The Fatal Englishman (11 page)

This surprisingly sure-footed decision was connected to the emotional certainties of his ambition to be a painter. His polio, and the three-year convalescent period of being nursed by his mother, had coincided with the absence of his father at the Front.
His illness changed the course of his life: from being an athlete he became a cripple. He was shamefully removed from the world of other children, and was in continual pain. At the same time he became handsome and attractive; puberty came to him as he lay prone.

He turned his frustrated physical and sexual energies to painting, which became an acceptable vehicle for all the unassimilated emotions of this harrowing period. He continued in later life to see his painting in this way, as when he viewed the ending of his affair with Meraud Guinness in the same way as the rejection of his designs for Diaghilev and used them both merely as a spur for his ambition. When he found as a crippled adolescent that he could paint, that he actually had some natural ability for it, he clasped the talent to his heart. In his life there was only one other emotion that counted, and that was the storm of enduring gratitude he felt towards his mother. She had saved him and nursed him; by encouraging him to paint she had helped release in him some tender, appreciative feelings towards the world he saw. It was natural that he should then make the one further step and lock together the two most important aspects of his emotional life: his painting would become a way of thanking and honouring his mother. The little paradox was that to accomplish this, he had to leave her. He had to go where the real art was and to escape from the influence of ‘Huyton’. Always there was the half-formed idea that he would one day return when he had sufficiently proved himself and made for her a monument that could never be tarnished or destroyed.

Clare Wood encouraged him to believe he had a special mission and that she was its presiding deity. She once wrote to a friend of his: ‘I adore him, as you know, and he must make a big thing of his life and use his talent conscientiously. I feel very seriously about that, as it is a thing that has been given to him to use.’ Clare Wood’s support of her son against the judgement of her husband took courage, but her emotional investment in Kit’s career as a painter was almost as great as his own. Kit was enabled by his gift and by the fact that he was a man to live and enjoy those aspects of life and feeling that she had had to subdue to the requirements of her unimaginative husband. Lucius Wood was a
decent man, but despite all he had seen at the Front from 1914-18 he lacked the ability to imagine the inner lives of those nearest to him. Clare and Kit were bent on some mission of their own, and she loved him with the unforgetting passion of a mother who had nursed her only son back from death.

In the Paris of the 1920s Wood was a rarity: an Englishman who painted. In a world of doubtful glamour his clean-cut innocence was a quality to which everyone could respond. He was always well dressed, usually in English clothes, though the cuffs of his Jermyn Street shirts were often frayed. He looked clean, even if he had been working all night and smoking opium; his clear complexion seldom betrayed the excesses of his life. He spoke briskly and simply, and had a streak of gallantry which often made him choose to dance all evening with the plainest-looking woman at a party. Younger women, such as his friend Gerald Reitlinger’s sister Winifred, thus felt flattered by his attention. He courteously warned her that his and Gerald’s parties became wild after midnight and she should make arrangements to go home.

His charm was qualified by his unreliability. He often failed to turn up at dinner parties if he thought someone who bored him might be there. His opium smoking also made him moody, though he warned friends not to worry if they called on him and found him distracted. He was quite punctilious about his louche habit.

A Parisian friend, Jacques Porel, claimed that ‘He never uttered a cruel word. His presence alone was enough to save any gathering from vulgarity. At the same time he made you feel at ease in the order of things his delicacy had imposed.’ Porel also noticed a certain boyish playfulness: ‘His eyes looked down to the ground, his schoolboy pout was fixed, then would turn into a shy smile as he suddenly took out of his pocket – with exactly the same air of surprise – a thousand franc note or a pair of twenty-five centime coins, and said, “Look how rich I am. Georges, Jacques, listen, my dear chap. I’m asking you to dinner.” ‘ According to Porel, ‘one half expected him to clap his hands and jump up and down with glee.’

Wood’s unreliability could be hurtful and alarming. Lucy
Wertheim, a friend and supporter, waited for two hours at her flat for Wood to come to dinner as arranged. At ten o’clock a friend rang to say Wood was unwell. The next day he arrived unexpectedly at her birthday lunch in a restaurant in Piccadilly, thrust a picture into her arms and borrowed half a crown for the taxi. He had a black eye, spoke as though in a trance, and hardly ate. Lucy Wertheim believed that, ‘a restless energy seemed to impel him to keep moving whilst the knee that troubled him obliged him to take frequent rests.’ Yet she, like Winifred Nicholson, was powerfully affected by his presence from the first meeting onwards. She sensed something in him that was almost frighteningly dynamic.

Wood sat on the train to Penzance in August 1926. He was ready to make the big push forwards. His private life had reached a fragile equipoise, his technique was sufficiently developed. In Ben Nicholson he had an ideal painting partner: quiet, dedicated and appreciative. Although Nicholson’s own painting would shortly embrace abstraction, never to return, he was at this time painting in a figurative style so similar to Wood’s that some people found their paintings hard to distinguish. Despite Wood’s social life and nervous character, Nicholson found him the most generous and inspiring companion he ever had. In analysing how Wood tried to emulate the Nicholsons it is easy to overlook how his painting inspired them at a difficult time in their lives.

Wood’s only obstacle to high achievement was his increased reliance on opium. He told Frosca that he would try to do something about it for her sake as he did not wish his appreciation of her to have any narcotic element. At the same time he invited her to come and stay with him at Porthmeor Beach, in St Ives, and preferably to bring some high quality drugs with her. The trouble was that Tony Gandarillas was now seeing so much of Maria de Gramont that Wood could not get access to his supply.

Frosca duly arrived at Wood’s little cottage, and to begin with all went well. His painting reached a new level and he felt happy with Frosca. He painted the sea, the boats and the local people with what Winifred Nicholson called ‘imaginative reality’. She
believed his painting was now back on track after the frustrations caused to it by city life and the upheavals over Meraud. ‘I too,’ Winifred Nicholson recalled, ‘painted with keenest delight. My little boy [Jake] ran with bare feet by the sea.’ Like all Wood’s bright idylls, this one was short-lived. Frosca Munster was not a woman easily upstaged, but cliques of friends are always irritating to outsiders. Frosca did not feel threatened by Winifred as a sexual rival, but she felt uneasy about the artistic and personal intimacy she enjoyed with Wood. She made one or two comments to Winifred Nicholson which hurt her grievously. Winifred took herself off to walk along the seashore, turning them over in her heart.

She would not admit to herself that she had the interest of a lover in Kit Wood. Her feeling, she told herself, was all spiritual. ‘My love for him,’ she later wrote, ‘was severe discipline, severe sacrifice, and meant going through fire, but fire purified it… and gave it that element that neither death nor sorrow can come near.’

Whatever state of purity it reached in her recollection, she decided in the autumn of 1928 that she was not welcome at St Ives and had better leave. She said it was the hardest thing she had ever had to do. Nevertheless she managed to subdue her own feelings sufficiently to take some pleasure in the happiness that Frosca had brought to Kit. She had seen the look of joy on his face when Frosca had arrived at St Feock with all her ‘lovely, glistening frocks’, and she had seen the new strength of purpose that came into Wood’s life as a result, she believed, of Frosca’s influence. She believed Wood had found the arrangement he had long sought: a relationship with a woman who was a friend as well as a lover, and who consequently gave him the peace of mind to be fully creative.

Wood and Ben Nicholson were out walking one day when they went past the door of a fisherman’s cottage. They looked inside and were amazed by what they saw: an array of primitive paintings they both believed to be bordering on genius. The painter was a retired fisherman called Alfred Wallis. He painted on old cardboard boxes, bus timetables, anything that came to hand. The pictures, which he had started to paint after the death
of his wife in 1922, were of the sea and ships: they had a foreshortened perspective and crude lines, but an intriguing sense of form and colour. Wallis was a kind of picturesque original who might appeal to someone who had been to too many of the Comte de Beaumont’s fancy dress balls. He lived in a single room, where, much to his neighbour’s irritation, he played improvised melodies on a battered accordion that he kept beneath a purple spotted cover. He had once been a rag and bone man and had once run a shop, but had not been able to balance the books. He had a gruff attitude towards his painting and to such of Wood’s and Nicholson’s as they subsequently showed him.

His effect on Wood’s work was considerable; in fact Winifred Nicholson thought that, after Picasso, Wallis was the most important single influence. His naïveté inspired Wood to develop an aspect of his style that had first become apparent in the days of ‘La Foire de Neuilly’. Wood was not a true naive like Wallis, and did not try to be, but he combined the naive with other elements of what was emerging as his mature style. Some critics commented that Wallis gave Wood an excuse for a certain clumsiness – that he gave a fancy vindication to a basic lack of technique – but Wood could have authenticated an unfinished element in his style by reference to any number of other painters, including the more respectable Picasso and Van Gogh. Wallis’s work persuaded Wood to narrow his range of colour and to experiment with house paint and board instead of oils and canvas, but what he really offered him was a renewed childlike directness: ‘I want a good new yacht… and a good peaint box.’

On 15 October Frosca returned to Paris and Wood cried himself to sleep. He invited his mother to come and keep him company, but bad health prevented her from making the journey from Wiltshire. Alone again, he resumed his work and was excited by what he was doing. ‘It is a great moment in my life,’ he wrote. ‘The studentship has passed, my work is forming something quite personal and mature, unlike anybody else’s, and I don’t think anyone can paint the pictures I am doing.’ It was a fair comment on what had happened to his painting. St Ives did represent a genuine advance, a real breakthrough. Wood
responded to it with the note of fatalistic desperation he found on such occasions: ‘This time of quiet has come at the right moment … now it is essential as it is now or never and I am making a big dash for it’

He worked hard by day, his needs taken care of by a local man: ‘My servant is a hunchback, and very quick and good tempered. We eat blackberries like golf-balls and fish that are still flapping about when they are served.’ By night he smoked opium. When Frosca got back to Paris, Winifred Nicholson returned to St Ives, but by this time Wood was going so deep down into himself that he found her and Ben irritating with their self-sacrifice, their vegetarianism and their noisy child.

Wood stayed on alone as the winter set in. St Ives was giving him something important, of which he had inadvertently given a good description in a letter. ‘When someone dies here, they bum the mattress, the clothes and even the bedstead of the defunct on the beach. The male folk, these darkly dressed men, carry it all down on their shoulders and make a huge fire among the rocks and stand around with paraffin cans in hand musing on the life of the dead person. It is rather impressive with the huge green waves like horses bounding and pounding in on the sand.’

What he was describing was what became a typical Wood picture: the sea, darkly dressed fisherpeople, drama, strangeness, something primitive; the homely human figures set against a background of wildness and mystery, expressed in misleadingly simple terms.

It was in the human figures that Wood was distinctive. He was the only serious English painter between the two wars who continued to believe that a picture could deal with the lives of people. The dogmatic concerns of modem art as it developed in England ruled out the appearance of human beings at all, unless in some non-representational way, a mere occupation of the picture space, like a pipe-cleaner in a Cubist collage.

In his cottage by the sea Wood was by this stage smoking five or six pipes of opium each evening, and the drug was of poor quality. He promised Frosca he would begin treatment for his addiction as soon as they were together again, but asked if she
would, in the meantime, try to get hold of some better quality opium from Gandarillas.

The euphoric effects of opium were real enough, and deeply appealing to Wood. De Quincey noted that ‘the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the majestic light of the intellect.’ Cocteau put it tersely: ‘Alcohol provokes stupidity; opium provokes wisdom.’ Wood was aware of his intellectual failings and prized opium’s ability to give him at least the semblance of power. But there was another aspect of the drug’s effect that was important to him. In a test at the Harvard Medical School in the 1950s a Dr Lawrence Kolb came to the extraordinary conclusion that, ‘the intensity of pleasure produced by opiates is in direct proportion to the degree of psychopathy of the person who becomes an addict.’ Millions of non-psychopathic Chinese over hundreds of years proved the finding to be false, but Dr Kolb’s footnotes were relevant to Wood: ‘Opium produces in these cases a feeling of mental peace and calm to which they are not accustomed and which they cannot normally achieve.’