The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  ‘I found myself with tears running down my face on the train, back through green landscape: I’d thought I’d never see anything like that again.’

  It so happened that the day Freud was discharged Sir Kenneth Clark donned earphones at Broadcasting House in London and declared open an exhibition of ‘British War Art’, selected by himself, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His brief speech echoed back at him across the Atlantic: words in praise of the ability of Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and others to express and reflect, as Herbert Read wrote in the catalogue, ‘all the variety and eccentricity of the individual human being’ in time of war. Sutherland’s blitz-damage compositions based on sketches made in Cardiff, Swansea and the East End of London and Moore’s drawings of people sheltering in the Underground like stockpiled maquettes were enlisted in the propaganda push to bring the United States into the war.

  Ex-Ordinary Seaman Freud had only a few sketchbook pages to show for his grim escapade, studies of sea, gunner and cook, too scrappy to qualify as the advanced war art that Clark favoured yet in their wariness all the more telling. Over the years, as his seagoing exploits ballooned into legend, questions were asked. How precisely had he obtained his discharge? Was it true that he had murdered the ship’s cook?

  What Freud remembered was how sick he had felt. ‘I was terribly ill by the time I got off. My chest had got very bad. I ran a permanent temperature and had to go to hospital.’ He was sent to the Emergency Medical Services Hospital at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, in peacetime the Bonar Law College for Citizenship, but by then taking patients from London, Blitz victims mostly. ‘My throat settled down once my tonsils were out. There were huts in the grounds and beds were wheeled out into the sun. I was so weak that I got caught and the skin peeled off. In the bed next to me was a musician from “Snakehips” Johnson’s Caribbean jazz band whose legs had been broken when the Café de Paris was bombed. The bomb landed bang on the band as they were playing “Oh Johnny”, killing Snakehips. We used to talk about night life and I enjoyed that.

  ‘My mother came to see me in hospital; it was good because I had such strong sedatives I was asleep when she came.’ In June his parents moved back into St John’s Wood Terrace, thinking perhaps that Lucian should convalesce there and be under supervision; meanwhile Hitler invaded Russia; with that the threat of an invasion of Britain receded. Internees were released and in August Cousin Walter arrived back from Australia, disembarking in Liverpool.

  Hospital was a bit like school. ‘This little boy of eleven came across the ward and spat into my face so I gathered all my strength, gave him a bash, passed out and the stitches in my tonsils came open. They kept coming undone: it was quite serious as they were so inflamed, so I was there over a month.’ He left hospital in late July. ‘After a lot of complications, I did some drawings in the ward, one of which is very good I think,’ he told Cedric Morris, assuring him that he would be back in Benton End by the following Friday. ‘I have to wait for my grandmother’s birthday on Thursday; otherwise I’d be down now.’

  Hospital Ward could be an ex-voto, a thanksgiving in convalescence. ‘Done from memory, except the flower’, Freud explained: patients tucked flat in their beds, a nurse checking for unruliness and a globeflower from Benton End (‘One of those tough slimy things: really beautiful’) laid on the coverlet, a reminder of the Comte de Lautréamont’s image of ‘the child’s face rising slowly above the opened coffin like a lily piercing the water’s surface’. The head resting on the pillow was not particularly the stricken Freud who, he told me, saw the figure as a war-weary soul: specifically Peter Watson with reddened eyelids and stubbled chin chafing under ward discipline.

  Hospital Ward, 1941

  In another little votive-mannered painting, done around the same time, Watson in open-necked shirt and tight jacket sits holding a tray of what appear to be etching plates featuring a Benton End bestiary: rat, rabbit, horse, dog, chickens, men. Behind him is a bed with a toothbrush laid on it and a view over bleak Nova Scotia in which the Baltrover is sighted offshore, lifeboats slung outboard in readiness for an emergency. A painted rendition of a drawing of a life model startled by the rooster on his knee adds comic alarm to this deployment of Watson as patron saint, a homage designed to flatter and implicate. ‘It was a portrait: the drawing is actually a drawing that existed. I did it in his flat, a crazy queer painting, very personal and like him. I used to always put secrets in. I still do.’

  Before going off to sea Freud had asked Watson to write to him in Halifax as he fancied the idea of being met with a letter post restante. Watson obliged. His keen interest was particularly valuable once Freud had become the seafarer returned. His flat in Prince’s Gate was open house where spongers such as the Glaswegian painters the Roberts MacBryde and Colquhoun stayed and where all callers could hang around looking through copies of Verve and Cahiers d’Art and the pictures that replaced those left behind in Paris. Watson wasn’t just the backer of Horizon and the London Gallery, he was everywhere making introductions and quietly exercising patronage. Through him Freud eventually met John Craxton for the first time. ‘Lucian turned up,’ Craxton remembered, ‘wearing a chic brown suit and looking very handsome – he had been in hospital and across the Atlantic since leaving me that note. He had incredible eyes and was very quick witted. He had a fantastic, riveting personality.’8

  Charles Fry, a publisher described by John Betjeman as a ‘phallus with a business sense’, asked Freud if he would care to write an account of his voyage for a series of short books that his firm, Batsford, were producing. Fighter Pilot had already appeared. What about Merchant Seaman? No, absolutely not. ‘It would have been a crazy surreal novel.’ He did not want to relive the episode or, for that matter, be taken through it under questioning. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 he had a visit from the CID. They asked him about Boeckl, the sailor from Kobe. ‘I thought he’d been caught: he had a grey box and was fiddling with it all the time, and he got very wary when there was talk about wireless. They said, “You realise what we are asking you?”, implying that he was a spy for Japan, which had come into the war by then. They wanted to know where he lived. I knew his girlfriend’s address in Liverpool and didn’t tell them.’

  8

  ‘Slightly notorious’

  Freud went back to Benton End in the late summer of 1941 (his parents meanwhile returning to Maresfield Gardens) eager to tell of icebergs and high seas. ‘Lett was on about how he was a mariner in a submarine in the First World War. I had quite a lot of trophies in my room, seaboots and stuff, a hat lined with corduroy and a jersey with flags on it. And I had scabies from dirty clothes: it was painful; you had to shave yourself from head to foot. The balls stung.’ The pathos of Hospital Ward suited the image of this novice veteran. But no sooner was he back in Suffolk than the threat of call-up arose. ‘I fairly soon had to have my medical in Ipswich. Luckily I was passed on a very low grade because I was still pretty ill; I was so run down, very nervous and jumpy.’

  Manpower, a government pamphlet on mobilisation, made it clear that the authorities had the measure of those who were determined to prove themselves unsuitable for conscription. ‘An exquisite youth might announce – and genuinely believe – that his life would be misery if he were put into uniform, given a pair of heavy boots and marched up and down a parade ground with a bunch of louts.’ Vetting routines to cope with such scrimshankers had been devised. ‘Elaborate machinery of investigation and appeal was designed to reduce these cases to a minimum.’1 It took Freud a single session to qualify as one of those cases.

  ‘It was generally thought that the doctors for the medical looked at people imagining how they would fare in the services, and I could not have. I wanted to appear as not convertible into military guise.’ Asked if he had anything to say in support of his exemption Freud replied that he had no objections to the military, indeed he had been boxing champion at his prep school. But there was just one thing: ‘I said to them
, “I’d love to be in the army. But” – which was perfectly true – “one thing was very bad in the Merchant Navy and that was being pestered by men, especially at night.” I said that if I was in the army I’d insist on having a room of my own as men treated me like a woman.’ He added, meaningfully, that he liked fires very much. This was enough to convince them that he was not conscript material. ‘I suppose my hair was long. And I painted my boots white.’ Classified Grade III, utterly unsuitable, exempt even from fire watching, he took the bus back to Hadleigh and resumed painting. A rumour developed that he had persuaded the tribunal to release him on the grounds that he couldn’t face being parted from his cat. He had no cat, but Stephen Spender had a photograph of him holding one. ‘Stephen always embroidered. That’s how it got about.

  My strength has been on the solitary anarchic side. A psychologist’s report called me “a destructive force in the community”.’

  After the war Freud used his convoy experience as a riposte. ‘When people used to be rude, I’d say, “When I was fighting to keep the seas safe, you were wetting your knickers”; I had to stop saying that in the sixties.’ It was a line that served him well on weekends in London. His £23 14s ½d pay-off he spent on a girl. ‘Some of it was danger money: it was enough for me to take someone out for three weeks.’ That someone was Janetta Woolley, a Horizon assistant and at that time married to Humphrey Slater, author of Home Guard for Victory! (1941). Freud went to their cottage near Dorking (‘it was being dismantled’) and when Cyril Connolly lent her his room at Albany, in Piccadilly, she took him there, to Connolly’s fury as he had a crush on her himself. He also took her to the Dorchester Hotel to show her off and show off to her: particularly pleasing as his father had found Clement a trainee job there. ‘I quite liked him being the waiter: he was rather a good waiter. Dressed in white he was OK. I discussed what the other waiters thought of him. “Terrific,” they said.’

  While Hospital Ward had been his recovery picture, Girl on the Quay (appealing enough to be included by Ernest Brown of the Leicester Galleries in a New Year selection for 1942) was Freud’s venture into the ‘Sailor’s Farewell’ genre, a flat frontal composition worked up to show that he, having served, knew his way around waterfronts and shipping: ‘It was my ship’s rigging and funnels and all my knowledge about where lifeboats are.’ The sea’s seething surface came of having spent hours on watch looking out for periscopes; it was also the result of having discovered that terre verte and cerulean are a rich mix. ‘The idea was a joke idea: the girl I left behind me sort of thing: actually a girl who was at Cedric’s when I came back.’

  The girl was Felicity Hellaby. Freud had already drawn her the year before, fancifully dallying with him in the silo tower; she also appeared, looking even younger, in the later pages of his convoy sketchbook and he had written to her from hospital telling her he missed her. ‘I liked her very much. She was very virginal: a terribly well-brought-up New Zealand girl; David Carr did things to try and put her and her family against me.’ Her lasting memory of him was that he used to make everybody laugh. ‘And he knew everyone.’ Although he gave her a drawing of a seaman off duty propping his head on his hand, he told her next to nothing about what he had so recently been through. She remembered him ‘writing about lying in hospital, how lovely it was lying in clean sheets’.2 She was at that point living in Norwich, working on spark-plug production, but occasionally at weekends she and Freud met in London.

  The crumpled newspaper lying on the cobbles in Girl on the Quay was not – though maybe it should have been – the Ipswich Evening Star for Saturday 30 August 1941 carrying the headline ‘Suffolk Artist Fined: for Damaging London Theatre’. The artist was Freud. ‘On a weekend from Cedric’s I was caught breaking into the Cambridge Theatre in Seven Dials. It got into the local papers and I was slightly notorious.’

  He was with Mary Hunt, his first buyer (Stable at Benton End) who, further back, had been one of the Coffee An’ regulars that he had not recommended to Stephen Spender as a potential Miss Right. The lack of one foot and part of a leg had disconcerted him rather when she first took it off in front of him; but, as he explained, the reason he ‘didn’t get it right’ on that occasion was more to do with her having been only the second woman he had gone to bed with. Since the previous January she had been married to Ralph ‘Bunny’ Keene, a film producer and picture dealer.

  ‘Mary Keene, 20, married woman of Park Walk, Chelsea, and Lucian Michael Freud, 18, of Benton End, Hadleigh, appeared at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court,’ the Ipswich Evening Star reported, charged with ‘wilfully damaging, to the extent of £2, an iron bar, at the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus, on Friday night’. The incident was unusual even for blackout circumstances in the West End. ‘Lance-Corporal Rush of the military police saw a woman disappearing through a door of the theatre. He ordered her to come out and she came, accompanied by a man. Both said they wanted to see the last performance of the show and the entrance was closed. The man and woman must have used their strength together to force the door open. He called the police.’

  ‘It was a “how about in here?” situation,’ Freud explained to me. ‘We had pushed these iron bars and as we were crashing up the palatial stairs into the darkened circle we were caught by police and dogs and locked up in Tottenham Court Road police cells for the rest of the night. They said, “What do you do?” I said “painter”, she said “poet”, and I laughed and she was very angry.’ A former girlfriend of Louis MacNeice and Henry Yorke (the businessman novelist, whose nom de plume was Henry Green), she resented being admired less for her intellect than for her good looks and tin leg.3 ‘Yellow face and magenta lips,’ Augustus John remarked to Matthew Smith, as one of her admirers to another.4 The Fauve in Smith appreciated her to the extent that, after many years of involvement, he bequeathed her his unsold works. She used to irritate Freud by telling him – assuming that as a Freud he’d be interested – her previous night’s dreams.

  According to the Ipswich Evening Star the defendants’ explanation of their breaking and entering was unconvincing. ‘Mr Freud said that he and Mrs Keene had wanted to see the last performance of the show. They did not know that it had ended at five o’clock. “I pushed the door and it opened,” he added. Freud was fined 10 shillings and ordered to pay 30 shillings towards the damage; she was fined 5 shillings and 10 shillings.’

  Stephen Freud remembered his brother arriving home the next day and telling their mother that he hadn’t liked being in a cell. ‘“I got kleptomania,” he said.’

  Letter to Felicity Hellaby, 12 December 1941:

  Darling Felicity, I have just been bitten by an enormous dog in the blackout. I am doing a picture of a boy and a strange motorcar and trees rather like the one of the town but more coloured. How maddening for you that they are so slow about your factory! Are you coming to London at all soon? I probably shall be in Ipswich soon as I may go to Walberswick for a few days but I will ring you anyway. I saw a very good sad film called Honky Tonk. Its very dark here and most people have scars either on their noses or foreheads from walking into posts. I won a jackpot in a machine tonight and 75 six-pences came out. I drew a very old and amazing woman today who was very skinny and stood in edwardian postures with her eye balls just visible in the very tops of her eyes, lots of love Lucian.5

  London night life was hazardous Freud found, and not just because of dogs, lamp posts, magistrates and the Blitz. ‘In the blackout it was almost impossible not to catch the clap. I went to the family doctor and he said, “You are going to die of syphilis or become a genius.” He made me take M&B as it was early in the war, before penicillin; he made me take it for too long to teach me a lesson, a modest Jewish lesson. Dr Levy said, “I feel I should let your parents know,” and I was nervous about him telling them. “Extraordinary,” he said, “that a member of your family should …” He lived with his mother, in his fifties, clients like my parents. Had a moustache. His mother told him not to get involved with girls and he wa
s trying to tell me what a terrible thing I’d done.’ Having got the clap Freud took girls to the cinema more, he said, and courted them there.

  In the spring of 2011, a few months before he died, the painter Catherine Goodman remarked to Freud how lovely the blossom was: had he never painted it? ‘Blossom? I knew her. In Soho once we found a phone box and I pushed the phone books off the shelf and put her on it and off we went.’

  Early 1942, Maresfield Gardens NW3:

  Darling Felicity I am just rushing off to lunch to my Grandmother where the Pekinese eats his three-course dinner and coffee. I’ve been distempering walls and ceilings and going for walks in the snow. The night I left you I went to Chelmsford and stayed in a very strange hotel where I had to give a password to get in and I gave the wrong one so they would not let me in but later I went back and gave the right one. They are playing a tune on the radio called ‘Prairie Mary’. Is there any ice-skating in Norwich? I saw the Garbo film yesterday and before there was a wonderful film about a madman who lived in a shack with an old man with one eye who bullied him. It began by the madman being in the far corner of the room and the camera came nearer to him until you saw the texture of his skin and then you saw his ear and by and by you saw right inside his ear where an awful banging noise was going on. I’ll come down to Norwich soon but I’ll tell you when beforehand. Do send me some secret plans of some planes or machines, lots of love Lucian6