The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Page 9

  He worked hard by day, his needs taken care of by a local man: ‘My servant is a hunchback, and very quick and good tempered. We eat blackberries like golf-balls and fish that are still flapping about when they are served.’ By night he smoked opium. When Frosca got back to Paris, Winifred Nicholson returned to St Ives, but by this time Wood was going so deep down into himself that he found her and Ben irritating with their self-sacrifice, their vegetarianism and their noisy child.

  Wood stayed on alone as the winter set in. St Ives was giving him something important, of which he had inadvertently given a good description in a letter. ‘When someone dies here, they bum the mattress, the clothes and even the bedstead of the defunct on the beach. The male folk, these darkly dressed men, carry it all down on their shoulders and make a huge fire among the rocks and stand around with paraffin cans in hand musing on the life of the dead person. It is rather impressive with the huge green waves like horses bounding and pounding in on the sand.’

  What he was describing was what became a typical Wood picture: the sea, darkly dressed fisherpeople, drama, strangeness, something primitive; the homely human figures set against a background of wildness and mystery, expressed in misleadingly simple terms.

  It was in the human figures that Wood was distinctive. He was the only serious English painter between the two wars who continued to believe that a picture could deal with the lives of people. The dogmatic concerns of modem art as it developed in England ruled out the appearance of human beings at all, unless in some non-representational way, a mere occupation of the picture space, like a pipe-cleaner in a Cubist collage.

  In his cottage by the sea Wood was by this stage smoking five or six pipes of opium each evening, and the drug was of poor quality. He promised Frosca he would begin treatment for his addiction as soon as they were together again, but asked if she would, in the meantime, try to get hold of some better quality opium from Gandarillas.

  The euphoric effects of opium were real enough, and deeply appealing to Wood. De Quincey noted that ‘the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the majestic light of the intellect.’ Cocteau put it tersely: ‘Alcohol provokes stupidity; opium provokes wisdom.’ Wood was aware of his intellectual failings and prized opium’s ability to give him at least the semblance of power. But there was another aspect of the drug’s effect that was important to him. In a test at the Harvard Medical School in the 1950s a Dr Lawrence Kolb came to the extraordinary conclusion that, ‘the intensity of pleasure produced by opiates is in direct proportion to the degree of psychopathy of the person who becomes an addict.’ Millions of non-psychopathic Chinese over hundreds of years proved the finding to be false, but Dr Kolb’s footnotes were relevant to Wood: ‘Opium produces in these cases a feeling of mental peace and calm to which they are not accustomed and which they cannot normally achieve.’

  It was not just the ‘majestic light of the intellect’ and the banishing of even the notion of unhappiness that opium offered Wood, it was access to a quite normal state of mind – mental peace – which in Dr Kolb’s unintentionally poignant words people such as Wood ‘cannot normally achieve.’

  The effect of all drugs depends to some extent on the character and mood of the person who takes them. This is particularly true of hallucinogenic drugs, such as LSD, when the mental state of the user seems in fact almost entirely to dictate whether the chemical has a euphoric or terrifying effect. But it is to varying degrees true of all drugs. Graham Greene was unexcited by the way that opium extinguished the possibility of unhappiness; his narrative passed quickly on from this revelation to the story of a dream in which he met the Devil dressed in a deerstalker and a tweed motoring coat on the steps of a club in St James’s Street. Greene was not interested in a world without grief because he could not write about it: he would rather retain unhappiness if losing it meant forgoing material for his next novel. De Quincey, on the other hand, was rapturous about the same sensation because he was what he called a ‘eudaemonist’, by which he meant he was too much attached to the sensation of happiness. Wood’s response was somewhere between the two: he shared De Quincey’s romantic eudaemonism and and in that way he was weak, but he had also a splinter of Greene’s icy ambition in his heart, and this made him resentful of his dependence on the drug. At the end of November he packed up and left St Ives. It had given him a great deal: boats, the sea, people, menace and joy. It seemed to have almost everything his painting needed.

  Back in Paris Wood moved into Frosca’s apartment on the Boulevard de Lannes. Frosca’s relative wealth set her apart from most of the Russian émigrés, of whom there were more than 50,000 in Paris, mostly of noble stock, working as porters, labourers, taxi drivers, bank clerks or floorwalkers in the big department stores. A typical Russian enterprise was the Restaurant Moskou near the Etoile, a modest little place with a canvas awning that was run by Colonel Narishkin. The number of taxis parked outside led strangers to suppose it had been discovered by Paris society, but in fact it was the taxi drivers who were eating there. The customers tucking into borscht, shashlik and kissel included generals, barons and princesses. Narishkin himself wore a blue denim tunic buttoned up to the chin on the grounds that until he could return in dignity to his estates he didn’t wish to ape the manners or clothes of a gentleman.

  Although Wood loved Frosca for her earthbound qualities – the concision and clarity of her letters, for instance – she had by most people’s standards a high degree of wilfulness and worldly desire. Like Wood she could negotiate her way through the salons where art and money had their doubtful meeting, though she also shared his ambivalent feelings towards Paris society and was often glad to accompany him to more austere places. He was proud of the fact that Cocteau and Georges Auric referred to Frosca as Madame Récamier and played charades at her house till four in the morning. He himself became so bored by it that he went off into the night on his own.

  Wood received an invitation to the opening of Meraud Guinness’s show at the Galerie van Leer and had dinner with her afterwards. The experience troubled him. He told himself that he was no more than fond of her and that he had definitely done the right thing in not proceeding with her. She had no serious conversation, her looks had gone off; she was quite empty-headed and lacking in the qualities that he loved in Frosca. And yet she frightened him. He believed that she still wanted to marry him, and since the year was all but up they could do it easily enough. A part of him still wanted her, but as he told his mother, ‘I feel she is without knowing it rather a dangerous influence to someone who has a very serious life to lead for the next few years as I will.’

  Bridget Guinness heard that Meraud had been seeing Wood again and despatched her friend Mrs Patrick Campbell, the actress, accompanied by her cook, a Mrs Danveral, to keep an eye on Meraud in Paris. Meraud’s other principal suitor was the Chilean painter Alvaro Guevara, who had previously been more attracted to Wood himself. Guevara saw what was going on and made himself pleasant to Mrs Campbell, who consequently took back favourable reports of him to Bridget Guinness.

  Wood meanwhile repaired to his parents’ house in Broad Chalke for Christmas where he spent a painful time trying to detoxify himself from opium. The difficulties of family Christmas were intensified by the symptoms of his withdrawal: everywhere cold turkey. Upstairs in his room he scribbled a note to Frosca, begging her to write to him, not in her usual terse style, but giving him the details of her inner life.

  Wood survived the festivities and in January 1929 set himself up in a small house in Minton Place, off Bury Street in Chelsea. The Nicholsons and Tony Gandarillas had their London homes nearby, so he was not alone, but the move showed that he no longer thought of Paris as his base.

  On 23 January at the Henrietta Street register office in Covent Garden Meraud Guinness, having given up on Kit Wood, married Alvaro Guevara, with C. R. W. Nevinson as the chief witness. While Mrs Guinness had fought and won the battle of Meraud’s hand against Wood in Paris, she now
found herself giving her blessing to a man who was famous on both sides of the Channel as a drunk, a poser, and a bore. Known as ‘Chile’ Guevara for his habit of beginning almost everything he said with the words ‘When I was in Chile’, Guevara also turned out, by an irony that pleased Kit Wood if not Bridget Guinness, to have been devotedly homosexual and a regular user of opium.

  Wood was well set up in his house in Bury Street, with a housekeeper called Mrs Illesley who filled the place with fresh flowers and cooked excellent dinners. In March Frosca came over from Paris to stay with him while he prepared for an exhibition of the Seven & Five Society at Tooth’s Gallery in Bond Street.

  The show, once again, was disappointing. Wood and Ben Nicholson had decided to exhibit Alfred Wallis at the same show and some critics thought Wallis’s genuine naïveté showed theirs to be bogus. At the beginning of April Wood had his first one-man show in London, also at Tooth’s, and this too failed to make the impression he had hoped. Even Winifred Nicholson was disappointed; she believed that there was something either in the gallery or in the way the pictures were hung that failed to give a fair idea of what Wood had achieved or of what lay ahead. Gandarillas threw a party for him in Cheyne Walk, Frosca was on hand to encourage him, and afterwards his mother also came to stay. But however good the pictures had become and however loyal their support, he was failing to make enough money to support either a small house in Chelsea or a regular opium habit.

  Wood was unable to think clearly enough to find a way out of his predicament. His inability to plan clearly was made worse by his drug habit and the way that his nervous ambition made him reluctant to stop painting long enough to take stock. He did sense, however, that a change of scenery would help, and in April he went to Dieppe with Frosca. She reported a frenzy of activity: ‘Kit is working like a mad thing. He never puts down his paint brush for a second … never has there been such a profusion of pictures.’ The results were of a high quality. Although the subject matter, boats and the harbour, was commonplace, Wood was now painting in his mature style, which gave charming depth – what Winifred Nicholson called the ‘resonance of organ music’ – to his best pictures. Some of the Dieppe pictures were ravishing: tightly controlled compositions with powerfully rich colours.

  In May he returned to Paris, where the early summer passed in the state of semi-agitated torpor the city now seemed to induce in him. To produce a good painting seemed to require twice as much effort in Paris as elsewhere. He went to see the new Diaghilev ballet, which had been designed by Georges Rouault and de Chirico, the Italian metaphysical painter whose great days had been during the War. Wood admired the scenery, but could not help agreeing with Cocteau, who had remarked: ‘One is too old to see de Chirico discovered by Diaghilev.’ The parties started up again in earnest. Tony Gandarillas now went everywhere with Maria de Gramont, but Wood still managed to attend a fancy dress ball given by the Vicomte de Noailles, who had covered his garden with a wooden hall 60 feet high, invited 1,000 guests and commissioned ballets with music by Poulenc and Auric. Even this was surpassed by Henri de Rothschild’s party with its moving stage and 3,000 guests.

  The morning after, Wood played tennis with Frosca at the Racing Club in the Bois de Boulogne and lunched under the trees. In the evening they went boating on the lake where people rowed with red Chinese lanterns slung from the bows. By the beginning of July he had begun to feel agitated by his life of luxury, and by the end of the month he was in Brittany.

  Brittany had appealed to painters before. Gauguin’s residence at Pont Aven near Lorient on the west coast was so fruitful that a ‘school’ was named after it. Matisse was powerfully affected by a visit there in 1895; the intensity he achieved in his Brittany painting led the English critic Herbert Read to suggest that he had approached a point of rapture. More recently Kisling, whose presence had made little impact on Wood at Le Canadel in 1924 but whose paintings did find echoes in Wood’s work, had visited the westerly fishing port of Douarnenez. So had Derain, whose early paintings considerably influenced Wood’s treatment of landscape.

  Brittany regarded itself as more Celtic than French and had had great difficulty in integrating itself with the Republic. It had ethnic links with Cornwall, which in some ways it resembled, though its rustic Catholicism was more wild and more picturesque than Cornish Nonconformism. British holidaymakers throughout the century found that, despite the demands of tourism, parts of the long Brittany coast retained a weird and forbidding character. In 1929 these had not been developed at all.

  Wood approached it crab wise, with no clear intentions. He went first to Dinard, which he hated, then to St Malo, which he liked but found unmanageably large. In St Servan he watched the fishing boats disappearing into the Atlantic while the sailors’ wives, dressed in black with white headdresses, sat and waited in a small rowing boat. He did not linger there, but he had seen the image that was to recur in his work that summer: the mysterious sailing boats vanish on their fraught voyages while the black-clad women wait.

  At St Malo he was joined by Christian ‘Bébé’ Bérard, the painter and designer who had been a regular at the Hôtel Welcome, and a twenty-two-year-old picture dealer called Pierre Colle. They drove to Douarnenez, which Colle knew because his parents had a house in the area. Douarnenez was a fishing port known for its prodigious catches of sardines. The bay it overlooked had the pleasant Breton characteristics of wind-whipped trees and whitewashed houses, but with its long wharfs and warehouses it was too much a commercial port to be picturesque. It sat on the eastern side of a long sea inlet; on the western side, reached by an iron bridge that had been erected about forty years earlier, was the village of Tréboul. The railway station was on the Tréboul side so that the track could be taken on into the western peninsula without the need for a second bridge. Despite the commerce of Douarnenez passing through the railhead, Tréboul was a small and undeveloped village. Its livelihood was the sea, but its fishing boats put out from a tiny harbour. In 1929 the Breton peasants were still in the traditional dress they had worn for centuries, uninterested in life on the other side of the inlet, let alone in ‘France’, a country to which they were most reluctant to belong.

  Douarnenez reminded Wood of St Ives, though the boats were bigger. At the end of August he rented a small house opposite the Hôtel Ty-Mad (Breton for ‘good little house’) in Tréboul and Frosca came to join him. The hotel was set just above a sixteenth-century church, the Chapelle St Jean. A narrow path led down to a small sandy beach. Fishermen came and went to the little whitewashed houses in the village behind the hotel; women dried nets against the walls: otherwise the solitude by day was undisturbed. Yet although this corner of the village was quiet, it was not dull. The proximity of the old chapel in its little sandy square gave a spiritual, but not particularly comforting, atmosphere. The tall, narrow hotel with its simple rooms and Breton-speaking waitresses had a powerful ambience of its own. The village of Tréboul was entirely inward-looking and visitors were left to make of it what they wanted.

  Wood initially viewed it as wholly tranquil. ‘I have a little sailing boat,’ he told his mother, as though Father Christmas had at last delivered. ‘I sit in it and glide along and look at all the things I love the most. I see the lovely fishing boats with their huge brown sails against the dank dark green fir trees and little white houses …’

  He painted steadily, but was not particularly excited by the results. Although he was usually the first to claim great progress for his work, he was not immediately aware of it in Tréboul. Perhaps this was because he was relaxed.

  These were the happiest days of Christopher Wood’s life. He was with Frosca, whom he loved; he was painting well; he was in a place that agreed with him. He found the balance he required: there was no Violette Murat waddling through the bar with her bag of cocaine, no Napier Alington plastering himself with gilded costume, no Luisa Casati unwinding her boa constrictor and laughing with her terrible red eyes. There was instead the plain, spiritual life of th
e ancient Breton coast, with its historic kinship to Cornwall, the country of his mother; there were sailing boats with sails of deep and gorgeous colours; there were silver, dazzling fish on the quayside; there was a terrestrial paradise of dour beauty ringed by transcendental, frightening horizons.

  Yet there were also diversions enough in the evening. As well as Frosca, Pierre Colle and Christian Bérard, there was the Breton poet and painter Max Jacob and the precocious English exquisite from the Hôtel Welcome, Sir Francis Rose. Jacob and Rose were staying in the Hôtel Ty-Mad, rechristened by Jacob Ty-Mad de Cocayne’. Francis Rose had a portable gramophone on which he played Stravinsky and negro spirituals until the others begged him to stop. Bérard was not inspired to paint by Tréboul: he lay in his hotel room with the shutters closed and smoked opium.

  Max Jacob had shared a studio with Picasso in the already legendary days of the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre when each was still hungry. Picasso slept by day and worked by night, vacating the studio’s lone bed for Max Jacob in his turn. Jacob had eventually won renown as a poet, and was a writer of fine and intelligent irony. Though born of Jewish parents, he had felt no religious attachment until he embraced the sacraments of the Catholic Church with all the alarming fervour of the convert. He was an incurable lover of young men, who daily and extravagantly repented his lust but was incapable of controlling it. Though flayed by guilt and anguish, he was a kindly man, much loved by his friends, generous and gentle in his manner; he wrote powerful Meditations on his new faith and his human failings.