The charm of Paris was wearing off by the end of a stuffy August when a letter arrived from Craxton saying that he was having a good time in Greece and pressing Freud to come and see for himself. After the Scillies, Craxton had taken a downstairs studio in Adrian Allinson’s house two streets up from Abercorn Place, and when Allinson (‘old Edwardian painter: Café Royal scenes’) asked him to leave, he said that he just might have to mention to Mrs Allinson that he had heard the creaking overhead of Allinson’s studio couch. Whether or not he did resort to blackmail over those telltale sounds he stayed put. And, Freud added, ‘The amazing thing was that Johnny actually told me this.’ Craxton had been in Switzerland for a show at the Galerie Gasser in Zurich (‘Gasser was about thirty and had come to England to see what painters and boys he could have’) and, Freud gathered, the possibility had arisen of his being shot by the husband of the woman he stayed with. Consequently Lady (‘Peter’) Norton, who had been manager of the London Gallery in Cork Street before the war (‘Art-mad, even madder than I am,’ said Peter Watson) and whose husband was now the British Ambassador in Athens, had flown Craxton from Milan in a bomber – ‘he was very thick with her; he had to tell her erotic things on the plane, I suspect’ – fixed up a display of his work with the British Council and installed him in a room over the Embassy garage. The Ambassador, Clifford Norton (‘A moustache is what I remember about him, not that he necessarily had one’), had a civil war to preoccupy him and suggested that, given Craxton’s undiplomatic tendencies, the best place for him was the island of Poros. Craxton wrote to EQ: ‘But oh how heavenly the place is & inside the church I felt like preying [sic] for the first time in years.’1
‘Greece is rapidly becoming a fascist state,’ it was reported at this time. ‘British prestige and moral standing is falling rapidly in Greece.’2 Greece was isolated in 1946, plunged in civil war and lacking ready communication with the rest of Europe. The only regular service by sea was from Marseilles to Piraeus on the Corinthia. Freud sent Craxton a telegram telling him to expect him and took the train to Marseilles. Waiting several days to embark, he whiled away the time drawing from his hotel window moored boats and swimming races in the harbour. His attention wandered.
‘I was sitting in my hotel in the Vieux Port watching girls going with clients into houses and the clients coming out afterwards completely done in. A girl I talked to said her father or uncle was a painter and a girl with her said, “She’s lovely: why don’t you go with her?” I couldn’t fancy them but in the end I said, “OK,” and went with her to the hotel. And they were absolutely furious as I didn’t have a suite – as I had very little money – and she came to my single room. Because of my incapacity it took ages; but then she washed herself in the tin bidet, and that was rather nice, and in the end she left and her ponce was waiting outside the door and he beat her up – a frightful noise – because, he said, she had done more things than planned as she’d been so long doing them. And then there was a misuse-of-room row and would I pay extra to the hotel for not using their whores. I knew afterwards why she wasn’t busy. Why she had been available. She had clap.’
In London a friend, Nanos Valaoritis, ‘from an ancient Greek family’, who worked at the Greek Embassy and knew his parents, had advised him to get a deck ticket. He had given him letters of introduction, including one to Nikos Kavvadias, a poet and womaniser nicknamed Marabou who worked as wireless operator on the Corinthia. ‘He didn’t speak English and my restaurant French didn’t get me very far but, anyway, we were walking up and down the deck and he said, “Lid ooze go goo then you and I”. It was Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. We talked Waste Land. Eliot is loved in Greece.’ Kavvadias had become a Greek John Masefield, though with greater sea-going experience, and claimed to be able to tell, blindfold, what country a woman came from by sniffing her skin.
‘I’d got clap. It’s a fever; it was very hot, and there was no medicine. Marabou commiserated and said he could give me the name of a doctor in Athens. He was the only one I told but whenever I passed the crew they put their hands to their parts and went Oooh Oooh.’ Living on deck he observed the other passengers and drew them: thirty or so drawings in a small sketchbook. Passing Stromboli (‘it had got lava dribbling down, and orange’) they went through the Strait of Messina into the Aegean and so to Piraeus, which had been devastated by bombing. ‘There were carts made of wood converted into prams to get passengers’ luggage off and I saw a boy lying asleep with his bottom in one of these carts and his mouth open and a thick web of flies that went up and descended on his face as he breathed in and out. Between Piraeus – a lovely shambles – and Athens there was a mile of land where people were living and camping, shouting and selling from impromptu bars and stalls. I saw a car without any tyres on its wheels, rattling along. Athens staggered me: such an oriental town. I was one of five non-Greeks in all Athens, it seemed; it was very much civil war. And no sign of Craxton, he didn’t meet me though he was staying in Athens; perhaps he didn’t want me there. I only had ten pounds – enough for the moment – and the doctor’s address.
‘I wandered round. In a strange square, Omonoia Square, I found a hotel and a man at the counter who was drugged, half asleep, took me up to a room with two beds and two mattresses on the floor. One of those mattresses was for me and I thought, God. I left my sack there and went off to the doctor in a shoddy first-floor room with bright maps on the wall of human insides, the liver scarlet. That was the waiting room, divided by a curtain from the surgery, from which I heard terrible screams and arguments. Victim left. I went in. The doctor was a monstrous little man, like Mr Punch, and he said, “I’ll give you an injection.” Obviously water. Penicillin? Never heard of it. “What money do you have?” “£10.” “I’ll have that. You’re a painter? Just give me your work for the other treatment.”’
Fortunately a friend of Craxton’s appeared: ‘a queer, old-style, French-educated interior decorator. He had a furious argument with the doctors and I left with him and he gave me the name of a doctor who had penicillin. It wasn’t M&B [sulfapyridine] but penicillin that was needed. Those very strong strains [of VD] developed through GIs in Naples which was the absolute centre of VD in Europe: US soldiers were handed out M&B, took it and stopped and then got the very strong, tough little ice-cream-vending germs. Posters used to say Clean Living is the Only Safeguard.’ Successfully treated, Freud caught up with Craxton and went off to Poros with him.
Before taking the boat to Poros Freud had attempted a currency exchange with Andreas Kambas, who had been in love with Matsie Hadjilazaros, an intellectual girl who had left him in Paris for Javier Vilató. The plan was that his parents, with whom he arranged for Kambas to stay, would give him pounds in London and Freud would go to the Kambas family for the Greek equivalent. He went to their mansion in Athens to collect it.
‘A portly merchant came down. “I’ve come from Andreas.” “We’ve not heard from him.” “Did he tell you?” “No, we’ve not heard from him.” So I said goodbye. It transpired he’d been turned out for having a girlfriend, or going with a married woman and getting her into trouble when discovered. It was very medieval. He was a real shit, big and never stopped eating. And he was staying with my parents. Naturally I didn’t write to them or tell them; equally naturally, when I got back to London and saw him in a café I tipped his chair over. I did sell a picture to Matsie, who had been married to Andreas Embirikos, a psychologist, who bought a drawing of a quince as I was skint and invited me to his wedding in Athens and when I went I was the only guest. Because he’d been married before nobody else went. I gave him one of the few oils I did in Greece: a pigeon.’ Freud told Nanos Valaoritis that Embirikos was the only analyst he had ever liked.
Coming into Poros ‘gives the illusion of a deep dream’, Henry Miller wrote in The Colossus of Maroussi, his tale of holidaying in Greece in 1939–40. ‘Suddenly the land converges on all sides and the boat is squeezed into a narrow strait from which there seems to be no egress.’ Four or five hours from Athens by ferry, a summer resort for Athenians, Poros, famous for its pinewoods, lemon groves and domed clock tower, hugs the shoreline of the mainland. ‘The island revolves in cubistic planes, one of walls and windows, one of rocks and goats, one of stiff-blown trees and shrubs, and so on.’3
Freud did not see Poros in quite such Jungian terms as Henry Miller. To him at first sight it seemed more a Greek Tenby, ‘curved away from the Peloponnese with the village spread along the water, and a naval station’. He and Craxton lodged with an Abyssinian Greek family called Maestro-Petro in a house with an iron gate, tangerine trees and chickens pecking around in the dirt. They had the two upstairs rooms, reached from outside up a flight of steps. Initially Freud painted Craxton (Man with a Moustache: open-necked shirt, blond hair, sunburnt forehead) and Craxton drew Freud. Both were barber’s shop Adonis heads, dissociated from Poros or indeed anywhere. Craxton’s mannerisms had become smoother with practice.
Life on Poros was basic, startlingly so, even for someone used to the insufficiencies of post-war England, and increasingly so as winter approached. ‘It was very very hard.’ When the money came through and they could pay their rent there was enough food, otherwise they and their hosts went short. ‘I had to pay two or three pounds a week board and lodging. The family – a widow and children – were rather desperate and relied on us. There were three sons and the daughter, no father, and the woman had a moustache. The elder son was a gambler and sold the family pig to get money. I had to hold the pig for him to kill it and tried to cover my ears with my shoulders while it screamed and the mother was crying. People bought the bits of pig to eat. There was a good smell as it cooked.
‘We went round cafés on the island and maybe had a coffee but couldn’t sit down. This went on for a month. And then one day a little boat bobbed up with John Lehmann and a British Council consignment from Athens and they sat down and bought us some drinks. Then Johnny bought a round, a £1 round, of drinks. And we had been there a month on nothing, not even lemonade. He was so mean. This was an opportunity for him and he arranged to go back with them to Athens, being friendly with Lady Norton: he had done Christmas cards and stripped furniture for her.’ In October, scaling up from pomegranates and lemons, Freud had painted Petros, one of the sons of the house. ‘A gentle boy, he said to me after one of his arguments with his catlike sister, Maria: “I understand they voice their opinion in England.”’ In the painting, Greek Boy, he is on his dignity, very much the young head of the house, immaculate hair catching the light like a raven’s wing. ‘I was pleased with it. Brown and green: you could see I’d been to the Byzantine Museum.’ Later, in London, Craxton swapped one of his drawings for it.
Guerrillas were operating in the mountains on the mainland. ‘I couldn’t work at night because of the lack of electric light insofar as bandits raided the island and broke the light plant. I had to read and draw by candlelight. There were suspected communists in the village and the police were horrible. They would go around dirty, smoking, and they would pick on people if they thought they were communists and would go and push their chairs over in the café. It was obvious the poor people were communists.’ He was told that women were seized by bandits. ‘I was amazed when they said it. I thought WHAT? But it wasn’t something you could ask about.’
Over on the Peloponnese Freud had an encounter straight out of classical legend. ‘I went across and out of the village into the hills and met a shepherd with his goats and he tried to give me one of the kids and was terribly hurt that I didn’t accept. It took me ages and ages to persuade him. He never saw a stranger. “Stranger” and “guest” is the same to them. A stranger is a guest, and you give something to guests and he only had his herd.’
He learnt that Demosthenes had poisoned himself on Poros at the temple of Poseidon. Island life could indeed seem ageless, or perennially archaic. ‘There was no tourism. After all, even in Athens it was fairly dangerous: you could walk out on to the hills in ten minutes and if they saw a stranger they threw stones. And in village life there were customs that refer back to ancient Greece. One thing stayed in my mind: Poros had sea on one side and on the other just the width of the Thames from the Peloponnese. Across the water there was a primitive village called Galata with one whore in it for the whole place. Sometimes she came across to Poros.
Also a boat came once with a corpse and there were women wailing and crying; then as the boat approached, people started cheering and shouting and drinking. By the time they landed it got really lively. Not one of them went out to the boat though, they just turned up the volume.’ When he turned to locals for company he was charmed and beguiled. ‘I used to go to the lemon orchards and have conversations about religion with a friend I made. We talked about girls and religion. I said, “Do you believe?” “How do you mean?” he said, amazed. “He’s there, after all, whether you believe in him or not.” He was younger than me, rough, worked in the orchards. (His parents had farms outside Poros.) Gave rather nice presents. Sweet lemons. They were like grapefruit. When we went for walks a cripple who hadn’t got legs, only shinbones, came with us, on all fours, like a dog. He never went into Poros, as he was a freak. When it was dark he’d say, “There are birds in that tree. I’ll show you,” and he’d get a catapult out of his shirt front and shoot into the trees and there would be a terrible commotion. He could tell there were birds there as he lived outside; his parents wouldn’t let him sleep indoors. It was that primitive thing that, if people look bad enough, they are either hidden or kicked out. He was very lively, very limited, looked very intelligent and animal-like, a very interesting semi-wild animal. He had this life on the ground.
‘I’d draw in the cafés and people would come and watch and I’d put a bird on top of the head of the drawing of a man and they’d point to the man and say “You’ve got a bird on top of your head. Ha ha.” I noticed that on several occasions. They looked at a drawing and believed in it and accepted it. Not like the British.’
Language was not much of a problem. ‘I could get along. A few words. It was so simple. My mother said that knowing ancient Greek, as she did, was a hindrance to learning modern Greek. I knew the nouns, never knew the tenses. Suddenly you’d hear a word and get a shock, coming upon a word like kleptomania. Gestures were odd too. When the gesture for “you come here” was a come-away gesture with a hand underneath. You got used to it. I used to play cards by candlelight. Conversations then were like in England, about sex, lamenting not having a sister and no girls. And wanking jokes. If one of the sisters was seduced by a man there was danger. They could do something with their older sister though: I think in fact it went on for a very long time.’ Ostensibly, segregation was strict, as was the dress code. ‘If a woman were wearing trousers in Athens, nuns would cross themselves as they passed by.
‘When I was in Greece I didn’t want to have a relief or anything. I wasn’t like Robert Colquhoun, who would wander round the streets saying, “I want me hole. I want to have me hole.” (What is it in Scottish? “I want me houle.”) I never wanted “me houle” at all. I mean, I longed to meet someone who I could actually like.
‘Once, when I went to Athens to try and get some money, I was so homesick for London I went into a place where the British army drank and danced. There were lots of Greek girls. I was with one and she said, “Would you like to stay?” “No money.” “You need only pay for the room.”
‘So we went to Plaka and a huge five-storey house. She was a number there, it was a rooming house for whores, and I stayed. A tiny bed. Quite nice. In the middle of the night her friend came in and sat on the bed, on me, and asked how she’d got on. I told her in Greek to fuck off and she was so impressed I was allowed to stay two nights extra.’
On Poros hand to mouth was the means of existence; to those painting there the way of life was similarly primal in that hand-to-mouth necessity paralleled the constant practice of eye to hand, hand to eye. Craxton told Geoffrey Grigson, who was preparing an essay on him to be published as a Horizon monograph, that in Greece he found it ‘possible to feel a real person – real people, real elements, real windows – real sun above all. In a life of reality my mind really works.’4 Freud wouldn’t have said that: much too glib; he did, however, paint real elements by real windows. These were, Craxton was to remark many years later, ‘some of his most limpid and luminous paintings’.5 A tangerine, a pomegranate, sun-bleached bone and lemons with shadows bitten in like scorch marks glowed that autumn in the upstairs room, enhanced, Freud said, by ‘the idea of metamorphoses and the light’. This exposed the widening differences between the two. Freud painted Craxton factually – a friendly specimen in daylight exposure – whereas Craxton drew him plumped up into a curly-haired Adonis. Freud’s powers of concentration propelled him away from Craxton’s terms of idyllic arrangement and generality.
Greek light denies distances. Everything, near or far, tends to appear evenly distinct. Freud’s lemons, the renowned Poros lemons, are Neo-Classical fruit, glossy as stoneware in the winter brightness. They are not symbolic, yet – just as the lemons of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (‘Little lemon, lemon tree … an oil lamp and a blanket on the floor’) relate to death – these painted lemons have a poetic singularity. Freud’s small Poros pictures turned out iconic, literally so in some cases in that occasionally, for want of canvas or panel, he resorted to using what pious souls would deem holy grounds. ‘All Greek houses have religious books and I did some paintings on the covers of books I stole. A reason why one of my lemons has eroded is that I tore a cover off one, to use, and glue stains have come through in the picture.’
What Freud painted in Greece was not unlike what he painted in London (lemons and fig tree substituting for quinces and potted palm), sanctified a little in the stronger light. He had brought sketchbooks with him from Paris. One in particular, oblong with a brown cover, he filled with chickens and pigeons, a pomegranate split open, the yard outside his lodgings, lounging village youths and the son of the house with incipient moustache, posing manfully. There were also thumbnail drawings – little more than doodles – for a self-portrait, working towards what became Still Life with Green Lemon: a lemon leaf posed like a sail against horizontal strips of shutter and sea as the artist’s eye and nose and a tuft of hair edge warily into view. He presented more of himself in a second self-portrait, Man with a Thistle, completed in the New Year. For this he had a canvas. Bleached out and baleful, the painting was an account of what it felt like to find mannerisms cramping one’s determination. Nanos Valaoritis described its bristling quizzicality in a diary published in Botteghe Oscure: ‘L. looking at L. looking at L. in the looking glass thinks he is L. looking at L. In fact he only sees L. looking at himself. He is a sort of mirror. L. invents a personality for people which he imposes upon them by the force of conviction and concentration like a distortion imposed on one by a crooked mirror.’6
Man with a Thistle, 1946
‘I felt more dissatisfied than daring. I set certain rules for myself and I suppose those rules were exclusive. Never putting paint on top of paint. Never touching anything twice; and I didn’t want things to look arty (which I thought of as hand-made), I wanted them to look as if they had come about on their own. Working in this way and not wanting there to be a mark or guideline, I went wrong through lack of composition. In the way that people go wrong who make up the story as they go along.’ And he had to eke out the paint. ‘I’d taken tubes and I was very careful and used very little and painted thinly. I was very careful and then I got my mother to send some paint. Quite a lot of it was German paint, with wax in. It could be used more easily working in the sun.’
Lieb Mutt,
I have a horrible feeling that you did not get my last letter, which included an urgent request for money and also my front door key. Thank you very much for the clothes. I hoped to find a letter in the pockets but then I remembered about how law-abiding you are. Please write. I have had and have no money for over a month and although I have almost no expenses I owe my rent to the family with whom I live.7
The rent for Delamere was to go to Mrs Harte, who lived downstairs at number 20. ‘The rent man would come round and she’d pay for me while I was away. The lesson is that neighbours must never be asked.’
In the first week of November a yacht appeared and anchored in a secluded bay. It was the two-masted converted lugger Truant owned by George Millar, one-time chief reporter for the Beaverbrook press in Paris. ‘Amazingly good-looking he was,’ Freud remembered. ‘Time magazine said of him “the face of a fanatic without dogma”. Rather pretty first wife worked on Horizon and went off.’ Millar, who was thirty-six, had distinguished himself by escaping from a train taking him to a German prisoner-of-war camp and had then joined the SOE to become a liaison officer in the French Resistance, eventfully so, hence his book Maquis, published in 1945, which paid for the Truant in which he and his new wife Isabel made their way through French canals and along the Mediterranean from Marseilles. Their arrival off Poros caused a stir in that it was the first time an English vessel had been seen in those waters since before the war; and as Millar describes it in Isabel and the Sea, his account of the voyage published a year or so later, he and Isabel were in turn surprised by the sudden arrival on board of ‘a lanky youth in a faded blue shirt’ who ‘drank two glasses of ouzo carelessly, with the speed of a rooster’s seduction’. This was Craxton, who rapidly established, Millar later wrote, that they had ‘mutual acquaintances in London, Paris and Hampshire’.8 Millar knew EQ (Kit Nicholson had been his supervisor in the Architecture School in Cambridge) and he too had frequented the Gargoyle. The following day a boy showed the Millars where Craxton was staying. ‘Craxton thundered down an exterior wooden staircase which trembled to his weight, and Lucian Freud followed him diffidently, a heavily built young man with a habit of carrying his head forward and glancing up through his eyebrows. He wore a football jersey marked with one thick maroon horizontal stripe on an off-white ground and, below that awesome garment, khaki-drill trousers.’ Craxton’s room was the untidier of the two and Millar noticed pinned up beside his bed the photograph of Freud in the football jersey holding the stuffed zebra head. ‘Freud’s room, like his painting, was neater, harder, and more self-conscious than Craxton’s … Freud was working on a self-portrait. Only the chestnut hair, one enraged eye, a long nose, had been minutely and exquisitely painted. Down in a corner of the canvas the outline of a tall Greek thistle had been pencilled in.’9
At first, Millar found, Freud was less forthcoming than Craxton. ‘The type of young man who is highly strung, yet who flings himself impetuously at certain types of physical discomfort and even danger.’10 His instinct had been to shy away when the Truant first dropped anchor. ‘But the Maestro-Petros were excited that we knew strangers on a boat – the civil war was going on so there was nobody else foreign around – and they bagged some things for us to take out there.’ To the Millars, returning Craxton’s call, it seemed that they were starved of company. ‘They appeared to be delighted to see us, eager to drown us in impetuous descriptions of Poros and Greece,’ Millar wrote. ‘Freud talked fluently with a larger vocabulary than the average young Englishman, with more tendency to exclaim and to reiterate, and with only a hint of throat guttural in the r’s. Craxton, pleasingly unselfish, was often prepared to listen to his companion.’11
‘My memory is retentive of faces, mannerisms, even long stretches of dialogue,’ Millar assured his readers in the preface to Horned Pigeon, his newly published prequel to Maquis.12 Freud and Craxton were the most mannered perhaps, certainly among the most memorable characters he encountered on his four-month odyssey, and accordingly he assigned them prominent roles in Chapter 28. Craxton had a ‘wispy moustache growing outwards from the division of his upper lip, as though the besiegers had managed to land a feeble airborne force’, and kept saying things were ‘delicious’. Having retained his flair for perky detail (ever the Beaverbrook journalist), Millar continued: ‘his favourite adjective at that time was “wonderful” and while we talked with them we reeled under enfilades of wonderfuls and deliciouses.’ As for first impressions, he recalled Freud saying to him that when he first saw Truant he feared the worst: ‘I feared that some purple-faced yachting cap, or some frightful lawyer from London, would leap out at me.’13 He rated Millar worth getting to know: a pretty good gossip. ‘George Millar was a taller, more athletic, more handsome, non-queer Bruce Chatwin; Isabel his wife was chickeny and asleep a lot. He was a hero and couldn’t stop being heroic and that was the point. He was interesting about Beaverbrook, about his stable of women he used to fuck, including his son’s.’
Craxton wrote to EQ reminding her that she had told them to look out for Millar. (A letter, Millar noted, written ‘in characters one inch high on a blood-coloured piece of paper measuring three feet by two’.)14 And there he was, providentially well equipped at that: ‘Their little cabin is delicious white with all the nicest books.’15 He went on to report ‘dough crisis as usual’ and that he had run out of materials. ‘Lucian is about a month and a half behind with his payments here and things are a bit restless – still he paints all day & at work now on a wonder[ful] large self portrait of himself looking through a shuttered window … Looch sends his love and congratulates you on discovering Miller … It was pure chance that drove them to shelter in Poros.’ Claiming later on that he had done ‘well over 60 pictures’ and that it rained a lot he added: ‘Loochie and I still bath with pleasure and my swimming gets more and more mermanly.’16 With winter setting in they discussed how they might manage to return to England. ‘Craxton thought he might be able to prevail on some friend in Athens to send him back by air,’ Millar heard. ‘While Freud had been given the idea that he might return to England by reporting himself to a British consulate as a “Distressed British Subject”.’17
Boat moored off Poros, 1946
Freud succeeded in selling a few of the smaller paintings. ‘I did once have the money to get back. Fifteen or twelve pounds or something: just not enough.’ And even that he lost. ‘The travelling roulette table came round so I didn’t have any again.’
Being more or less stranded in Greece, Freud was unaware of an article by Michael Ayrton in the third number of Orion arguing that ‘one or more facets of a single tradition’ were the dominant concern in British art18 and that Lucian Freud (‘his paintings … show a steady development’) and John Minton represented those two facets. There they were, two of a kind but contrastingly so: Freud wintering on Poros painting lemons and consorting with misfits, and six months later Minton on Corsica illustrating Time was Away, Alan Ross’s travel book commissioned by John Lehmann, his Corsica proving to be Treasure Island alleviated with café-bars. Currency-restricted ration-book holders in late forties Britain were to regard Minton’s drawings of superabundant produce in Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food as visions of plenty to come and, meanwhile, plenty elsewhere to be had. Even on Poros there was good food to be had, provided one’s rent money arrived.
Towards the end of the year Craxton exhibited at the British Council in Athens where Ghika had been given a retrospective (aged forty) a few months before. Craxton, who had met Ghika in London a year before, was to derive from his take on the Byzantine every element of style: ‘colour used emotionally rather than descriptively’ as he put it fifty years later in his obituary of Ghika, his lifelong exemplar.19 Freud went too and took the opportunity to go to the Byzantine Museum. ‘I went quite a few times. It affected me, trying to do simple forms. I hadn’t seen [Byzantine] things as part of the life. The portraits, and the trees and so on, seemed so robust and subtle.’ He had been told that when his grandfather went to Athens in 1904 he made a point of putting on his best shirt before going to see the Acropolis.
‘Craxton was friendly with a man in the Canadian Embassy. He had a boat and we went out from Athens around the harbour and Greek soldiers started shouting something and then bullets were coming at us and I was lying down saying this is the most boring thing that ever happened to me in my life. They were shooting in dirty uniforms and the man from the Embassy said, “I may have to report this.”’
Freud returned to Poros with Lady Norton and others in a motor launch belonging to the British commander-in-chief in Greece. ‘We shot across from Athens,’ he told George Millar. ‘It was wonderful. We only took an hour and a half and spray was breaking like mad over the thing.’20 He and Craxton entertained the party, taking them to a taverna and inviting them to breakfast in their lodgings the next morning. Craxton then returned with them to Athens, intending to go on to Crete, having wangled a lift on a naval vessel. ‘I think if there was something he thought worthwhile I doubt if I’d have gone: he never wanted any of the special treatment to go to anyone else so he’d make arrangements and be off. Not only that: he very much didn’t want me to come as I think he thought sponging doesn’t work so well if it’s joint.’
Watching the boat dwindle to a jolting dot, Freud was downcast. ‘I remember being alone.’ He and the Millars were conscious of the sudden silence. Christmas loomed. ‘We all felt a little depressed,’ Millar wrote. ‘Particularly Freud, who talked, as he accompanied us to Truant, of the impermanence of life and the probability of early, sudden, violent, and tragic death.’21
‘I had no money and occasionally – to do with hospitality – I had to barter to buy something. I had fancy shirts from the Charing Cross Road and swapped a checked shirt for a chicken. And then, soon after, a boat arrived and there was my red-and-blue-checked shirt on a sailor: a shirt from Cecil Gee’s. It made me think of the world of Ovid.’ The Millars invited him to lunch so he took the bartered chicken to them, its claws tied with yellow ribbon. He asked Millar how a chicken should be killed and, told that the thing to do was to wring its neck, he pulled hard and the head came off in his hand. Millar plucked and cleaned the remains and Freud ‘after the usual wriggles and grimaces, drew drawing materials from his bosom and set to work’. He had decided to draw Truant, or rather they asked him to draw it for a Christmas card (‘he said he only did that to get me off the boat’) and he asked to borrow the dinghy to go ashore with his sketchbook and find a good spot. Millar was intrigued by his habit of carrying his drawing things inside his shirt and would shove a hand in and feel around to find his inkbottle. ‘He had another, equally disconcerting habit of glaring at you, and then looking swiftly down in sudden shyness. There were signs of greatness in him, and I wish that I had been as brave as he at the age of twenty-three.’22
Freud took them to meet Giorgios Seferiades (pen name George Seferis) and ‘banged on all the doors and windows while we stood shyly before the house’ until the poet appeared on the balcony above. Seferis was the leading figure in an article by Nanos Valaoritis on modern Greek poetry in the March issue of Horizon: an exile returned to a land of maddening wind, ‘a wind laying naked the bone from the flesh’, ‘constantly haunted’, Valaoritis wrote, ‘by the vision of a world and a happiness lost for ever’.23 Seferis, Freud knew, was ‘very grand, distinguished, elderly – aged forty-six – the T. S. Eliot of Greece’. Indeed, he had translated The Waste Land into Greek and was spending a two-month holiday on Poros, ‘cleansed progressively by such a life’, he said. Millar was surprised ‘that good poetry could issue from a man with such fleshy hams and thighs’. Freud, on the other hand, wondered at the classical restraint of another guest.24
‘A man who was there said, “I was swimming today in the sea, I went far out and, twelve or fourteen feet down, I saw an archaic Greek statue lying there. I stayed and looked and looked.” “But didn’t you think of getting it?” “No. It looked so beautiful there,” he said.’
To Craxton such inhibition was plain silly, according to Freud, who confessed to having been a lookout for him when he snaffled icons. ‘I was fortunate enough to witness some of his more daring acquisitions. On Poros there were wayside shrines, small, hollowed out, open air. I used to watch outside. My father loved old things: antiques and statues that he got from his father. These icons were perfectly nice, very old, kissed away, and Johnny said, “Do you think your father would like one?” The icons were “odds and ends of little solemn gods”, as Hilaire Belloc wrote. It was pilferage, and that was why later on he was kicked out of Greece, barred for four or five years; he was just light-fingered, always pinched.’
Winter set in. There had been the sirocco and then suddenly it snowed. There was hunger on the island, not the starvation that there had been during the war, but bad enough. ‘When it was Christmas I really minded being there: I was upstairs and they were below having a Greek Christmas, and because of being a paying guest …… I just felt a bit bereft.’ He and the Millars were invited to dinner at the big house belonging to a man called Christos Diamantopoulos. They had Christmas pudding made with the help of a German cookery book from the 1820s. Their host had two heart attacks that night. A few days later the Millars left. It rained and rained and they called in at Freud’s lodgings to say goodbye and tell him that they knew that they would meet him again. ‘Freud was in his small, cold room, concentrating on an exquisite painting of a lemon.’25
The Millars sold the Truant to a British general they met in Piraeus who told them he fancied sailing it back to England.
‘What George Millar didn’t know was that Lady Norton had said to me, “I’m going skiing in Italy: I can give you a lift as far as there.” But she then met George and gave him the seat on the aeroplane because he was tall and blond and she fancied him. Simply disgusting; especially as when I went to Athens to get a visa for going on the plane and said I was going with her, I got those looks, as she was a well-known nymphomaniac.’
Darling Felicity [December 1946]
I hope you like this card it seems the best I have seen for very long [the card shows an old maid muzzled and clamped]. Where are you? and doing what? I am on the most amazing Island but I think I will soon come to London. A very happy and lucky new year and I hope to see you soon. Write me c/o Lady Norton, British Embassy Athens Greece. Johnny Craxton is here but has dissapeaed I hope the Bandits have (not got him).26
When Craxton returned they went by ferry to other islands. ‘I saw Ghika’s amazing palace on Hydra, one of the merchant palaces. His family had been one of the few to resist the blockade against Napoleon. And I saw the Tombazes’ palace with brand-new-looking, 1815, gilt Empire furniture. The Greeks didn’t make furniture so they were paid in furniture. The hideousness of it: green striped silks and bright gold. You were allowed to go in and look; Craxton got in, anyway; he always knew somebody. He didn’t notice he wasn’t welcome. I hate that.’ The palace was to become an art school. ‘Craxton borrowed a house on Spetsai for a week, from a fashionable woman in Athens, Dora Morchetti, Nanos Valaoritis’ aunt; he’d pressed on as usual and she’d said very well then. She lent the house to Johnny but the kitchen was locked. The servants – this was not unusual there – were poor relations (rather like the maids of whores in Shepherd’s Market are often their mothers) and one of them was a rather tragic niece or cousin: a beautiful girl.’ Nothing developed between Freud and the girl. ‘The word in Greek is gestinos? Which means “Miss” which means “Virgin”. I didn’t feel at all forward in a country where I couldn’t speak the language, had no money and had colitis from the greasy food. There’s no forcing anyone when you are a dodgy mixture between tourist and spiv and don’t feel very well. I was fairly ill all the time.’
Anxious to buy a ticket home he wrote to his mother trying to arrange for her to give twenty pounds to Nanos Valaoritis, who would then ask his mother in Athens to forward him the equivalent. ‘I’m sorry that all my worries are money,’ he said. ‘But what is the use of a lot of saleable pictures on a Greek island?’ The alternative possibility of being shipped back to Britain as a DBS (Distressed British Subject) proved impracticable. ‘I was in Greece as a perfectly ordinary tourist, so I couldn’t have been a DBS, as it was for if you had been in the services. It was to do with the Merchant Navy; if you deserted and were caught you were sent back, but I knew that they took your passport away and only gave it back if you repaid them, and I must have known that was impossible.’
Early in 1947 the Attlee government was getting round to telling the Americans that the British could no longer afford to maintain their presence in Greece, Britain itself being a Distressed Object. However in February Freud succeeded in borrowing from Lady Norton the cost of a ticket to Marseilles. ‘I never gave the money back. I just thought she was horrible. I had a note once from someone saying that I “owed Greece a lot”. That must have been her.’ He gave his hosts, the family downstairs, a little painting of a pigeon. When this came up for auction at Christie’s nearly sixty years later he dismissed it as a ‘souvenir’, hinting that Craxton had got it off the family and sold it on.
Freud owed more to Greece, in the short term, than he did to Paris. Greece gave him light and air. The elemental qualities of Poros, white walls and icons, the hovering falcons, sweet lemons and sour, represented astringency tempered if not mellowed by acquaintance, frugality and generosity intermixed. The paintings he brought back with him reflect, besides the blue and white of the islands, the virtues of insularity. Before Greece his still lives had been tinged with Surrealism. Greece reduced him to essentials. The reality, there on the table in his upstairs room, concentrated him for a while. He took back to England a clutch of distinctive work. ‘Ten things, mostly tiny, strapped together: lemons, portrait of boy, little head of Johnny Craxton, tangerines, lots of drawings, little self-portrait head half cut off. The drawings were in a book. Craxton stole some of those. Lots of fig trees.
‘We came back on an Albanian ship or something. There were two merchant seamen travelling back DBS, their passports confiscated. They complained about the fish heads we were given to eat. I said I knew a café in Marseilles and I would treat them to eggs and bacon there. So I did, but they didn’t like it at all as the eggs were done in butter instead of the hair oil they were used to in England. One of them said, “I don’t like food with all them flavours.”’
In Paris Craxton (‘just pushing in anywhere’) rang up Christian Zervos, saying he was a friend of Peter Watson’s. They went to his gallery where they saw Night Fishing at Antibes. ‘In came Picasso, looking like famous Picasso, and Johnny had his catalogue from the British Council in Athens with copied Picasso goats on the cover. “J’ai quelque chose pour vous,” he said and gave it to him. Picasso put it under his arm. And he looked at me and said, “Who’s that by? Who’s that man?” It was rather sad: the three things he asked about were by Calder and someone else.’ The following year Craxton painted a six foot by eight foot Pastoral for P[eter] W[atson] in which goats and goatherd foregather in a hilly landscape based on formulae developed by Ghika and Yannis Tsarouchis, the Hellenic Cocteau. ‘I wanted to safeguard a world of private mystery,’ Craxton explained,27 and did so by screening out direct observation. To Freud, who initially was to have been featured in the picture in the guise of a goat alongside further goats based on Watson and Lady Norton, such arrangements were too easy on the eye. ‘Johnny did compositions, which I didn’t.’ This painting, so sleekly organised, marked a parting of the ways.