The white feather in Man with a Feather, indicative of war avoidance or a lovelorn state, was a chicken feather brought from the country and given to Freud in the winter of 1943 by Lorna Wishart. Nearly twelve years older than him and married to Ernest Wishart, owner of the Marxist publishers Lawrence & Wishart, whom she had married at sixteen, by 1943 she was an undeniable femme fatale.
‘I used to stay at Glebe House, where Lorna and her husband and children were, and I was caught by Wish with Lorna. There was an awful scene in a field. She was concerned for me; he shouted and called her a whore, probably because of her being with a much younger boy. He was rather nice to me, feigned interest in painting. It’s hard for me to say, but I think he was a stiff, unemotional, sedentary man and she was very glamorous and capricious. I was very upset and didn’t go down there again.’
Fanned by emotion, the involvement swiftly took hold. Lorna Wishart was used to acting on impulse while retaining a sense of social superiority. ‘She used to come to Abercorn Place and stay and she’d say about Johnny, “Is he a gentleman?”’ Being the youngest of a family of nine, she had an unusual number of siblings to learn from and outdo. Her brother Douglas had been involved with Peggy Guggenheim (who thought Lorna ‘the most beautiful creature’ she had ever seen)1 and her eldest sister, Kathleen, was Epstein’s mistress. Their mother was the illegitimate daughter of the statesman Lord Grey. All this impressed Freud. Smitten, he even took her to see his mother. ‘Everyone liked her. Including my mother.’
‘Their father was a doctor, who beat his children and sent them to German universities as he’d been educated there. They went wild when he died. Kathleen came to London and drove a horse and cart for Lyons, taking Welsh rarebits from Cadby Hall to the Lyons Corner Houses; she and her sister Mary saw this beautiful man lying in sick and blood, tall, thin and pale, and they picked him up and it was Roy Campbell, the poet, whom Mary married.’ By the time Freud became involved with Lorna she had a fifteen-year-old son, Michael, and ten-year-old Luke, also four-year-old Yasmin fathered by the poet Laurie Lee whom she had met six years before when holidaying with her family in Cornwall. She had a cottage at Binsted in Sussex and he stayed in a caravan near by; she also had a place in South Kensington, the Wisharts’ town house having been allotted to the Czech government in exile.
Laurie Lee’s short story ‘Good Morning’, published in the March 1943 issue of Penguin New Writing, provides a telling description of the woman who became, for the following two years, Freud’s muse. ‘Just before noon Jenny came shivering into the house, her hair plastered with coconut oil for some reason I could not discover. She had on her blue suit with brass buttons, and brought a bottle of wine, a goose’s egg, a packet of porridge and a crumpled snowdrop.’ For ‘Jenny’ read Lorna. ‘We kissed each other and she looked at me slyly. “There,” she said, “you do love me only you pretend you don’t. Or you don’t love me and pretend you do.”’2
Lorna Wishart c.1930
Freud had been aware of Lorna before she took up with him. ‘She used to visit Cedric’s. She came down to see David Carr: he was terrifically keen on her. There was an awful lot of talk about her always.’ The Wisharts had holidayed in Southwold in 1939 and her glamour had attracted attention. ‘David Carr was lusting after her but I wasn’t really concerned then; she was sort of well off, wonderful looking, and was the first person I got keen on. (The first girl: I’d been very fond of the farmer at Dartington.)’ To Lee in 1943 the threat from this ‘dark, decayed-looking youth’3 was intolerable and – poetically speaking – lamentable. Lorna had made efforts to keep them apart but inevitably they met and clashed. ‘Lorna had a room in Bute Street and Laurie Lee attacked me, walking there; I didn’t know who he was. He slapped me.’
By Lee’s account, set down in his diary, the encounter was a ghastly shock. It was a wet night and so, taking her coat, he had gone to meet Lorna returning to the flat from South Kensington tube station. He saw them walking along hand in hand, Freud’s head inclined towards hers. ‘That moment was the worst in my life,’ he wrote. Freud slipped away across the road to the bus stop and Lorna laughed. ‘What’s the matter? You are white with fury.’ She told him not to be silly, but he went after Freud (‘I wanted to hit the boy hard’) and spoke to him. ‘He gave me a mumbling look and jumped on the bus.’4 Freud noticed that Lee seemed to be sweating with fury. ‘I went for him and beat him up … Well, I must have bashed him on the nose as I had his blood all over my hand from my great victory. His blood, or sweat, smelt revolting.’ Lee’s diary entry recorded the torment of being spurned yet failed to mention the bloodied nose. By Lorna’s account she called out to a passing soldier to stop them but he just said that he expected she was the trouble and walked on.
Back in her room Lorna told Lee that they had been to see Cecil Day-Lewis and that Freud was falling for her. ‘It isn’t fair of me, I know.’ He reproached her for flaunting him. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I only wanted you to know so’s you shouldn’t worry.’ He watched over her while she slept, asking himself, ‘Is she a child or what?’ Waking, she said to him that she was going to keep on seeing Freud and going to nightclubs with him and that he had better lay off. ‘I see no mercy or solicitude in her,’ he wrote, picking over his humiliation. ‘Why should you tell me how to live?’ she said. ‘I won’t be bound down.’ He noted that things had gone missing from her handbag. ‘No surprise to me,’ he added.5 Freud in turn accused Lee of pilfering: ‘He broke into Abercorn Place and stole a lot of letters.’
Freud had been aware of Lorna’s inclinations as self-proclaimed muse and promoter. ‘I knew she was concerned with Laurie Lee as she showed Stephen poems of his to publish in Horizon. There were pseudo-Lorca poems published, never much good. He was such a “simple fellow with his violin and quill”. He faked up things about the Spanish Civil War.6 That was a bit disgusting.’ Lee was to become famous for Cider with Rosie, published in 1959, his memoir of childhood in a bucolic Gloucestershire village; when he tangled with Freud that evening he was engaged in writing Land at War, morale-boosting tillage for the Ministry of Information. His The Sun My Monument, poems published in 1944, was dedicated to Lorna; appropriately so in that his reproaches (‘the peonies of my anger’) pervaded it. ‘I think at night my hands are mad, / for they follow the irritant texture of darkness / continually carving the sad leaf of your mouth’ (‘At Night’). And: ‘she has no honour and she has no fear.’ In 1941, when he was thirteen, her son Michael prepared a book of drawings in a Lawrence & Wishart dummy, provisionally and appropriately titled ‘YESNO’ and dedicated to his Bedales schoolmate, Thom Gunn, the future poet, consisting mainly of illustrations to the manuscript of The Sun My Monument in which he placed surrealistic images of his mother (‘mistress of scarves and painted skins’),7 her eyes and mouth and the crucifix at her throat.
Yasmin Wishart told Laurie Lee’s biographer Valerie Grove that ‘Lorna was a dream for any creative artist because she got them going. She was a natural muse, a catalyst and an inspiration … She used to say she didn’t know what guilt meant.’8 She told Freud, for instance, that she had dismissed Laurie Lee with a quip, telling him that the Bute Street incident was the end of their affair, so: ‘That’s where you got the boot.’ Her son Michael talked about her ‘vast ultramarine eyes’;9 with these eyes (also remarked on by Peggy Guggenheim) and with eyebrows cleanly plucked she was a leftover from pre-war romantic thrillers, part Dornford Yates heroine, part Snow White’s stepmother, given to driving around in an open-top Bentley, until petrol became unobtainable. ‘She never stopped talking about it,’ Lucian remembered. ‘But then she had to put it on grass, and birds were living in it.’10
In the autumn of 1943, when he was in the throes of rejection, Lee would sit and type ‘Lorna Lorna Lorna Lorna Lorna’.11 Years later he wrote in his notebook, ‘The betrayal & desertions she was capable of making in her passion for you never warned you that she would eventually do the same to you for another.’12
Craxton considered Lucian a match for Lorna. ‘He was déraciné; he wasn’t bound by conventions. He was very free. And so was she. Lorna was the most wonderful company, frightfully amusing and ravishingly good-looking: she could turn you to stone with a look. And she had deep qualities; she was not fluttery, she wasn’t facile at all. She had a kind of mystery, a mystical inner quality. Any young man would have wanted her.’13
It was probably Lorna that Freud was referring to at the end of his letter to Felicity written around Easter 1943: ‘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.’
Nothing did. The Freud of Man with a Feather looks sharp yet tentative, hardly fitting Laurie Lee’s description of him as ‘a dark and sinister presence’. He could be a trainee Jehovah’s Witness. His feather, as exquisite as was possible in shiny Ripolin white, is a disarming attribute but one that might have been calculated to rile the spurned lover. Lorna went on to buy him a more imposing find: a stuffed zebra head. This came from Rowland Ward, the taxidermist in Piccadilly. It was to keep him company, she told him, and it was an improvement on the monkey corpses from Palmers Pet Stores in that it didn’t stink. The monkeys were pathetic, foetal yet aged looking, while the expressionless zebra head (‘a bit tiresome and quite heavy’) was bulky enough to be intrusive.
Lucian Freud with zebra head, photo by Ian Gibson-Smith, reproduced in Penguin New Writing, 1943
Darling Felicity here is an improved steer for you [Freud having defaced a dim little postcard reproduction of a Wilson Steer painting of girls on the coastal path at Walberswick] thank you for your Letter I am painting some quinces I am making some quince jam I will give you some of it if it comes off if! I am going off to Dorset on Saturday. I do long to see you! Lots of love Lucian14
The zinc-topped table at Abercorn Place was shifted to one side; against the blue sky of a presumed Africa the zebra head enters the picture scenting a blemished quince. Its muzzle looms over the serrated mouth of a paper bag.
Cumbersome in its dismounted state, the zebra head served as stage prop and surrogate, or so it appears in a photograph taken by Ian Gibson-Smith at Abercorn Place in 1943, around the time he shot stills for the Powell and Pressburger production A Canterbury Tale, a film riddled with emblematic teasers. Posed, zebra-like, in a striped jersey, Freud, connoisseur of the junk-shop find, strokes the inert head with the meditative air of a Saki character perfecting a trick.
‘If you haven’t turned my wife into a wolf,’ said Colonel Hampton, ‘will you kindly explain where she has disappeared to?’15
The dandy – flâneur – character Freud affected was more Saki than Baudelaire, as were his associates. ‘Ian Gibson-Smith wanted to be part of things. He looked horrible: very old when he was young (a schoolfellow of Michael Wishart, though a few years older) and felt that money could overcome his ugliness. He had some money. The photograph wasn’t taken for any purpose.’ (It was reproduced, eventually, in Penguin New Writing (no. 35, 1948) as one of a series of images of promising young artists. Craxton also featured.) ‘He wanted friends; he wanted to be asked to stay. Jewish partly and not too happy at that, he had an unpleasant owlish look. I never felt comfortable with him. He had some rather spectacular naked poses, like Greek athletic things, that I did at Abercorn Place. He was certainly not interested in me, but he bought a number of things: he got a couple of Picasso drawings and he bought from my first two shows.’
Those who sat for Freud in the mid-forties were generally content just to be paid attention. Big-eared ‘Bobo’ Russell, for example, whose father was the Arts and Crafts designer Gordon Russell, became more tiresomely affable than usual when being drawn. He had been a member of the Art Club at Bryanston, a painter of abstracts with a habit of playing the philosopher which involved, Freud said, shouting at the ceiling, ‘What does it mean? What is it meant to be?’ There had been a poem addressed to him by Spender in the Freud–Schuster Book and by 1943 – when Freud drew him, legs crossed, a novice pipe-smoker – he was painting vaguely, ‘all grey and tonality, like Sickert’. Nigel Macdonald, who used to stay at Abercorn Place, posed as Tired Boy and Boy on a Balcony and Boy on a Bed, arms behind his head and then, in close-up, wanking; later, when he had a flat in Ladbroke Grove, he and Freud would fool around occasionally with his guns. His half-brother Ian was Boy with Pigeon, holding one of a number that Freud kept in a basket on the balcony at his next place, in Paddington. They came from Club Row market in the East End. ‘I once bought some homing pigeons. I asked the man about them and he said, “You can let them out and they’ll always come home,” so I did and they homed to him and were in the market again the next week. I was always excited by birds. If you touch wild birds, it’s a marvellous feeling.
‘I was always very conscious of the difficulty of everything and thought that by willpower and concentration I could somehow force my way, and depending simply on using my eye and my willpower overcome what I felt was my natural lack of ability. I thought that by staring at my subject matter and examining it closely I could get something from it that would nourish my work.’
In the summer of 1943 Freud spent a week halfway along the northern shore of Loch Ness. ‘It was wild to go to Scotland in the war. Nothing but natives.’ He went with Nigel Macdonald and Betty Shaw-Lawrence from Benton End, who liked to think she was related to Bernard Shaw and T. E. Lawrence and was now Nigel Macdonald’s girlfriend. He had a photograph of the naked Betty on his mantelpiece but was also, Freud knew, involved with Peter Watson. ‘He was the same elegant shape as Peter Watson and wore Peter’s suits and I said once, “You’re the wolf in Pete’s clothing.” Peter Watson went to Wales with Johnny Craxton and I think it’s why Nigel and I and Betty were going to Scotland. He provided £50 for the three of us. He gave us the money and Nigel wanted to take Betty.’
They took the overnight train to Inverness and asked at the tourist office where would be a good place to stay. Drumnadrochit, halfway down Loch Ness, was recommended. The Drumnadrochit Hotel, ‘very Scottish, solicitous, quiet’, thirty shillings a night. They took two rooms, one for the boys, the other for Betty. (‘In those days he couldn’t have taken the same room as her.’) Being in Scotland, and unaware of Highland touchiness, Freud wore his tartan trews. ‘No one would talk to me: it turned out that the trousers were Royal Stewart and it was as if there were only two left in the clan.’
He had with him a yellow-covered sketchbook, the dummy for Spender’s novel The Backward Son. In it he had drawn his fellow passengers on the train north and now there were figures in kilts gazing out on to Loch Ness, a face in the ruins of picturesque Castle Urquhart, Nigel Macdonald asleep and – awake – naked and playing with himself. Hotel life proved irksome. There he was, in ‘a really hot stuff tip-top hop-scotch luxury dive for old dames’, as he described it in a postcard to EQ, isolated in countryside good only for travelogue. ‘It’s really a fit subject for a new Fitzpatrick the Voice of the Globe Traveltalks films in technicolour.’ He sat himself in the bedroom window seat and over three or four days drew the view: Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit. Out there was a landscape of bumpy complexities where the line of the far shore of the loch divided grazing from wilderness and where attention crept with mapping-pen precision over the rock and cement wall across field and graveyard to a hillside dotted with cattle and boulders, buoyant clouds above.
‘The two fences next to the tree are the only thing wrong,’ he commented. ‘They’re as straight as Loch Ness.’
Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit, 1943
Drumnadrochit, Freud’s furthest north, was not a place he ever wanted to revisit. Generally his excursions from London were weekends only; if not Dorset then Sussex with Lorna, staying with her in Binsted when circumstances allowed. Once they put up in a pub in Petersfield where he did drawings of a dentist pulling a tooth and of the house where Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty, was born. The reason for being there was that it was near Bedales, Michael Wishart’s school, and they went to see him, taking magazines. And cigarettes. A schoolfellow of Michael’s, Bruce Bernard, recalled the visit as being ‘camped up’ by Wishart, who boasted to his mother that he had this friend, Bruce, in dire need of ciggies. He was to become, decades later, a key sitter. They met again in the school holidays when Bruce, ‘very impressed by Lucian’s exotic and somewhat demonic aura’, as he later recalled,16 was warned by his mother that, being Sigmund Freud’s grandson, he might be dangerous to know. ‘Though this of course made me even more interested in him … I think that he regarded me and my family with only momentary curiosity and remember him calling me “Bryce” with a soft German “R”.’17 The interest was not entirely unreciprocated. They met again in the school holidays when Freud was rather shocked to see Bruce’s mother swipe him across the face.
There was a trip to Cornwall where they stayed at Cadgwith on the Lizard and went from there to Tintagel Castle, worth seeing, Freud explained, because Freddie Ashton had asked him to design the setting for Picnic at Tintagel, a ballet based on Arnold Bax’s Tintagel Suite. ‘A ghastly piece of music,’ Freud was quick to say, but Ashton’s patronage was not to be spurned, for others, given the opportunity to do stage designs, had been conspicuously applauded; John Minton and Michael Ayrton for example had collaborated with great success on John Gielgud’s travelling production of Macbeth and Graham Sutherland had designed Ashton’s The Wanderer, producing small gouaches for enlargement into monumental backcloth cliffs and crevices. To see sketches transmuted into spectacle was an enticing prospect. Freud always found it stimulating to see his work put through the processes of being proofed or laid out on the page. ‘I got a kick when things were photographed.’ That was reproduction; this was transformation.
Picnic at Tintagel promised to be as whimsical a mix as any Cocteau scenario. A picnic party visiting the castle ruins was to be plunged into the Tristan and Isolde era only to return to the present day for the final curtain. Freud quite enjoyed the recce, but the production fell through. When Ashton revived the project in 1950 he commissioned Cecil Beaton instead, who, conscious of ‘the competition on the one hand of Wagner and on the other of Cocteau’, proposed a skirtless Isolde and a Tristan modelled on Olivier’s Henry V. The Tintagel venture was not a complete waste of time. Either there or at Lyme Regis (where they stayed two nights, long enough for him to manage a small view out over rooftops and sea), he picked up a dead puffin. As was his habit, he worked from it until it had served his purpose, the sorry creature far gone, its bones protruding like umbrella ribs through the bedraggled plumage. He drew it twice in pen and ink, the pen strokes that trailed, contoured, dotted, nicked and hatched, the dishevelled plumage intricately cloaking the rotting body.
During another brief jaunt with Lorna in Tenby in South Wales Freud occupied himself with a prospect of the town from across the bay, a picture-postcard view that, characteristically, he later regretted not having destroyed. He drew jetty and huts, fishing boats and castle ruins: visitor attractions set out as though for a mariner’s return from trauma, the sea silvery, the harbour bay as clear as glass and, moved inshore a little, the Horse Rock remodelled into a reminder of the three-legged sandstone horse on the mantelpiece at Walberswick. This was more an Alfred Wallis setting, a Toy Town on sea, than a Graham Sutherland Neo-Romantic haunt. ‘Tenby being so beautiful, Italian cafés were started there; not Deux Magots but nice, with Italian chips and quite cheap.’ No one was pretending that this was the real Mediterranean, but the taste was genuine enough. Whereas, Freud later observed, the Neo-Romanticism emanating from further along the coast with Graham Sutherland and John Piper seemed simultaneously sloppy and overwrought. ‘That rather horrible thing with greasy chalks and water, like washing up gone wrong’.
In August 1944 he plunged briefly into this greasiness when lodging, with Craxton, at the Mariner’s Arms in Haverfordwest; Graham and Kathleen Sutherland planned to stay there too but, finding the pair too boisterous, they withdrew to a cottage at Sandy Haven, the setting of Sutherland’s 1939 Entrance to a Lane. Freud showed his disinclination to heed the prevailing genius loci by drawing in pencil on Ingres paper a Christmas cracker that he found in a box in the hotel attic. Gorse he liked too. It was the toughest plant around. He drew gnarled stems and barbed green baited with yellow. His gorse was specific, unlike Sutherland’s gorse – interchangeably aligned with thistle heads and crowns of thorns – and Craxton’s tusky specimens.
As the war dragged on, Neo-Romanticism thrived, a manifestation of insular escapism proliferating quicker than willowherb on bombsites. Freud saw it as Symbolism gone haywire, ludicrously so. ‘One thing amazed me: Michael Ayrton wrote, “all but the very best people are affected by undergrowth and roots.”’ An equally trying alternative was Cubistic pastiche such as that of the Scots duo Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun who conflated Braque and Wyndham Lewis. Actually Freud preferred Colquhoun’s work to that of his big influence, Jankel Adler, who, discharged from the Polish army in 1941, painted initially in Glasgow, then in London. Freud went to his studio once to see his work and thought it too prearranged. ‘He was making Modern Art for “the stupid British who didn’t know”: boring angular things, all patterns. With Colquhoun there was a bit of talent, but Adler was working from Czech people I hated. Supposedly more intelligent than Josef Herman, who did those square peasants all the time, and I suppose he looked at Klee.’
Sigmund Freud’s notion, pleasing to Neo-Romantics, that ‘the artist is an introvert on the edge of neurosis’, gave special credence to subjective moods, even those as topographically distrait as Graham Sutherland’s, whose ‘emotional feeling of being on the edge of some drama’ whenever he went to Pembrokeshire failed him in France where he was sent in late 1944 – his first time abroad – to draw wrecked railway yards. The critic Michael Middleton remarked that ‘painters who thought, a decade ago, that “child art” or abstracts were The Thing, now put their signatures to a formula of rugose and ecstatic tree-forms …’ Sutherland lived at Trottiscliffe in Kent, to the east of Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’, and gained inspiration from the ancient yews that grew along the Pilgrim’s Way under the North Downs. Signatories to the manner, John Craxton and Michael Ayrton, who talked of ‘the sensation of the unremitting war fought by trees’, were exceeded only by Charles Hawtrey in the character of Osbert the art student in the film Much Too Shy boasting his affinity to ‘a tree in agony … a tree who intimately lives with rain … a tree begging for mercy, crying out to be saved …’
Glorifying affectations, Neo-Romantics such as Hawtrey’s Osbert expressed themselves like billy-o, homing in on secret places under waning moons. The style ranged from entanglement to turgid watercolour washes. Craxton saw potential here, but Freud regarded the vogue as platitudinous. ‘I just walked in on it. Keith Vaughan was the worst. A legal way to do men and he wanted to do something.’ Vaughan made a thing of deliberate generalisation, male figures blending with trees. There was, surely, more substance in the tangible, more purpose in concentration. Facts detailed, things realised, whether the intricacies of a wicker basket or the wrinkled paw of a dead monkey, could have a hard-to-define lingering quality, like the quick acrid whiff of one flint bashed against another.
Portrait of a Young Man (John Craxton), 1944
Differences between the exacting and the generalised widened into a divide when, in 1944, Craxton illustrated The Poet’s Eye, an anthology put together by Geoffrey Grigson, produced by Walter Neurath’s book package firm Adprint and published by Frederick Muller as one of a ‘New Excursions into English Poetry’ series that included Landscape Verse with darkling lithographs by John Piper and Poems of Death adorned by Michael Ayrton. Craxton’s lithographs, predominantly mustard yellow and blackout blue with white highlights, featured poets clasped in hollow tree trunks and a reconstituted Pembrokeshire where scything curves tidied every sandy cove. Craxton wrote to EQ that the proofs for these were ‘as hopeless as Auntie’s split bloomers only more skitso prenick’.18
Darling Felicity I am sorry I have not written for so long to you though I have often meant to. I have been in Scotland and in Cornwall (last week) since I last saw you and I had a wonderful wavy bathe. Rushing about England nearly makes me feel quite different but not quite. My life is at a very crucial stage at the moment, one day I think I am beginning to make my work how I want it to be and then I feel so dissatisfied with it that I leave the house. I made a lithograph in Ipswich of a horse and jumping fish by the sea. I have bought a very large Zebra’s head it looks very strange on the wall with big glass eyes and mane going up. By far the best thing I have ever bought. Do come to London. Surely its your Autumn Holiday Lots of love to you from me.19
As this letter suggests, by the autumn of 1944 Freud’s concerns and predilections, not least his involvement with Lorna, had distanced him from Felicity. (The pair of lipsticked lips collaged to the bottom of this letter was jokey over-compensation.) Now was the time for applying himself and launching out. ‘Johnny was doing The Poet’s Eye and I went to Cowell’s in Ipswich with him and they gave me a zinc plate.’ He drew a genial horse slithering on shingle and kicking out at a wicker basket filled with fish, sending them flying. He gave Peter Watson a print from this with the sea coloured in slightly and, provoked by Craxton’s efforts, set to work assembling drawings to go with The Glass Tower, a book of poems by Nicholas Moore. This was to be published by Editions Poetry London, an imprint now backed by Watson. He had known Moore, Tambimuttu’s assistant on Poetry London and son of G. E. Moore the Cambridge philosopher, for years on and off. He liked to compose his poems straight on to the typewriter using a red ribbon on yellow paper; he smoked scented tobacco or gold-tipped Russian cigarettes. ‘Will talk interminably about himself but diagonally, or in a roundabout way, by implication,’ wrote Charles Wrey Gardiner, the publisher for whom he sporadically worked,20 while Tambimuttu awarded him praise in the form of a backhander saying that there was ‘little pretentiousness’ in his poems.21 Even Stephen Spender dismissed him, referring to him in Horizon as ‘the prime example of what one might call the Little Jack Horner school of poets, who put in a thumb and pull out a plum and say, “what a good boy am I”’.22
Dead Monkey, 1944
The poems to be illustrated verged on the surreal with topical references cued in (‘Hitler is love’s taunting fable, the earth gone wrong’), so there was obvious imagery for Freud to pick up on. Not that he did. ‘I just used to read them and look for words I liked. Animals and so on. Definitely done for money: I got £40 cash.’ Two of his dead-monkey drawings qualified for inclusion thanks to the line ‘monkeys with sexes prevalently showing’, also the head of a toy monkey belonging to Moore’s baby daughter Juliet whom he had drawn with it not long before. A gull lifted from Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds stood in for ‘The Five Peculiar Gulls’ and his zebra head served again, fitted with a unicorn horn. Moore invoked ‘Max Ernst of the peculiar birds and people’, but Freud ignored that as too obvious a reference; and he resisted the lure of the line ‘The second egg was white, curved like woman’s thigh, virgin,’ making do with a nondescript egg lolling in the crumpled paper bag from Quince on a Blue Table. A drawing of EQ’s black cat asleep on a black and white cushion was submitted but not used.
The Glass Tower became more Freud than Moore. ‘I designed it all: the jacket and the binding, yellow and black on the front and black on yellow in reverse on the back.’ The motif was a palm tree from the Loudon Road nursery, ghostly on the front cover, more elegant and effective than Craxton’s bleached eye socket for The Poet’s Eye. He toothed and feathered his lettering for the title page and placed in the centre a sad-eyed puffin viewed head on: the Poetry London colophon garlanded with barbs and bunting. Drowned birds and shells occurred at intervals, near-emblems gracing the page, rather like the fish and poppy tattoos that he was to apply later on (‘as tokens’) to favoured girlfriends.
Some months before The Glass Tower was proofed and despatched to the printers in Bournemouth, Freud and Craxton were thrown out of Abercorn Place. For one reason or another, particularly the noise overhead and the crunching glass, Clinton Grange-Fiske in the ground-floor flat decided that he had had enough of the pair of them. He particularly resented girls ringing his doorbell late at night and asking for Lucian. ‘Being a grandee, the Rector of Stiffkey’s driver, he couldn’t stand it.’ Craxton returned to his parents’ house in Kidderpore Avenue and Freud found a house in Delamere Terrace, on the seamy side of Maida Vale.
‘I could have had the whole house for £2,000 or something and I said to my father, “It’s marvellous and not out of the question for me to get it,” but he said, “When the war is over there’ll be a housing shortage and you’ll have to let it to people who never get to pay the rent, or to friends, and it’ll be chaos.” He was sensible, being an architect and also a landlord a bit. So I didn’t.’ His father said he could get him a twenty- to thirty-year lease ‘for a small sum’ because everywhere was so cheap. ‘You’ll be turned out if you pay rent: I can get you a thirty-year lease.’ He didn’t. Freud took a first-floor flat at number 20 for thirty shillings a week, the idea being that he would pay the rent from his share of the Sigmund Freud royalties.
‘It had a canal balustrade with columns like chess pieces, big balconies with the ironwork mostly gone, except where it was protecting basements. It was very broken down.’
Delamere Terrace runs along the Grand Union Canal behind the Harrow Road, immediately west of the avenues around Paddington Basin or Little Venice, as Robert Browning, who had lived there in the 1860s, called it. In his day the Terrace had been quite grand, though unpaved, with its stucco fronts, gates at the end and a halfpenny toll to non-residents; he had walked along every afternoon to call on his sister-in-law, Arabel Barrett, who lived at number 7 and had been a dedicated supporter of ‘Ragged Schools’ for the poor and other such amenities in the surrounding area. Before the war the London County Council had bought up most of the district – twelve acres of decay from Delamere Terrace to Clarendon Street (renamed Crescent) – with the intention of redeveloping it. ‘Much of the Clarendon Street area of Paddington is insanitary,’ the Architect’s Journal reported, adding however, ‘it is a sociable, homelike place with a character of its own, and it is liked by the people who live there.’23
The move could have counted as slumming, but for Freud it was more a venturesome plunge, like diving off to Liverpool three years before. ‘Delamere was extreme and I was very conscious of this: down the hill, down to the canal. It was through having been to sea that I moved to Paddington. There was a sort of anarchic element of no one working for anyone.’ He was now twenty-one; he had come of age.
‘I like the idea of hideouts but the real point is privacy.’
Around this time Stephen Spender wrote a short introduction to the Air Raids volume in a pocketbook series ‘War Pictures by British Artists’; as a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service he was well placed to pronounce on the social impact of the London Blitz. A cultural easing had occurred thanks to the war, he suggested, slipping into Crown Film Unit commentary mode. ‘The gulf that has separated the man of imagination and creative power from the man-in-the-street has considerably narrowed. Both live now amongst the same grim realities.’24 He and Natasha had stayed on in the flat in Maresfield Gardens, two districts and a world away from the circumstances in which Freud now found himself. ‘Delamere Terrace was in a completely unresidential area, with violent neighbours. I felt very at ease.’ He was on his own now, he liked to think: lodged with a breed of people who got by on instinct and tribal habit.
‘My mother used to go daringly down there and leave me food parcels on the step. I never liked having her round. She never called in.’ Which was just as well, he felt. It would not have looked good for Lu the Painter, as he became known in the district, to have been seen to be mothered by a fine lady with a German accent. Her concern for him was irritating. His father on the other hand was realist enough not to bother him. ‘He worried, understandably; I think his happy nature made him not want to know what I was doing in any way.’
Among the few things Freud took with him to 20 Delamere Terrace were the zebra head (‘my prized possession’), a top hat, a couch and his potted palm, the objects displayed in The Painter’s Room, a picture begun in Abercorn Place and completed – ‘like I took Box of Apples to Wales’ – in new surroundings. Shown off like shop-window items, accentuated in effect, they could be clues, though there is nothing about them to suggest mystery or significance. Freud acknowledged the painting to be ‘a bit out-of-Miró’ in that the living space is as abstracted as the playground of Miró’s Harlequin’s Carnival, a painting that he had admired in reproduction for its ‘most marvellous elation’ not knowing that the milling organisms were said to be hallucinations brought on by hunger. In The Painter’s Room the scarf and top hat are, plainly, a boulevardier’s trappings. The palm stands over the couch, as in the Douanier Rousseau’s parlour jungles and the line in Ubu Roi about ‘palm trees growing at the foot of a bed so that little elephants standing on bookshelves can browse on them’; the zebra head may suggest a connection with Christopher Wood’s Zebra and Parachute – shown at the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street in 1942 – in which exotic coincidence is effected on the flat roof of le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie. But this was not Freud turned Surrealist. He admired the scissors-and-paste upsets in Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de bonté collaged from old wood engravings; plonking the Lion of Belfort on a billiard table was a neat move. However, the incongruity of the zebra head is striking rather than surreal. He had lived with it long enough to regard it as familiar, as his familiar indeed; the metaphysics it scents and sniffs at is de Chirico’s ‘furniture grouped in a new light, clothed in a strange solitude in the midst of the city’s ardent life’, that same strange solitude that his father aimed to achieve when designing consulting rooms and that stills the silenced mêlée of Uccello’s Rout of San Romano. (‘I thought I got nothing from art, but that didn’t mean I didn’t. I certainly looked at it for a long time.’) The collapsed paper bag in Quince on a Blue Table and the scarf abandoned in The Painter’s Room resemble the bits of kit on Uccello’s pink battlefield floor. The creases in the muzzle and the shrivelled tip of the palm leaf, the nap of the hat, upholstery and neck, the studs and bristles, the skidmark shadows cast by the castors, are vivid transferences, like W. H. Auden’s line ‘the tigerish blazer and the dove-like shoe’.25 A blazerish red galvanises the zebra patterning and casts the scarf as a detached stripe. The couch stands daintily, like a foal, below the watchful head.
‘I never put anything anywhere odd; except, obviously, I used the zebra as if it were more native to the room than it actually was. I was working in a very cramped way of altering nothing and feeling that was the only way I could do things. I wasn’t aware of that at the time – Matisse hadn’t probably said it: “Accuracy is not the truth.” If I had read that I can’t help feeling that I’d have seen what he meant. But I was trying for accuracy of a sort. I didn’t think of detail; it was simply, through my concentration, a question of focus.’
For some months following D-Day, from June 1944, London came under attack from V-1 flying bombs. ‘Nobody in London has slept for four nights past,’ Freud’s neighbour Wrey Gardiner wrote. ‘The flying bomb has passed over and exploded somewhere else. For the moment.’ Later he added: ‘As I write this the siren wails to herald the flying bomb which people fear more than the other kind for obscure psychological reasons.’26 Freud used to look out for them from the roof of Delamere Terrace; sometimes, when he spotted an explosion, he nipped along on his bike to view the damage. One doodlebug landed in Maresfield Gardens, demolishing several houses and bringing down the ceiling of the Spenders’ flat. Another day, leaving The Painter’s Room on the easel, he went out to the paint shop in the Harrow Road to get pigments. While he was walking back a bomb struck behind the terrace and he was plunged into a cloud of dust. ‘As I started down the street I saw a red thing moving towards me in the fog. I put out my hand and it was wet, covered in blood. A thing just walking a few steps and then it was gone. Dead. No face. Completely gone.’
The window of his room was shattered but the painting, on an easel at right angles to the window, was miraculously undamaged. With that the zebra head, craning through the aperture more in confidence than curiosity, became a backhanded take on Guernica, ‘full of life and hope. No horrors of war there.’