The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Page 11

  At the beginning of July Frosca returned to Paris, because her mother had died. Wood worked on in unabated fury. The only other occupant of the hotel was Max Jacob. The two men met at mealtimes, then returned to their work. Jacob was charmed by Christopher Wood and by the innocent frenzy that gripped him.

  On 10 July Wood wrote to Lucy Wertheim, whose purchase of his pictures, coupled with small loans, was helping him to exist: ‘I have quite run out of paper and have got into such a state with my work and the fact that I have not been out of my room for over a week that I can’t possibly go downstairs to get any more. My life is terrible here … When I have worked at one end of the room for four hours without stopping even to make a cigarette and go and lie down on the bed at the other and smoke perhaps a pipe of opium which is the only resource of quietness which takes my mind for the moment out of that awful turmoil of ideas and colours that go on in my busy head …

  ‘I have painted a good deal of architecture, churches in a curious lonely country by the sea, very restful but very strong, and determined. Max Jacob said that I paint “des arbres pleins d’oiseaux” which is a very beautiful way of expressing fullness and feeling and yesterday he saw a large picture I had done. He said “C’est meilleur que fait mon vieil ami Derain”.’

  Better than Derain … such praises goaded him on. ‘I am enjoying my work enormously,’ Wood told the Nicholsons, ‘and I haven’t the least idea of what is going on anywhere else, whether my house still exists or whether Paris is still in the same place as it was before.’

  There were occasional visitors to Tréboul. One of them was a Swiss writer called C.A. Cingria, who was on a bicycling tour of Breton churches. He was astonished by Wood’s self-absorption. On Midsummer Day a celebratory bonfire was piled high in the square between the Chapelle St Jean and the Hôtel Ty-Mad. A light breeze made the flames surge through the dry branches and the resulting blaze was so powerful that onlookers feared it would engulf the hotel. But as the uncontrolled fire crept up the sides of the building, Kit Wood lay stretched out on his bed by the open window, indifferent to the mounting blaze, drifting on the private fumes of opium.

  A moderate opium habit can be sustained, with money and care in preparing the drug, with no adverse effects. The problems begin when too much is taken for too long, when a drastic reduction is attempted or when it is not properly prepared. It was in the state of withdrawal that De Quincey experienced his appalling dreams and visions, which, despite his careful explanations to the contrary, many people take to be a description of the effects of the drug rather than of unsupervised withdrawal from it. Jean Cocteau was disintoxicated in hospital at St Cloud in 1929, as was Tony Gandarillas, with the help of sedative drugs and close medical supervision. Even so, it was not easy, and much of what Cocteau wrote at the time (in Opium, 1930) had a bearing on Wood.

  ‘You cannot trifle, or mess about with opium. If you do, it will forsake you. You will be left with morphine, heroin, suicide, death.’ This was melodramatic: there was no absolute connection between opium and its less pure compounds, but it showed Cocteau’s respect for the drug’s power.

  ‘If you ever hear someone say “X killed himself by smoking opium” you can be sure it’s not true and that the death was caused by something else,’ he wrote. This was true, though Cocteau did not mention that ‘something else’ could include the side-effects of withdrawal.

  ‘Opium is a substance which defies analysis – living, capricious, and capable of suddenly turning against the smoker. It acts like a barometer for a weak personality. In humid weather the pipe leaks. The smoker arrives at the seaside and the drug swells up, refusing to cook. The approach of snow, or storms or strong winds makes it ineffective …’ Cocteau might almost have had Wood in mind when he was writing.

  Cocteau was not always clear about the question of the ‘dross’ – what is left in the pipe after the smoker has inhaled. Graham Greene spoke disparagingly of its bitter taste, but Cocteau thought mixing dross with the raw drug might increase the chances of getting a good smoke in difficult circumstances in which the drug for some reason would not ‘behave’. However, the addition of dross changed the nature of the pipe, and, as Cocteau warned, ‘It’s impossible to foresee the results.’ He came down against dross: ‘Some people tell you: “Experts throw out the dross.” Others say: “Experts make the boys smoke opium and only smoke the dross.” But if you ask a boy about the dangers of the drug he’ll tell you: “Good opium makes you fat, dross makes you ill.” The sin of opium is to smoke the dross.’

  By the sea, however, the drug was hard to handle. On his own, Wood didn’t have the social aspect of opium-smoking to keep him respectful; nor did he have a supply that was equal to his craving. In these circumstances he was tempted to smoke the dross or even to eat it. The results of either would have been, as Cocteau emphasised, dangerous and impossible to predict; instead of offering increased intellectual control, the drug could become hallucinogenic. But Wood had no regard for his own safety: he was reckless, impatient and addicted; he was also in the midst of a creative storm.

  ‘Opium,’ wrote Cocteau, ‘becomes tragic only in as much as it affects the nerves which govern the personality … It is dangerous to smoke it if you are unbalanced … Never confuse the opium-smoker and the opium-eater. They are quite different things.’

  The first, he implied, is civilised, desirable and, in the ‘majestic light of the intellect’, superior to his fellows; the latter is crude, inferior and self-destructive.

  New, surreal elements appeared in some of Wood’s late pictures. He had shown almost no interest in Surrealism proper until this stage; in fact since his rejection by Diaghilev in favour of Miró and Max Ernst his attitude had been hostile. Yet strange figures wandered into the dark backgrounds of these paintings and, in the case of ‘The Yellow Man’, came striding to meet you. He appeared to be a saltimbanque, perhaps liberated from the tents of the freaks where Wood’s designs for Cochran’s Luna Park had first imagined him. ‘The Yellow Horse’, stranded in the mid-ground of a moonlit landscape, was a fantastic creature, unrelated to the burly drayhorse of ‘La Foire de Neuilly’.

  Some saw in these exotic additions to the late pictures the defining stamp of Wood’s achievement. Those who, like Winifred Nicholson, loved the simple emotions of his more earthbound landscapes, saw them as brilliant, but aberrant. In Winifred Nicholson’s eyes they were also signals of Wood’s increasing mental disorder. She described what she admired in the rapturous paintings of 1930: they were ‘very much more inspired than any he had done previously. He worked at high pressure painting forty pictures in a month … There were pictures of churches, of the sea, of women praying, the colour was very simple and of the utmost purity like Hope itself. Human passion is at its highest tension, thought is mystic, and the theme of travel beyond the horizon which had constantly recurred in all his work now reached a pitch of utmost intensity beyond which it is not possible to go.’

  This assessment had a characteristic element of wishful thinking: Wood showed no interest in the spiritual life, and if there was a ‘mystic’ quality it was concerned not with a wordless union of people and god, but of people and place. But the minatory, fearful note struck by Winifred Nicholson at the end was justified: ‘Beyond which it is not possible to go’. It had taken Wood almost seven years to reach this stage, but when he got there he painted in such a way that he seemed to close off most logical avenues of development.

  At the end of July Christopher Wood returned to Paris. He showed his summer’s work to Christian Bérard. The paintings were wrapped in packets. Bérard knelt down and cut the strings that tied them. He separated them and looked at them one by one. He was astounded. He saw landscapes of such light and purity that he felt as though all around him were in a deep fog.

  While in Paris, Wood painted two of his best-known paintings: one depicted a tiger in front of the Arc de Triomphe, the other was called ‘Zebra and Parachute’. Both showed a mastery of composition he had
not always achieved before, though the original unsettling elements of the Tréboul paintings were here exaggerated into outright incongruity. A tiger from the deepest Rousseau jungle lay peacefully before the realistically painted Etoile, not far from where Wood had first stayed with Alphonse Kahn and then with Gandarillas. The background of ‘Zebra and Parachute’ was the Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier’s famous Modernist house near Paris. A placid zebra gazes left in the foreground; the diagonals of Le Corbusier’s design give a desolate air to the middle ground, reminiscent of some of de Chirico’s forlorn quays; and in the top right-hand corner a slumped figure, apparently already dead, floats to earth on a parachute.

  On 19 August 1930 Wood set off for England to meet Lucy Wertheim, who was to mount an exhibition of his pictures in London. He took the train from Paris to Le Havre in order to cross to Southampton, from where he would travel to London.

  An encounter on the boat made him believe he was being followed by members of the Guinness family or their agents. He felt so sure he was being watched that he threw his pipe and opium overboard. Although he loved Frosca, he had never been able to extirpate Meraud from his thoughts; he was frightened of her family, with whom he had been on bad terms ever since the affair had ended. There was no doubt that the affair with Meraud – although he forced himself to view it, and her, as immature – had troubled him in a way that related to his sexual identity and to his whole idea of himself. But the development of Wood’s anxieties to the point of paranoia can only be explained by the unsettling effects of the last few months. He was mentally and physically exhausted by his work, and his system had been abused by alternate indulgence in, and withdrawal from, large doses of opium.

  When he arrived in Southampton he sent a telegram to his mother asking her to meet him for lunch in Salisbury the next day. He then caught a ferry to the Isle of Wight.

  No one knows why he decided to go to Salisbury before London; Frosca understood that he wanted his mother’s advice about something that was troubling him. At any rate, it is possible, thanks to the inquiries made some weeks later by a private detective, to recreate Wood’s movements with a certain plodding precision.

  He arrived at the Pier Hotel in Yarmouth at eleven o’clock on the morning of 20 August. He had three suitcases with him and three large packets of pictures. He said he would have lunch at the hotel if they could reassure him there was no one else around. Lunch was served to him, but he was too agitated to eat. He was out for most of the afternoon, took no dinner, and went up to his room at nine. He was heard walking about until eleven o’clock, soon after which he went to bed.

  At 6.30 the following morning he appeared in the dining room and asked for a whisky and soda. He was told that the bar was not open. He said he wanted breakfast at once but the waiter told him the chef was not up. Wood paced up and down the dining room. He told the waiter he had been out all night; that although he had initially gone to bed in his room he had then left the hotel and slept on a quayside. The waiter went to hang up Wood’s coat, which he had left on a chair. Owing to the weight of it, he looked in the pockets. There he found a six-chamber revolver. Perhaps it was the same one with which he had frightened off the eagles in Greece.

  Wood went upstairs and had a bath. He came down at 8.15, had breakfast and left in a hurry. The boat for Lymington was due to leave at 8.30, but fortunately for Wood it was a quarter of an hour late. He just made it. Although the Guinness family was well known in Yarmouth there was apparently no trace of them there at the time. They had a yacht, which they sometimes brought over for Cowes week, but various ‘yachting people’ interviewed by the private detective stated firmly they were not there. Wood was imagining his persecution.

  That morning he took a train from Lymington to Salisbury. At about 11.30 on the morning of 21 August Wood walked into the bar of the County Hotel in Salisbury and accosted a Major Beckley, who was staying there. He said, ‘Can I have a little interview now, as I expect my mother in about half an hour.’ Beckley explained that there must be a mistake: he had never seen Wood before and had no business with him. Wood paced about the lounge until a woman’s voice was heard outside. He went out and spoke to her. She asked how he was; he replied that he was very well, and said they would ‘settle what we will do in half an hour’.

  He had lunch with Clare and Betty Wood in Salisbury. What passed between the three of them is not known. Frosca later wrote to Winifred Nicholson (presumably on the basis of what Clare Wood told her) that Wood told his mother that he was being pursued and that he had heard voices telling him to commit suicide. Afterwards Betty drove all three of them to the station, where Wood bought a ticket for Waterloo. A porter called Alfred Hibberd saw the car pull up at about 1.40 pm. Wood jumped out and the car drove off. Hibberd saw him say goodbye to Betty, but was not sure if he said goodbye to his mother, as he himself then went into the station. Hibberd was told that a passenger in the cloakroom required a porter. This turned out to be Wood. He took his luggage on to the Number Two platform for the Waterloo train. A newsboy called Leslie Smailes, employed by Smith and Sons, sold Wood a book for eight shillings and sixpence. He said Wood appeared agitated and flushed; he sat on a seat near the bookstall but seemed too distracted to be able to read. He shut the book, stood up, and walked up and down the platform. He was standing only two feet from the comer of the bookstall when the train was coming in.

  At this point, according to Smailes, Wood ‘sort of ran and jumped and dived and screamed’. He jumped right in front of the engine.

  The driver of the engine, Charles Davie, was on the point of pulling up in the usual way, on time, when his fireman, who was on the platform side of the engine cab, called out: ‘Whoa! A man’s jumped in front of the engine.’ Davie applied the brake fully and the train pulled up quickly.

  A Mr F.L. Buttar, a medical practitioner and police surgeon, said he was telephoned by the police and asked to go to the Southern Railway Station. When he arrived he saw the body of a man on a stretcher. He had received severe injuries to his trunk and legs. He was dead. The upper part of his body and head were uninjured. Buttar believed death to have been instantaneous, caused by shock following the injuries.

  Buttar, Hibberd, Smailes and Davie all gave evidence to an inquest in Salisbury conducted the following day by the City Coroner, Mr A.M. Wilson, sitting with a jury. They were told by P.C. Berryman of the Salisbury City Police that on searching Wood’s body he had found a bloodstained envelope with the County Hotel’s stamp on the flap. Wilson read what he could of the message; he said it appeared to him ‘perfectly senseless’ and evidence of the fact that Wood was not in his normal state of mind. As far as he could decipher them, the words were: ‘Are they positive’, followed by a word that might have been ‘though’ or ‘through’. Then it continued: ‘Are they positive as to who they are. Throwing away is not a big enough proof The coroner believed the words had been written by a man ‘out of his senses’.

  The jury returned a verdict that Wood died from shock following injuries sustained from his throwing himself in front of a train while of unsound mind. The coroner expressed deep sympathy for Dr Wood and his family on the loss of one he believed to have been a brilliant artist.

  The last word was spoken with the controlled politeness of the English upper-middle classes into which Wood had been born. Dr Lucius Wood, veteran of the Western Front, embodiment of Huyton and good sense, rose to his feet and thanked the coroner for the sympathetic way in which he had conducted the inquest.

  Christopher Wood’s life was finished.

  Across Europe, in apartments and hotels, in galleries and houses, there were detonations of private grief. News reached Wood’s scattered friends at different times, awkwardly, sometimes from the wrong people. Frosca first heard when Winifred Reitlinger wrote to console her. The pathetic letters Wood’s friends exchanged conjured the terrible shock, the stricken intake of breath, the slamming doors. The scribbled lines revealed the hellish despair of Frosca Munster, Tony Ganda
rillas, Winifred Nicholson and others who had loved him; what remained beyond reach were the feelings of Clare Wood as she surveyed the ruin of her fallen Icarus.

  One of the last letters Kit wrote to her concluded: ‘I love you so dearly and think of you as my best and dearest friend, and I shall never forget how perfectly sweet and understanding you have been towards me, and when I think of all the sacrifices you have made for me it makes me very ashamed, and makes me think you must care for me very much. Goodbye my sweet. All my love and I’ll write as soon as I get back to Paris. Your loving Kit.’

  It was appropriate that his final words should be of thanks. In the confused mesh of his motive and ambition, a desire to improve his painting, to realise his talent to the utmost, had become synonymous with his feeling of gratitude. His wish to please her led him indirectly to the strain that made him do the thing that in all imagining would hurt her most.

  Clare Wood showed herself to be a woman of great resource. In the days between the death and the funeral she was so composed that friends worried for her. When Winifred Reitlinger wrote to offer her condolences, Clare Wood replied magnificently: ‘Dear Miss Reitlinger, Thank you for your letter full of kind thoughts. I feel so sorry for you to have lost such a good friend as I know Kit was… Will you give Frosca my love and tell her I am thinking of her all the time. I am glad she will soon be seeing you.’

  Lucy Wertheim telephoned Clare Wood on the evening of Kit’s death. Mrs Wertheim, who was subsequently to enter a tense relationship with other parties over the possession of Wood’s work, had bought a large number of his best paintings at advantageous prices: ‘The Yellow Man’, for instance, became hers for only £30. Wood had liked her and enthusiastically supported her proposed gallery; he borrowed money from her on account during the summer of 1930 against future work. Nevertheless, it was not tactful to telephone a house that had received such news only hours before.