CONTENTS

  1  FA 1008

  2  Tracks

  3  ‘Am greatly disappointed in the boy and have unpleasant misgivings regarding his future’

  4  ‘They must have a very high opinion of him to consider him dangerous’

  5  ‘The poet’ and mentors

  6  Bohemian trappings

  7  ‘No likelihood of complications’

  8  ‘To put an end gradually’

  9  ‘Doubts that he is a shit are still graver’

10  First essays and the futility of pot-boiling

11  ‘Paint run mad’

12  ‘Dunk’ and Hoel

13  ‘I have a sort of idea he’s a genius’

14  The laughing woman

15  Ça, c’est trop fort!’

16  Blast

17  Clap

18  ‘My dear, safe as a church’

19  ‘You need sympathy, sympathy, sympathy’

20  ‘Why not paint a picture instead?’

21  ‘I’m thirty-seven till I pass the word round!’

22  ‘Most indubitably yours’

23  Studios

24  Portraits

25  ‘People are only friends in so much that they are of use to you’

26  ‘Concentrate on one book at a time’

27  ‘Your output has become prolific’

28  Peter London and Miss Mayfair 1924

29  Apes and Nazis

30  Black-hatted in Barbary

31  ‘A roaming wild oat come to roost’

32  ‘Definitely something abnormal about her’

33  The princess and the juggler

34  ‘Anything but a Jubilee year’

35  The Black Principle

36  ‘X’

37  ‘I want to escape from this economic inferno’

38  ‘How would I live out here without portraits to paint?’

39  ‘This tough city’

40  ‘Attendance upon the great ones of this bloody earth!’

41  ‘Some modest perch out of the storm’

42  ‘He is a well-known British artist – not a knight’

43  ‘We consider the artist not a very responsible person’

44  ‘I fear that we have simply been swindled’

45  ‘Smile up to your ears!’

46  Merulius lacrymans

47  ‘In the absence of proof of malice’

48  ‘A great artist’s dental plate’

49  ‘Nothing is visible, there is no pain, no disagreeable sensations’

50  ‘The Tapewriter’ and ‘The Biro’

51  ‘So lonely an honour’

52  ‘Does he not mean Self-Condemned?’

53  ‘The Vorticist whale’

54  ‘He’s getting confused now – can we stop?’

55  Post mortem

Acknowledgements

References

Bibliography

Index