The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Page 3

  Wood and Gandarillas, restored by their civilising stay in Constantinople, then found themselves in the middle of the slaughter. Wood viewed it with a kind of feverish detachment, though now he had a particular reason for it: he and Gandarillas had both contracted malaria. Wood’s temperature descended from 106 degrees just in time for him and Gandarillas to catch the last available boat out of Smyrna. The Turks moved in the next day and killed everyone in sight, including the staff of the nursing home.

  Even this sweaty brush with death provoked no more reflection in Wood than the comment that ‘this fellow Kemal Pasha is a dreadful menace’. On the boat to Athens they shared a cabin with the governor of Lesbos, who smelt, and Prince Louis Alphonse, the shifty brother of the king of Spain, whom they ditched on arrival.

  The pleasure cruise was now further protracted by the need for convalescence. Karlsbad in Austria had a pleasantly hygienic, Northern ring to it after the terrors of the Aegean; and Gandarillas planned a route that took them through Venice, where Wood could look at the paintings by Veronese, Tintoretto and Titian. He repaid Gandarillas’s consideration by describing their brief stay in Venice as the most wonderful night of his life.

  Once in Karlsbad they consulted medical opinion. The doctors prescribed arsenic injections to counter the effects of malaria, castor oil to make Wood’s hair grow where his head had been shaved, and iron for his newly diagnosed anaemia. The recuperation should be completed in the mountains, they advised; Wood told his mother that this definitely ruled out Huyton.

  Gandarillas also wrote to Clare Wood from Karlsbad, telling her that she need have no fear about Kit: so long as her son was in his company, whether in Paris or abroad, he would make sure he lacked for nothing. It was a charming and strategically well-judged letter, which drew a friendly response from Mrs Wood. Meanwhile Kit wrote to her again and said: ‘I am enclosing to you a letter for Daddy which I wish you to read first and if you think it will ease matters should be glad if you will give it to him, otherwise tear it up.

  ‘Remember this, that I do not wish in any way to reproach him for his curious ideas but merely to put things quite straight as they stand from one man to another. For now, although you probably never realised it, I am become a man and have to a certain extent developed during this last year.

  ‘It hurts me to think of him being ill and worried, for at the bottom of my heart I love him, but have I, during the last few years, been able to show it?

  ‘I shan’t say more except that I love you dearly and I hope that we shall reach a good understanding.’

  Wood was a slapdash writer, but there were certain suggestive phrases: Dr Wood’s ‘curious ideas’… ‘I am become a man’… his father ‘ill and worried’ … his recognition that his mother might think it wiser not to pass the letter on to his father but to ‘tear it up’. Yet somehow it is hard to believe that Wood chose to tell his father that he and Gandarillas were lovers. He could sufficiently have emphasised his independence without distressing his father further. Gandarillas’s letter to Clare Wood spoke only of friendship, and it would have been foolish of Wood to jeopardise the good feeling it had engendered for the sake of some cleaving to the ‘truth’.

  Although he was a doctor and, thanks to his years at the Front, a man of considerable experience, Dr Wood was not the kind of father to welcome the news that his son was sleeping with another man. Homosexuality was one of the areas in which Britain had most determinedly ignored the developments of European thinking. To Dr Wood, as to most other Englishmen, the most famous instance of homosexual activity was still the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. A writer called Edward Carpenter had proposed ideas about the instinctive nature of homosexuality in Homogenic Love (1896) and The Intermediate Sex (1908), but they were not generally accepted in England until they appeared, only slightly updated, in the pages of a report prepared for the Home Office under the chairmanship of a Yorkshire schoolmaster called Jack Wolfenden in 1957. Havelock Ellis’s great work Studies in the Psychology of Sex tackled the problems in 1897, but the book was considered depraved and could only be published in America. It did not appear in England until 1935.

  In any event, Christopher Wood, despite his passionate, unguarded nature, had a strict Edwardian delicacy. Even at their most jocular his letters had no vulgarity and no mention of bodily functions, sexual or otherwise. The most significant line of his letter is the plaintive one: ‘At the bottom of my heart, I love him, but have I, during the last few years, been able to show it?’ Lucius Wood’s part in his son’s life was marginal, but its small tragedy was shadowed in that sad, half-stifled question.

  From Karlsbad, Wood and Gandarillas returned at last to Paris, stopping en route at Munich (where they found the wooden seats in the opera house uncomfortable because they had grown so thin), Leipzig and Nuremburg, then known only as the birthplace of Dürer.

  At the end of November Wood met his mother for a few days in London and introduced her to Tony Gandarillas. Clare Wood was a good-looking woman who appeared at least ten years younger than she was; nevertheless she was a provincial doctor’s wife whose chief concerns, as she expressed them, were curtain fabrics and the shortage of domestic help. Gandarillas was one of the most worldly men in Europe. The meeting, however, lubricated by his charm and their common dedication to her son, was a great success. It was followed by a further cordial exchange of letters.

  In London Wood also saw Augustus John, whom he continued to admire, believing him to be ‘very refined and a gentleman to his finger tips’. Back in Paris he effectively moved in with Gandarillas in the Avenue Montaigne, though there was some pretence that he lived in a small hotel nearby. They had been through the wonders of Taormina and the trials of Smyrna together; whatever might happen to their sexual feelings, they were now bound close in affection and friendship. On 28 December they went to the evening service at the classical church of Saint Sulpice, the ‘cathedral’ of the aristocratic Faubourg St Germain. It had been a tumultuous year.

  In the new year, 1923, the contrast between Wood’s work and his social life became more marked. By day he attended classes or toiled in his studio, worrying about the price of paint and canvas. At night he moved with such people as Luisa, the Marchesa di Casati. She owned the Palais Rose in Neuilly, formerly the property of the exquisite Robert de Montesquiou, who had served as Proust’s model for the Baron de Charlus. Her dining room was hung with black velvet, and at one end was a plate-glass partition behind which a boa-constrictor was fed with live animals during dinner. She also owned an eighteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, which was later sold to Peggy Guggenheim. It was here that she gave a ball at which Nijinsky danced with Isadora Duncan – supremely to her satisfaction: ‘It was more wonderful than making love with a negro boxer on Mr Singer’s billiard table.’

  Luisa Casati had red hair and red eyes, which she concealed behind a veil. She was the friend of another fantastic character, Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian poet-aviator who had taken the Adriatic port of Fiume by force and turned it into an independent republic. By this time, however, D’Annunzio was on the way to becoming a kind of proto-Fascist. Wood knew nothing of Fiume, which became Rijeka, part of Serbia, and cared less. He liked his new friends more than the old ones and that was all that mattered to him.

  He had also understood something that escaped puritanical critics of the Parisian social circus. Many of the most colourful figures of the beau monde had good taste and the money with which to back it. Gandarillas’s aunt, Eugenia Errazuriz, for instance, was a figure almost as exotic as Luisa Casati, but the two people she had chosen to finance in their struggling days were Picasso and Stravinsky, for whom she had bought a piano. Mme Errazuriz’s decorative taste was for simplicity – scrubbed tiles, whitewash – and was said by Cecil Beaton to have defined ‘the whole aesthetic of modern interior decoration’. Paris was not susceptible to easy distinctions between the vulgar and the valuable because the two were often co-existent.

  In
February Gandarillas’s wife paid a visit to Paris and he chose that moment to absent himself. The doctors who had been treating Wood for the after-effects of malaria recommended a change of climate, so the two headed south. In Rome they visited Luisa Casati in her marble house whose upstairs gallery contained more than 100 portraits of her by contemporary painters, including Picasso, Boldini and Augustus John. Wood was overcome by the dramatic character of Rome and wanted to stay longer; he felt sure he could work well there. Now that the coast was clear of his wife, however, Gandarillas wanted to return to Paris.

  Wood was happy enough to be back in his well-organised studio. He had made a small library and installed a vast couch in the gallery upstairs so he could spend the night if he liked. In the evening a servant would bring him dinner, and under Gandarillas’s influence he had become a gourmet. On 20 April 1923 he dined alone off vegetable soup, a fresh lobster, filet de boeuf, asparagus, compote de bananes, coffee and a bottle of Bordeaux.

  He worked away and felt encouraged by what he did. Alphonse Kahn told him to go and copy the paintings in the Louvre and he took this fatherly advice in good part. One of his strategies for self-encouragement was to be dismissive of the shows he visited: ‘I saw the Salon today,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘and really there was not one picture I could not have painted much better myself.’

  Like many painters, Wood had a weakness for the circus, and in June he painted a big picture with what, in the terminology of the day, he called ‘two niggers’, Pierrots, a gypsy, a monkey and a dog. He was not happy with the result, but the work he put into it paid dividends almost at once in another painting.

  This was ‘La Foire de Neuilly’, one of the first paintings in which Wood’s own style could be seen. It was a big, jolly, well-organised canvas. He had absorbed some naive influence, possibly from Douanier Rousseau, but it was rendered in terms he had seen in the paintings of Matisse and Derain. The result was raw but exciting; it was a French painting with a strong English accent.

  The summer season of parties was by now in full swing. The Comte and Comtesse de Beaumont held a ball in their Louis XIV house which had been decorated for the evening by Misia Sert, Diaghilev’s associate at the Russian Ballet. Gandarillas wore a Pierrot outfit designed by Picasso; Wood made a Russian costume of his own. A fellow-guest was Lord Alington, one of the most remorseless pleasure-seekers in Europe. He went as the Sun King, his costume consisting of a number of rays attached to his gilded skin. As the evening progressed he gave away the rays one by one, until even his Louis XIV mask and his golden stockings were gone. When he returned the next morning to the Ritz hotel the old ladies in the Place Vendôme were taking their poodles for an early walk. The manager of the hotel rushed out to wrap Alington in a blanket, but not before Alington, on the steps of the hotel, had removed his golden fig leaf and presented it to the Ritz as a little souvenir.

  Exhausted by parties, Wood confided in his mother that he was having doubts about his own abilities. ‘I can no longer be content to draw things as I see them,’ he wrote. ‘What is the use, it has all been done long ago.’ It was only a tremor. Soon he was back in his usual vein of (desperate ambition: ‘All I want is to succeed, and I shall do it somehow.’

  Then came the invitation he had longed for. Mme Errazuriz asked him to dine with Picasso and his wife. Picasso was the king of Paris. He was at this point going through a monumental, neoclassical phase, though ‘Three Musicians’ (1921) and ‘Three Dancers’ (1925) used techniques of advanced Cubism. He was also doing figurative paintings, such as the beautiful portrait of his little son Paolo dressed as a toreador, and set designs for Diaghilev. Picasso was above the petty squabblings of rival movements; he had won the battle for respect by his Cubist pictures before the War, and by now was recognised and deferred to, far more than his great contemporaries Braque and Matisse, as the Master.

  In France. In England he was regarded with distaste, except by a handful of critics led by Roger Fry. Christopher Wood, to his credit, recognised Picasso’s genius. While his own painting went down different paths, he never doubted Picasso’s pre-eminence. What Picasso had done, at the same time as one or two others, such as Delaunay and Kandinsky, was to break finally with the idea that a painting need represent a version of something that exists. By 1912 he had stopped trying to fix an object as the focus of a painting but was using the whole picture space itself: everything in it, whether colour or shape, contributed to the painting, but not as a representation of something in life or nature. The assumption behind this development was that images could appeal more directly to the eye if they were free of the wearisome task of trying to represent something else.

  Wood did not really understand this assumption and was not much interested in it. He put it baldly: ‘The old landscapes and pictures of women that looked exactly like them are no longer sought after by those who know what’s what.’ But he was shrewd enough both to recognise Picasso’s genius and to steal from him what could be useful in his own work: ‘pungency’, according to the artist Winifred Nicholson; or freedom of line and boldness with figures.

  The dinner went well. Picasso talked to Christopher Wood about painting and Wood believed they had become great friends. The function was probably a duty required of Picasso by his patron to please her nephew, but in any case he made himself charming to the young Englishman.

  In July Wood gave his mother an unprecedented glimpse of his mental agitation. He felt lonely and unable to discuss the problems of his painting with anyone because Gandarillas was unwell and he didn’t like to trouble him. ‘My brain is working too hard and I don’t know where the end will come … I have come to a certain stage, I suppose one would call it a revolution in one’s mind … I have worked very hard and produced nothing whatever to satisfy me.’ He told his mother he would give ten years of his life to be alone with her and talk. ‘You are unhappy sometimes, you write and tell me so,’ he went on, beginning to sound more like his mother’s lover than her son. ‘Have you ever loved really? Do you realise the value of it? … I am so looking forward to seeing Daddy again. I do so want to be very happy with him and I shall do all in my power to be so. Do you think he wants me to come home? I think a great deal about him, although I never write. I admire him extremely as a man in very many ways, but don’t tell him so.’

  Don’t tell him so … Wood’s exile to Paris, and the difference of opinion it revealed between his parents, caused tension at home in Huyton.

  Wood worked on throughout the hot summer, standing stripped to the waist and cooled by an electric fan. In September he and Gandarillas went to London, from where they planned to motor up to Scotland with a friend called Jack Gordon. Although they went past Liverpool they did not stop at Huyton. They played golf at Inverness but gave up after nine holes, because even with his limp, Wood was too good for his companions: it is hard to imagine that a man of Gandarillas’s indoor habits was much of a force on the links. From Glencoe Wood wrote to his mother: ‘I am longing to see you, but I do hate Huyton.’ She had to make of this what she could, knowing that he had driven almost past her door.

  They returned to London, where Wood met Luisa Casati’s daughter Christina, who struck him as being a more attractive version of her mother. He was beginning to be drawn to women, though he still preferred male company because women, he claimed, always kept him waiting and then required too much attention and reassurance. Gandarillas was his true friend and benefactor: they had an excellent arrangement which allowed Wood to do as much painting as he liked and, to a large extent, live the life he chose. Wood could not imagine any marriage providing such latitude. The trouble with Gandarillas was that he was so dedicated to parties: they were not a youthful indulgence, they were the love of his life.

  Christopher Wood by now struck a curious figure in London. Friends of his insisted that he retained an English public school manner throughout his life. One friend, Gerald Reitlinger, said it was always possible to imagine Kit as a golfing, shooting Savile Row g
entleman and that only some quirk had made him an artist; but such people knew little of his inner fury and fitful self-discipline. Meanwhile the company he kept had also left its mark on his manners, and his behaviour briefly took on a tart, impatient edge.

  On 11 November he went to Westminster Abbey for the Armistice Day service. The queues were such that he could not get in; they stretched up Whitehall into a great mass in Piccadilly Circus and thronged over Westminster Bridge. T.S. Eliot had seen the same crowd and described it in The Waste Land, which had just been published by the Hogarth Press: ‘So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.’

  Wood made little of it, or of the General Election in December, which ended in a stalemate when Baldwin’s Conservatives lost ninety seats to Labour and the Liberals. On Election night Wood went to a party at Selfridge’s; he did not vote.

  By now the shape of Wood’s immediate problem was clear. He had somehow to find a way to improve as a painter, with all the toil and self-questioning that would take, while at the same time trying to keep the demands and side-effects of his social life within bounds. As he became known for his own charm and good looks and not merely as Gandarillas’s accessory, the demands became greater. The potential for destruction was typified in the person of Princesse Violette Murat, an enormous drug-addicted lesbian with a hunger for company. She owned a white rat, which she believed to be reincarnated, and had a fetish for cleanliness. If she arrived to stay at the Ritz she would tie her hair up in a scarf, ask room service to send up a pail and some brushes and start scrubbing the bathroom. She had some society reputation for ‘good taste’ but, unlike Mme Errazuriz, left no proof of it.

  With Violette Murat came drugs, though Wood had already been introduced to opium by Tony Gandarillas, and it played a crucial part in his life and death. Opium is the milk from the green capsule of the poppy indigenous to Indo-China and parts of Turkey. The European centre was Smyrna, which was possibly one reason Gandarillas and Wood made their ill-advised detour there in 1922. By the time the opium reached Paris it had the consistency and colour of treacle. A pin was dipped into it to pick up a blob of opium which was held over a small flame until it bubbled and expanded to about the size of a large pea; it was then plunged into the pinhole opening of an 18-inch pipe. The pipe was reversed over the flame while the smoker inhaled, preferably taking the entire contents in one draught.