17

‘My large room in Paddington!’

‘I used to go to lunch with Marie-Laure de Noailles in the Marais: hôtel particulier, a large shady garden. She’d say, when I first went, “Would you like to stay back?” Bérard took me the first time and she was shocked that I’d only been once to Vienna. She had a lover in the war, an Austrian count, who lived in Vienna and she said, “Why don’t we go for a trip?” Yes, I was married to Kitty by then …

Marie-Laure was famously mean but stupendously rich.’She was in her mid-forties. Her father had been a banker, her mother was a poetess. (‘There’s a late Vuillard of this tiny woman in bed with manuscripts around her.’) And she and her husband, the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, were seasoned patrons of the Moderne, Surrealism in particular. They had commissioned Buñuel and Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or, the Vicomte insisting that Stravinsky write the score and Buñuel insisting that he should not. Even their wealth was surreal. ‘They owned New York harbour …

I think they had a very bad time at the beginning of the marriage, which was arranged: grandeur marrying money.’ She had come upon the Vicomte embracing his gym instructor; subsequently they lived in separate parts of their house in the Marais, a hôtel particulier with dark mirrors let into the walls of the garden. He had his own staircase.A woman of varied accomplishments, she was a painter. ‘They had something very nice about them,’ Freud said. ‘I think she made anagrams and screens. She had a collection. She had a letter from Picasso about going to brothels (in Barcelona I think), all illustrated. I loved going with Marie-Laure to the theatre and so on, but the idea that the chauffeur was outside waiting – I didn’t like that. One of her lovers was a painter called Tom Keogh; his wife was a novelist and she did something absolutely brilliant: she started an affair with Baca the chauffeur.’

In May 1949 Freud and the Vicomtesse went by plane to a Vienna soon to be used as the location of The Third Man: Graham Greene’s ‘city of undignified ruins’ abjectly split like Berlin into American, British, French and Russian zones. ‘The Russians being so contemptuous of the Austrians they arranged for the airport to be Russian ground, where taxis wouldn’t go, so we had to be met by a car at the airport: she’d got that thing of making things rather special. (She quite waved it around that she was a vicomtesse. Monstrous behaviour.) Vienna was amazingly gloomy and beautiful; the Habsburg tombs; the beauty of the river going through. I noticed no children anywhere: very odd. We stayed about a week.

‘She took her amazing heavy jewels, worth a million and so heavy on her neck they made bruises. We went into antique shops and two assistants were kneeling on the floor looking at the things on her neck and wrists: she had all these jewels on, very bizarre. Then we went to some nightclub and I separated from her and she rang at 4 a.m. “Darling, I’ve been robbed of all my jewels.” But it turned out that one of her friends – she was drunk – took her jewels off for safety. Something I only noticed when we travelled was that she’d got immaculate behaviour. She said, “Darling, if you’d like company I’d be delighted to see you,” and gave me her room number. I was several floors above her.’ They were staying in the Grand Hotel. ‘I went to the barber’s shop there and the man said, “You are a self-shaver? Selbstscherer.’ Which sounded to me like Selbstmörder, suicide.

‘I did some things with Marie-Laure and some not.’ At night Freud preferred to be unaccompanied. ‘I rather went out on my own. I met a girl I thought wonderful, married to an American at the Embassy, an upper-class Italian girl; and I went round the nightclubs. The same people were going from club to club. These places, in basement rooms, were unbelievable: curtains shaking and groaning behind, Russians in ill-fitting uniforms and all the Austrians being terrified of them.’

Proud of being the great-great-great-granddaughter of the Marquis de Sade and owner of the manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom, Marie-Laure had an idea. ‘She’d got that thing of making things rather special. We were introduced to Dr Masoch, a sort of professor at the university and the great-nephew of Sacher-Masoch. So she said to him, “Sie sind Masoch, er ist Freud und ich bin Sade.” There she had it: sublime coincidence, a surreal royal flush. ‘The man ran for his life.’

Another expedition brought out her dynastic bent. ‘We were in the Habsburg tombs. At the very very end of the rows of barred cells, which begin in 1400, there were empties waiting and she said, “Oh no, Charles’s little nephews!” She was proud of it and said it in English.’

They looked at the Freud house at Berggasse 19. ‘I only saw it from the outside. Marie-Laure was shocked that there was no notice and arranged to have a plaque put on it.’ This could not be done overnight. It was five years before a plaque was unveiled, and then only because the opportunity presented itself when the World Federation for Mental Health met in Vienna.

By day Freud went to the museums and found them deserted. Many of the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s paintings were away on a tour: as it happened, they were in London that month, at the Tate. ‘But the Brueghels were there, as they are on panels and couldn’t tour, and I was very impressed by the Bellini: the woman looking in a mirror, his only secular picture.’ He went repeatedly to see Brueghel’s Christ Carrying the Cross, its trail of humanity obscuring Christ, the gibbet and the crow, the leaping dogs, the thistle in the foreground, the muddied cartwheels, the cutpurse – a Paddington face in a Paddington crowd – and the skull. ‘I thought how marvellous, how far things are, how extreme to have a momentous event incidental: the action, the tragic story, leaving it in the middle distance. The fact that it could mean so little to someone.’

One week of Vienna was enough for him. ‘Vienna is about as Baroque as I can stand.’ In later years there were to be calls from Vienna for the Sigmund Freud furniture to be shipped back for a Freud museum, and there was to be a Freud memorial on top of an underground car park (‘A bit of turf: park your car, go upstairs, and jump about on this tin roof with turf’). To the grandson the objection to such amendments was not political, let alone moral. ‘Just something to do with their reactionary attitudes and smug optimism.’ Though a drawing by him of two pigeons had been included in a British Council exhibition for Vienna the previous year, he vowed that he would never exhibit in Austria. The deaths of his great-aunts were not to be put aside.

Back in Paris, Charles de Noailles asked Freud whether Marie-Laure had got into trouble at all in Vienna. He was reassured. Marie-Laure, Freud found, was prepared to be helpful. Impressed by the drawing of Bérard she said that she would get Freud a commission to paint Count Alexis de Redé. ‘Where did he get his title?’ he asked.

‘Marie-Laure was naturally active, very impulsive, sophisticated and very emotional.’ She also wrote novels and painted. ‘One was of a man with a sword, three-quarter length. Snot colours. “I got so tired of people saying they looked like me,” she said. She obviously did get passionately interested in people, but mostly with queer people who were all in competition. The first time I went with Bérard to one of her grand lunches – distinguished people, Poulenc was there, and tarts, and there were footmen posted behind the chairs – she kept me back and said, “How do you like my collection of reptiles?”

‘There was a party where the house was turned into a village, Daisy Fellowes did the food and her huge Spanish lover, a faker of Picassos, was there: Óscar Domínguez, who stole things from the house and copied them; he was really wild and quite dangerous. He charged me like a bull, probably because I’d been talking to Marie-Laure. His pictures were spectacularly bad. He did ballet decor and killed himself. There was a photo in French Vogue of a party of Marie-Laure’s. Tout Paris was there, apart from the very grand people who thought Marie-Laure was immoral. Georges Auric, Poulenc, Dior, were named and in the spine was me: my name wasn’t there, but my mother found the photo and kept it.’

Two full-length portraits by Goya hung in the dining room. Freud noticed some years later that they had been removed to a drawing room. He asked why. ‘Darling,’ the Vicomtesse said, ‘people kept comparing me to the Goyas.’ Once she had proposed to Picasso: ‘You be Goya and I’ll be the Duchess of Alba.’ Portraits, some flattering, of Marie-Laure hung in a ballroom, portraits by Bérard, Berman, Dalí, Tchelitchew. And by Balthus who, when he painted her in 1936, had told her that he couldn’t manage it in such surroundings. ‘So he took an obscure room – bed and chamberpot – and locked her in and went away for three hours.’ Though Freud thought the portrait good, he didn’t especially like it. ‘Why have this hard wooden chair? I thought. Marie-Laure called Balthus “Ma jolie petit rat”. Quite accurate.’

Balthus claimed to be more nobly born than Marie-Laure, to be a Polish aristocrat indeed: namely Balthasar Klossowski de Rola. ‘He wasn’t the Comte de Rouelles in those days, he was M. le peintre Klossowski.’ In fact he had been brought up by his mother in straitened circumstances, initially in Berlin; Rilke had been a surrogate father to him and had arranged for the publication of drawings of Mitsou, his disappearing cat, done when he was ten. His nickname, ‘Baltusz’, on the cover became his name for life. He never, he said, stopped seeing things as he saw them in his childhood. The Balthus look, described by Antonin Artaud as ‘organic realism’ and essentially polished Courbet, affected Freud, particularly the peepshow intensity of the illustrations for Wuthering Heights, published in Minotaure in 1935 and which he came across reproduced in Lilliput. Some of these drawings belonged to Marie-Laure, the rest to Duchamp. Peter Watson had warned Freud that Balthus was highly strung and liable to spit at anyone who wore a tie. Yet when they first met, Balthus was wearing a tartan tie, implying Scottish connections. He explained that the Gordons were among his ancestors; this he maintained gave him a claim to be related to Lord Byron. Freud appreciated the forging of a romantic link for its absurdity more than anything. ‘I wasn’t in awe of him.’ Balthus’ self-serving assertion that ‘paintings don’t describe or reveal the painter’¹ was, he conceded, well worth saying, no matter who actually said it. Balthus then, and later, was apt to be disparaging about ‘Dear little Freud’, saying, ‘He could have been good.’²

They were in a bar once, the Bar Vert in the rue Jacob, Francis Bacon was there too, and others, and Balthus had been asking about Kitty, and Epstein, when he suddenly remarked, ‘How curious, to find oneself talking about Epstein.’ Pompous old fool, Freud said to himself. Already he preferred Balthus’ early work to what he was then producing. Such as the landscapes: ‘There’s a slight Nazi painting thing about them. Looking over the gate.’

In 1947 a ban on the import of foreign art for sale in the UK was imposed. ‘If it is extremely difficult for a painter to move around the world or export his wares, it is quite impossible for anyone else to go abroad to look at painting,’ Cyril Connolly complained in a Horizon editorial in 1947.³ Anything brought in had to be returned within six months, which meant that, for practical purposes, smuggling became standard procedure in the international art trade, such as it was. Balthus asked Freud to take a painting through customs for him and deliver it to Connolly, the idea being that an article on him would be published in Horizon. If challenged he should say that it was one of his own. They wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. ‘The customs will look at this picture comme une vache regard un train.’ Freud did as he was told and passed through Dover without a hitch. ‘The customs really liked that picture – a little girl up a ladder in a tree – and I said I’d done it because I’d got materials in my luggage.’ In April 1948 the painting, Les Cerisiers, was reproduced in Horizon, illustrating an article by Robin Ironside in which he talked about ‘the immediacy of reality’.⁴ Connolly failed to pay for the painting and soon sold it.

While Balthus could claim to be the modern Courbet, Realism (seen as sad reality) was more associated with Francis Gruber, the painter of emaciated figures on bare floorboards, who died in December 1948, a martyr to privation. Shortly afterwards Freud saw a group of his paintings. ‘He’d just died and round the corner, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, there was a memorial exhibition in a brown room: a roomful of pictures which did impress me. Their influence on Giacometti, or the other way round, was it? I looked at them and I believed them: they seemed to work well, then less so, later on.’

Once when Kitty joined him in Paris Freud introduced her to Giacometti. She asked him if he had heard of Epstein. ‘He said, “Le grand Epstein, bien sûr,” and she said, “Why do you say ‘Grand Epstein’?” She had no idea that Epstein was great, or that her half-brother Jackie’s mother was Isabel [Rawsthorne], who was famous for having been with Epstein as well as Giacometti. Giacometti once lent me money. I asked him how would he like it back, and he said, “Give it to Isabel.” We went out quite a lot together. I impressed him once. Kitty and I were at the Coupole with Annette and Alberto and as we left some louts started pulling girls about and I tripped them over and Giacometti thought me terribly heroic.’

Giacometti had seen Dead Heron in ‘La Jeune Peinture en Grande Bretagne’ at the Galerie René Drouin the previous winter. ‘He said he had seen it: out of politeness, not interest.’

Still Life with Squid and Sea Urchin was bought – nominally by Robin Ironside, purchaser at the time, actually by Kenneth Clark – for the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), which presented it to the Harris Art Gallery, Preston. Clark maintained that distributing paintings to provincial museums was the best possible patronage for young artists; he often did this through the CAS, notably a number of Sutherland drawings, which he distributed to regional galleries in 1946. Freud was dubious about this skewed generosity. ‘He did something which I think was wrong, which is, he bought to encourage whether he liked the stuff or not. He was very lonely. Girlfriends, yes. He began buying when he was at Oxford: buying a Tintoretto. Ruskin he idolised and, unlike Berenson, he was a good teacher. The only lecture he gave at the Slade that I heard was on Classicism and Romanticism. I couldn’t tell until the very end which side he was on.’

Clark projected his inhibition and detachment on to others. ‘Great artists seldom take any interest in the events of the outside world,’ he wrote in his autobiography, the second volume of which tailed off into accounts of official commitments. He had perhaps led too charmed a life, Freud thought. To Clark, Freud was a young artist in the unclassifiable category. ‘In the history of English art a few of the most gifted artists have always stood outside the main tradition,’ he wrote in an introduction to an exhibition selected by him, with Robin Ironside and Raymond Mortimer, in 1950 for the English-Speaking Union of the United States, for which the Freud he chose was Sleeping Nude (1950). Consequently, and unexpectedly, Freud was offered some teaching. ‘Clark took Coldstream to see the painting and Coldstream wrote to me saying he was going to the Slade and offering me one day a week, 10–5. He felt that unreliability should be catered for; he thought I represented unreliability.’

William Coldstream became Professor at the Slade School of Art, part of University College London, in the autumn term, 1949. His methodical painting, described by Lawrence Gowing as ‘the system that maps the visual evidence’,⁵ had been written off ten years before by that inveterate writer-off Geoffrey Grigson in his magazine New Verse, as ‘a blind man’s painting – clever, correct, well informed, academic and frozen’.⁶ He had become a practised portrait painter (Bishop Bell, Lord Jowitt) and an accomplished committee man, notably as a trustee of the Tate. He brought with him to the Slade from Camberwell, where he had been head of painting, a number of staff and students, testimony to the fact that his teaching was more persuasive than Grigson allowed, and more tolerant. ‘If there was one thing I really did value it was the individual statement,’ he said, and that, combined with his constant advice to students to ‘look more closely’, recommended Freud to him.⁷

Interviewed in 1965 by Rodrigo Moynihan for Anne Dunn’s magazine Art and Literature Coldstream said, ‘what struck me early on was that there is no idea of representation that can be agreed on … it does strike me that there is a possibility for representational painting that leaves one with an extraordinary amount of freedom.’⁸ In a BBC broadcast on Holbein in 1947 he said how ‘deadly efficient’ Holbein was, painting portraits from drawings. ‘I do become terribly interested, almost obsessively interested in anything – even still life – that I start really looking at.’⁹ The sitter’s presence was essential, ensuring as it did that liveliness was at stake. ‘I can’t work at all without something in front of me.’ Coldstream found the obsessive processes liberating. He became, for Freud, something of a marker: the dogged practitioner to be respected, not least for his forbearance as an employer.

Freud’s teaching stints were as intermittent and evasive as he could make them. Initially younger than many of the ex-servicemen students, he was much too shy, or preoccupied, to be an engaged or indeed proficient teacher. There were exceptions such as Michael Andrews, six years his junior and fresh from National Service in Egypt, who impressed him with his astute diffidence. Taking students to the galleries was, he decided, a good way of avoiding the strain of conversations at the easel. He never had the nerve to work alongside them in the life room, as Euan Uglow – a Slade student from 1951 to 1954 – did when he graduated to teaching. He needed his privacy. ‘I used to walk in and watch. I didn’t like being watched.’ Stanley Spencer’s daughter Unity, who was at the Slade in the early fifties, used to see him come nervously into the life room and make a beeline for one girl, being too intent, or uneasy, to pay attention to the others. He hit on a strategy for showing his face without being waylaid. ‘I had this idea of an optical thing: if something goes round fast enough people think it’s still going on. I based my visits on this thesis. Went through all the rooms three times, at enormous speed, wondering what I was doing there. Once I went in a room and was bitten by a dog and I thought at least something happened here: never been bitten by a dog before (I always get on well with dogs), so I thought, well, yes, there has been an interaction.’ Another time – another interaction – he paused for once behind an easel. ‘There was a very odd man, a big bloke. I did that thing of standing and looking at him working, which I felt uneasy about as I loathe being watched as I work. “Are you the new Inspector or something?” he asked.

“I’m the part-time visiting assistant lecturer.” “Well, I suggest you fuck off then.”’

Had the situation been reversed, Freud added, it was what he would have felt. The student was called Norman Norris and his reported remark (‘Oh, fuck off, Freud,’ it was said) became Slade legend, according to a later painting student, the cartoonist Nicholas Garland. ‘What courage. What aplomb! The story would not have been told about Mr Townsend or Mr Rogers or anyone else because to speak to anyone else like that would have been simply rude and stupid.’¹⁰

Duties at the Slade were undemanding in that, having no particular desire to teach, Freud felt that his involvement could only be marginal. ‘I was surprised how much it was for a day. £50? It wasn’t that it wasn’t useful, but I’ve never had a proper economic structure.’ Earning regular pay was a novelty. As for actually earning it, others who taught there found him hard to take. Claude Rogers, worthy co-founder of the Euston Road School, went up to him one day when he was sitting in the common room reading the newspaper, whipped it from him and sat down to read it. ‘He just took it out of my hands. And newspapers mean quite a lot to me. Enough to get out your gat and shoot ’em in the balls.’

‘It is worth trying for a moment putting oneself in the position of a foreign observer new to England but unprejudiced,’ George Orwell wrote in his 1947 essay The English People. An outsider, he suggested, would find ‘artistic insensibility’ characteristically English, also ‘gentleness, respect for legality, suspicion of foreigners, sentimentality about animals, hypocrisy, exaggerated class distinctions and an obsession with sport’.¹¹ In Camera in London published in 1948, Bill Brandt talked of an imagined photographer of London – obviously himself, formerly of Hamburg – who had ‘something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveller who enters a strange country’.¹² Freud could still remember coming to England flush with just having read Black Beauty and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Restless, nervous, unsettled, he had spent what was left of his childhood being the Young Mariner venturing and floundering in a strange, in many ways baffling, intriguingly stratified society.

‘If one likes Paris one tends to think that the Parisian will not like London,’ Stephen Spender suggested in a Horizon editorial published shortly before VE Day.¹³ After the war London with its bombsites and general dilapidation took longer to recover than Paris; among the attractions of Paris were its denial of the immediate past and the verve with which its cultural pre-eminence was reasserted. Rationing soon died out there and licensing hours did not exist. Freud went to Paris whenever he could; Paddington however was where he worked, mostly, and carried on. The poet William Plomer wrote of it as a near-ghetto: ‘Long been favoured by the Jews and the Greeks as a quarter to live in … Its population has a grubby fringe, a fluid margin in which sink or swim the small-time spiv, the failed commercial artist turned receiver, the tubercular middle-aged harlot.’¹⁴ Given his passport to Paddington Freud felt he was armed against class distinction. The Slade in Gower Street was a weekly fixture, on and off (‘more often off than on’, he added); Soho was for seeing friends, St John’s Wood for intermittent domesticity. ‘My LIFE was at Delamere, and I’d sometimes go back to Clifton Hill. It was partly a class thing. I always felt that extreme social change gave me what travelling gives other people. My travelling is downwards, rather than outwards.’

Popular belief had it that the rents of Paddington brothels went to the Bishop of London while across the canal lay respectability. Along the canal, towards Paddington Green, the populace was more mixed. ‘The Warwick Arms where I drank a bit, the Williams-Ellis bookshop and a café opposite run by a mad Polish woman; Feliks Topolski used to go there and he told me that she used to think people were wanking and she’d say, “You can’t have pleasure in my café”; the Jewish fish and chip shop, really horrible, trying to make people more anti-Semitic.’ The bargee pubs by the canal had been busy until the war, but no longer. ‘The Old England, round the corner, had couples fighting and extraordinary old boys, twenty pints of beer in an evening, singing “I never been done, never been interfered with.” They couldn’t make me out. They thought I was some kind of either prince or foreigner. They’d got awfully good manners though. “Do you do, like, photographs?” they’d ask.’

‘Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders,’ says Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘Crime is to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.’¹⁵ To an outsider, Paddington ways were stimulating, not to say Nietzschean, and risky. The first time Freud took Frank Auerbach into the Old England he declined an offered drink and Freud had to explain to him that you didn’t actually have to drink the drink but it was unacceptable to say no. Having taken to being something of a local character, Freud showed off his social gumption.

‘I liked going to dice games, especially clubs where Charlie’s friends met. Charlie was good with girls. I used to envy him because we’d be walking down the street and there’d be girls and Charlie would say, “Hey, what yer doing later? Come and have a drink.” “Oh we’re busy,” they’d say. “See you,” he’d say. I felt too tense to do that, too excited seeing girls; he was very good with them. We were generally known as friends. We got on very well. Sometimes things that I didn’t understand Charlie would explain to me: the harsh ways and laws of the life there, such as the things people were respected and despised for. I went a lot to the Met in the Edgware Road and Charlie would go in the circle at the very top and fight, like in Sickert pictures: always fighting and shouting and making passes at each other. Max Miller used to slip out and drink in the bar at the back where he could watch the audience and stage. Marvellous jokes. “If those five hundred dancers won’t be allowed to dance with their brassieres off it’ll be a thousand pities.”’ Clocking his audiences from behind, Max Miller saw them as bawdy livestock.

‘Charlie was in reform school quite a lot. I heard this clinking in his jacket; it was a knuckleduster and I took it out; next day he came back with an eye almost out and I felt bad. He and another boy had had a fight. I went to Humphrey Razzall, who was Johnny Minton’s solicitor, to brief him about Charlie and he said, “You’re living in a dream world. This is an attempt at a salvage job.” Razzall got to question the other boy, though; Charlie had hurt him rather badly and he said, “What would you have done to Charlie if you’d caught him?” and what he said got Charlie probation, not jail.’

Charlie Lumley – ‘Your Little Genie’ as Douglas Cooper referred to him when taunting Freud – made Paddington seem at times almost a Guys and Dolls neighbourhood. Charlie was incorrigible, Anne Dunn felt: ‘I always remember Charlie Lumley stealing a watch belonging to a friend that I had undertaken to have mended. Lucian eventually forced him to give it back. There were serious raids on the Spenders’ house when L was in his “Genet” mode with Charlie.’¹⁶

‘In a way that’s rather bad-mouthing,’ Freud commented. ‘I looked after Charlie. I made his life much easier: money and comfort. He was good company. He seemed to get into trouble more when I went away. I went round one of the Borstals he was in and there was a room without windows, with a concrete floor; they said, “When they feel wild we let them in here to relax.” I got really nice letters from him in prison. He was very bright and quick-minded and he very much went about with me. Kitty quite liked him. He stayed at Clifton Hill a lot.’

Frank Auerbach, who met Freud first in 1955, suspected that there was rather more involved than Charlie just tagging along. ‘One sometimes wondered about his relationship with Charlie because Francis told me that Lucian had told him that sometimes he woke up – and it’s not entirely rare in Lucian’s life – in the same bed as Charlie and thought, oh yes, it was only Charlie, and turned over. That was Lucian’s story.’¹⁷

Comprehensive Development Plan Area 13, Freud’s part of Paddington, was itself a strange country in which, behind the stucco façades of Bayswater and the stews of Clarendon Street and Westbourne Grove, notoriety was more likely than fame. In November 1949, at 10 Rillington Place, less than a mile away from Delamere Terrace, Reg Christie the necrophiliac had to decide where to conceal the bodies of his latest victims: in the washhouse or under the floorboards? He was pushed for space.

‘Strange lives,’ as Kenneth Clark had said. Strange but true: one of Freud’s neighbours claimed to be a descendant of Anthony Trollope who, of all Victorian novelists, was the one who harped most on the contours of class. Freud came upon Mr Milton shortly after he moved into Delamere Terrace: ‘They’d taken the railings for the war effort, leaving patches of earth in front of the houses, and the coal man next door, George Nightingale (who fed his horse on pineapple, as he had worked in a circus and knew a thing or two, and who dyed his hair, and children teased him as they can tell when people are vain), had a huge pile of manure with straw in his front patch. I came out one day and there was this gent, bald and in tweeds with a malacca cane, looking for something in the dung heap.

‘“Good morning,” he said, poking at the straw. “I wonder if you’ve seen my false teeth anywhere? Of course you wouldn’t. Silly of me.” He was sort of crazy. “I’ve been thinking recently of going back to the United States,” he said. “When were you there?” I asked him. “I haven’t been,” he said. He was a draughtsman and a gentleman, incredibly poor because he was too disorganised to get the dole.’

In 1949, Henry ‘Bo’ Milton found himself posing with his daughter for Freud, much as Balthus had arranged Miró and his Daughter in 1938: same restraining hand and a similar baffled look as he parts the bead curtains (bought by Freud at the Galeries Lafayette in Nice) with his knees. Well turned out in hat and cravat, he radiates tension. He knows that he is a gentleman, but does the painter appreciate this? Milton’s pale eyes look less observant than his daughter’s dark eyes, inherited from Ruby, her mother, who used to come and clean Freud’s rooms. The Miltons lived chaotically but had a phone and Freud used to climb across the balcony divide to use it.

‘Ruby had been in Soho and around a lot, at the Coffee An’. She was Italian, from Glasgow, and had obviously been very attractive.’ He had drawn her as La Voisine and painted her in 1949 as Woman with Carnation in a velvet-collared coat. ‘Her eyes were a bit mannered, I thought.’

Over the years portraits acquire resonance. People ask who the subjects were, and what became of them. Ownership adds associations. Father and Daughter was bought by Richard Addinsell, composer of the pastiche Rachmaninov Warsaw Concerto for the film Dangerous Moonlight, a wartime hit. He hung it, this faintly hostile picture, over his grand piano. Sitters live on for a while but their portraits generally outlast them; yet what happened later to the sitter may become part of the picture’s hold on the imagination. Bo Milton’s daughter Paula grew up to be a friend of Christine Keeler, the call girl at the heart of the Profumo scandal in the early sixties, an affair that unfolded like a twelve-part Trollope serial. (Her brother John dabbled in antiques and was involved with Stephen Ward; he burgled, widely, and killed himself in 1984.) ‘Things that are relevant and true are worth having,’ Freud argued. ‘Gossip is only interesting because it’s all there is about anyone.’ A portrait defies the gossip. Father and Daughter is the moment before the beads lap together again and the figures separate.

When Bo Milton died a few years later, the family were moved to a council house opposite Freud’s parents in St John’s Wood Terrace. There was a burglary. A number of figurines –‘some Cycladic, very small, some good things’ – mostly given to Ernst by his father were stolen and Freud had his suspicions. ‘I told my Aunt Gerda, not necessarily to tell the police, and she said she didn’t want to do anything as they were about to get the insurance money.’

To most of his neighbours in Delamere Terrace, Freud was not the bearer of a famous surname but the young bloke who used taxis and received telegrams and had posh visitors. Some called him Lu the Painter, like ‘Hot Horse Herbie’ or ‘Benny the Blond Jew’ in Damon Runyon or the London types in the Gulliver column in Lilliput magazine. When they referred to ‘saucepans’ (i.e. saucepan lids/yids/Jews) he said that he replied, ‘“None of that: I’m a saucepan,” and they said, “No you’re not: you’re a gentleman.”

‘In Delamere they used to say to me, “’Ere, Lu, do you do that Epsteen stuff? That Picasso stuff?” There was a sort of anarchic element of no one working for anyone.’ Colin MacInnes dubbed the district ‘London’s Napoli’: a place that ‘the Welfare State and the Property Owning Democracy equally passed by’.¹⁸

‘Charlie’s family of seven were living next door while I had a whole floor to myself – kitchen and bathroom in one room – so I was considered rich.’ Certainly Charlie thought so. The bank in Maida Vale called Freud in and told him: ‘Try writing your cheques properly, it’s in pencil and pen, all over the place.’ Seeing that it was only a £4 cheque that Charlie had cashed, he explained that it was a friend of his who had done his signature so there was no need to take the matter further. ‘He had amazing awareness and quickness and liveliness. In a store he’d say, “Look what I’ve got,” and there would be something under his coat.’

In George Orwell’s Prole London of the late forties, projected into Nineteen Eighty-Four, boarded-up houses mark the divide between the salaried – with whom Freud could not identify – and the proles, a warm and feckless breed, swarming in their condemned dwellings. The ways of the proles, carrying on a world away from St John’s Wood Terrace and Clifton Hill, were pleasing because, Freud found, they never presumed, living hand to mouth as they did with close horizons and reckless etiquette.

‘The Page family, neighbours, had costers’ stalls in the Bell Street, Church Street, Broadley Street markets, veg and fruit stalls, so there were barrows sometimes outside the house. They didn’t have shops because of their waywardness and what went on drink.’

One of the Pages, the head of the family, died. He had been a regular at the pub and Freud, being ‘known a bit’, he said, in the street, was expected to go down the road and pay his respects. ‘There were all these different generations – I was a little bit older than the young ones – standing in the front room and there was silence. And then one of them suddenly shouted, “He was a great man.” Then it was quiet again. Black leather chairs round the walls and a terrible discomfort and this oak coffin at the window, which probably belonged to the undertaker.’ He was urged to view the corpse. It had been embalmed, the face thickly painted. ‘Very heavy brushwork, lots of impasto: it looked as though it had been laid on with one of those wooden spoonish things you do butter with. The work that went into it, amazing.’ He stared into the coffin, fascinated by this death-defying form of indulgence. The face reminded him of one of those Romano-Egyptian Faiyum funerary portraits his grandfather had collected. He stared and stared. Then suddenly he realised that he had been engrossed for perhaps ten minutes. Embarrassed, he tried to think of an appropriate remark. Eventually he broke the silence. ‘I said, “You couldn’t have done more for him.” It was the right thing to say because it had cost a packet.’

A Delamere neighbour who knew a thing or two about court appearances offered advice. ‘It’s when you’re in the right, Lu, that you need a good witness.’ Acting on this, Freud asked Cyril Connolly, Sonia Brownell, Peter Watson and Cecil Beaton to testify that he would never have said what had been asserted in Time magazine only to learn, when the case came up in the summer of 1949, that not more than one witness was allowed. The magazine did not – as Wilfred Evill, his solicitor, had expected – settle out of court. Henry Luce, who owned Time Life, had a policy of fighting every case against his publications, deeming them as he did above criticism and beyond complaint. In August that year Life was to demonstrate its myth-making powers when it published a photograph of Jackson Pollock posed – as Freud had been posed – in front of a painting. The headline alone ‘Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’ was enough to project Pollock into notoriety. Time had labelled him ‘the darling of a highbrow cult’ and dubbed him ‘Jack the Dripper’. Legitimate wordplay: he couldn’t sue. Reacting to a later review he sent a telegram to Time, ‘no chaos damn it’, but his lawyers advised that no libel had occurred. Compared to Time Life’s handling of Pollock, Freud’s case was an obscure affair. Artistic reputation was not involved and the hearing was over in a day. There was, however, a real grievance. Freud resented being made out to be an alienated ingrate. And there was the possibility of damages.

Gerald Gardiner, representing the plaintiff, described him as ‘this young man who had been to an English public school’ and drew attention to his ‘war service’; he also sought to establish that Time magazine had been pursuing a policy of disparaging the British, Freud remembered. ‘It was at a very anti-British moment in American relations so, to give some idea of what this was, Gerald Gardiner started reading something very rude about the Queen and said, “I think I will spare the judge and jury from hearing more.”’ The judge thanked him.

Cross-examining Freud, the defence barrister, Sir Valentine Holmes, tried a cosmopolitan slant. ‘He was trying to break me down; not break me down but get me to say something.’ He talked about Freud’s ‘travels in the South, in sunny France and beautiful Greece’, implying that he had no time for England. ‘No wonder,’ he said, ‘when you got back to your small room in Bayswater—’

Freud interrupted. ‘My large room in Paddington!’

(Laughter in court.)

‘Bayswater is the genteel name for what’s nearest the park,’ he later explained. ‘I felt that was a turning point, rather …

I was said to have said, “In Britain everything is so foul and crazy that artists either go crazy, become a Surrealist or get into a rut,” and to have gone on about “the clockwork morality of Britain that one feels on a bus …” It was talk about licensing hours and so on.’ Why clockwork? ‘I was talking about the symbolism of the clocks in the work of Giorgio de Chirico,’ Freud explained. It so happened that the judge, Lord Goddard, had attended a dinner held recently to mark the opening of a de Chirico exhibition at the Royal Society of British Artists so he let it pass. A hanger and flogger, Goddard was notoriously hard on softies. Observing that the plaintiff had been described in the article as having ‘dreamy eyes and frayed cuffs’, he said, ‘I’m surprised you aren’t suing about that.’

‘The summing up was so violently against me and ridiculing me that the jury – a special jury of higher rate-payers only – gave me the verdict, and costs, which must have been huge, were paid by them. Gerald Gardiner said to me, “Lord Goddard is one of those old-fashioned lords who sums up in a way that goes against the way the case has been going, to make the jury think twice.” Costs were huge: people had to come over from America. I checked up a bit and saw the chairman of the jury drive away in a Rolls-Royce.’ The plaintiff was awarded ten pounds damages. Hardly a triumph, but then he had brought the case more out of irritation than anger. Once the case was over Gerald Gardiner asked Freud if he would paint Carol, his daughter, who was a student at the London School of Economics. ‘He said, “I hope you’ll charge a lot as I make a lot of money.” It was the only time I ever accepted a commission blind. What a shock. She was very nice: Dutch potato eater, nice expression on a rather potato-ish face. Gerald Gardiner and his wife came to Delamere when I’d nearly finished. Carol sportingly said, “Well, I like it, anyway.” But some years after he wrote to me. “I had a burglary,” he said, “and the burglar must have had fine taste, because the only picture he took was yours.” I knew Mrs Gardiner had destroyed it. Like Lady Churchill did. Cecil Beaton liked the painting, which was a bad sign.’

His name having been what had alerted Time to an unremarkable show in an obscure gallery, Freud felt it necessary to rebut any notion that he was less than appreciative of his adoptive country. ‘Obviously I was longing to go abroad. But it certainly wasn’t to do with “I’m fed up here.”’

‘Always when I return I am overwhelmed by the ugliness of the architecture, the gloom of the people, the drabness of the sky, the obedience to authority.’ To Cyril Connolly, sounding off in the final issues of Horizon like a tetchy paying guest, ‘peevish, overcrowded, bureaucratic England, land of cut films, banned books and class-conscious little moustaches’,¹⁹ was sinking fast. Across the Atlantic his diatribes could have passed for understatement. American commentators, isolationists especially, were apt to represent Britain as a bankrupt socialist state still fancying itself an imperial power. ‘On every side radio announcers and newspaper reporters bleated that Britain was mismanaging her affairs, running into debt, twisting America and persecuting the Jews,’ an English journalist, June John, reported in Leader magazine in September 1948. June Rose, the Time reporter, was perplexed by Freud’s indignation at being made to sound anti-British. During the hearing she said, ‘I don’t know why Mr Freud’s taking this line; after all, we are both Jewish.’

Freud resented the assumption that, having been uprooted from Germany, he was unappreciative of the land he had grown up in. ‘All my interests and sympathy and hope circulate round the English,’ he said, and indeed this manifested itself in a knowledge of bloodstock and Who’s Who, a liking for thoroughbred Englishwomen, fair-haired ones especially, and an appreciation of John Constable, Max Miller and good tailoring. Having been naturalised British meant being not more British than the British but more at home: enabled to come and go without question. He felt himself to be a free agent in Conrad’s London, Sickert’s London, the London of The Waste Land and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Michael Hamburger, his childhood friend from Berlin, arguing from a similar point of view said that the free agent is also one who takes cover, practising ‘extreme conformism so that you don’t stand out. My work as a translator was to do with displacement: a way of keeping in touch with an earlier part of my life; Lucian I knew had a kind of double life.’²⁰

Mastery of a language is only achieved when what is implicit is recognised, not just what is said. The ‘clockwork morality’ referred to in court was ambiguity. ‘Well, I like it, anyway’ was mild defiance. Just as, in painting, he had moved beyond artless candour, so too in the language he used Freud was conscious of having replaced his childish German with a richer English. ‘My initial language has almost fallen away. I was terribly interested in words. You learn them and enrich your vocabulary. “Why”, my mother said, “do you say everything is ‘squalid’?”’

His acquired English came close, in conscious style, to the plain English of George Orwell, as indeed his drawing style matches the clarity of Orwell’s prose. Though no question of his doing so ever arose, he would have been the ideal illustrator of Orwell. ‘I knew him from the Café Royal, I met him there with Stephen Spender, he was always hanging round. He wasn’t very old when he died and yet he seemed so old. He’d got good manners. He always spoke in exactly the same tone because he had been shot in the throat; there was no intonation because it was coming out over an obstacle rather. He was very unphysical. He seemed terribly dry, everything about him seemed dry.’ He seemed to dislike art. ‘He was decent: to such a degree that his decency was almost a form of imagination.’

Sonia Brownell, tiring of Horizon chores – she had become its one staunch organiser and, in Cyril Connolly’s absence, effectively its editor – and realising that it had little future, took on Orwell. He became her cause – as Freud said, ‘she loved to sort out people’s lives’ – and, with the success of Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in the summer of 1949, and the worsening of his TB, he was an eminent if enfeebled literary lion to tend. In October 1949 she married him, in a bedside ceremony at University College Hospital, not expecting the union to involve anything more than her becoming the legalised organiser of his affairs. She had always been bossy and marriage, Freud maintained, made her more so. ‘She was very nasty to him; she was disgusted at his becoming amorous through TB. The doctor told Sonia, “He’s dying, but if you marry him he might get better. If they have something to live for it can change the metabolism.” He started getting better; Sonia panicked and said, “If he’s going to get well enough, we have to go away, and will you come with us?” I got on well enough with him so I said I would.

‘Kitty and I used to go and see him – he was fond of Kitty, nice to women – and he said to me that when in pain, in hospital, he’d think of all the things he’d like to do to the people he hated.

‘Sonia was a great friend, we were much involved, but she and I were not amorous. I never went with her and I never worked from her. It never occurred to me to draw her. She went away to France so much she gave me the key to her flat. But she was also a nuisance, trying to be helpful; she was always trying to solve people’s lives which didn’t need solving, always trying to get Kitty to leave me. She was a marriage wrecker.’

It was arranged that Freud should go on a private plane with Orwell to Switzerland, thence to a sanatorium. His role would have been to help lift and carry. ‘I wouldn’t have gone but at the same time it seemed churlish to say no for an unlikely event in the future.’

On the evening of 21 January 1950, a few days before the planned flight, Freud had dinner with Anne Dunn at L’Étoile. Then, she remembered, they went to a club: ‘The Sunset in Percy Street, just opposite Sonia’s flat. He said, “Why don’t we ring up Sonia and ask her to join us?” So that was what happened. She came over – she had stayed at the hospital until nine o’clock which was as late as they allowed – and we drank for a couple of hours and that was when they were trying to reach her from the hospital to tell her that he had died.’²¹

Freud’s view of Sonia Orwell, as she called herself thereafter, was coloured by her domineering traits in later life. ‘Sonia was heartless; the last five days she never went to visit him [in fact the hospital allowed her to visit him only one hour a day, and this she did]. Panicked when he got better.’ But talk of Sonia living it up with Freud while Orwell died was malicious, Anne Dunn insisted. ‘Lucian and Sonia did have an affair but that was earlier. He was with me that night: Sonia went back to Percy Street and we went back to Delamere Terrace.’²²