The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Read online

  As Crevel’s health improved, Gandarillas and Wood took him up to the village of Vence in the hills behind Nice, where the air was reputed to be good for the lungs. Wood’s instinctive reaction when in trouble – to go and find Gandarillas – paid dividends in an unexpected way: in his painting. He was pleased with Vence. He painted pictures in dark colours, experimenting with shades of black. His mood of petulant post-Meraud gloom may have been a facile starting point for this new darker colouring, but he developed it into a subtle and important way of giving depth and doubt to his mature paintings.

  Wood stayed with Crevel until December when he went back to join Gandarillas in Paris. Gandarillas had been diagnosed as having consumption and had experienced a minor haemorrhage in Vence. Wood was upset by the news but thought it would give him the chance to show his devotion by nursing Gandarillas in some remote mountain sanatorium. But the illness, whether TB or not, neither developed nor prevented Gandarillas from resuming his old ways, beginning with a New Year’s Eve party in Berlin.

  At Christmas Wood wrote to his mother: ‘Daddy talks of my not sticking to my arrangements. I never make any on purpose but I don’t think he need worry about my place in the world, I think that will be all right.’ The ambitious optimism recalled Keats’s more well-founded claim, made at an even younger age: ‘I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.’ Wood resembled Keats in many ways: in the desire to live a life of sensation rather than of thought, the almost reckless devotion to work, the spasmodic development that came swiftly from the ruins of temporary failure, and in the boyish eagerness that felt weighed down by admiration of past achievement but quickened by its appreciation of the modem.

  As far as his ‘arrangements’ were concerned, Dr Wood’s captious view was vindicated in the most spectacular way a few days later when Kit announced that he and Meraud Guinness were about to elope.

  Meraud arrived in Paris in preparation for leaving the country and marrying abroad, since no ceremony could take place in France without her parents’ consent. There was one small piece of grit in this plan: Meraud had left her passport behind. Wood was not upset by such a minor administrative detail. He was happy and exhilarated beyond anything he could recall. The long months of separation, thinking that she didn’t care; the dull weeks nursing Rene Crevel and painting with a black palette … all could be forgotten now, because it was Meraud that he loved, and had done all along, ever since he had first seen her almost four years ago. Meraud’s father was furious, but what was a father’s anger at such a time? ‘It is wonderful,’ he told Clare Wood. ‘All the world is at my feet.’

  Figuratively, perhaps, it was; but without Meraud’s passport the world in fact remained crucially distant. While Wood basked in the justice and rapture of love won, others took swift and practical steps to prevent matters going further. Bridget Guinness came to Paris and gave the performance of her life. Although the things she most objected to in Wood were his past homosexuality, his drug habit, his poverty and his middle-class background, she mentioned none of them. Instead she appealed to his deeper nature. She gambled on the possibility that no number of masked balls with Luisa Casati or lines of cocaine with Violette Murat would quite have eradicated a schoolboy sense of fair play. If he could prove himself a suitable husband, Bridget Guinness proposed, then all might yet be well; but even Christopher himself must admit that he was not on the face of it everything a mother might look for in a husband for her beloved daughter. So what she was proposing was a compromise: he and Meraud should not see each other for a year, and if at the end of that time he had proved his devotion, then they should be married.

  Wood at last saw the significance of the missing passport: if they had already been married none of this bargaining would have mattered. As things were, he was made to see the justice of Mrs Guinness’s plan. If he really loved Meraud then a year was not very long to wait; and then she would have her full inheritance and the blessing of her parents. It was fair enough.

  Then Bridget Guinness began negotiations with her daughter. She explained how much Meraud owed them in return both for the education and the latitude they had given her. Bridget Guinness played on Wood’s drug problem, knowing that her daughter was also worried by it: Meraud had in fact thrown Wood’s opium pipe into the Seine. She pitched her appeal subtly, arguing more from love than anger, and Meraud, like Kit, found her sense of justice touched.

  She found it ‘dreadfully hard’, but she did what she was asked and returned with her mother to Cannes where she was promised the run of her father’s flat in the grounds of the Majestic hotel and given an allowance of £400 a year. She was determined to see out the year, as was Kit. Of the three principals only Bridget Guinness understood that once such a break has been made the stipulated time makes little difference: one year, five years … Whatever telegrams of panic and congratulation passed between Cannes and Pittsburgh, she had proved herself a formidable modem mother.

  Wood was left in the wretched – state of the lovelorn, feeling he had contributed to his own misery and exhausted the sympathy of his friends. He met Meraud’s sister Thanis on a train and she merely asked him, ‘Why didn’t you do it properly?’ Gandarillas meanwhile considered the matter closed. Although he was always game for gossip and intrigue, he was too world-weary to care about the travails of love once the plot had failed.

  Wood went to London where, using some money left to him by his grandmother, who had died a few weeks earlier, he set himself up in a flat on the King’s Road. He saw a good deal of the Nicholsons, who had at least not been bored by the saga of Meraud. Winifred made curtains and chair covers for him, while he painted hard, though none of it, in her view, was any good. It was the worst month of his life. He had wanted the romance with Meraud to prosper because it would bring into harmony all the different urges of his sexual and creative life: he saw its failure as an indictment of his unformed personality.

  The Nicholsons were kind to him, and even in his distress he showed his habitual sense of gratitude. In February there was another show of the Seven & Five Society in which he exhibited two of the pictures he had done in Vence while nursing Rene Crevel. Winifred Nicholson, quick to damn his inferior work, was impressed by them; she thought they had the ‘profound resonance of organ music’. The exhibition, however, made little impact, and afterwards Wood went to stay with his parents at their new house in Broad Chalke, near Salisbury. Here, quivering in the different force fields exerted by his parents, he tried to reorientate himself.

  Stays with his parents, tense at the best of times, were complicated by the fact that he was always in enforced withdrawal from opium. At such moments he needed to express himself on paper, and since he could not very well write to his mother, he had to find another confidante. Winifred Nicholson was his choice. She was happy to oblige, and found new scope for self-sacrifice in the role assigned to her. Winifred wrote to Meraud, more or less on Kit’s behalf, but in the end he did not post the letter in case Meraud should feel that he and Winifred were asking for her pity. The trouble was, he told Winifred, that he had come to despise himself; but now he had determined to make a new start.

  The mental toughness he had learned in dealing with the Diaghilev setbacks was now applied to his emotional life. He determined to forget the past and look only to the future. At some level he was letting go of Meraud, even as he planned to keep her. She became subservient to his artistic ambition. She was a failure from which, with enough determination, he could learn. In fact the emotional and artistic became confused in one strange fatalistic commitment: ‘Now for evermore I don’t talk of myself, for if you knew how sincerely I loathe myself…but I feel freer, happier and with my face in the wind, which is a real exhilaration and ready to start on the biggest journey one can make. I will get there and I do trust that it will be quick.’

  In March Wood went to stay with the Nicholsons in Cumberland. Winifred Nicholson was willing at the time to be his confidante, his helper and his critic, but s
he did not reveal her true feelings for him till many years later, when she recalled his visit to Bankshead.

  ‘He came in March. His arrival was like a meteor. The wild country delighted him. The dark forests took on a mystery and magic as he looked at them … Inspiration ran high and flew backwards and forwards from one to the other … he painted some pictures from nature, carrying an enormous box of paints and an easel over the rough fields and hills, and walking at his usual swift pace … He came up from the valley with the springing step of eternal youth.’

  In his ‘swift pace’ and ‘springing step’ she did not even see his limp.

  In Wood’s mind the visit was only a partial success. He did like Bankshead and he enjoyed the chance to paint with two such dedicated people. However, he found conditions ‘Spartan’ and he was missing Gandarillas. At the end of April he returned to Paris where his troubles seemed to crowd in on him again. Someone had told Gandarillas that they couldn’t see why Wood did not marry Meraud regardless of her parents’ wishes; people found it hard to understand how two such unconventional characters had given in so meekly. Meraud’s sister Thanis believed they would still marry. He had one piece of good advice from a friend of Meraud’s: ‘If you really want her, you can have her, but if you are not sure, leave her alone.’

  He was not sure. Paris was close and thundery; storms rocked the house and tempers were strained by the heat. Wood kept thinking about Meraud and kept comparing her with Winifred Nicholson. He asked himself what he needed from a wife. He thought about love as an abstract idea; in mystic terms he had borrowed from Winifred, he contemplated love’s purifying force. And then, if he was really honest, part of the problem was this: he had met someone else.

  Frosca Munster was one of the many Russians who had been swept to Paris by the Revolution. Boris Kochno, Diaghilev’s secretary, described her: ‘She was a young Russian woman whose serene face had the strange beauty of the models painted by Piero della Francesca; she was an impenetrable but captivating character.’ She had separated from her husband, a Polish count, a year earlier, though it was some months before Wood even considered there might be a Mr – or a Count – Munster.

  Frosca was unusual among Russian émigrés in having managed to bring out a reasonable amount of money. She lived on the Boulevard de Lannes, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, whose tennis courts, picnics and other gentle relaxations were visible from her house. Although she moved in the same social world as Wood and Gandarillas, Frosca was sceptical of its worth. She had discernment, taste and a stable temperament. She was shy about her feelings, particularly about her fondness for Wood, whom she rechristened ‘Kit of the Woods’ because she felt he was so untamable. She was by most people’s standards an exotic creature, and it says a good deal for the co-ordinates of Christopher Wood’s world in 1928 that what he valued most in Frosca was dependability.

  He compared her in his mind to Meraud, from whom he had just received a letter and a photograph ‘which made her look such a silly little girl. It made me look at dear old Frosca and think “you do look more solid with your head well planted between your shoulders and feet on the ground.” ‘ The role of ‘dear old Frosca’ was therefore the one that Wood assigned her, and she was sufficiently glamorous and self-confident not to mind.

  She became the biggest love of his life, though her influence crept up on him and had to defeat his frequent insistence that she was more of a friend than a lover. This was never the case, but Wood still liked to think of women as either the Meraud-type or the Winifred-type. It took him a long time to understand that Frosca had over-ridden this distinction and was capable of being his lover as well as his friend. When he finally surrendered to the depth of feeling that she had engendered in him, he admitted it was the strongest he had ever known.

  Late in 1928, however, before this transformation was complete, Wood was still haunted by Meraud. ‘I am a little frightened to see her now,’ he told Winifred Nicholson, ‘as I am so fond of Froska [he usually spelled her name with ‘k’] and am happy and so is she, very, and I’m terrified that M has some extraordinary power or attraction for me which is destructive…’

  The year of separation was coming to an end and Wood felt humiliated by the fact that Bridget Guinness had plainly outmanoeuvred him. He did still want Meraud, but only in a halfhearted way. He did not think they could be happy together, and in any case he now had Frosca to consider as well. It had all worked out exactly as Mrs Guinness must have planned: he had been her dupe. To concede as much by not going back to Meraud, however, would be tantamount to admitting that their affair had not amounted to much in the first place, and that was not the case. On the contrary, his feeling for Meraud – whatever reservations people, including him, might have about her character – had been frighteningly intense.

  As if this were not complicated enough, Wood had not fully broken off with Jeanne Bourgoint. He continued to think wistfully of her and occasionally to give in to temptation. There was then the more substantial figure of Tony Gandarillas, though here there had been a curious development. Gandarillas had begun an affair with Maria, Duchesse de Gramont, Wood’s very first sitter in Paris. Wood loyally believed they had been in love for years, and felt no jealousy. His problem was that he was not sure how much Gandarillas still needed him. He did not know whether he should continue to live in Gandarillas’s flat out of politeness, in order not to hurt his feelings, when the old atmosphere was changed and the rooms were filled with the presence of Maria. Worse than this was the fact that Wood was secretly sorry for Gandarillas. He thought that his endless partying was, au fond, pathetic; he pitied him because he had no purpose to his life. His pity was misplaced because Gandarillas was able to function quite happily without a serious sense of purpose; he was a survivor almost as charmed and tough as Jean Cocteau.

  Meanwhile, as Bridget Guinness’s one year neared its end, a crystalline pattern formed about Wood. Tony had backed Meraud but hated Jeanne. Jeanne thought Meraud was despicable. Tony loved Maria. Kit pitied Tony and feared Meraud. Winifred tortured herself to be kind to Frosca. They all loved Kit.

  And he was really less interested in any of them than in his painting. The tensions of his emotional life, while complicated, had reached a temporary equilibrium. It was good enough, anyway, for him to be able to paint and to feel himself at a point when his full talent was about to be realised.

  In August he took the train to Cornwall and the real work began.

  From the moment he had arrived at Alphonse Kahn’s house more than seven years earlier Wood had been certain that if he could find the time alone, in the right circumstances, then he would be capable of producing pictures of the highest quality; that he could be – and he didn’t feel shy of the term – a great painter.

  He had no obvious reason to believe this. Picasso and Matisse, for instance, could not only draw much better than he could, they had a sense of composition and an understanding of traditional and modern forms that was far beyond his. Lesser painters than those two were still more obviously accomplished than Wood.

  What had he done anyway? He had shown himself to be deft at copying others, at taking useful tricks and mannerisms from them. He was also good at digesting what he took so that within two or three paintings, the borrowed style became part of his own vocabulary. Cézanne, Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, Braque, Picasso, Rousseau, Van Gogh and Utrillo were among those he had raided: Wood’s paintings of the mid-1920s made the head hurt with the number of associations and references they triggered. For all their high points – ‘La Foire de Neuilly’, the portrait of Constant Lambert, the brilliant early watercolours, the developing single-line drawings á la Picasso, the red ink sketches in Rome, the self-portrait in the bright sweater – they lacked grandeur. They were often impressive, but they remained the work of someone finding his way.

  At the beginning of his painting career Wood had had temporarily to divert his ambition to paint great pictures into a determination to improve his technique. Si
nce both long-term ambition and immediate determination were controlled by a common willpower this was not as difficult as it appeared. As his study and practice developed he came to the stage in August 1928 when he believed he had the technical means to do what he wanted. This then was the moment for him to recall exactly what it was that he had planned to do with his work; this was the time to look back inside and see what driving force, temporarily diverted into learning, had made him want to be a painter in the first place.

  Wood believed his painting had an autobiographically expressive purpose. This was unfashionable as a premise then as now, and Wood’s painting partner in 1928, Ben Nicholson, particularly disliked the sentimental idea that pictures ‘tell us’ something of the artist. The feelings and ideas Wood had were the product of the mingled emotional forces of his English childhood, youthful illness and the determined, unreciprocated, ignorance of the public world.

  It was in painting that England had fought its most dogged battle for insularity. Augustus John was a draughtsman of rare talent and some of the paintings he produced in the first decade of the century were touchingly beautiful. However, he chose not to accept the challenge laid down by Cézanne, by whose work most of the Modern movement in France was shaped. John turned his gifts instead to society portraits; by the time Wood met him in 1921 his work was already beginning to look meaningless. Sickert had understood both the Impressionists and the Realist painters such as Courbet and Millet, yet found his bluff agonisingly called by Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition in London in 1910. Though he admired individual paintings, Sickert’s heart was not in it; his response was generous but it was not warm. Even such tepid respect as this was unusual amid the general outrage that greeted the show.