Like the Freuds, the short-story writer A. E. Coppard had a holiday home in Walberswick, as did Coppard’s Argosy magazine rival L. A. G. Strong. Coppard’s daughter, Julia, was six months older than Lucian and considerably more confident. ‘She wrote me a sort of love letter, which stimulated me. I was fooling around with her in a hayrick and another boy tried to get her and he had a fit, which excited me. I was conscious that I had bow legs from all that riding and it worried me and so I did a Just William thing: had socks coming down.’ (In Thomas Henry’s illustrations to Richmal Crompton’s books about a scapegrace Home Counties schoolboy, socks invariably sagged to the ankles.) ‘Nothing remotely happened with Julia; she became a siren in Hampstead and married twice.’
Lucian Freud with his father at Hidden House, Walberswick, 1936
At Bryanston there were similar temptations. The Backward Latin master, Aubrey de Sélincourt, had two daughters: ‘Anne, who everyone lusted after, and Lesley: I sent notes to her, which I left in the stables saying she didn’t look after her horse properly. No reply. We never spoke.’ Lesley went on to marry her cousin Christopher Robin Milne of Winnie the Pooh fame. The headmaster, Thorold Coade, had daughters too: ‘Faith, Hope and Felicity. People used to wank over the eldest. The headmaster was going through a religious conversion. He said to Mervyn Jones-Evans, “The only time I ever make love to my wife is when I want a child,” and Mervyn relayed it to the school. Faith, Hope and Felicity meant that he did it only three times.’ In the throes of adolescence Lucian became a byword for inkiness and general untidiness; he was the wayward spirit, impulsively outrageous yet shy and elusive. ‘I didn’t go into classes so I couldn’t be called absent because I wasn’t there and that meant I couldn’t be given the assignments which you did in your own time.’
Art was an alibi, and an end in itself. His painting of the old man running, described as ‘old gentleman at speed’, was praised in a school report. ‘I used to go and sculpt; I’d disappear down to the pottery school.’ Ceramics, he found, often failed before the firing stage. Sculpture was a better option. Having read Jude the Obscure he rather fancied becoming a stone carver like Jude and maybe, like him, falling in with women and seeking his fortune in the world beyond Dorset. His fish on a rock, in alabaster, was a good start and then, gratifyingly, his martyr on a rock was compared in the school magazine to a Michelangelo. His Bryanston masterpiece, however, his one sculpture known to survive, vigorous in its feel for limbs and neck and grazing lips, was a sandstone horse, nearly two feet high, three legs serving convincingly as four. This was no mere ornamental horse. ‘I have shod horses: filing the nails, rubbing linseed oil and blacking on to the hoofs. The thing of keeping them upright: you have to be the back leg, leaning against the leg as you raise it.’ Though pleased with the horse he came to regard sculpture as an initiation only. As he put it: ‘a schoolboy phase. It’s unwise to pursue your first love.’
Bryanston proved quite agreeable once he began to let himself be known. He almost won the school’s riding cup. Michael Jeans proved an ally, though not wholly reliable. ‘He did me one very bad turn. We had early-morning runs before breakfast and there’d be a prefect in the bushes to see we’d done it. The head of Portman House was someone called J. F. L. Bowes and as I was going round with Michael he said, “Ask Bowes what the F. L. stands for,” so I did and he said, “Come to my study later and I’ll tell you,” and when I came into his study he hit me on the side of the head so hard I nearly became unconscious. Not until twenty years later did I find out what “F. L.” stood for. It either meant you knew about sex or, even more impressive, you knew what prophylactics were for. Bowes was killed in the war, I was pleased to see.’
Jeans was more companionable on home ground in Walberswick. Besides he had a sister and, for that matter, a family worth knowing. ‘Ronald, his father, wrote plays with Noël Coward and, with J. B. Priestley, ran the Westminster Theatre; Margaret, his mother, was a novelist [The Clown and My Fellows] and she was amused, in a slightly bitter way, by his philandering: pretty actresses at L’Etoile. They had a private cinema at Walberswick, seated thirty, where they showed funny films or good silent films.’ Up in London during the holidays he and Jeans tried being young men about town. ‘We went to what we thought the grandest restaurant, the Carlton Grill in the Haymarket, sat down, swarming waiters – as it was only 12.30 – had soup, paid and left. Getting in there proved we were having a good time.’ In Walberswick they hung around. ‘An ordinary elderly couple at Walberswick had a lunatic son, a village idiot, about twenty, and we’d see him on the village green in a proper hat and suit, very good clothes, walking his dog, and when his dog went for another dog he’d cheer his dog on. George Orwell had been his tutor; in Down and Out in Paris and London he mentions that he went back to England and looked after “a tame imbecile”. We tried to talk to him and do imitations. He was harmless, manic, only just a lunatic. I’ve always been fascinated by lunatics, as schoolboys are.’
Stage roles attracted Lucian, this time Ibsen. ‘I played a girl in The Pillars of Society,’ a part ‘sustained by dreams and expectations’ the school magazine commented. ‘I had to say, “I want to make something of myself, and I don’t want just to be an object to be used.” That got a round of applause.’ What he accomplished off stage made him notorious: diving head first out of windows, somersaulting the Dartington way so as to land safely and storming the school with a pack of hounds. ‘I did a really clever thing: the Portman Hounds were wandering in the park and I got them into the hall and up the stairs, all flapping around.’ Less cleverly, in that the school rules insisted that boys had made their beds in the mornings, he refused to do so for he never felt, then or ever, that domestic chores were any business of his. Others followed his example and the strike caught on. Patrick George – who became Head Boy and captain of rugby – saw Lucian as a leading player in ‘the conspicuous band of boys wearing white shirts rather than the bluish grey ones. This was some mark of wrongdoing, and a punishment, but was turned by the delinquents into high fashion.’
In the summer term of 1938 any notoriety that Lucian enjoyed at school was eclipsed by the tremendous event of his grandfather’s exit from Austria and arrival in England. Since the Anschluss in March that year more than 70,000 Jews had been arrested in Vienna and photographs had appeared showing crowds looking on as rabbis were set to scrubbing pavements. Sigmund Freud’s eminence ensured his being a prominent object of Nazi concern, but his fame and international connections gave him some slight protection against this, though Anna was arrested and detained for a while. ‘The Gestapo arrived at Berggasse 19, very embarrassed, with their guns and my grandmother said, “Do put them away in the umbrella stand,” which they did. She asked the maid to bring the key to the safe and they cleared it out and left. A week or two later a high-up man came and said, “We have had a lot of complaints that private people have been roughly handled and would you be kind enough to sign these papers saying we acted in a civil and polite manner?” My grandfather read it, smiled, said he’d sign it as it was true and said, “I’ll add ‘I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to everyone.’”’ A senior Nazi official commandeered the villa at Grinzing.
‘Two prospects keep me going in these grim times: to rejoin you all and – to die in freedom,’ Sigmund wrote to Ernst who, a month later, was to escort him from Paris, on the last stage of the journey to England. His choice of refuge was world news. Here came a great name, another Einstein, ‘the discoverer of the subconscious mind’, as Picture Post put it, and the publication of two of his books as Pelican paperbacks endorsed the belief that his ideas were crucial to modern minds. Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the Pelican edition of which appeared in February 1938, ‘Tells you something of the “you” you may have forgotten or never known’, readers were assured and by the time Totem and Taboo (concerning ‘resemblances between the psychic lives of savages and neurotics’) appeared eight months later Freud the elderly refugee from modern barbarity beca
me the symbol of civilised thought and practice. Diplomatic strings were pulled to get him to England, principally by his well-connected supporter and former patient Princess Marie Bonaparte; President Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt, US Ambassador in Paris (another former patient); and, it was rumoured, even Mussolini proved helpful. Princess Marie’s privileged status protected her and her persistence paid off, for besides bribing and pressuring the authorities in the Greater Reich to release Freud she had arranged for the confiscation of his possessions to be waived and for his gold coins to be sent over in the Greek diplomatic bag.
The great man arrived at Dover on 6 June with a small entourage of supporters and dependants; on landing he was exempted from customs examination on the orders of the Lord Privy Seal, though Lun the chow was taken into quarantine. ‘I found the kindliest welcome in beautiful, free, generous England,’ Freud wrote when, having settled in, he resumed work on what was to be his last book, Moses and Monotheism, in which he declared: ‘Here I live now, a welcome guest, relieved from that oppression and happy that I may again speak and write – I almost said “think” – as I want or have to.’1
Lucian’s four great-aunts remained in Vienna provided with enough money to see them through. Following Kristallnacht in Germany and Austria five months later (‘pogroms in Germany’, Sigmund Freud noted in his diary, significantly writing in English), there was growing anxiety over their fate. It was hoped that arrangements could be made for them to be moved to the Riviera but this proved impracticable. They died some time later: the youngest, Dolfi, of starvation in Theresienstadt, Rosa in Auschwitz, Pauli and Mitzi in Treblinka. Lucian had hardly known them. To him they were as remote as creatures of legend. ‘Mitzi had a daughter, Lilly, who claimed to be the inspiration of a song: her married name was Lilly Marle and the Marles’ lodger at one time was the man who wrote “Lili Marlene”.’
In Britain there were pockets of professional animosity directed against the Freuds, notably from Melanie Klein whose psychoanalytical theories focused on childhood stemmed from Freud and whose antagonism was directed primarily at Anna Freud. A feud developed. Although Lucian decided to detest his aunt, his sympathies were with her over this: ‘Melanie Klein came to London before her (in the late twenties) and she went to the Foreign Office and said it would be dangerous if my grandfather and aunt were admitted to this country. “It would be in the national interest to keep them out of England.” I have to say that when my aunt heard about it later she laughed.’
‘Into a large-windowed Hampstead house’, News Review reported in newsreel-commentary style, ‘moved Nazi-exiled, psycho-analytic GOM Dr Sigmund Freud, with one of his multitudinous chows and his daughter, Dr Anna.’
Installed temporarily in a rented house in Primrose Hill, Professor Freud received masses of plaudits and marks of recognition. Letters addressed to ‘Dr Freud, London’ reached him, the charter book of the Royal Society was taken to 39 Elsworthy Road for his signature, and André Breton hailed him in the English Surrealists’ house journal, the London Bulletin, as ‘he from whom so many of us derive our finest reason for existence and action’. On 19 July Salvador Dalí called with a sketchpad. Edward James the art patron, who accompanied Dalí, said that Freud whispered to him, ‘That boy looks like a fanatic; small wonder that they have civil war in Spain if they look like that.’ Dalí was eager to make a drawing that would bear out his notion of the resemblance of Freud’s head to a snail and this he did, also a more robust one on blotting paper.
Lucian was to develop a regard for Dalí’s nerve, not as exercised in the showy paintings but when vented in fearless gestures. There was the occasion he threw himself downstairs at the art academy in Madrid and, even better, his response to André Breton’s question as to how he saw Hitler. He liked the way his belt dug into his stomach, he replied: such lively observation. Then there was the time he went round the Louvre and said, ‘Any work here not signed by me is a fake.’
Aware that he had little longer to live, Sigmund Freud made a will leaving the copyrights in his writings to the grandchildren and bequeathing to Anna the books, furniture and antiquities that he had been allowed to bring with him from Vienna; despite this, Lucian became convinced later on that some of the collection could have been intended for him: ‘Tang horses, Oceanic things, Cycladic things and one very fine Greek head, given him by Marie Bonaparte, Praxiteles or a bit later, perhaps 100 bc. He had amazing things.
‘What was very lucky was that he had some money in England. This sort of cautious thing, which is quite a Jewish thing: just enough for my father to get the house ready, and so on.’ Ernst found a Queen Anne-style house, 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, ‘corresponding to our complicated demands and modest means’, his father wrote: it was to be, he said, ‘re-erected Berggasse’. More than that: it was to be the best home he ever had, so much so that he felt tempted, he said, to shout ‘Heil Hitler’. When Lucian went round the house with his father to see if it was suitable he was pleased to see that the previous occupant, the Mayor of Hampstead, had installed a cocktail bar in the hall. That went and improvements went ahead.
One Saturday afternoon in June 1938 Marie Bonaparte filmed Stephen and Lucian with their grandfather at 39 Elsworthy Road, Lucian slight and deferential, conscious of the camera’s clockwork whir as they walked round the garden, pausing at the goldfish pond set into a rockery. Then Lucian performs one of his running somersaults and makes a dash for the camera as though aiming to knock it senseless.
The move from Elsworthy Road to Maresfield Gardens took place at the end of August. By then Ernst had put in a lift, as his father couldn’t manage the stairs, and recreated the Berggasse study, complete with couch and antiquities, figurines mostly, crowded into cabinets, on shelves and on his desk. Stephen was given the task of cataloguing the books.
To Lucian, his grandfather seemed ‘light-hearted; and he had such a humour and wisdom generally. He seemed fairly youthful really. He was extremely nice to me. Always seemed to be in a good mood. He had what people who are really intelligent have, which is not being serious or solemn.’ In September he went to see him after an operation. He saw him through the porthole in the door of his room. ‘I went to the London Clinic; I think he wanted to see me, and I looked through a hole in the glass door. You hold these things tenaciously.’ One Friday afternoon two months later when Lucian went to tea at Maresfield Gardens hoping not to see Mervyn Jones, son of Ernest Jones, he met Isaiah Berlin. Professor Freud mentioned maybe setting up a practice in Oxford and had an edgy conversation with the young philosopher, suspecting, correctly, that Berlin doubted the validity or efficacy of psychoanalysis but was too polite or overawed to say so. Lucian said he had been to see Romeo and Juliet. ‘I thought you were your own Romeo,’ his grandfather said.
In July 1938 an exhibition of 20th Century German Art was held at the New Burlington Galleries, the catalogue for which was issued along with Modern German Art, a Penguin Special by ‘Peter Thoene’ (pseudonym for the critic Oto Bihalji-Merin) and a statement ‘Art has its disciplines, but these originate in the mind of the artist, and cannot be imposed by the indoctrinated will of a statesman, however wise.’ (‘In view of the political situation the organisers have refrained from consulting the artists themselves.’) The exhibitors included Beckmann, Corinth, Dix and Grosz. A Franz Marc horse was reproduced on the cover wrapper. ‘A book with a lot of Nolde and Lehmbruck who I did like, rather.’ A couple of months later Guernica was exhibited to raise funds for Spanish Relief at the New Burlington Galleries; Lucian saw it either there or at the Whitechapel Art Gallery where it was also shown, under the auspices of the Stepney Trades Council, in January 1939. ‘I remember thinking how dull the paint was. Exciting but … Much, much later, when I saw it in New York, I thought it looked tiny.’ The first Picassos he had seen were at Rosenberg & Helft in Bruton Street in 1937, among them a number of paintings of the voluptuous Marie-Thérèse Walter, most notably the fondling doubled loops of Young Girl at a Mirror (193
2). ‘I was very excited but I’ve never been able to use things directly that excited me.’ Read’s Art Now remained his atlas of Modern Art. ‘It’s all I saw, never saw anything else.’
Hans Calmann, his uncle by marriage, was the Freud family connection with the art trade. He had arrived from Hamburg with his family in March 1937 and within a year established himself in a gallery in St James’s Place. Lucian found Calmann patronising and absurd. ‘He said of Picasso: “a sentimentalist turned mathematician”.’ Calmann dealt almost exclusively in old masters and antiquities. Exceptions were an exhibition in November 1937 of watercolours by Chiang Yee, author of The Silent Traveller in Lakeland, an unexpected bestseller followed up with The Silent Traveller in London and ten other books illustrating an alien’s experience in a strange land. And in March 1938 Calmann gave Mervyn Peake his first exhibition. ‘I went in there to see it. I met him; he was sweet. I was aware of the affectations: a big head to show “Hungry”. I never liked whimsy or fancy at all. Except Odilon Redon: the eye on a parachute.’
In September 1938 Alexander Freud, Sigmund’s youngest brother, came to Britain from Switzerland, hoping to obtain a visa for the United States. ‘He was very nice, lived in a block of flats in Oxford Street, there was a feeling of good living and opulence; he took me to lunch at the Hungarian restaurant Csardas in Soho.’ Anna Freud established herself in Maresfield Gardens as housekeeper and guardian of the Freud cult and legacy while specialising in child therapy. For someone who had never got on with children, her nephews agreed, this was an unexpected development. Lucian developed a fixed dislike of her. ‘Aunt Anna was completely medieval, tremendously unapproachable and very very grand. She’d got that spinsterish thing of minding very much about things really, and the collection of antiques; her relaxation was reading murder stories and weaving huge carpets on an enormous loom. It’s her lack of inner life that makes me wonder. The fact that she hadn’t been to the cinema or, perhaps more importantly, was a virgin: none of these things matter at all. It’s that she was full of phobias and very intolerant.’ Not only that, she welshed on a deal with him. Shortly after he left school he gave her a painting of tulips (‘like a Matisse painting of flowers’) that she had admired, asking only that she paid for a frame. ‘I was sixteen and really pleased so I said could I have it framed? I took it to West’s in Swiss Cottage and had it done for £2 10s or £3 and said to her could I have the money? “How much? Absolutely ridiculous,” she said. “Zat is out of ze question.”’ He destroyed the painting.
The Lives of Lucian Freud Page 7