Steve_Bamlett_blog

First reading William Feaver (2019) The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth London, Bloomsbury Press

I think this has to be a ‘first reading’ for me because much will be explained when we read the second volume covering the life lived from 1968. This volume – capacious as it is – ends on a kind of cliff-hanger. I’m also hoping that the second volume will justify Jenny Uglow’s view that the book provides ‘impeccable, penetrating analysis’ of the works because I do not find quite this in Volume 1. There is more that is penetrating and illuminating for me, at the moment in Frances Borzello’s The Naked Nude from 2012 though it touches on Freud only in passing (p.93ff.).

But Feaver’s book is not to be judged as an analysis of painting but by how well it conveys life and lives in transition, and it does it better than any biography I have ever read. This is not least because of its reliance on verbatim quotation from interviews of Freud, of which Feaver is the only person to have direct access and which he both cites and re-reads in a quite brilliant way. It shows Freud in a way that is morally, as well as physically naked. The reference to the psychology of Browning’s Bishop Blougram’s Apology (quoted by Feaver on p. 562) is telling and leads us to how both elaborated on the ‘dangerous edge of things’. Freud’s view that naked people edge on ‘animals’, as Borzello (p.93) points out, shows no disrespect to animals or to humans, if the latter are free from the false pride of superiority implied in ‘being human’ in pre-existentialist humanist philosophy. The Freud that emerges here is important, and I think, symptomatic (in a non-medicalised way), because of his awareness of the construction of sexuality, gender, class and status on this very same ‘edge of things’ across the period covered by this book, between the wars and afterwards. Features like sexuality exist not as catalogues of types in this history but as series of boundaries that are constantly crossed and re-crossed forwards and backwards.

Feaver is brilliant, in his silence often, on Freud’s sexuality not only in the obvious disclaimers about not being ‘queer’ by Lucian himself but in his presentation of the dangerous and edgy (but to whom?) evidence of his relationships to Stephen Spender as a young man besotted by Freud and by W.H. Auden as a much wilier and wiser possible – at least in Francis Bacon’s view – sexual partner free from the illusions, as both might have seen it, of ‘human love’ – ‘On my faithless arm’.[1] Young Freud used his attractiveness to men as part of his reasons for needing a single room were he to go into the army, Feaver tells us. His friends were like himself of genuinely fluid sexual expression, even when they accepted labels such as homosexual. Freud appeared to hate Keith Vaughan’s work (I forgive him 😊) because it was an extreme type of Neo-Romanticism, like that in John Craxton (who shared an address with Freud if not a bed – but then who knows), using ‘affectations’ as a ‘legal way to do men’.[2] Cusps of homosexual/heterosexual, human/animal, self/other are dangerous edges indeed. This is not a book for the heteronormative in spirit since it is true to the dangerous way in which family is inscribed in both social history and biography.

Freud was, of course, a terrible player of the role of son, husband, lover, and father – perhaps even more familial roles. This is not just because he was too involved in his art, as Feaver appears to accept from the man himself sometimes, but because he had no idea how to perform those roles normatively. And here lays the influence of Browning again and perhaps of the one family member he continually failed to understand (mesconnaissance in Lacan), his grandfather, Sigmund, of whom Feaver shows Lucian’s fondness.

Pictures of John Minton, Francis Bacon, Dickie Chopping and others often appear and are absorbing. These characters are often, I think, better understood by Feaver than by some of their own biographers, particularly Bacon. The painting Freud knew as ‘The Buggers’ (by the public as ‘The Wrestlers’) by Bacon was owned by Freud and kept in pride of place. Feaver keeps pointing silently to it. Lucian seems sometimes a better friend to Bacon’s working-class criminal lover, George Dyer, than was Bacon, who appeared to love George more when he was dead, a corpse propped for a few days in Bacon’s Paris Hotel.

And the real cusp of danger is class. Freud teetered between a kind of lumpen-proletariat criminal or under class (I don’t like the labels but let’s use them for now) and an equally avaricious, and perhaps far less consistently ethical, aristocracy and haute-bourgeoisie – which only met it seems out of the necessity of the latter to use (and sometimes abuse as with Peter Watson, the ‘margarine’ entrepreneur-aristocrat, and Bacon, whom was aristocratic only in spirit and horsiness) the former.  It is wonderful to see The Krays flit across these pages both as sexual and social actors. It is great to see how embedded in power Lucian became living on the ‘dangerous edge of things’, using the weapons of both the criminals and the aristocrats he merged into and out from. His relationship with various working-class or criminal young men (especially wonderful Charley Lumley) who acted as sidekicks, and with whom Auerbach quotes he was often found in bed at the end of boozy encounters, is brilliantly portrayed without definiteness nor judgement nor certainty as to its meaning. This is the queer world of the period – one I want to learn much more about in relation to Keith Vaughan, John Minton and Bacon. It is queer because it escapes certainty of interpretation and categorisation and I think the sexuality of the period truly to have been more like this than is presented by some witnesses.

As for the portrayal of women in the life of Lucian Freud, one should ignore this book’s presentation of them by Freud and in their own words, at the peril of misunderstanding the cusp on which power desperately played with danger. The danger was often to the women but Suzie Boyt arises out of this as fresh as in Ali Smith’s portrayal of her in Autumn. The children though – there we must pause with some certainty that there was much in those relationships (and non-relationships) that was seriously abusive (at least in terms of abuse by neglect). But again we need to see how Feaver will write the outcomes of these relationships out in his next volume – although we get a taste of how Esther Freud met the ‘dangerous edge of things’. At the age of 6 or 7 Esther was nearly, she reports, sold by her sister in Morocco where ‘the two children learned to fend for themselves’.[3]

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[1] Feaver (2019:276)

[2] Feaver citing Freud (2019:183)

[3] Feaver (2019:603)