that Man Wheeling Picture, a drawing worked up in ink, watercolour and varnish, represented, consciously or not, his departure from Benton End: the artist quitting the East Anglian School and trundling his bizarre accomplishment to town. It also declared his availability as a weekend guest.
‘I used to cycle down to EQ’s. I’d hold on with both hands on the back of lorries – they used to have a big platform with metal bar – and they’d brake suddenly and try and throw me off.’
‘We learnt a lot from each other,’ Craxton said. ‘I learnt from Lucian how to scrutinise, which I wasn’t doing before, and Lucian learnt how to plan pictures and use colour. We were packed off to Goldsmith’s College by Peter Watson. Peter was worried about Lucian not being able to draw. Peter said, “Lucian must learn how to draw a hand before he distorts one.” It was Graham Sutherland who recommended Goldsmith’s.’23
Sutherland had seen in the May 1943 Horizon Freud’s drawing of the poet Nicholas Moore’s baby daughter sleeping in a basket with her rag-doll monkey sprawled across her. The drawing impressed him and he got in touch. ‘Small and neat (trousers creased) and intense, with a look of avian anguish,’ as the critic Geoffrey Grigson described him,24 Sutherland was a generation older than Freud and prominent among Kenneth Clark’s most favoured artists. For draughtsmanship, he thought, where better than Goldsmith’s, where he himself had been a student; his friend the Principal, Clive Gardiner, had no objection to them coming in and drawing from the model, he said. ‘Provided it’s not crowded and you don’t keep anyone else out.’
They did not take to life drawing classes, preferring to work freely elsewhere. One of the people who had been in hospital with Freud told him about the shelter in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields and another, for the homeless, by Charing Cross station, so he went there to draw. ‘The place had a St James’s club type name: it was an all-night refuge for tramps. They slept leaning on bars and mattresses, like birds.’ He also drew at the Roehampton swimming pool and in Kew Gardens. Then, a month or so later, Sutherland asked if they would like to go with him to Pembrokeshire, the corner of West Wales that served him as his spiritual landscape. He had rhapsodised over it in a letter to Peter Watson (readdressed to Colin Anderson of the Orient Line as a more eminent recipient) for publication in Horizon, extolling its primordial seclusion. ‘A mysterious space limit – a womb-like enclosure – which gives the human form an extraordinary focus and significance’.25 In his Palace Gate flat one day Peter Watson suddenly took Sutherland’s Steep Road drawing off the wall and gave it to Craxton.
Although Freud liked Sutherland’s work he was never excited by it. The Horizon letter struck him as oratorical ‘to an embarrassing degree. A bit of a little boy performing in front of the class, I felt; Graham’s reputation was enormous on the strength of the war things which were neck and neck with Piper.’ A few months earlier, in the summer of 1942, Sutherland had produced a suite of eight drawings for David Gascoyne’s Poems 1937–1942 published by Poetry London Press: ink-and-wash embellishments as high pitched as the lyricism of his Horizon letter – ‘steep roads which pinch the setting sun, mantling clouds against a black sky and the thunder, the flowers and the damp hollows’, which, consciously or not, echoed Maldoror digging his heels into ‘the steep road of terrestrial voyaging’.26
‘What was wonderful about him’, Craxton said, ‘was that he did not want to make one do Graham Sutherlands.’ Yet Craxton did.27 His landscapes had Sutherland escarpments and shadows, the only difference being that, where Sutherland did without figures, Craxton usually had a male Dora Maar dozing, as it were, within earshot of the Song of Maldoror: ‘In a flower embowered thicket the hermaphrodite sleeps, profoundly hushed upon the grass drenched in his tears.’28 Emblem books with their formal arrangements of attributes gave him ideas about repertoires of information and adornment, part heraldic, part tarot.
Freud went along with Craxton’s foraging – anything for stimulus – but eventually diverged, aiming for intensity by dint of detail and singularity; not so much life studies in the conventional characterless sense, more portrait designs in a Renaissance manner, often on Ingres paper, brown and grey, from an album that he found on a book barrow in Bell Street off the Edgware Road. While aiming for competence – ‘to give all the information I can’ – he took in what others had made of the sort of objects that engaged attention. Dead creatures could be studied minutely, their fingernails examined, and the lack of reaction in their eyes. Plants could be similarly if not equally fascinating: gorse, sprigs of thistle raised, crab-like, on their points. Detail was a measure of integrity. ‘I didn’t think of it as detail, it was simply through my concentration a question of focus. I always felt that detail – where one was conscious of detail – was detrimental. I always liked Ingres.’ He may not have been aware then of Ingres having said, ‘line is drawing, it is everything,’ but he did see that precise delineation was worthwhile, that consistent focus gave a drawing coherence. ‘Freud is a mimic. He has to see continually what he has to paint,’ Craxton commented sixty years later.29
The elegantly cavernous nostril of an Uccello horse or an Ingres neck smoothed to perfection could serve to stir him more than an actual neck or actual nostril, particularly as he had problems finding suitable necks and nostrils to draw. Who would sit for him? There was next to nothing in it for them, payment least of all. Like any other twenty-year-old beginner, he had to be opportunistically persuasive. ‘My things were completely unconsidered.’ Most drawings were scrapped. Craxton, he later claimed, often retrieved them. ‘He jolly well went through the bins.’
Throughout this period there was emulation and overlap. Picking up on Craxton’s assured manner Freud’s drawing became more rounded and trim, sometimes nattily so, firm outlines plumped out with schematic shading. ‘Before we met up he was always using a mapping pen to draw with,’ Craxton pointedly remarked. ‘Under my “influence” he took to Conté crayon.’30
Peter Watson wrote to Freud from Tickerage, commending the way that, since he had known him, his work had ‘improved in every respect, such as conviction and solidity of draughtsmanship, colour, all allied to an ever fertile imagination which I think will never flag’. He told him that he was ‘one of those people who must learn everything by trial, error and your own experience’.31