The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Page 10

  The unsustainable claims made for Jacob in the name of Breton nationalism, which eventually replaced sardine-canning as the principal industry of Douarnenez, paradoxically made it difficult to take him as seriously as he deserved. He was unfortunate to be upstaged by the Surrealists in the mid 1920s when the poetry he had been writing, such as Cornet a Des [Dice Cup), was arguably Surrealist before the fact. His painting never developed sufficiently to compensate for this disappointment. It was in his struggle with himself, with his desires and beliefs, that the measure of the man became visible. Francis Rose thought him a saint; the more dependable evidence of Jacob’s own Meditations showed a profound and generous thinker. He remarked of himself: ‘The cross I have to carry through my life is being born a Jew, being homosexual, and still being a practising Roman Catholic’ His conversation was playful, but in his missal he kept the names of the living and the dead for whom he prayed each day.

  Max Jacob was involved in a car accident with Pierre Colle and broke his leg. It was while he was recovering that Wood painted his portrait, a bold, witty painting of a Breton Mr Punch that was given to the Quimper museum. Francis Rose recalled the summer of 1929: ‘Kit, from a fishing boat, painted pictures of other fishing boats. He used ripoline house paint, thinned with turpentine, and his colours were clear and pure. No real sail held as much of the brown and orange of a sun-lit sail as did those of his paintings. His “Mackerel” and “Sleeping Figure” shone with the blue deepness of the sea and the silvery glitter of a wet fish. His lobster baskets were as wet in colour and as well drawn in pattern as the real ones, and there was never a suspicion of the decorative in his work. Kit was good, handsome, simple, deformed; with a masculine build, a delicate nature, and the terrible fears of the poet. I loved him deeply… I spent most of my days with Kit and Frosca in a whitewashed villa on the seashore. He, too, smoked opium, and loved collecting opium pipes in bamboo and ivory when he could afford it. We found them at an antique dealer’s near the Galeries Lafayette in Paris, where Cocteau and all the other smokers went to buy lamps, pins, and equipment for smoking opium.’

  When Francis Rose was on the beach one morning a postman brought him a telegram from Serge Lifar. Diaghilev had died in Venice. Christopher Wood was sufficiently moved to believe that Diaghilev ‘will be terribly missed by everyone’. But the news did not really disturb the calm surface of his mood. ‘I sit on the green grass banks above the sea each evening which becomes like a lake, pale grey blue like milk and lovely ivory-coloured sailing ships go past very slowly,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘I can’t tell you the beauty of this place with dark fir trees and the little white houses like jewels, the curious faces of the people like Holbein’s drawings, there is such dignity and compactness about everything.’

  Even so, he still, at this stage, preferred Cornwall. Tréboul did not exert its full power on him during his first visit, and in view of the fury of that eventual power, he should perhaps have been glad of the tranquillity at first given to him by the ‘dignity and compactness’ of the village. The minute he returned to Paris, the effect on his paintings was remarked by others. In October he was approached by Georges Bernheim, who ran an important gallery in the rue du Faubourg St Honoré. Bernheim offered him a one-man show for the following May. This show, Wood told his mother, would make him the first English artist to be exhibited in Paris since Whistler. As Whistler was in fact American, the honour was perhaps even greater than Wood supposed. Perhaps in the excitement of the moment he could be forgiven for overlooking the fact that Meraud Guinness had exhibited the previous year; or perhaps he discounted her on the grounds that her show was more or less sponsored by Picabia.

  Boris Kochno, who had been Diaghilev’s secretary, asked Wood to do the scenery for a revue he was putting on for Charles Cochran with the remains of the Russian Ballet. The music would be by Lord Berners, whom Wood knew from Cannes. Like the Romeo and Juliet project, this was a show about a show: called Luna Park, it concerned the life of freaks or phénomènes, who followed a ballet company round Europe. Wood might well have felt disdainful about receiving the commission now, when he had already been offered a show in Paris, but he could not afford to turn down any chance of making money. He wrote simply to his mother: ‘I was very happy about [the Kochno commission] after the unfortunate affair of four years ago when I was not really competent enough to do it.’ He asked Clare Wood for money. Usually he was reluctant to do so, and often returned her cheques with assurances that he had no need of funds since everything was about to work out fine. At about this time, however, money or the lack of it, became more than an inconvenience for Wood: it became a major destabilising factor in his life. The bailiffs seized his house in Minton Place.

  He had not officially been ‘kept’ or given an allowance by Tony Gandarillas, but nor had he been expected to pay the bills, either at home or when they went travelling. The looseness of their arrangement, however, was demonstrated by the way that, as they saw less of each other, Wood found himself in trouble: no arrangement could be made to continue when they were apart, because none had existed when they were together.

  Wood told his mother about the bailiffs repossessing his house on 25 October 1929. He characteristically made no mention of the fact that the day before had seen the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in the events known as Black Thursday. In Paris, most of Christopher Wood’s rich friends were burned. Frosca had to take a job introducing rich clients to a picture gallery in return for a commission. A month later Wood claimed that Violette Murat had lost five or six million pounds. Maria de Gramont was having to work as an interior decorator (a consultant rather than actually going up a ladder) for £100 a month. Gandarillas was broke, and his aunt, Eugenia Errazuriz, had, according to Wood, ‘lost everything’. Clare Wood suggested that her son should do more work, but an artist, he told her tartly, was ‘not a machine’: the greatest painters – Degas, Cézanne, Renoir – had left no more than 300 or so canvases. Whether this was a sufficiently urgent response to a crisis that had convulsed the world, Mrs Wood was free to Wonder.

  Wood never dreamed of taking a job. The Duchesse de Gramont might have to dabble in decoration; the exiled dukes of Russia might be slicing up beetroot for the borscht in the Restaurant Moskou, but he would carry on searching for a way to make his paintings capable of expressing the ambitions he had for them. He would do the ballet designs for Cochran: that was, after all, a commission; it was a ‘job’ of a kind. Then in the New Year he would have to prepare his paintings for the exhibition at the Galerie Georges Bernheim.

  ‘Everyone wants money and thinks of little else at the moment. C’est une belle horreur,’ he wrote in November. Tony Gandarillas had urged him to marry Frosca, but he felt he did not have enough money. Cochran was to pay £25 for the revue designs in January and a further £25 a month later. Mrs Wood suggested he come and work at Broad Chalke, but he declined her offer. ‘It’s not my atmosphere and kills my work and me. I love your part of it, and if you lived there alone I should love it and be there a good deal.’ But she was not alone; ‘Huyton’ was there too.

  On 13 December Wood told his mother he had caught sight of Meraud in a restaurant, ‘looking very changed and not at all happy’. Any agitation he felt about Meraud was swept away by the terrible news that came on Christmas Eve: Jeanne Bourgoint had committed suicide. She had been behaving more wildly than usual after becoming the object of Violette Murat’s unwanted advances. The hard-bodied tomboy had become dishevelled and drug-addicted; she lived in squalor, seldom bothered to wash or dress, and was said to have had an abortion and a failed drug cure. She died of barbiturate poisoning in the family house in the rue Hippolyte-Lebas. Her desperate end was discovered by her brother Jean, the surviving enfant terrible.

  Wood worked hard through January to finish the ballet designs, and this time there were no reverses. He painted more pictures, but saw no chance of selling them. The revue opened in Manchester in March – ‘a great success’, Wood told his m
other-before transferring to London. Frosca, whose financial reverse was not as serious as she had feared, had a skiing accident in St Moritz and was in hospital for several weeks with torn muscles in her leg. Wood went to Mousehole, in Cornwall, in March, and painted hard to give himself enough representative material for the Bernheim show in May. Bernheim himself helped by finding Wood a house in Paris where he could work quietly. Two of Wood’s best paintings – ‘The Little House by Night’ and ‘The Little House by Day’ [sold at Sotheby’s in June 1994) – were depictions of this house in the rue Singer, in the seiziéme.

  Back in Paris, Wood did something extraordinary: he persuaded Georges Bernheim to let Ben Nicholson share his show. On 16 March he wrote to Bernheim: ‘I won’t have enough pictures to really fill your two enormous rooms, since I don’t have any outsize pictures like Max Ernst’ – the word he used for outsize was ‘grosses’, an interesting adjective for the work of the man Diaghilev had preferred to him. Wood offered twenty-five or thirty pictures of his own and recommended that the rest of the space be occupied by Nicholson, whom he described as the painter he most admired in England and whose work had something of the same character as his own. He even proposed that the show be titled ‘Deux Peintres Anglais’.

  Although there was a practical consideration – filling the space – this was a magnanimous gesture, which shows that Wood’s self-absorption did not always make him selfish. He was not slow to complain about the difficulty he had in persuading Bernheim to accept Nicholson, but the fact that he was aware of his own achievement in being offered the show made it more remarkable that he was prepared to compromise the glory by sharing it.

  Ben Nicholson, alas, was ‘simply beastly’; he was unhappy with his work and could only offer ten paintings. Nicholson was also by this time seriously worried about Wood. In a postcard to Winifred on 8 April he wrote: ‘Kit needs our help. I think that he is trying to stop his opium and drinks instead, or mixes the two … I am doing all I can to make Kit stay in Paris and chuck London and that awful life he was living there.’

  The show, which opened on 17 May, was dominated by Wood. It was a qualified success. Wood sold about eleven paintings, but for the modest prices that were all the post-Crash world could manage. A further panic on the New York Stock Exchange just before the show opened had made matters even more tense. He had in fact only two buyers: Winifred Reitlinger bought a picture of a fishing boat in Dieppe harbour; the other ten canvases all went to Lucy Wertheim, a collector from London who had taken a passionate interest in Wood. He himself seemed indifferent to the impact of the show. This may have been an affectation, but it may also have been caused by his restless determination to continue with his painting. He knew that his best work – or the work that he believed he could do – was not in the show. It was in his mind, and he needed to go back to Brittany to release it.

  Winifred Nicholson believed the Bernheim show had at last done Wood something like justice. ‘His work in that exhibition was fine, dark and blocked. It was hard to see what his next move would be. One picture was different from anything he had done. It was at Tréboul, of a woman mending nets against a white cottage. This was simple and mystic.’

  Money worries pressed him still harder. He asked Clare Wood to pay the rent on the house in Minton Place; Frosca’s affairs had undergone a reverse because she was subsidising her brother-in-law. And so, with the threats of creditors and the praises of Cocteau and Georges Auric humming in his ears, Wood left Paris in early June to return to Tréboul.

  He stayed this time in the Hôtel Ty-Mad itself, looking over the sea. In a period of about six weeks, from early June to late July, Wood painted in a frenzy. He completed almost forty canvases, about one a day.

  Later accounts of Keats’s extraordinary summer of 1819 – scraps of paper, birdsong, coughing – were burdened with significance they cannot really have had. Christopher Wood’s summer of 1930 seemed to have the makings of myth even as it was being lived.

  The Ty-Mad was completely unlike the hôtels de grand luxe he had frequented with Tony Gandarillas along the shores of the Mediterranean. Its writing paper was headed ‘Pension G. Cariou’, with the name Ty-Mad in small letters underneath, and in most respects it was no more than a pension. A painting Wood did of Francis Rose at his toilet showed the simplicity of the rooms, furnished with iron bedsteads, bare table and chair, and walls decorated by a single picture of a woman in a Breton headdress. The Ty-Mad was plain to the point of austerity; it was a corrective to the Vicomte de Noailles and his fancy dress balls, and it was also, to Christopher Wood, a liberation.

  Tréboul was not merely a convenient and quiet place to paint; it provided subject matter, inspiration and the atmosphere in which Wood finally brought together his technique and his ambition for it, with the result that he was able to plunder his emotions – something which until then he had been able to do only with frustrating inconsistency. Once he had unlocked this power, he exploited it relentlessly: he worked by day and by night, using postcards to prompt his memory of a scene when the light had gone.

  The paintings that resulted were basically landscapes and seascapes, characterised by the presence of sailing boats, Breton peasants, whitewashed churches and cottages, dark grass, fir and cypress trees on the cliffs edge and the day-to-day objects of the life of fishermen and their families. Within this framework, however, he introduced remarkable variations. Some of the figures were, as he intended, like drawings from Holbein, but in other paintings he worked in more modern ways. In the foreground of ‘Building the Boat, Tréboul’ the face of the old woman seems to foresee the drownings the finished boat would bring: her head recalls ‘The Scream’ by Munch.

  In the painting known as ‘La Plage, Hôtel Ty-Mad, Tréboul’ (in fact it depicted the hotel at a neighbouring beach, Les Sables Blancs), the foreground is occupied by monumental characters who might have come from an undiscovered period of Picasso. In the magnificent ‘Sleeping Fisherman, Ploaré’ (also wrongly catalogued: it was set on the Plage St Jean, Tréboul), the huge figure of the title seems less like a peasant than a Greek god, slumbering on the sands where he has stopped to rest. A French critic, Françoise Steel, commented: ‘Kit Wood was often a nostalgic witness to the rootedness of these Breton men and women who seem to have sprung up spontaneously out of their own patch of earth.’ This seems right. The ribs of the boat in ‘Building the Boat, Tréboul’ appear to be part of the same notional body as the skull of the old woman in the foreground: she nurses in her arms what first appears to be a baby but turns out to be a piece of timber from the boat. In the paintings of women drying the nets or decorating the inside of the church, Wood portrayed a mystical union between people and place. They were one and the same: they had ‘sprung up spontaneously from their own patch of earth’. Wood understood and realistically depicted this autochthonous quality of the people; yet he also made them look like gods.

  The results were at best, as in ‘The Sleeping Fisherman’, powerfully moving: strange, beautiful, unsettling, with a taste and character not quite like those of any other painter. The naive elements, developed from Rousseau and Wallis, were now settled down into the painting; the landscape techniques taken from Van Gogh and Derain had been assimilated. The result was that Wood’s own vision at last came blazing out in all its curious and contradictory forms.

  The landscapes without people had a similar sense of precarious harmony: the wild and the familiar, the romantic and the quotidian, set side by side in unsettling colours. The painting of the Chapelle St Jean, done from his bedroom window in the Ty-Mad, has a characteristic mixture of these elements: it is certainly beautiful, restful and realistic – all the pieties and reassurances of rustic Catholicism have been observed; but it is also edged with menace. There is the sea behind; there are voyages to be made beyond the horizon. While the picture is faithfully Breton, it is also otherworldly. The achievement of it was that the transcendent aspect did not have to be read into it in some literary way: it was prese
nt in the actual manner in which the church was painted. This was finally painting of a gorgeously expressive kind; it was not what Modernism was concerned with, but it was what Wood had striven to do all his life.

  Although Wood had tried to stop smoking for Frosca’s sake, he had not been successful. He relied on her to send him supplies from Paris, but she in turn depended on Tony Gandarillas, who was frequently out of town. In the creative frenzy of June and July 1930, Wood gave up any pretence of moderation: he smoked all night if he had opium to smoke, and failing that, he smoked the leavings or dross. His physical state therefore varied between intoxication and withdrawal. He didn’t care. He had risked everything to get this far; he was driven by forces he did not even wish to control.

  This was what it had all been for: all the ‘progress’ he had so eagerly reported, all the ‘struggles’ he had so boyishly endured. He sensed that he had to make a ‘dash’ for it; there was a compelling urgency: it was as though he believed that he might lose what he had searched so long to find – that if he did not paint as much as he could while all the elements of his life were in propitious harmony, they might shift into a new configuration and he would have lost his dream or his ability to paint it. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ he told his mother, ‘how I have to hurry, hurry from one thing to another, but it’s just the one moment or chance I have to get on.’

  Frosca came to stay but did not distract him. He was too tired to write letters; he had a wardrobe full of unanswered mail. He was painting one, sometimes two pictures a day and was obliged to rent a second room in the Ty-Mad because the smell of drying paint was so overpowering. Some of the painting showed recognisable scenes from Tréboul; some were fanciful mixtures, taking a building from one place, a beach or seascape from another. At night he smoked opium and sometimes still painted, consulting his stock of local postcards. ‘I was always called hasty but I can’t work otherwise,’ he wrote. ‘It nearly kills me, the effort to get it done.’