The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Page 6

  From the outset, Wood’s friendship with them appeared momentous. Winifred Nicholson recalled the first meeting in almost apocalyptic terms: ‘I was dressing in a little white room I had at our flat in Chelsea… and somebody was talking with Ben and Cedric down in Ben’s studio. I had no idea who it was but they went on talking and talking, with a voice that moved me strangely…And I sat and cursed-for half an hour-and I cursed and cursed. I did not want something to come into my life, as big as my love for Ben, and to come like this with fire …’

  Winifred Nicholson, who was pregnant at the time, was a woman of powerful religious and emotional convictions. She formed a passion for Christopher Wood that was the more harrowing for being chaste. Self-sacrifice was at the core of her life, and the scope for it in the triangular relationship that developed between Wood, her husband and herself only strengthened her feelings for him. She was a Christian Scientist with firm beliefs in purity and the after-life; she seemed to see in Wood from the first day some intoxicating spiritual innocence.

  It led her to exaggerate the strength of the paintings Wood had done in St Ives, which she saw at Tony Gandarillas’s house in Cheyne Walk. ‘He was showing us his summer’s work … Crowded together in his small bedroom were an amazing array of canvases. He produced masterpiece upon masterpiece … dark with adventure and imagination. We walked home in the high skies. Here was England’s first painter. His vision is true, his grasp is real, his power is life itself.’

  England’s first painter … his power is life itself… However much of Winifred Nicholson’s euphoria is discounted, there remains in it the recognisable effect that Wood’s paintings had on those who appreciated them. In the world of English painting, a world reduced in French eyes to Sickert’s grim interiors and John’s banal society portraits, Wood was on the verge of doing something different. If Sickert had been an honorary consul in Dieppe, bringing news of the commotion that had bypassed England, Wood was able to offer something of its spirit in his work. Winifred Nicholson was too quick with praise that the pictures did not yet deserve, but what she wrote captured the visceral effect of the best of Wood’s pictures: sophistication in simplicity, Modernism in an English idiom, the exhilaration of something bright and joyful achieved in a mysterious and oddly menacing way.

  Whatever happened at St Ives in the late summer of 1926, Winifred Nicholson and Kit Wood were both right to see it as a turning point. In Winifred Nicholson’s mythology of Wood’s life it was the first of a succession of summers in which he created the body of his work. Wood, who did not see his own existence in such an organised way, responded to the change in the only manner he knew: more ambition, more work. His life was full of breakthroughs, new beginnings and moments when he believed he had at last discovered something durably exciting; as such it was typical of the lives of artists. Its peculiarity lay in the ferocity with which he drove on from each new departure.

  At the end of 1926 Tony Gandarillas was given notice to quit his house on the Avenue Montaigne, and at the beginning of 1927 he moved to a sumptuous apartment in the rue des Marronniers in Passy, on the south-west outskirts of Paris. Wood was assigned a bedroom and a small studio, which he furnished with a low sofa made of mattresses and cushions, an easel and two tables – a long one he had brought from his old studio in the rue des Saints Peres, and a smaller one on which to draw. There was a terrace with a view of Paris and the barges moving slowly down the Seine. Wood found it all rather cramped, but the confined conditions suited the mood of self-denial he brought to what he increasingly referred to as his ‘struggle’.

  ‘I have never worked so hard before,’ he wrote to Winifred Nicholson, ‘and am really having a life and death struggle with it never as I knew before … So many ideas crush my brain that I seem never able to contemplate one than a thousand others disturb it.’ The intellectual weakness – an inability to order his thoughts – that he had previously diagnosed in himself made it more difficult for him to know which avenues to follow. One good painting did emerge from this period, and this was a self-portrait. It showed him standing on the balcony of his room with the roofs of Paris behind him. He was wearing a tight, multi-coloured sweater, and his clean features glowed with uncertain pride. It is the picture of a man who, as Gerald Reitlinger remarked, could just as easily have been a golfer: his huge red hands look swollen by the seaside winds, as though he had just won the President’s Putter at Rye.

  His own pleasure in the picture led Wood to tell his mother how much he would like to paint a Wood family portrait, with his father depicted reading the Bible. His parents had confirmed their move to Wiltshire and Kit was enthusiastic; he thought that his father was ‘just the sort of man for country people who don’t like gushers’: no Diaghilev he.

  The Nicholsons invited him to go and paint with them at Bankshead, their farmhouse in Cumberland, but Wood decided that, though he envied them the rustic idyll he imagined, he ought not to disturb the creative tranquillity he was enjoying in Paris. It was in fact a confused decision, because although he was spending many hours at the easel, he was too frantic to produce much that was worthwhile.

  One of the things that was agitating him was the question of money. His increased renown as a painter had made little difference to his income. While Gandarillas gave him lodging and shared his meals if he was in Paris, he did not actually give him money, and his own finances were erratic. There was a temporary slump on the Paris stock market that foreshadowed a bigger cataclysm. While Wood paid no attention to such matters, the movement of capital did not leave him out of its considerations: it was hard to sell pictures to rich people worried about falling share prices.

  The fruits of Wood’s frenzied spring in Paris went on show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in Bruton Place off Bond Street in April, though by this time he was mainly exhibiting with the Seven & Five Society, of which Ben Nicholson was chairman. The Seven & Five had begun in 1919 as a refuge from the war of competing styles: their cautious manifesto felt that ‘there has of late been too much pioneering along too many lines in altogether too much of a hurry.’ From its non-doctrinal beginnings the society grew to give a fair reflection of the progress of English art. Under Ben Nicholson’s influence it eventually, in the 1930s, refused to show any more representational work.

  The Beaux Arts was a joint show with the Nicholsons and the potter William Stake Murray. Cocteau wrote an introduction to the catalogue in which he spoke of Wood’s innocence, comparing him to a puppy that had not yet had distemper. Just before the show opened Winifred Nicholson fell through an open trap door and broke her back; her Christian Science beliefs denied her the usual medical treatment and she herself ascribed her recovery to a miracle.

  There was little miraculous about the show. Wood’s best work was not in it; the pictures he did show left no impression even on Winifred Nicholson. For all the ‘life and death struggle’ he had put into them, the street scenes he had painted at Passy were unremarkable. Wood told his mother the show was a success, though he sold only three pictures. He sent six to the Leicester Galleries, the rest to the London Artists’ Association and reckoned that, when one took framing into account, the thing had just about paid its way. Winifred Nicholson’s verdict was terse: ‘No one noticed the exhibition.’

  From May until the end of 1927 Wood was in the Mediterranean. He told Winifred Nicholson that he could not go to England because it was the time of year that he always went to Rome with Gandarillas, ‘whom I love the best in the world’. They hadn’t managed to make it the previous year because Gandarillas had lost all his money at the casino in Monte Carlo on the way.

  Wood had by this time developed an intimate friendship with Winifred Nicholson, based on his appreciation of her abilities as a painter and the fact that she was what he called a ‘real woman’. There seemed much more to her than to Jeanne Bourgoint, of whom he had started to tire. He told Winifred Nicholson that he had ‘the misfortune to love if one can call it so a Tom Boy who is wonderfully beautiful physi
cally but that is all and a person who doesn’t create anything, not even a thought and who won’t be created in any form. If I had allowed myself to love her I should have been very unhappy.’

  Winifred Nicholson changed Wood’s views of women. He had thought of them previously as people who kept him hanging about but might, as in Jeanne’s case, provide sexual pleasure. His feelings for Winifred Nicholson were ardent but pure – exactly the kind of emotion she wanted to feel for him, though there was a sexual element in her fondness for Wood which, by denying, she intensified. She was not Wood’s preferred physical type, but his admiration for her, coupled with the memories of the pleasure Jeanne Bourgoint had given him, made him eager to find a woman who might combine both roles. His ideal might have been a gifted and spiritual artist, like Winifred, a loving admirer, like his mother, with a hard, boyish body like Jeanne Bourgoint.

  Meanwhile he went with his friend Tony Gandarillas to Naples, Athens and Monaco before, after a brief return to Paris for Luisa Casati’s fancy dress ball in June, they went south to Cannes in July. Gandarillas was detained at Vichy to ‘get over all his debauchery’, as Wood rather frankly put it to his mother, adding with all the confidence given by a liver still at its peak: ‘I eliminate mine by painting.’ A fortnight later, however, even Wood’s youthful constitution was feeling the strain and he took a water cure at Cannes.

  Cannes had been ‘discovered’ for the English by Lord Brougham and was popular with the wealthier elements of London as well as of Paris. In August 1927 the town was almost as full of Chelsea and Mayfair as of the seizième and Montparnasse. Wood liked it because it was beautiful without being obviously picturesque. The mountains opened up before him like a Chinese fan, and the air, so soft beneath the deep blue skies by day, was filled at night with the mysterious sound of tree frogs.

  Wood was able to put behind him the memory of his fruitless spring in Paris. Such passages of unrewarded labour were necessary, he convinced himself, to a painter’s development. He believed that in Cannes he might do some work of real substance, provided he could escape from the rackety claims of ‘society’.

  When the major development that Wood was expecting finally arrived, it was not in his painting. He fell suddenly in love. Everything was emotionally propitious; in fact, from the new interest in women he had developed since knowing Winifred Nicholson it might almost have been inevitable. The woman in question, however, raised as many questions as she answered: she was called Meraud Guinness, and he had met her at Lord Alington’s and at a party given by Augustus John in Dorset.

  Meraud (pronounced ‘Merod’, though she preferred to be called by her second name, Michael, given in honour of her godfather, the Russian Grand Duke) was the daughter of Benjamin and Bridget Guinness. Even by the standards of the family they were rich, with houses in London, Pittsburgh and New York as well as in Cannes. Meraud was a painter and had studied at the Slade, then with the sculptor Archipenko in Paris, before attaching herself to the Surrealist Francis Picabia. She insisted that she was a serious artist some of whose subjects happened to come from the beau monde; critics viewed her as an ex-debutante who dabbled in painting.

  She had large, heavy-lidded eyes, a short nose and a fleshy mouth. A portrait of her by Alvaro Guevara in 1929 minimised the breadth of her jaw and width of her lips, but showed her candid, gamine sexuality, at once more feminine and less pretty than Jeanne Bourgoint. According to her mentor Picabia, she had ‘eyes full of sighs’. Kit Wood spoke of her with childish glee: ‘I see her pretty often, she has a lovely sailing boat.’

  He was so wrapped up in her that for ten days he even forgot to write to his mother. When he did so he was full of apologies for his neglect, reassuring her, in a way that was certain to alarm, that she was still his greatest love. ‘Don’t forget,’ he concluded, ‘your old friend of the war days.’ The reference to his illness showed how seriously Wood was taking the affair with Meraud: he invoked this intimate and painful passage in his life only when something of comparable significance was happening to him.

  The romance began in mid-August and within a month was being widely savoured by the gossip-hungry population of Cannes. Speculation focused on the likely reaction of Meraud’s parents. Wood had no illusions about his desirability; he thought Meraud’s parents were snobs who ‘would like her to marry a duke’.

  One night he was woken from a troubled sleep in his hotel room by the sound of laughter outside. He stumbled to the door in his pyjamas to find Prince George, the Duke of Kent. Awash with champagne, the Duke’s party had come to see the young painter whose love life was the talk of Cannes. Wood was not at his best and made a note to send round his apologies the next day.

  At this delicate moment Tony Gandarillas left for Nice, where he was to have an operation on his haemorrhoids. His parting advice to Wood was that he should marry or elope. Wood valued his old friend’s approval because Gandarillas had made no secret of his dislike of Jeanne Bourgoint. It was an awkward time to be alone, however, with his opium, his painting and his uncontrolled feelings for Meraud.

  Meanwhile, Bridget Guinness, Meraud’s mother, moved into action. She told Meraud she could not throw herself away on Kit Wood but must wait for someone suitable. It was not just her daughter’s happiness for which she was concerned but her own social ambitions. Although she was a generous patron of the arts there were limits: Kit Wood, after all, was penniless, he smoked opium; and, with the exception of a liaison with a decadent tomboy mannequin, his tastes had been homosexual. To the mother of a nice young girl in 1927 these objections counted for something.

  In separate conversations with Wood himself, Bridget Guinness pointed out that her husband would not consent to the marriage. As a mother she disliked the gossip that had been attached to her daughter’s name and now expected Wood to see a good deal less of Meraud. She presented Wood with a choice: either he could elope with Meraud, in which case she would be disinherited; or he could finish the romance with dignity and in his own time. But if he had come to the Guinnesses looking for a way to finance his opium and his painting he had chosen the wrong family.

  It made Wood reconsider. What exactly was he after? The model of the Nicholsons – that of two painters working devotedly side by side – exerted a powerful attraction. Could he picture himself and Meraud as such a couple? Her paintings leant heavily on the example of her mentor Picabia, who had been an important figure in successive movements from Post-Impressionism, through Cubism, Dada and, by 1927, Surrealism. The trouble was that where Picabia’s work was authenticated by proven talent and experience, Meraud’s paintings had some of the more dubious trappings of Surrealism – shock tactics, bits of string – without the proof that she could even really draw. Wood had no interest in Surrealism and felt particularly suspicious of it since ‘his’ commission from Diaghilev had gone to Miró and Max Ernst; and where Winifred’s homeliness and spirituality offered a good anchor for an artist husband, Meraud was headstrong, dangerous and twenty-two. Wood doubted whether she was really what he called ‘enough of an artist’ for him; he wondered whether her principal motive in marriage was not merely to escape from her snobbish family.

  But he was in love with her. The relationship was of the enclosed, self-regarding kind that makes parents uneasy: they are convinced on one hand that such feelings in their children are comically short-lived, but wistful on the other that they themselves can no longer aspire to such passion. Wood told his mother: ‘I worship the very ground she treads on, and am proud to be capable of so great a love.’ Even the worrying narcissism of young love was there.

  Bridget Guinness’s campaign to ‘save’ her daughter was successful. Meraud told Kit she would have to see less of him because ‘people’ were talking. It would be different if they were engaged, but since her father was in America that was impossible. Wood thought that if she really loved him none of this would matter, but he was convinced by her submission to her mother that Meraud was ‘a baby at heart’.

  H
e left Cannes and took himself to Aries, a sacred place for him because of its association with Van Gogh. He wrote letters of bitter despair to Winifred Nicholson. The anguish of his thwarted love for Meraud was intensified by a suspicion that she was not, au fond, the right woman to share the artistic life he planned. On hopeful days he ignored this suspicion; on days when he wanted to get on with his work, he exaggerated it. By October he had persuaded himself that Meraud was too ‘girly’ and empty-headed for him. ‘I must say,’ he wrote, ‘that French women once they care for you nothing can drag them off; English women by contrast, ‘are decidedly undeveloped sexually and mentally.’ His experience of Jeanne and Meraud scarcely entitled him to such grand generalisations, and he knew it. He was temporising. He did then what he always did when he was confused: first he wrote sentimentally to his mother, then he went to join Tony Gandarillas.

  This meant going to Marseille, where Gandarillas was looking after Rene Crevel, an old hand from the Hotel Welcome, who was suffering from tuberculosis. He had been on the point of leaving for Egypt, but had been too ill to travel and had almost died in the hotel. Wood and Gandarillas spent an anxious ten days while Crevel’s condition gradually improved. In intervals from nursing, Wood painted in Marseille. He did some landscapes, some flower paintings and two self-portraits. He wanted to work at his waterfront hotel, but it was too busy. He vowed to return one day because he liked the traffic of the port: ‘All the bustle of this great place makes one want to do some very ugly pictures,’ he told Winifred Nicholson. ‘I see everything ugly here. The women with hideous faces and bodies, enormous legs and fat arms, holding pig-like babies, the men who slouch round are the worst dregs … I only like ugly things now, as what I thought beautiful before, it does not last… I shall never many anything but a hideous wife if ever I do this foolish thing. I have forgotten almost about my lovely lady of Cannes this summer.’