John Craxton: A Life of Gifts 0300255292, 9780300255294

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
part I
part II
part III
part IV
EPILOGUE
SOURCES
CREDITS
PICTURE CREDITS
INDEX

Citation preview

Born into a large, musical and bohemian family in London, John Craxton (1922-2009) enjoyed a nomadic childhood but from an early age longed to live and paint in Greece. He achieved his goal and enduring joy coloured his ensuing pictures. Craxton never passed an examination in his life, not even

in art - save for the test to drive his beloved motorbikes. His was an anarchic spirit of self-taught erudition. He hated labels - especially that of the Nee-Romantic movement of the 1940s, of which he was considered to be a youthful star. While lonely figures in dark landscapes were emblematic self portraits, he lived a highly sociable existence all through the Second World War. Seeing himself as a renegade, at 19 he met a wild kindred spirit called Lucian Freud and they roared through blitzed London. Freud followed Craxton to Greece in 1946 but returned to England five months later. Craxton never really left. A modernist with a love of archaeology, Craxton was a singular artist. First infiuenced by Blake and Palmer, and then by Miro and Picasso, his work evolved as a personal response to Byzantine mosaics, El Greco and Greek life. In Greece he loved the persistence of myth in rural lives largely unchanged since Homeric times. He had famous friends but painted ordinary people. In the end he looked like a shepherd on his adopted Crete. An innocent abroad, and a victim of his own impish wit,

he got into many scrapes. His love of sailors, privately and professionally, was often mistaken for an unhealthy interest in military intelligence. His love of antiquities and Cretan painted churches, and his (successful) campaign to save the Venetian harbour at Chania, brought further suspicion. Through all travails he held on to heroic hedonism.

JAN COLLI NS is an independent art writer and curator. He has written monographs on Rose Hilton,Joan Leigh Fermor and John McLean and has worked with the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, the British Museum in Lor.don, the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, the Benaki Musc:um in Athens and the A.G . Leventis Gallery in Nicosia. He lives in England and Greece.

Also available from Yale University Press:

Eileen Hogan: Personal Geographies Elisabeth R. Fairman

Whistler: A Life for Art's Sake Daniel E. Sutherland

Front cover: Self Portrait, 1946 -7 Back cover: Two Men in Taverna, 1953 Printed in China YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

ALIFE OF GIFTS

IAN COLLINS

Yale University Press/ New Haven and London

John Craxton by Rene Groebli, 1983

We must attain a new humanism or else the world will collapse into slavery for years and years. As you said, there is no man in the street. Everyone is very terrible but very wonderful too. Just as life is. Peter Watson to John Craxton, 194¥

A little farther we will see the almond trees blossoming the marble gleaming in the sun the sea breaking into waves a little farther, let us rise a little higher. George Seferis, from Mythistorema

Not having a motorbike made me feel like a centaur turning into a rocking horse. John Craxton to John Piper, 1985

Note: Unless otherwise listed, John Craxton quotes are from conversations with the author between January 2000 and November 2009.

Carnival Horse, Paras, 1954 Oil on canvas, 5 3 2 x 60 cm. John Craxton Estate

CONTENTS

PART ONE 1 Setting Off 2 Open House 3 Wood of St John 4 Harold and Essie 5 Nomad Child 6 A Life in Art 7 Wild Dorset 8 Beautiful Visits

10 12 17 21 25 33 41 47

26 Daphnis and Chloe 27 Aegean Adventure 28 Bloody Blighty 29 I Spy Trouble 30 The Sea Change 31 Lotus Eating 32 New Muse 33 To the Lighthouse 34 Arresting Times , ,- Phoenix Nests 36 Portent of Tragedy 37 Eclipse of Apollo 33 Into the Ravine 39 Athens of the North ..).:)

PART TWO 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

A Private War Bang in the Blitz Dreamer in Landscape John and Lucian Brothers in Arts Exquisite Corpses Welsh Arcadia The Poet's Eye Less than Liberation The Great Escape _

56 68 78 85 93 105 113 118 125 131

&'!IE!" [ IPlil!UlillClll'IIIM!ffli

PART THREE Spring in Athens Rites of Passage 21 Lucian Again .?.2 Voyages of Discovery 23 Ravisher of Eyes 24- On a Tightrope 1:/) Going Native ·19

20

144 150 159 170 177 185 192

202 214 223 229 237 245 253 263 270 277 287 292 298 308

PART FOUR A Time of Gifts The Last of Lucian Hull and Back Painting Pleasure King of Chania Growing Young Charmed Life

316 322 327 333 345 352 356

Epilogue

366

Sources Credits Picture Credits Index

370 375 377 378

.,.;;: __

I~-

*-·::-:,...-~

-11 I·.

•

SETTING OFF

In 1930 Harold Craxton and his family enjoyed a windfall. The professor of the pianoforte at London's Royal Academy of Music had written one popular song and named it 'Mavis'. In November 1914 Irish tenor John McCormack recorded both this romantic ballad and 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary' - the First World War marching song that soon became an anthem for doomed youth. Now, in the Great Depression, the royalties for 'Mavis' were finally coming home. Living chiefly on charm and connections, for all talent counted, Harold and Essie Craxton might have found many practical uses for the money. They had five bolting sons, a baby daughter and several hard-up lodgers; their house, rented for a song, was a good address though crammed and threadbare. But to hell with practicalities when a shack on the Sussex coast could be bought for Easter and summer escapades. At first they travelled by train, changing at Chichester for the Selsey Tramway, where the Craxton brothers hopped into the goods van. Then they added the second luxury item of a second-hand motor car. At the start of the holidays, the family assembled in the street with every possession needed for weeks at the seaside. The six children were as unalike as a bus queue - becoming in due course and descending order: Spitfire pilot, radio and television producer, engineer, painter, politician, musician. They were taught to be individual and intrepid. The two youngest boys (the future painter and politician), baby and luggage went in the back of the Austin 12. Essie had the driver's seat, with Harold beside her, leaving three sons still on the pavement and no more room in the vehicle. One boy (the one who became the Spitfire pilot) was directed on to the tailboard, to sit in an adapted luggage rack with his feet dangling behind them. The last two (the producer and engineer) were sent ahead, to wedge themselves between the bonnet wings and headlamps - each clinging to a lamp-bar for dear and thrilling life. In that careless era before the advance of child protection agencies, the Craxtons set off in a wild westerly direction pursued only by waves from amused and startled onlookers, rather than by policemen with whistles and handcuffs. On reaching Chichester Essie celebrated with a few spins around

10

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Chichester Market Cross and Cathedral

the Gothic crown of the city's Market Cross - giving all her children a lifelong love of fairground carousels. The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, one of many with a youthful crush on Harold, said that the Craxtons were happy and that, like pollen, happiness rubbed onto anyone who came into contact with them.' Harold and Essie wished fun and fulfilment on their children; imparting the clear if unspoken lesson that they could do and be virtually whatever they wished, providing they were passionate about it and brilliant at it. Each of the siblings excelled to some degree, though bliss became elusive. Four merited major obituaries; but it was the painter - now the best remembered of them all -who did the family credo proud with a life of supremely productive pleasure. Longing to live in Greece from an early age, John Craxton achieved his goal. Enduring joy coloured his ensuing pictures.

SETTING OFF

11

OPEN HOUSE

Leith John Craxton was born on Tuesday 3 October 1922 in London - the fourth home-delivery of a son for Essie and Harold Craxton in six years. The mother of this still-incomplete family later confided an ignorance of contraception; but, as the band of boisterous boys grew, there was also a deepening desire for a daughter. The obvious fact of life at Acomb Lodge, in the St John's Wood district, north-west of Regent's Park, was that Essie and Harold were engaged in a lasting love affair whose air of joyful freedom combined with an overriding sense of purpose in creative labour. It added up to an atmosphere where anything positive seemed possible. To have such parents was the greatest stroke ofluck in a future artist's fortunate existence. None in the happy Craxton family knew that in the Greek world a Tuesday birth was a bad omen - as it had been ever since Tuesday 29 May 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. During that first October week of 1922 British newspapers were reporting another dire Tuesday for Hellenic history. In the latest conflict with the Turks, Greeks were being driven out of Asia Minor where they had lived since ancient times; Smyrna was a smoking ruin. A peace conference from 3 October would kill Greek hopes of reclaiming Constantinople and lead to a vast exchange of populations - Greek and Turk, Christian and Muslim in opposing tides of matching human misery. By the weekend London shared the mood of mourning, as black crepe fringed every pub bar following the death of music-hall legend Marie Lloyd.

Four weeks old

12

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Harold and John

Harold Craxton looked like a music-hall turn. He wore his eruditio1i1 lightly under a Homburg hat, with twinkling eyes and self-mocking expression made all the funnier since he had the face of a medieval ascetic. While looking set to deliver a comic patter coupled with a tap dance, the masterly musician -who introduced the sounds of De hussy to England and revived the early English repertoire - actually delighted those attending annual Acomb Lodge reviews with clever skits. One featured Beethoven giving a composition lesson to a prim English lady whose trite little waltz was slowly but surely transformed into the Pastoral Sonata scherzo. Harold was forever the life and soul of the party- serious enough to be perfectly playful; amused in his gratitude that, after a rocky start, all had turned out well. Essie, somewhere on the scale between innocent and nai:ve, trusted everyone equally. From a class that no longer exists, she was like an empress who had abdicated all power while maintaining authority through radiant kindness. Lovely in her youth, she grew luminous with age as her large blue eyes and sheer benevolence shone out. She was to have been a concert violinist before falling for her impecunious piano accompanist and devoting herself to the care, and the art, of others. Her air of serenity survived ceaseless activity as wife, mother of six and aunt to all, and came to owe more than a little to an interest in spiritualism. ('Mummy is in her misteriouse [sic] misty mystic mood,' John noted as the Second World War loomed.) Her gift lay in looking beyond the immediate - enveloping dust, kitchen chaos, chamber pots outside bedroom doors filled with soaking socks - to a munificent universe. Her genius was to keep the show on the road and make ends meet.

OPEN HOUSE

13

The matriarch held in her head an astonishing network of contacts so that by an elaborate process of association (what her future son-in-law called her 'rigmaroles') she could summon assistance for any challenge, though not as often as she herself supplied it. She was ever so gently indefatigable. As the dependent company grew to cover sons Tim, Antony, Robin, John and Michael, daughter Janet, other needy relatives, friends, neighbours and any number of musically gifted students, attendants and hangers-on, there was never a suggestion that the last straw had just been drawn. Those arriving at Acomb Lodge - 8 Grove End Road - for the first time were inclined to think the Craxtons were on the verge of moving out. There were stacked bicycles in the hall and piles of stuff everywhere - books, laundry, shoes, bags and boxes of oddments. A flurry of dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs and white mice suggested the trappings of a travelling circus. After one visit, the pianist Harold Isaacs commented: 'It's a very strange house. Essie knitted it." Since no Craxton could resist a bargain, the nearby Lisson Grove saleroom snared all. Essie set the impulsive pattern. Bicycling with flowers and fruit to an ailing pupil, she looked in at an auction en route and bought a job lot of fridges - one for the pantry, one for a hard-up student's family and several for storing under roped tarpaulin in the garden until they found deserving homes. Eventually the captive forms contrasted with the strewn entrails of bicycles, motorbikes and veteran cars, as a garden shed became a garage where Tim led teams of boy mechanics while progressing towards his goal of piloting aeroplanes. Meanwhile, Harold and Essie's sweetness of temper at all times was most severely tested when the lads tore up the lawn in speedway circuits. With upright pianos in most rooms, as well as Harold's two concert grands in the teaching studio, the sound of music could reach a clashing crescendo; meals were exercises in mass catering and chatter; amid a chorus of helpers of variable helpfulness (aunts, temporary servants, musical volunteers) there was less peace than pandemonium. Rehearsals and recitals could last long into the evening. Charles Rubens, who lived next door and became the Craxtons' solicitor, replied to an apology from Harold about the din permeating the party wall: 'The problem is that the music is so good that I can't bear to go to sleep and miss it." Early to rise and late to bed, Harold and Essie's only quiet space was their attic bedroom - although Harold was allowed to dine alone and, in a household big on nuts, pulses and brown bread, to indulge his passion for turbot. At the start of an especially busy day a reveille might be blown on a bamboo pipe at the bottom of the stairs by Daisy Holland, Harold's former pupil who loved him devotedly for the rest of her life. Serving as secretary and timekeeper, she was also likened to the 'barbed wire' 3 around him, guarding the keys to the kingdom and keeping the king on his toes. 'Dear Professor, your lesson's at nine-thirty, coffee's made, and it's now twenty-past!' 4 was a

14

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Nina Milkina by Cecil Waller, 1933 Pencil on paper, 48.5 x 34.5 cm. Tallis Foundation, Australia

typical morning exclamation. Daisy controlled the diary and Essie the house, with an uncertain amount of overlapping and unbounded goodwill on both sides. Life at Acomb Lodge, in its multitude of movements, was rarely predictable and never dull. Students had standing invitations to remain for lunch or supper I - and, in case they felt peckish between sittings, a trolley with the remnants o{ meals (jelly, junket, shepherd's p~, grey morsels past any identification date and a sour white substance giving many a first taste oflive yogurt) was permanently parked in a passage by the kitchen. Many slept over; some moved in. Denis Matthews, a brilliant young pianist of meagre means, came for 'a week or two' and stayed four years. Other lodgers included Alan Richardson, Noel Mewton-Wood, Jean Gilbert, Ross Pratt and Olive Zorian - all notable names in the musical world from the 1940s. Nina Milkina, a child prodigy as a pianist and composer, was among Harold Craxton's most beloved pupils. Born in Moscow in 1919, Nina came from a cultivated Jewish family: her father was a portraitist of composers Prokofiev and Mussorgsky, a friend of Marc Chagall and collector of Russian romantic pictures; her mother was a harpist. They left for Paris in 1926, where Nina gave her first public performance four years later; by this point she was growing up on both sides of the Channel. In London she stayed initially with a grandfather and aunt but gravitated inevitably towards the Craxtons: in their warm and welcoming household she became the nearest thing John had to a second sister. For the shifting company of Acomb Lodge, the Royal Academy of Music was a penny bus-ride, or a pleasant walk through Regent's Park and its ring of Nash terraces to York Gate. The Queen's Hall, centre of musical life in London between the wars, was a two-penny fare one stop short of Oxford Circus. Still, for Denis Matthews and many others, the house on Grove End Road was the beating heart of everything: To me, as an only child, the Craxton family seemed endless, and in addition the walls of 'No 8' were the most hospitable I had ever entered. Pupils young and old, their parents, wives, husbands and friends, friends of the children: all flocked and were welcomed, turning almost every meal into a party. The bohemian atmosphere made the Craxtons the most talked-about (and the most loved) household in musical London.5

OPEN HOUSE

15

Lord's cricket match, 1926 Acomb Lodge is behind the white pavilion top right

Introduced to Acomb Lodge at 14, Elizabeth Jane Howard added: It was a revelation to me, who had until then experienced nothing but a

bourgeois state of punctuality and hygiene, and I fell at once irrevocably in love with the house and its family. They seemed to embody all the glamour of bohemian disorder, and I longed to live as they did. 6 For all the hard work, recreation was a Craxton speciality. Beyond the music and mealtime banter, guests gladly navigated paths through the garden obstacle course because a low boundary wall gave a view over Lord's cricket ground in an era when Australian batsman Donald Bradman was in his record-breaking prime. With refreshments conjured up by Essie, summer garden parties assembled for free entertainment and occasionally to assist with the fielding. A cricket net for the boys failed to prevent the odd ball from smashing through Harold's studio window. This was the enviable world into which John Craxton -the family had a habit of dropping first names on birth certificates, along with many other formalities -was born; a supportive household in which, for all his singularity and travels and eventual home in Greece, he would retain a toehold for the rest of his long life. Although he and his siblings were sent away from very early ages with what appeared to be reckless abandon, they went armed with the spirit of adventure based on the emotional security of knowing that they were loved and could always return.

16

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

WOOD OF ST JOHN

In 1922 John Galsworthy's five-volume story of a well-to-do and warring London family, guarding its property and secrets down the generations, was published together as The Forsyte Saga. Jolyon Forsyte, the most attractive character, is a painter suffering social disgrace after eloping with his daughter's governess to rackety St John's Wood. His secret is happiness. Behind the curtains in his adopted neighbourhood, there is a lot of it about. In literature the unorthodox character of St John's Wood had already been noted by George Moore in his novel A Modern Lover, where an amorous painter lives in shameful seclusion at 'Orchard Villa, Grove Road'. His wife is known to be an artists' model, practically another term for a prostitute. In life, as in art, St John's Wood was widely recognised as the place where men of means installed mistresses, or where unmarried women bearing the growing burden of vague indispositions could withdraw for several months before emerging thanks to peace and fresh air - feeling so much the lighter. Meanwhile, a baby was quietly adopted. In what Harold Craxton turned into tales for his children as the 'Wood of St John', art and impropriety went hand in hand. Painters and sculptors had clustered hereabouts throughout the Victorian era - the most renowned being royal favourite Sir Edwin Landseer. Like other animal-depicting artists, the sculptor of the Trafalgar Square lions enjoyed the proximity to the Regent's Park Zoo. Grove End Road, where detached and semi-detached villas had been laid out in generous gardens in the 1820s, hosted a gallery of incoming artists whose houses and studios expanded as they prospered. By the 1920s it had provided more addresses for Royal Academicians than almost any other street

St John's Wood - Hamilton Terrace and Abercorn Place, 1907

WOOD OF ST JOHN

17

in London. At the junction with Abbey Road, a memorial to sculptor Richard Onslow Ford rose above fashion with the useful motto 'To Thine Own Self Be True'. Fleeing the fall of the Paris Commune, Jacques Joseph Tissot settled in Grove End Road with a divorcee lover, building plans ending summarily on her death. The house was then bought and largely demolished by the Dutch-born painter of mythical subjects, Lawrence Alma Tadema. Over a decade from 1885 he produced a fabulous folly for himself and his artist wife - a sprawling mansion based on fanciful notions of the architectural designs and colour schemes of Roman Pompeii, with Byzantine, Arabic and Far Eastern flourishes. It was the last word in exoticism. When John Craxton was growing up, this bizarre local landmark was continuing the Orientalist theme as the unlikely home of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, Commander-in-Chief of the British Indian Army, whose rebellious daughter, Penelope, was later part of the artist's wide social circle as the wife of poet John Betjeman. The earliest-known artistic tenant at 8 (formerly 4) Grove End Road was Charles Santley, the predominant baritone of the Victorian age. A line of distinguished painters then began with Edward Armitage, depicter of legendary battle scenes in the studio and on-the-spot sketches of the Crimean War. Next came Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis, best-known for his 1857 picture The Death of Chatterton, in which the suicide of one poet was modelled by another (the young George Meredith -with whose wife the artist eloped, to confirm St John's Wood's raffish reputation). The success of that image at the Royal Academy emboldened Wallis to a sensation of the following year, The Stonebreaker. Here a labourer in a twilit landscape looks to be asleep but has died of exhaustion. In 1865 the semi-detached villa was acquired by William FrederickYeames, who named it Acomb Lodge and made it a centre for his St John's Wood Clique of historical and narrative painters. A decade later he oversaw designs to enclose the entrance hall with two wings - one adding a drawing room with nursery and bathroom above and the other a sitting room below two bedrooms. The extension was complete when Yeames began his most famous painting, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, in which the son of a fugitive Royalist is interrogated during the English Civil War. He left the house in 1893 but held the freehold until he died in 1918 - his tenants including the landscape artist Alfred East. When the Craxtons arrived in 1921, from another rented property in nearby Blenheim Place, they were answerable to the grandees of Marylebone Cricket Club. The owners of the hallowed Lord's ground proved the most benevolent of landlords, with a token rent and tenancy rules to be waived or flouted. Harold and Essie named their fifth and final son, born in September 1925, Michael Christopher Craxton. A gesture of gratitude lay in the initials: MCC. In the Craxtons' day radicalism among local artists was more in private life than in the art they exhibited. Since familiarity bred profitable contentment,

18

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

The Stonebreaker by Henry Wallis, 1857 Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 78.75 cm. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

potboilers flowed. Here Scotsman John MacWhirter ceaselessly pictured Highland cattle in mountain scenery. Among genuine radicals the district had become a watchword for reaction. In Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, charting the June day when Clarissa Dalloway is hosting a party in London, scornful lines are aimed at Mr MacWhirter: 'Dear Sir Harry!' she said, going up to the fine old fellow who had produced more bad pictures than any other two Academicians in the whole of St John's Wood (they were always of cattle, standing in sunset pools absorbing moisture, or signifying, for he had a certain range of gesture, by the raising of one foreleg and the toss of the antlers, 'the Approach of the Stranger' ... ). John Craxton's instinctive avoidance of instruction, and reliance on his own interests and imagination, was forged in St John's Wood. Shunning the local art school, he was persuaded by Harold to make a few tree-drawing excursions with the associated sketching club led by the premier British Impressionist, George Clausen. From infancy John disliked organised activities and group pursuits, team sports most of all. He alone among the Craxtons never took to cricket. As a King's Chorister at St George's Chapel Choir School, on duty even at Christmas, Antony Craxton dreamed of a professional cricketing career with long spells ofleisure. As a BBC producer he was to specialise in concerts and Test matches before moving to royal and state events. For now, since trees grew on the Lord's side of the Acomb Lodge back garden wall, he took drastic steps to preserve a privileged vantage point. When the nightwatchman had passed, he stole out to lop off branches anywhere near to spoiling the spectacle. John, however, would have preferred to live in a forest.

WOOD OF ST JOHN

19

Tall, lean and highly physical, the Craxton children were plucky climbers the Rubens family next-door at Number 10 once watched amazed, mid-lunch, as John clambered on to the shared garden wall, then crashed through their greenhouse roof. Trees were magical presences for him - secret realms ripe for exploration and, in the garden specimens he knew first and best, rife with caterpillars and moths, birds' nests and dreys of red squirrels. Each uniquely sculpted form seemed shrouded in its own myths. Every evening the lamplighter made his street rounds with a ladder, opening the lanterns and turning on the gas. Flickering light sent shadows of branches shuddering across John's bedroom ceiling which, especially when the wind howled, seemed to him alive and playing out a mysterious drama. Although he enjoyed fairytale illustrations by Arthur Rackham and grotesque imagery from the Brothers Grimm, the shifting overhead pictures were more compelling than any bedtime storybook. There were times when horizons closed in and everything ground to a halt as if under a grim spell of enchantment. London fog known to the world from the novels of Dickens and Conan Doyle thickened in periods of calm, cold weather, forming a lid over the capital. As coal was added to domestic fires and industrial furnaces, even in relatively airy St John's Wood smoke became trapped as if in a killing jar. Such noxious yellowish-green 'pea-soupers' were indeed lethal. The smog seeped indoors - obscuring cinema screens and theatre stages, deepening the tobacco fug in pubs - and into private houses. Thousands died in a hard winter from respiratory problems. On 4 December 1928 the Bloomsbury diarist Frances Partridge, later a friend ofJohn Craxton, could not see across Gordon Square: Complete stillness and white mist preserve the trees in the square garden outside. Every minute it darkens visibly, the mist grows yellower, until now it is the colour of urine and smells as foul. Not a twig can move in the thick mixture and only very faint lights show from the houses opposite." While he suffered physically from the toxic effects of such pollution, John's imagination was powerfully fired.

20

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

HAROLD AND ESSIE

Generations of Scraxtons had worked as farm labourers, leather workers and shoemakers in the Higham Ferrers district of Northamptonshire when, in the 1870s, they decided to become Craxtons. Taking his new name, Thomas Craxto~ moved further from his rural working-class.roots by migrating to Devizes and then to London, serving as a surveyor's assistant and marrying a school headmistress, Sarah Hunt. They had five sons - Harold, born in 1885, was the eldest - and a daughter who died in infancy. Before Harold's first birthday the family moved to Devizes, where his father had retained contacts and his parents took over the tenancy of the Elm Tree Inn, the oldest in the Wiltshire market town. Even with 31 competitors by 1900, the Elm Tree's yard still filled with farmers' carts on Thursdays and trade was brisk all week. The living was bettered only by the nearby Bear Hotel, where Georgian portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence had been raised. His boyhood sketches were still on the walls. Back in London Harold's mother had sung in a forerunner of the Royal Choral Society, supporting operatic stars in recitals at the Royal Albert Hall. She determined that her first-born son should have a musical training beyond her spouse's bar-side strumming of the banjo. And so, when Harold was barely three, she drove a horse and cart to a Wiltshire village and brought back, for £10, a Broadwood upright piano that elderly cottagers had stored upside down under their bed. Mother was Harold's first teacher and spur to precocious performance. As he recalled: When I was five, I had my first public appearance, playing the left-hand part of a duet with the barmaid of the Elm Tree. Her name was Fluffy, and the occasion a smoking concert at the Bear. She kissed me in public! The next time I was kissed after this was when I was 15 and gave a concert at the Hammersmith Town Hall; a charming old contralto, Madame Belle Cole, assisted at the concert and she kissed me, but by then I would have preferred the barmaid's kiss.' At seven he passed the first grade of the Trinity College of Music examinations in the Assembly Rooms in Bath. The trip with his mother was all the more memorable since - apart from his initial fear that two dummy knights

HAROLD AND ESSIE

21

4

guarding the entrance were the examiners - it was swiftly followed by financial disaster, as the family fortunes plunged literally downhill. A veil of Victorian propriety covered the highly probable fact that Thomas Craxton drank the Elm Tree profits dry. It was said only that he had got into business difficulties but the impact was unavoidably dramatic. The Craxtons were evicted from Long Street - and a point of eminence on a slope of the Wiltshire Downs - to the bottom of the town. They fetched up in a lowly terrace on Bath Road, by the Kennet and Avon Canal, then and now the edge of Devizes. The new billet lay beside the descent of a succession of 16 locks, designed by John Rennie in 1810 and called the Caen Hill Flight, that had been the last link in a grand plan to connect London and Bristol by inland waterway. This gem of the Industrial Revolution was still busy with commercial traffic when the Craxtons washed up on its bank. Striving to feed his family, Thomas tried to make a go of a butcher's shop, a shoe-repair business and a hair salon, but failed in each new venture. He then found a job managing three London pubs - The Greyhound in Fulham Palace Road, and the riverside Dartmouth Castle and Rutland Hotel on The Mall in Hammersmith. Whether or not this was wise given the Elm Tree Inn saga, it at least ensured that 30 shillings (£1.50) were sent back weekly to the family in Devizes to stave off a further relocation to the workhouse. Harold also helped out by fishing in the canal for roach and perch for his mother to cook for breakfast. Sarah Craxton and her five sons were really saved by the Roman Catholic St Joseph's church on the other side of the canal. All the boys were received into the faith in return for Christian charity. The indigent converts played active roles in church life and grew to love its music-rich rituals. Harold remained ever grateful to Father Bernard, the champion of his musical education and an adopted parent in all but name. He cherished the humble humanity of a priest who also assisted Sarah and her sons with daily chores - hanging out the washing and helping to clean the house: ... at that early age I was troubled and surprised that such nice priests and nuns had to live celibate lives, for to me the nuns were almost as kind as my mother and the priests often kinder than my father. I shall never forget those boyhood connections with the Catholic church and its happiness.' What was billed as 'Master Craxton's First Grand Evening Concert' took place in Hammersmith Town Hall in January 1901, when the player was 15. At 16 he had a full-time post with the Devonshire Park Symphony Orchestra in Eastbourne. His long association with the Royal Academy of Music began in 1907, when he was 22 -with advanced studies eventually under the esteemed Tobias Matthay. Professor of the Pianoforte for more than forty years from 1919, Harold set his untrainable painter son a sterling example by never

22

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Essie when young

passing a professional exam in his life. That was doubtless another reason why the testing time in Bath's Assembly Rooms lingered in his memory. From 1911 Harold served as accompanist in turn to dames Emma Albani, Clara Butt and Nellie Melba and travelled with the leading divas of their day at home and abroad. Despite a formidable reputation, Dame Clara was kind to her pianist on a world tour, during which they performed some of his compositions. In early newsreel footage he can be seen following her on to an ocean liner. They crossed Canada on a private train, but while the singing star enjoyed the equivalent of state dinners in grand houses, the piano player ate in butlers' pantries. Then Harold found pressing reasons to stay in London. All this time he was also providing music lessons and private accompaniment. On visits to a house in Willesden, the gifted violinist he assisted on the piano came to arrest his roving eye for more than musical reasons. Esther Faulkner, always known as Essie, was the eldest of three surviving daughters of art publisher Charles William Faulkner, whose business was based at Golden Lane in the City of London. Although CW. Faulkner & Co. produced homely prints, calendars, cards, children's books and games, Benjamin West, second president of the Royal Academy, was a distant forebear.

HAROLD AND ESSIE

23

Essie was related via her mother Minnie May to the Horniman clan of Quakers, tea merchants, liberal politicians, campaigners, collectors, travellers, museum founders and free creative spirits. Among an extended cousinhood, Annie Horniman sponsored George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats and co-founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; Ben Horniman was a militant backer of Indian independence as a newspaper editor in Bombay, while his brother Roy stayed at home to write the darkly comic novel Israel Rank - an Edwardian tale of a serial killer murdering his way to an earldom, later to inspire the film Kind Hearts and Coronets. In their artistic Faulkner/Horniman household, Essie was to be the musician, middle sister Sylvia the dancer and youngest sister Amy the painter. All three were also supposed to marry into the security of money. Essie had already announced an engagement to Roderick Jones, scion of a wealthy family who was on course to become chairman of the Reuter's news agency. She broke it off to marry her musical partner - a Roman Catholic pauper whom her Anglican parents rejected. Harold offered to change religion but Essie would not allow it. Finally the couple found a Presbyterian minister willing to take them as they were, and in gratitude to him their children would be baptised as low Protestants. Formal religion was always a flexible matter for them compared with immutable moral principle and the sacred nature of friendship. To be doubly sure in her choice oflife partner, Essie also wrote to an astrologer. He replied: 'If your marriage is not harmonious I should, judging from the planets, say it was entirely your fault. I have never seen two horoscopes more harmoniously aspected.' They were wed in December 1914, with the First World War and family fury raging. Dame Clara Butt entered the fray like a dreadnought, witnessing the wedding and eventually quelling Faulkner resistance before any hope for well-heeled suitors was dashed. Amy Faulkner would ultimately wed a penniless painter; Sylvia Faulkner never married at all. Amid financial turmoil for businesses in wartime, Charles Faulkner had more than family worries when, in November 1915, he died under a train. At a time when failed suicides went to court and then to jail, and successful self-killers were denied Christian burial and their families insurance pay-outs, kindly coroners recorded verdicts of misadventure where they possibly could. It was said of the late Mr Faulkner that on the fateful occasion, at a point where he had often crossed the railway line before, he had neither seen nor heard the approaching locomotive. Essie was left to hold the family together - she and her siblings inheriting tiny dividends from their father's enterprise. She had already suffered her most grievous loss when her nearest younger sister, Phyllis, died of diptheria at the age of ten. Essie's response was lasting solicitude. Deeply interested in social problems, she early on considered a career in public health and welfare before caring for music and musicians.

24

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

NOMAD CHILD

Given that the Craxtons hosted the musically talented and monetarily challenged for lunch, weekends, weeks, months or maybe a year or four, space in the family home was always at a premium. Household budgets were severely cramped. Dispersal became a parental priority when, for all the harmony meant to spring from a largely vegetarian diet, belief in a universal brotherhood and sisterhood, and purposeful creativity, the children turned into a riot. John always excepted, the Craxton boys sometimes formed a gang with lads from the workers' flats opposite, grouped around the Angel brothers. At other times they fought, with volleys of stones lobbed across the road and passers-by caught in the crossfire. There was an earth bank at the base of the Acomb Lodge wall on the garden side from which attacks could be launched or repulsed as if from an iron-age fort. During one skirmish Tim, eldest and most daredevil of the Craxton siblings, retreated to the roof and hurled slates at a policeman. Indoors the brothers unleashed practical jokes. Miss Judge, Harold's most narrow and nervous devotee, known to him as Judgie, was their

The Craxtons Left to right Janet, Michael, John, Robin, Antony, T,m, Essie and Harold

NOMAD CHILD

25

favourite prey. Books or pails of water were balanced above half-opened doors, to greet the carer when she pressed forward in her eagerness to help. Eventually the aptly named Miss Judge suffered a breakdown. At one time or another all of Harold and Essie's boys crossed the borderline into delinquency - where Janet followed. From early on - and, barring brief periods of rapprochement, ever after -Antony and John actively hated one another. 'Mummy! Daddy! Come quickly! Antony is trying to kill John!' Janet might cry. Once, armed with kitchen knives, the brothers chased each other around the dining table. In family photos through the 1920s and 1930s Antony- the second eldest son, born in 1918 - is usually the only one unsmiling and looking away from the camera. Sickly at birth, he had suffered from pre-natal rickets at a time of general malnourishment. There remained something guarded about him aloof, brooding, begrudging. John's open-hearted exuberance, his guiltlessness and guilelessness in doing precisely as he pleased, and a certain androgynous quality in his artistic nature, hit a raw nerve with Antony for reasons no one could fathom at the time. Anyway, separation was clearly advisable. John began his education at a Montessori day school in St John's Wood, where his chief memory was of trying to hammer round pegs into square holes while aware that they would not fit. A 1927 report summed him up: 'A particularly lovable personality covers a multitude of offences.' From the age of seven the Craxton boys were destined for distant boarding schools where a progressive curriculum was desired, but the first consideration was a liberal easing of fees through scholarships or special arrangements (family favours being frequently called in). This led, inevitably, to schools of very variable quality. In 1929 Essie, further distracted by the birth of a longed-for daughter, sent John for tuition with the children of her friends Frank and Peggy Whitworth at Pythingdean Farm near Pulborough. The evacuee's letters home over several months fail to mention any set lessons save for cookery and gardening. He adored the Sussex countryside, learning to ride a bicycle along the tracks and lanes; he loved helping on the farm with haymaking, demolition of an old thatched shed, feeding goats and calling the cows home for milking as they answered to their names. Primroses, catkins and a new brown carthorse were admired and a sense of wild and cultivated profusion in an era before intensive agriculture was engendered (barn owls swooping over the fields, rats gnawing in the granary). Nests of swallows, house martins, lapwings and yellowhammers were tracked and monitored. One letter noted: 'Felix is a naughty cat, he got at the wagtails' nest yesterday.' Uncle Frank got at a jackdaws' nest and gave the children pet fledglings. The one recollected trauma was an otter hunt at Petworth, with a crimson- faced Lord Leconfield cursing and swearing at the hounds. As the youngest person present at the kill, John was smeared with blood from a severed paw or tail - he could not remember which; just the sense of feeling sickened.

26

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

John the biker

John was also spending holidays with his godmother Rebecca Birkett on a Lincolnshire farm beside the Ermine Way- the Roman road linking London to York. In fields he found pieces of red-glazed and decorated pottery and coins bearing the head of Constantine the Great. At once an archaeologist and a collector, he was very soon a curator of his own bedroom museum back in Grove End Road. As the passion took hold, Essie knew just the man to help. Extravagantly moustached and devilishly handsome, Mortimer Wheeler was already famous as a pioneering archaeologist and mercurial man of action. As Keeper of the London Museum, then housed in Lancaster House in St James's, he was enlivening and expanding a decrepit institution. Innovations included free evening concerts involving Harold Craxton and his pupils and attended by his family plus 'an astonishing medley of critics, music students, tradesmen, guardsmen with their girls, passers-by and pilgrims of all sorts'.' Mortimer Wheeler and his wife, Tessa, made headlines in 1930 almost immediately after embarking on a dig at the Roman city ofVerulamium in a valley below St Albans - the big hit being a mosaic pavement with a scallop-shell design. When, the following July, Essie presented her son as a student of archaeology, complete with a box of his finds, he was enlisted to the cause. Met from the bus each day at St Albans, John helped to uncover and clean mosaics and experience the thrill of discovery. He was not yet nine: the Wheelers' son, Michael, had assisted his parents from the age of five.2 In September John was set to follow a brotherly path to Abinger Hill School, at Holmbury St Mary near Dorking. Many old boys would have fond memories of this relatively advanced establishment in rolling Surrey countryside but John Craxton was not one of them. His school report for the summer of 1931 now invites laughter as it admonishes an eight-year-old for being 'childish' and 'immature'. 'Lack of concentration', complained the maths master. 'One finds him aimlessly scribbling and drawing pictures when not watched.' The art tutor added: 'Shows promise - but needs to apply himself more to his work.' John blamed the unheated interiors and strenuous outdoor winter activities of Abinger Hill for the ill-health that would dog his early life and do much to determine his future. Here he was

NOMAD CHILD

27

laid low by a first outbreak of the chest or lung complaints that were to be summed up as pleurisy amid uncertainty over underlying causes. As he grew taller as a teenager, he went from slim to thin. Meanwhile, protracted detention in the school infirmary prompted an appeal to Essie and removal to the emotional warmth of Acomb Lodge. Many schools were considered for the recovering invalid and one or two were briefly tested before he went to Port Regis preparatory school on the Kent coast at Broadstairs. It was intended as a progressive school for the sons of interesting people, but for John the only aspect of interest was the art teacher, Elsie Barling. He was parted from the first of his creative mentors on 24 March 1933 - the day Hitler gained dictatorial powers in Germany-when drafted into the Prebendal School in Chichester. Luckily for him, it was only an interlude. As a Cathedral Scholar, he became a chorister in the majestic cathedral towering over the school with which it had always been associated. Choral duties cut annual fees from £75 to £35, and within months they were allotted to brother Robin too. These economical honours were awarded by Harvey Grace, the new cathedral organist and choirmaster and an old friend of the Craxtons. In truth, the school of high repute was at the lowest ebb in its long history and needed all the support it could get. Chichester was already a place John knew and loved, thanks to its proximity to Mavis - the Craxton holiday home nine miles southward at Selsey Bill. He had savoured the 'huge pale olive green stone' of the cathedral, the Roman street layout and the medieval Market Cross. The big, grand city was so near and yet a world away from Selsey. Mavis, a First World War army hut with timber additions, stood on brick piles in a line of similar conglomerations on the low cliff above West Beach. With piped cold water and paraffin heaters, the flimsy retreat was not exactly a bargain when, in 1930, the Craxtons snapped up the basic hut on a ten-year site lease for £200; but it brought them a decade of blissful Easters and summers in a spot with views across the East Solent to the Isle of Wight at the front, and green and golden fields to the rear. John remembered: There, in what now seems like a succession of endless, if not cloudless, summer days, I ran barefoot, rode ponies, shrimped at low tide, collected fossils from the Bracklesham Beds, went to the movies, carried milk from the farm (which still had a working windmill), and had family picnics on the beach. 3 While John searched the shoreline for shells and cuttlefish, his brothers took to the water - once lashing old oil drums together to make a raft that drifted far out to sea so they had to be rescued. Afterwards they kept to canoes and dinghies that were only slightly less risky. The children were treated to pony rides at a local riding school, whose owner was so charmed by them that they were invited to stay on her sister's farm near Midhurst - helping Essie to

28

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

John and Mavis

recoup the costs of the lessons. The Craxton siblings now learned how to herd goats and load straw on a truck for bedding. Selsey had been a bohemian resort since the 1890s. The characterful inter-war cast included composer Eric Coates - Harold's Royal Academy of Music colleague - and Robert Cedric Sherriff, who had plotted his First World War play Journey's End in Selsey. A raggle-taggle line of West Beach shacks provided holiday homes for the families of open-air-loving musicians, academics, lawyers and a chairman of the Coal Owners' Association. Next to Mavis, Sunny Side Up - two railway carriages and a wooden verandah with corrugated iron roofing - belonged to concert pianist Betty Humby, an ex-pupil of Harold's. While married to a parson, she spent prolonged holidays in Selsey with her son Jeremy Thomas, a future British Ambassador to Athens (who, aged seven, had a crush on nine-year-old Janet). Betty later wed the conductor and impresario Thomas Beecham, another friend of the Craxtons. She and Essie organised games of rounders on the grass between their cottages, plus races, treasure hunts, sing-songs and musical evenings. Betty hosted a party on an old hulk rotting in Chichester harbour, illuminating the rigging with fairy lights. By way of further entertainment, a feud was being waged by the two outsized personalities who owned Selsey between them. John and his parents liked Edward Heron-Allen, naturalist, horror novelist, palmist, violin-maker, local historian and translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from the original Persian. Ranged and often raging against him was Sir Abdullah Charles Edward Archibald Watkin Hamilton, double baronet and double divorcee who was among the first British converts to Islam. When the Craxtons knew him, Sir Abdullah was also a member of the British Union of Fascists. Even isolated Selsey could not escape the accelerating national, continental and global tensions of the 1930s. Although Eric Coates was inspired to write By the Sleepy Lagoon (later the theme music for BBC radio's Desert Island Discs) while standing on the beach

NOMAD CHILD

29

at Selsey one evening, admiring the deep blue of the sea against a pink glow in the sky above Bognar Regis, the weather on this stretch of the south coast could be wild. During one tempest, Harold and Robin propped furniture against the front wall of Mavis, to keep it from bowing in while neighbouring roofs were being torn off and carried into the fields. A broad green sward before the gravel cliff was steadily nibbled by storms until consumed entirely. The row of holiday chalets was moved back several times, but all in vain. Soon after the hideaways were requisitioned by the army, in 1940, surging seas reduced them to matchwood and driftwood. Given the liberty of Selsey and the comparatively enlightened nature of John's previous educational outposts, Prebendal School proved a shock. There were rigid rules and beatings for minor misdemeanors. Homesick boys slept in an attic Long Dormitory, where oak-panelled walls were scratched with the initials of former inmates during periods of incarceration dating back to the seventeenth century. High windows looked down to the Bishop's Palace Garden, extending in those days to Chichester's Roman walls and suggesting a world of beauty, tranquillity and freedom. Such an impression was all the more potent at that moment since Bishop George Bell, who had witnessed Hitler's rise to power, was the most eloquent clerical voice in Britain against Nazism and anti-Semitism. He could be observed walking between the herbaceous borders deep in conversation with his German theologian friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer -who would be hanged on Hitler's orders in the dying weeks of the Second World War. John was allowed to paint in the garden and it stayed in his mind as a place of solace. Cathedral Scholars wore grey cassocks with wide puritan collars as often as school uniforms of jacket and shorts in grey tweed, with matching shirt, socks and pullover - the blizzard of grey presented by an assembly of Prebendal School pupils relieved only by scarlet caps bearing the arms of a Tudor bishop who had endowed their original grammar school in 1497. There was a demanding schedule of rehearsals and recitals at cathedral services, where the demands might include working the manual pumps of the organ. Looking back in his seventies, John wrote: 'I owe it to Chichester for helping me to become a pagan, but above all, I owe to Chichester a Pauline conversion to what I most emphatically call art.' 4 Along with Harold Craxton, Dr Grace was reviving interest in early English composers such as Gibbons, Tallis and Taverner. To John's lasting delight, the organist and choirmaster filled Chichester Cathedral with their music. He also took the choir on a tour of Belgium, visiting medieval Bruges and Ghent's Cathedral of St Bavo -where the monumental and exquisite altarpiece, a treasure of the Flemish Renaissance painted by brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck in the 1430s, left John enraptured. With blood-curdling imaginations aflame after traipsing around First World War cemeteries and battlefields, and further kindled by the staple reading of adventure comics, most of the choirboys preferred a set of paintings in the city art gallery vividly detailing

30

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

The raising of Lazarus, c.1125 Limestone, 120 x 115 cm. Chichester Cathedral

vile variations of torture visited on the biblical unjust judge. After an initial 'sick interest' in such gruesome violence, John was quickly repulsed. In Chichester he went to concerts, plays and an exhibition devoted to a wooden model of Milan Cathedral - a perfect copy that seemed perfectly pointless, and still more dismal since it had taken its maker 52 years to craft. 'Naturalism is the enemy', John insisted. 'The point of art is to make a new reality.' Imagination had to be brought into play as the true artist evoked rather than described. During choir duties in the cathedral he was dismayed by a convocation of naturalistic bronze sculptures of Victorian bishops - intended to be true-to-life and ending up 'completely dead'. What he loved most, in a great Norman and Gothic structure constructed over a Roman site, were two sculptures of genuine originality and intense conviction: early twelfth-century Romanesque bas reliefs; survivors, John felt, of a medieval frieze. These twin scenes of Christ's entry into Bethany and the raising of Lazarus became guides for his own work: For I came to realise, without help, that great art from the distant past could be without epoch: it could look fresh and immediate and modern, and clearly didn't have to mimic nature to look real. These sculptures became my talisman, for their astonishing drama and great presence were there to see every day, even when the heavy noxious smoke from my censer made me feel faint. 5 He contrasted the steadfast sincerity of the crude carvings with the sentimental elaborations of organised religion - especially Anglo-Catholic ritual. The moment of Pauline conversion to paganism came when the Dean, Arthur Duncan-Jones, spotting the inscription in John's Bible from the Presbyterian minister who had christened him, said that to continue in an Anglican cathedral choir he would have to be baptised into the true faith. John felt a visceral revulsion against fake religion and utter cant. Much later he would discover

NOMAD CHILD

31

that visionary painter and poet William Blake, one of his artistic and antiauthoritarian heroes, had been tried for sedition in Chichester. John himself, at 11, was pitched into subversion via mockery. The rebel was viewed as virtually satanic when, with two other choirboys, he was apprehended in the vestry feigning drunkenness after swigging from a bottle of communion wine and reciting in slurred fashion amended lines of the Lord's Prayer ('Our father who art in Hendon, Holloway be thy name'). He concluded that one of the worst sins of zealotry is a sacrificed sense of humour. He left soon afterwards and in adult life would be irked by claims that he had been expelled from 'seven or eight' schools - claiming that he had always walked out before being kicked out. Robin Craxton was also turned against formal religion during his two years at Prebendal School. With a knowledge of chemistry and engineering that John lacked, he expressed his opinion via a pipe bomb. Using a manual on explosives in the school library and buying the necessary ingredients openly from a Chichester chemist, he loaded them with a wooden plug and some fuse wire in a length of hollow tubing from a cut-up bicycle frame - ramming the mixture home with a sawn-off piece of broomstick. He then wired the device into the school electrical system and, when a master switched on a light, BOOM! Smoke cleared on a crater in the playground, for which the bomber was never called to account (boys then were known to be mad about fireworks). The surprise was that he could treat a bicycle so casually. Nearby, John loved what is now the national nature reserve of Kingley Vale and was then part of the great sweep of wood-dotted and sheep-rife grasslands on the unploughed South Downs. Riddled with antiquity, the landscape is marked with Bronze Age burial mounds, an Iron Age settlement and a RomanoCeltic temple. A yew forest, surviving the clearances for longbow staves in the Middle Ages, contains trees possibly dating back two thousand years to the near-mythic era of the Druids. Some were planted, legend claims, in AD 849 to honour slain Viking warriors. Whatever their age and origin, the oldest yews have been contorted by the tumult of centuries into beastly statues - trunks and branches twisted into limbs spiralling upwards and writhing on the ground after being partly severed. Thrown down by gales and lightning strikes, they have limped across fresh territory on new root systems while resembling petrified serpents. John walked here until the war, when the eerily romantic atmosphere of Kingley Vale began to creep into an art that appeared to have sprung from nowhere.

32

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

A LIFE IN ART

In 1935, aged 12, John Craxton enrolled at the only school he ever enjoyed - lately founded by Lord Northbourne in the family pile in Kent. Moving to a farm elsewhere on his estate near Deal, the educationalist and environmentalist peer left behind a lot of antique furniture, aristocratic bric-a-brac heaped in attics and cellars, plus his son and heir, who was one of Betteshanger School's five pupils at its inception. Word spread quickly and at his first speech day J.L. Craxton was billed in the chorus of an abridged production of Milton's Samson A9onistes. It followed a Demonstration of Basic Physical Training in which the waywardly lively pupil nicknamed Crackers most probably did not feature. Influenced by the principles of the Austrian philosopher and social reformer Rudolf Steiner, Betteshanger (now Northbourne Park) School aimed to nurture all the faculties in each child for the benefit of 'the whole individual personality, fully integrated and wholly free'. So noble a goal did not come cheap and, on top of the fees, no fewer than 90 items were listed in an inventory of required articles, ranging from Bible, blazer and boilersuit to cricket, football and Wellington boots - all available from (and many exclusive to) Harrods. Even for Essie Craxton, the mistress of recycling, with three sets of hand-me-downs for her fourth and most favoured son, it was an immense challenge. Betteshanger House appeared to have accumulated over the centuries, but its medieval, Tudor, Jacobean and Georgian profile had emerged all of a piece thanks to Victorian architect George Devey, purveyor of the amalgamated 'Old English' style. The theatrical mansion invited Gothic adventure, especially with all those abandoned heirlooms, and vintage wines still in cellar racks, that John treated as toys. And beyond the unattractive playing fields and tennis courts lay the revelation of raw life itself. While the school prospectus boasted a position 'four miles from the sea in the healthiest part of South East Kent', pit-head chimneys belched closer still. Betteshanger Colliery had opened in 1928, with second-hand machinery and miners recruited from far afield. Often blacklisted on home-ground for militancy, these veterans of struggle now worked thin seams via flood-prone shafts in the depths of the 1930s depression. John was charmed by their

A LIFE IN ART

33

Elsie Barling by Frances Hodgkins, c.1931 Pencil on paper, 39 x 29.5 cm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

foreign-sounding accents encountered on the seafront at Deal. He set about depicting the parish mine as well as mills grinding corn in more picturesque fashion. The pleasure of Betteshanger was being reunited with his old art teacher, Miss Barling, in whose classes he aimed to stay put. His obsessive focus was enabled by a new talent for giving himself a temperature in order to avoid tests in subjects where he had fallen behind or failed to study at all. The English teacher observed that he wrote in 'Anglo-Craxton' - and, then and ever after, the wonderful cards and letters he penned as comic and caustic flights of consciousness lacked brakes of punctuation and checks on spelling. A games master's report noted in terse bewilderment: 'Poor, but he doesn't seem to be attracted to cricket.' Integration was never a Craxton concern. Elsie Barling had modernist sympathies and artistic talent. She spent school holidays painting in Spain, the South of France or Britain's Celtic edges, often with the New Zealander Frances Hodgkins; but she concealed her work from her pupils so as not to damage development of personal styles by imitation. Instead reproductions of revolutionary images by Picasso and Matisse were used to extol an art of exploration resting on endless practice in drawing. For the rest of his life John would have sketching materials in his pockets when not in his hands. He kept in touch with Miss Barling, visiting her in retirement in Dorset. The art tutor was a friend of Vladimir Polunin, the Moscow-born artist, teacher and designer who had painted sets for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes - most notably Le Tricorne, as designed by Picasso, in 1919. He talked at Betteshanger on how art, music and dance could be magically combined. Barling contacts may also have led to John's being lured from the art room for dance sessions guided by Margaret Morris, partner of Scottish Colourist painter John Duncan Fergusson and trailblazer in Britain of the Isadora Duncan technique of free movement in white Greek tunics and on sun-bronzed bare feet. Some boys became besotted with a dance style also taught in London by Aunt Sylvia but John, for all his lithe physique and natural rhythm, preferred the challenge of capturing forever a moment of motion on paper or canvas. Essie must have been relieved that, even with John's insulation in the

34

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

private world of his imagination, he was invited to spend holidays with classmates, thus cutting bills and tensions at home. Harry Hawker, from the aviation family, took him to Elizabethan Wamil Hall in Suffolk. Viscount (Richard) Boyle led him to the 'servanted stiffness' of a house belonging to a brutish relation near Reading since his Raj-focused parents were 'preoccupied with their racehorses in Bangalore'. The Boyle yacht did once put into Dover harbour, where John suffered instant seasickness. The affliction would long cloud his travels. In March 1936 Hitler marked a third year of power in Germany by occupying the Rhineland, in a contravention of the Treaty of Versailles that went unchallenged and encouraged all the aggression to come. Betteshanger, like the rest of Britain, remained haunted by the First World War rather than alert to present threats. The headmaster had lost a leg in the conflict, and hi~ harrowed figure now showed an unnerving interest in the perfect bodies of pubescent boys exposed while bathing. The pupils learned to race through cold dips -with John at the end of the line after working out that the bathwater was least icy for the last boy in. For the Armistice Service that November John had to sing solo Hubert Parry's anthem 'Jerusalem', to words by William Blake, in Northbourne church, and he never forgot the terror of it. The boys were drilled in the fact that, in November 1914, Rupert Brooke had penned his sonnet 'The Soldier' after attending an army camp at Betteshanger -with the prophesy in its famous opening section realised by April 1915, when the poetic face of patriotic England was buried on the Greek island of Skyros, having died of blood poisoning from an insect bite while en route to the Dardanelles: If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. A symbol of sacrifice and martyrdom was to be portrayed on the walls of the school chapel, via frescoes illustrating the life and death of Kent saint Thomas Becket. All the boys depicted the Archbishop of Canterbury's 1170 murder, and drawings by pupils Craxton and Whately-Smith were then merged into a single design. John directed a team in painting a large scene behind the altar of the troublesome priest being set upon by sword-wielding knights of Henry III. It was the only image of violence he ever executed. Miss Barling ensured that the work of her star pupil was prominent in art shows -with 15 paintings and linocuts among a Betteshanger School display in London's Bloomsbury Gallery opened, in November 1935, by the lately retired Slade Professor of Fine Art, Henry Tonks. Poised to be only the second living artist with a Tate retrospective exhibition, the veteran painter-tutor pointedly observed: 'There is a lot of promise here. But that isn't everything. Some who show the least promise later run off with the laurels.' John

A LIFE IN ART

35

The death of Thomas Becket mural, Betteshanger School, Kent

weighed those wise words lightly against the solidity of the money from his first sale, plus a cut-out-and-kept review from a now-unknown newspaper: John Craxton is at once the most prolific and the finest artist. True, John is 13. His studies of Alkham Village, of a timbered interior, and of garden and coast scenes, have the strength and maturity of a finished artist. The last phrase was picked up by Aunt Sylvia. She wrote to Aunt Amy of being 'most impressed with John's paintings - some of them are quite lovely'. But: There has been quite a sensation about John's work in all the papers but I hope to God they keep it from him - otherwise they will finish him. I have dropped a hint to both Essie & Harold - I hope it will sink in - I doubt it though. Apart from his art teacher, Betteshanger left an indelible mark through passing friendship with two pupils. Artist's son Christopher Kennington invited John on family outings to an Italian restaurant in Dover for a first taste of the Mediterranean: olives, anchovies, garlic. Over weekends at the Kennington house in Oxfordshire, his drawings won praise from an ideal role model.

36

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Breaking with an era of the archaic, heroic and symbolic in art - and a striving for poetic effect more likely to produce bombast and bathos - Eric Kennington depicted people as they were and are. Injured on the Western Front in 1915, while serving with the Kensington Battalion of the London Regiment, he painted through a long convalescence. The Kensingtons at Laventie shows nine sorely tested and infinitely individual soldiers resting in a wintry ruin. Naming and describing each figure in working notes, and placing himself among them, he produced his shiningly humane study by painting in reverse on glass and picking out metallic elements in gold. An image of shattering modernity reflected medieval stained-glass windows, Orthodox icons and Uccello's panel from The Battle of San Romano on view in the National Gallery (and hung in reproduction in Betteshanger School). John admired the technical invention and emotional charge of an art that l 'made heroes of ordinary people' and portfolios of figure sketches that were works of art in themselves. They were all the more impressive as milestones on a journey since by this point their maker had advanced to sculpture. Eric Kennington travelled in the Middle East and resulting drawings illustrated Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the soldierly memoir of his friend T.E. Lawrence. The tortured champion of Arabism died in a Dorset motorcycle crash in 1935, and Kennington carved his memorial for St Martin's Church, Wareham. An affecting effigy in Arab clothing- ironic echo of a medieval crusader - began with members of the public being invited to chip a stone block in return for a donation. The recumbent figure was largely formed when the sculptor turned around in his studio to find John ready with mallet and chisel as if to aim a blow at the head. It was an early example of a lifelong love of jokes and wind-ups that brought unending trouble: the joker and trickster never learned. This time, forgiveness followed furore.

The Kensingtons at Laventie by Eric Kennington, 1915 Oil on glass, 139.7 x 152.4 cm. Imperial War Museums

A LIFE IN ART

37

The sculptor was also at work on a tombstone for artist-gardener Arthur Dacres Rendall in the Suffolk coastal village of Walberswick. By way of thanks the Kenningtons were loaned the late artist's Eastwood cottage for a summer break. John went too. They took long walks to explore an area of extravagant church adornment in the Middle Ages followed by seventeenth-century iconoclasm. A medieval rood screen in Southwold church retained its stature despite Puritan defacement; the beautiful shell of Blythburgh church, whose ceiling angels flew too high for downing, had been a cause celebre for William Morris in his belief that restoring meant ruining when it went beyond merest repair. Very often, John concluded, taking the Morris dictum further, it was better to leave well alone and admire the romantic nature of decay. The second Betteshanger pupil to prove of inestimable value was Robin Oliver. Visiting Robin's family home in Scotland, John fell for the glamour of his father, Mark- a painter, collector and dealer in Old Masters. He was introduced to the work of Stravinsky via a gramophone recording of Petrushka, playing it endlessly and entering a new world. Music at Acomb Lodge had stopped at Debussy and Ravel, but when John told his parents of his discovery Harold bought three tickets for the next London production of the Stravinsky ballet. They all loved it. At the Oliver house he could examine a treasury of historic pictures, including a Rembrandt oil and both a drawing and painting by a Cretan icon painter turned disciple of Titian in Venice turned leading light in the Spanish Renaissance: Domenikos Theotok6poulos, or El Greco. Here was a painter who emerged from medievalism to become a precursor for modernism. The sketch of St Matthew or St John the Evangelist with an Angel was a lambent aid to study. The painting was a revelation. Created in Toledo in the 1580s, An Allegory (Fabula) depicts a boy lighting a taper, between the huddled and shadowy figures of a rapt monkey and grinning man. There has long been speculation about a moralising message: the monkey may stand for vice, the man for folly and the flame for passion kindled in an innocent. John was relieved that no definitive conclusion has ever been reached. He felt that to maintain the allure of a masterpiece an artwork must keep an element of mystery: solve the enigma, kill the magic. This conviction, formed so early, left him with a lifelong aversion to the pronouncements of art academics and critics - although he delighted in correcting their errors. El Greco was always to be his favourite artist. In the summer of 1937, when he was 14, John expected his holiday highlight to be the Walberswick trip with the Kenningtons - all the more so since he had dropped flaming plasticine on to a knee during a modelling exercise and, in an era before antibiotics, the wound festered. Finally fit enough for the novelty of a first journey to France, he was seasick on the Dover to Calais ferry. He was bound for a boy scout rally on an island in the Seine, to which Betteshanger School sent a detachment. A regime

38

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

An Allegory (Fabula) by El Greco (Domenikos lheotokopoulos), c.1580-5 Oil on canvas, 67.3 x 88.6 cm.

National Gallery of Scotland

of organised outdoor pursuits did not allow for sketching in solitude, so mutiny could have been in store. Rescue came in the form of Mark Oliver, at the wheel of a swish car- picking up his son and John and speeding them to Paris. They were off to the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modem Life, with only one national pavilion in mind. Opened in May, the exhibition was meant to promote creative bonds and celebrate contemporary life in the machine age; but it had been subverted by the totalitarian rivalry between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Spain had missed the party and the programme. Since civil war had broken out the previous July, when General Franco led a rebellion against the Spanish Republic and its Popular Front government, foreign exhibitions were low on the agenda in beleaguered Madrid. After massed civilian casualties, especially in the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April by German and Italian aeroplanes, there was a late drive for an artist-led display to publicise the plight of the Spanish people and the democratic cause. The Spanish Pavilion duly opened on 12 July. Two British boy scouts were among the first visitors. To the end of his life John Craxton kept sharp memories of Alexander Calder's Mercury Fountain, Joan Mir6's now-lost mural and the Guernica painting that Picasso had completed in his Paris studio on 4 June. This stupendous denunciation of civilian slaughter drew on medieval Catalan frescoes, Goya's The Disasters of War etchings and representations of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents by Poussin, Rubens and Guido Reni, and then added beastly iconography - bull, bird, horse - that was pure Picasso. All the anguish and agony in the human procession is expressed in the screaming equine figure at the centre of the picture. But John said:

A LIFE IN ART

39

What I remember of Guernica is not so much the violence and the tragedy but the marvellous architecture of it. It had this wonderful symphonic sense. Everything was contained within the room of the canvas, just like a Titian ... There's not a line wasted or out of place. And there was no sense of brushwork; I was already aware of the false admiration of 'beautiful passages of paint'. You shouldn't be aware of the construction. The point is the emotional impact. As John recalled, the Spanish Pavilion had consisted of Calder, Picasso and Mir6 masterworks alone - and he recollected the vast Mir6 mural as 'the great painting ofThe Reaper' rather than by its alternative title, Catalan Peasant in Revolt. He had missed the propagandist element entirely - failing to register huge photo-collages at the pavilion entrance proclaiming the sufferings of the Spanish people in war and their achievements in peace. From a day of amazement in Paris he would remember a first taste of fresh pineapple juice, a nosebleed in a bank, and an exhibition with works by the Belgian expressionist Constant Permeke, Matisse and Raoul Dufy- the last of these a high note for a dazzling picture of a red combine harvester in a golden cornfield. All that was painful and political passed him by. Friendship with the Olivers ended abruptly. On a last visit to the house in Scotland John asked his host over dinner: 'Which side do you support in the Spanish Civil War?' He assumed that a nettled silence meant backing for Franco when it might have been irritation at such a gauche question after the trip to Paris. Or perhaps it was annoyance over the muddling of art and politics. John himself, hating the carnage of war, was horrified by reports of Republican destruction of church art. Then and always he was disinclined to take sides, preferring to assert the independence of the artist as the best safeguard for civilisation and the only course for himself. But it was innocence that got him into hot water, then and after, and left him baffled when Mark Oliver drove him to the train for an early and final exit. At this stage he was invited to the palatial home of one of Harold's piano pupils -who had posed with her sisters and parents for Raoul Dufy's The Kessler Family on Horseback. Her parents, both from Dutch oil dynasties, collected pictures by Van Gogh, Degas, Modigliani, Matisse and Picasso among others, which John was allowed to inspect at leisure. His own work was praised and his ambitions encouraged.

40

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

WILD DORSET

After a summer of painterly discovery, John had to return to school while wanting only to paint. Reluctantly he joined his brother Robin at the new Clayesmore School in the Dorset village of Iwerne Minster near Blandford Forum. This was another1 progressive establishment, and so ahead of j_tself that the first intake of boys chose between sport and construction work - by the latter manual labour, fee-paying pupils helped to build, wire and fence the school for free. Robin Craxton was in his element, gaining valuable training for his future career as an electrical engineer. John saw both exercise options as a total waste of time. Falling in love forever with the ancient landscapes of Cran borne Chase the chalk plateau spanning 150,000 undulating acres of Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire - he lasted at the emerging public school for barely an autumn term. The school register praised 'a promising artist and charming boy' before bad blood set in. He was beaten for handing out biscuits without a regulatory queue - punished, as he saw it, for using his initiative. 'What did I learn there? That you can't learn anything from that sort of school.' At Clayesmore, on his fifteenth birthday, he completed a painting of an ornamental fountain in the school grounds; but then was confined to the infirmary with chicken pox. The matron, fearful for a pending holiday, scraped the spots with a knife to speed recovery. The result was a septic back and cause for the injured party to be reclaimed by Essie. Matron said she had been bitten during her knife attack; John said he wished the idea had occurred to him at the time. One foggy day, much later, he was riding his motorbike in Dorset when he saw the Clayesmore sign and took a sudden detour. 'I drove all over the lawn, making skid-marks everywhere', he said with satisfaction. 'I saw white faces in the windows before I made for the hills.' Clayesmore appealed to Essie because there were now family connections in the neighbourhood. After her sister Amy married Cecil 'Bim' Waller in 1934, she helped the two artists raise £40 to buy a cottage in the Minchington valley north of Blandford and deep in Cran borne Chase. The seventeenth-century house of timeless romance and no modern amenities became John's second home. Facing a similar dwelling across a kitchen garden, Dingley Dell had grown organically from a landscape to which it seemed to be slowly returning. It was made of local reeds and chalk dug from nearby downs. The soft chalk

WILD DORSET

41

7

Bim and Amy at Minchington

was bound with clay and chopped straw, to form 'cob' for thick, uneven walls, protected from the wet with stone foundations and overhanging eaves of the thatched roof. Inside there was one downstairs room with a kitchen range in a large open fireplace, two small upstairs bedrooms and a lean-to, rat-ridden shed tacked on one end. A lane was accessed via a plank over the River Winterbourne - a stream ranging from trickle to torrent and fed by springs bubbling under, and sometimes over, the sitting-room floor. Born in 1899, Amy died when she was almost 101 - her life covering one entire century and touching two more. As the visual artist in the Faulkner family, and with the force of character never to concede defeat in any struggle with adversity or a contrary opinion, she was a huge influence on John. He wrote for her funeral: She was for me a partner in Art, a conspirator. At times when close relatives thought I ought to get a decent job, learn to play cricket, or do something useful, she was always on hand to offer moral support. She understood painting and painters. Amy's doughty determination, which John inherited, disallowed the notion that life should be made easier by embracing fashion, material comfort and aesthetic or ethical compromise. Short cuts were disdained, difficulties practically demanded if enabling a quality of life that had nothing to do with prevailing living standards or worldly ambition. Once a teacher friend called at Minchington on his way to a job interview at a more prestigious school. 'Why leave a perfectly good post?' Amy thundered. 'There comes a time in life when one needs to get on', the teacher said. 'GET ON?' Amy cried. 'You should GET OFF!' While aware that stoicism, improvisation and humour are the arts of life, Amy was hypercritical. Of D.H. Lawrence, she said: 'I sat next to him once. Horrible scratchy tweed suit, squeaky voice, dirty fingernails, awful wife.' Her hard judgements were harshest as applied to herself: when she gave up

42

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

painting without explanation, John perceived a thwarting by impossibly high standards. But she retained intense belief in the art of her husband and nephew. The Waller dwelling in all its hard-won decrepitude, and its weed-stricken garden that would eventually be recognised as a nature reserve, stood for the owners' austerely beautiful philosophy of paramount independence and next-to-nature art. As John recalled: What was, when they moved in, a very primitive cottage inspired them to work hard to make it more so. Out went the reasonably efficient Victorian kitchen range in order to expose the splendid great fireplace with its original oven. Beams were exposed, layers of wallpaper were scraped off, partitions removed. The natural grace of the original cottage was a marvel ... Of course the beams were lethal for tall people and the l open fireplace smoked horribly. Amy and Bim's lungs must have be.en kippered. There was no electricity, just candles and lamps; water was fetched from the well; there was an outside loo; and they both bicycled to the village for provisions through the winter floods. When film director Bill Douglas scouted locations for his 1986 drama Comrades - relating the early nineteenth-century Dorset trade unionist saga of the Tolpuddle Martyrs - he wanted a traditional cottage that a team of set designers could return to its unaltered state. Chancing upon the Waller cottage, he found that Bim and Amy had removed virtually all trace of at least two centuries - and so their carefully dilapidated domain appeared in his movie just as it was. London-born Bim Waller had cause to take comfort in the time-warping obscurity of rural life. He was illegitimate and his redoubtable mother, Evelyn, refused to give him up for adoption. To mask the shame she had brought upon them, her wealthy family invented a subterfuge: Evelyn had a mythical sister who had married a Dutchman and moved to Holland, where both had died in a car crash. Evelyn had adopted her orphaned nephew, who was to call herTanta, the Dutch word for aunt. This when the word bastard was the biggest term of abuse in the Edwardian code of social conventions, and to be exposed in such a state could be deemed a fate worse than death. Tanta moved with her son to a house on the Bryanston estate in Dorset, where she was to help reorganise the gardens around a palatial Norman Shaw mansion for Lord and Lady Portman. Bim had the freedom of the park where he could play with the Portman children but preferred to wander with his sketchbook. Aged six, skipping piano lessons in Blandford, he was spotted by the town architect and offered encouragement. When Tanta discovered her son's defection from music to art, she hired the architect as a drawing master and bought a box of oil paints. Bim was expelled from boarding school when his illegitimacy was discovered, so they returned to London, where he enrolled at St John's Wood

WILD DORSET

43

Art School before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools. Tanta ran a lodging house whose paying guests included the pianist Clifford Curzon, a student of Harold Craxton, who led them to Acomb Lodge. Bim also visited the St John's Wood home of fellow student Leslie Hurry, an undertaker's son, to draw embalmed corpses in the funeral parlour. Friendly with American art student Andrew Wyeth, Bim followed him for months of painting and farm labouring in Pennsylvania. Then he moved to New York to work for a publisher and paint portraits on the eve of the Wall Street Crash. His job folded, he slept rough and ate in a soup kitchen before being taken on by a merchant ship to work his passage home. Shabby and emaciated, Bim found a refuge with the Hurrys and a friend in Amy Faulkner. Although making only a meagre living as an artist, Amy pooled commissions and connections with a needy artist nine years her junior. They worked jointly and singly on illustrations and stage designs; when they were hired, in 1933, to restore sets at the Alhambra Theatre for Les Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo, they were engaged to be married. Tanta rented a cottage at Compton Abbas in Dorset -where John went for respite care during his unhappy term at Clayesmore School. Bim longed for his childhood scenery, so he and Amy moved to Minchington after marrying, and John soon joined them. Bim was to manage the Eastbury Estate for Ronald Farquharson. He bicycled to work along six miles of lanes and woodland tracks, a journey revealing locations for plein-air painting on days off. The biggest estate of the district, Rushmore, near Tollard Royal, belonged to the Pitt Rivers family, the last lords of Cran borne Chase. They ensured that, in the middle of nowhere, John Craxton had fallen on his feet. For the Pitt Rivers Museum, in a Tudorised Victorian building originally a gypsy school, was an easy walk from the Waller cottage. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers had formed and exhibited two vast and idiosyncratic collections: the first can still be seen in its own museum in Oxford; the other rose like a mirage in the Dorset countryside until a 1960s scattering. As he recovered from the matron's knife, John walked again and again the mile to Farnham and a world of wonders - shortly after the dismissal of a larger-than-life curator named Trelawney Dayrell Reed. In a cabinet of curiosities he had been the most curious exhibit of all. John would meet him later. Inspired by Charles Darwin's concept of biological evolution, General Pitt Rivers had amassed artefacts from prehistory to recent times so as to demonstrate evolving material culture. The result was an Aladdin's cave of archaeological, ethnographical, social and art-historical finds from Cranborne Chase and points all over the planet, presented in what looked to be eclectic and eccentric profusion. Here John, blind to the founder's theories, educated himself. Sunlight streamed on to treasures in display cabinets with dunes of dust. The lesson was that precious things should be part of everyday life and not shrouded in reverence.

44

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Mummy portrait of a young man from Hawara, Egypt, c.100 AD Wax encaustic on wood panel, 40.3 x 17.6 cm. Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (formerly in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Dorset)

Cycladic female figure, c.2700-2400 BC Marble, 21.9 x 6.5 x 4.5 cm. Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (formerly in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Dorset)

Amid glories of creativity from so many cultures, John felt most affinity with Ancient Greek art: elegantly elongated female figures carved in marble in the Cycladic islands four or five millennia ago; pottery with spiralling patterns from the Minoan civilisation of Crete around 2000 BC; pots painted with everyday scenes during the Classical period heyday of Athens in the fifth century BC; Fayum panel portraits from Roman-era Egypt, when the prevailing artistic culture of the eastern Mediterranean remained redolently Greek. The last of these - intimate, full-faced likenesses showing people in the prime of life and masking the faces of the dead during mummification had a profound effect on John Craxton's art. All would combine to direct the future course of his existence. From now on he dreamed of the Mediterranean and yearned most especially for Greece. Rustic Dorset, as a magical dominion and a first step to life in the sun, seemed gifted by the gods. Here his aunt and uncle gave him the freedom to explore a secret world of art, nature, history and legend where archaeological remains and folk memory extended to depths of Greek richness - uniting

WILD DORSET

45

past and present, fact and fiction and firing a creative imagination. John bicycled with Bim to draw and paint all over Cranborne Chase. Although bisected by Roman and pre-Roman roads, its only surviving settlements are small villages and hamlets hidden in an apparent wilderness. In the 1930s the church bell at Berwick St John was still rung at 8pm from September to March, as a sound beacon for lost travellers bequeathed by a rector who died in 1746. Even today Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Blandford, Wimborne, Ringwood and Fordingbridge edge the Chase like border garrisons. For 500 years from the Norman Conquest, the territory had been guarded as a royal hunting forest for deer, with similar rights then controlled and contested by a clutch of powerful local clans for three more centuries. Between the wars traditional ways of living from the landscape were still active on Cranborne Chase: foresters and gamekeepers in the woods, shepherds and farmers on downs and combes, watercress-growers in chalk streams and potters on clay seams. Ancient wooded tracts were managed in the old manner, with annual auctions of hazel coppices among makers of woven sheep-hurdle fencing, and moss gathered for packaging. Woods were designed for deer; stands of elms, furnishing country chair seats and coffins, were festooned with rookeries. John was especially fond of a tract known as 'the dark wood', with spreading oaks, ashes and yews spanning the centuries. The trees bore silent witness to battles waged between keepers and poachers or soldiers and smugglers into the nineteenth century. He roamed in the Larmer Tree pleasure grounds laid out by General Pitt Rivers around the hollow ruin of a wych elm with an oak now at its centre. Here King John's thirteenth-century huntsmen were reputed to have met. The grounds held a classical temple, open-air theatre, bandstand and buildings from the Indian Exhibition at Earls Court in 1890. Now the exotic concoction was falling romantically apart. Beyond the park the cottagers whose stories the young John Craxton relished were at one with their slumping dwellings and the burial mounds and defensive ditches imprinted on the landscape. Like characters from Thomas Hardy novels, some could quote verses by nineteenth-century poet-priest William Barnes in Dorset dialect. When John first saw Cranborne Chase, in 1934, Paul Nash was researching his Shell Guide to Dorset, in which he would liken the county to a masked face 'composed of massive and unusual features; at once harsh and tender, alarming yet kind, seeming susceptible to moods but, in secret, overcast by a noble melancholy - or, simply, the burden of its extraordinary inheritance'. Looking back on his youthful wanderings, John wrote: The Dorset landscape is not an obvious physiognomy but, like a person, has many hidden aspects - the mysterious enigmatic earthworks, tumuli and barrows, the atmosphere of conspiracy from the great days of smuggling still lingers, the deep, impenetrable forests with King John's hunting lodge to prove that time is ever relative.'

46

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

BEAUTIFUL VISITS

Since he was barely 15, John's education remained a problem. A solution arrived when Harold accepted Jane Howard, granddaughter of the composer Arthur Somervell, as a piano pupil. Five months younger than John, she haq fallen ill as a result of bullying at a boarding school. Her mother's governess was summoned from any idea of retirement and it was agreed that she should also take on other school-allergic pupils. Jane Howard's ultra-romantic nature was fixed forever when she played Juliet at 14 - the year she wrote her first play, shared a governess with John Craxton and fell for her piano teacher. The pursuit of love was the leitmotif of her life and its recurring disappointment; if she ever found the passion, devotion and drama she craved, bliss never lasted. It remained the central, complex and conflicted theme in her graceful novels, written under the pen name of Elizabeth Jane Howard. Jane's mother danced with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and never loved her; her father was a would-be abuser when she found a safe object for a chaste obsession in her piano tutor. Harold dedicated a piece to her and took care to wear for their meetings the sweater she had knitted him - a typically courtly response to an adolescent crush. She met the artistnaturalist Peter Scott at 16, married him at 19 and wrote most of her first novel, The Beautiful Visit, before her 21st birthday. The story's 16-year-old heroine has a composer/piano teacher father and an 'incurably romantic' mother facing the disapproval of her upper-class family for marrying a lowly musician. Here in essence is the story of Harold and Essie Craxton. Miss Cobham, the governess, was old, obese and myopic. Miss Milliment in Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Cazalet Chronicles, she ignored appearances, her own included, to share a joy in learning. She powered above her bulk and age, trotting to and fro in her Ladbroke Grove classes. Everything else was relaxed. A loose daily timetable began at 10.30am and concluded three hours later, with a Friday luncheon party. Endlessly patient and tender, Eleanor Meredith Cobham had high intelligence and wide knowledge, never pressing subjects her charges found irksome - so John, gladly rid of algebra and grammar, missed a grounding in Latin and Greek. The tutor drew her pupils into discussion on any topic they fancied, imparting fascinating facts and ideas in Egyptian history, Italian Renaissance art, the French language, plays, poetry and novels. Jane shared her interests in drama and literature with

BEAUTIFUL VISITS

47

Carol Beddington, whose father, Jack, was publicity director for Shell. Thanks to him, the sides of petrol lorries bore bold modernist posters by the likes of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and John Piper; many of the artists he commissioned also became his friends. For once, John failed to pursue a useful connection. Absorbed in his own art, he still enjoyed spying for exhilarating images on tankers travelling the roads between London and Selsey. John and Jane visited museums, galleries and theatres together; but concerts ended after a mortifying incident in the Queen's Hall. A performance of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony had barely begun when Jane turned to John and loudly demanded: 'Hold me very tightly. I am going to cry.' At Acomb Lodge she had privileged access to the jackdaw's nest that was John's small bedroom. It glowed with antique rugs and objects bought with pocket money supplied by Daisy Holland when his parents were out of funds. Gifts included Greek and Ottoman artefacts - Grand Tour souvenirs from Smyrna and Constantinople, collected by his Faulkner grandmother. An antique marble Buddha sat on a scrap of orange velvet left over when Essie made a party dress for Janet. The carving had been a present from family friends in Richmond on condition John carried it home. He took Jane on treasure hunts to Caledonian Road market where, for tiny sums, they scooped up Tudor manuscripts, Turkish slippers, Chinese embroidery, illustrated books and Old Master prints and drawings. Their interests merged when Acomb Lodge staged its January review, with sets, costumes, make-up and full houses of paying audiences to aid the Musicians Benevolent Fund. Folding doors between the morning and drawing rooms were opened to form a stage and auditorium. The Craxtons played to their talents: Tim sorted the seating- borrowing benches from Lord's and ensuring that 90 spectators could be squeezed in for each show; Antony was producer and announcer; Robin wired spotlights, dimmers and batons of footlights; John designed and painted scenery (Ali Baba, the Pied Piper of Hamelin); Michael and Janet sang and acted; Harold donned Edwardian costume to perform ballads such as 'Silver Threads Among The Gold'; Essie greeted and waved off everyone at the door. Despite displays of serious musicianship -with recitals by promising pianists and an operatic aria - the atmosphere was vaudevillian. Tim's friend Teddy Barford excelled at comic sketches and the Craxton boys devised shadow plays behind sheets, with one plot enacting an operation in which a string of sausages was extracted from a patient's stomach. Harold handled encores with burlesque aplomb. By now he had appeared on major platforms with the most distinguished musicians -violinists Jacques Thibaud and Joseph Szigeti, cellist Pablo Casals - and edited Beethoven's piano sonatas with Donald Tovey. In Acomb Lodge reviews he played the children's tune 'Three Blind Mice' in the style of any composer suggested by his audience and performed the 'Sleigh Bells Gallop' with bells strapped to his wrists. In January 1937 Aunt Sylvia, always the first to panic, told Amy that 'No. 8 was looking more like a circus than ever' and adding:

48

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

The Pied Piper of Hamelin stage backdrop, c.1937 Oil on canvas, 216

x

285 cm. Craxton Family Archive

The family are now having meals in the studio as there is no other spot. The play is supposed to take place on Monday but none of the family know their parts - or what they are going to do ... Some of John's scenery which I saw seemed quite lovely. After the performance she added: 'The show last night went better than I expected ... John's done some very effective new scenery ... he did some very rhythmic & effective movements as an Indian priest.' Jane Howard recalled this production with delight: One Christmas the Craxton family put on a production of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. John did all the scenery, which was enchanting and remained in the dining room for weeks; the household revolved around the play. John and I spent those weeks dressed in turbans, long silk robes, pointed slippers and elaborate beards that involved a good deal of spirit gum. 1 Then there were recitals, receptions and gatherings of the Harold Craxton Club - drawing colleagues, friends and neighbours including composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, conductor and cellist John Barbirolli, evolutionary biologist

BEAUTIFUL VISITS

49

Julian Huxley and his wife Juliette, painters Laura and Harold Knight, and actresses Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft and Jean Forbes-Robertson (the 1930s Peter Pan). On Grove End Road the party spirit ran through the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler. For most of the Craxton boys and their friends the growing military threat signalled an even bigger adventure. During the Munich Crisis Tim helped Teddy Harford to make a pretend armoured car out of plywood in the garden shed; Teddy then painted it grey and drove to Denham Studios to sell it as a film prop. The vehicle was rejected, so he drove it back again. At 16 John was engrossed in his private world of painting. Most middleclass mothers, hoping for safe career ladders from which their teenage sons were not to deviate until comfortable retirement, would have been at their wits' end. Essie got to work ever harder on her network. She knew the Manchester Guardian art critic Eric Newton, champion of modernist artists such as Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. Just as she had once arranged for John to show his archaeological finds to Mortimer Wheeler, now she set up an inspection of his drawings by Mr Newton. The critic saw potential in the work and had sympathy with the artist's aim to study life drawing while going it alone as a painter. As John later put it, 'I didn't want to acquire a ready-made Burton suit of paint'. He was directed to Iain Macnab, founding principal of the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Pimlico. Even this forward-looking tutor had to enforce an art-school rule that no student could look at a nude model before the age of 17. The 16-year-old was advised to wait- but actually sent packing. In 1938 Eric Newton wrote the catalogue for a memorial Redfern Gallery exhibition for Christopher Wood, whose work, eight years after his death, was also being shown in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Kit Wood had been the only English artist of his generation to infiltrate the core of European art and society. He had drawn with Picasso, designed for Diaghilev and painted and partied in the French capital and on the Riviera. Pursued by demons, with an opium habit and a revolver in his pocket, he leapt under the Atlantic Coast Express as it roared through Salisbury station one summer day in 1930 when he was 29. This was John's stop on the journey to Amy and Bim and the association never left him. Kit Wood became a hugely romantic figure for the young Craxton, and the memorial catalogue his ongoing guide. An initial pointer was to Paris. Students walking to St John's Wood Art School passed Acomb Lodge. John had already spotted the 'long El Greco face' of John Minton, whose air of tragic dynamism struck a warning note. Now he met the rampageous April Pollard, who told him of a pending migration from 'The Wood' to Paris, and an art school with life classes open to all. Her father had flown General Franco from the Canary Isles to Morocco in 1936, to muster troops for the Spanish Civil War. April in Paris threatened more trouble abroad. Student friends John Minton and Michael Ayrton had been drawn to Paris by a backlash to Cubist-based abstraction now emerging in the poetic forms of

50

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Surrealism and Neo-Romanticism. The key Neo-Romantics were the Russian emigres Eugene Berman and Pavel Tchelitchew and Parisian Christian Berard - a theatricality in their lyrical work making them all accomplished stage designers. Berman in particular added a sense of melancholia in images of lonely figures in blasted landscapes owing something to the eerie, symbolladen Greek ruins of Giorgio de Chirico - the Volos-raised and Athens-trained painter of Italian origin who had influenced and then infuriated the Surrealists in Paris. Such visions of devastation suited the tension of the times and captivated the two now former art students who wanted to meet their heroes and work in the creative heart of things. John and April, however, were out for their own adventures. In the spring of 1939, Essie wrote to Nina Milkina's parents in Paris to secure open-ended accommodation for her wanderer son. Sick on the ferry l and exhausted when met at the Gare St-Lazare, John was delivered to lodgings with Admiral and Madame Court and their three children at 11 Villa du Pare de Montsouris - a mansion in a private cul-de-sac beside a landscaped park laid out in 1869, just ahead of the Franco-Prussian War. Here, in the southern 14th arrondissement, with all of central Paris within walking distance, there was calm before another storm. Charles and Germaine Court let a garden studio to the Milkins. Sophie, Nina's mother, was an 'elegant, super-grand White Russian lady'; her father, who had now changed his name from Jacob to Jacques in French fashion, had studied under Ilya Repin, the pre-eminent Russian artist of the nineteenth century, and had left behind a substantial reputation of his own when they fled the onset of Stalinist terror for Paris. Reduced circumstances had done nothing to diminish their sense of style, with a sheet draped across their single room like a grand curtain to separate living and working spaces. 'They had such nobility', John said. On the mantelpiece there were 'good Russian things' and Jacques's work was everywhere. Entertaining, and encouraging about John's drawings, he advised cutting a hole in cardboard as an aid to focusing on a subject. It was in Paris that John found he had an instinct for perspective. Jacques said presciently: 'One day you will design beautiful ballet decor.' Madame Court paid John to eat cakes in the park to spare her children bad habits. Family and guests sat down to magnificent formal meals including foie gras and a speciality Armagnac from Madame Court's family estate in the Gers. 'One day an aviator came to lunch - a World War One hero who had been in a crash and flames had eaten away one side of his face', John said. 'He was frightening, but I managed to sit there without looking appalled. We had leg of lamb with garlic cloves sticking in it, and whenever I saw a leg of lamb after that I thought of his ravaged face.' The prevailing mood was more lighthearted and, 80 years later, one of the Court sons, Michel, could still remember meal-time laughter during John's stay- as when the conversation turned to love and the lodger placed a handkerchief over his mouth to make comic kissing impressions with his lips. After settling in, and sampling the

BEAUTIFUL VISITS

51

attractions, John sent Harold and Essie a letter with an ink drawing of Notre Dame cathedral: It is a very nice family and I am getting on very well with them, they have the most marvellous yoghurt, cream of chestnuts, fromage blanc, vin ordinaire, delicious French salads and some dishes which even Mrs Cooper [a sometime cook at Acomb Lodge] has never dreamt of?! Please for goodness sake send some money to me. I have only 9 francs left after seeing all the sights - Notre Dame, museums and tasting the best out of practically every boulangerie in Paris. Even the faithful Essie, performing daily housekeeping feats close to the biblical miracle ofloaves and fishes, might have gulped at news of a son spent out on the pastries of Paris. He never let on that he was being bribed by his hostess to gorge in the park - and for all his sweet excesses he would return home thinner than ever. Introductions beyond the Milkins and the Courts had come to naught; April Pollard had been virtually stretchered home after falling ill on the field of bohemian action. Paris was his to discover in his own way: I travelled everywhere on my own; never got picked up by anybody. I bought a seventeenth-century wooden angel for the equivalent of a few shillings and fell in love with the place. It was all absolute bliss for me. Georges Braque lived near the Courts and John never knew it. He walked past buildings unaware of their significance in his later life - one in the Rue du Bae, where a rich young aesthete called Peter Watson was assembling a fabulous collection of modern art. He wandered oblivious past Picasso's studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, where Guernica had been painted. On the Right Bank he explored the Louvre and roamed to Montmartre, where avant-garde painters had first gathered. Usually he took the shorter walk to Montparnasse, where the most interesting writers and artists mingled in the Dome, Flore and Select cafes, and he never stepped inside. His goal lay in the heart of this creative district in the Rue de la Grande Chaumiere. Here Paul Gauguin had worked, Amedeo Modigliani had died and Minton and Ayrton now had a studio. John's goal was the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. Founded in 1904, the art school without barriers had already featured teachers such as Antoine Bourdelle, Fernand Leger and Ossip Zadkine, and pupils from all over the world including Modigliani, Alexander Calder, Balthus and Alberto Giacometti. Many went unrecorded since, separate from the tutored classes, the main appeal was a life-drawing programme where anyone could turn up and pay small fees at the door - for a three-hour pose in the morning, two 30-minute stints in the afternoon, and ten-minute sessions throughout the evening. In a gaunt high room with a north light, and with chairs and easels gathered around a stove,

52

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

there was silent concentration on the model of the moment. John may have coincided here with two young Scotsmen called Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, who had begun and were now ending a touring scholarship to the Continent in Paris, with cheap lodgings close to the school. No words were exchanged. After 'pink-faced embarrassment' at his first sight of a naked female model, John was absorbed in the task of depiction: 'I had lovely hand-made paper and I tried to draw with a pen in the single-line Augustus John style. It wasn't much good. But I was off the top diving board, realising how difficult it was.' To be sure of getting the most that progressive Parisian art tuition could provide, he also dropped in on life-drawing classes at the Academie Julian in the arcaded Passage des Panoramas. The Louvre lay handily en route. He never met the artists with whom he would later be linked in the British Neo-Romantic movement, nor mentioned seeing the work of their steering spirits in Paris. As he began to hone skills in portraiture, he was drawn to Old Master paintingJ in the Louvre, and especially to two artists of the French Renaissance: Frari\:ois Clouet and Corneille de Lyon. The latter introduced the half-length portrait to France and favoured a direct gaze for minutely realised yet enigmatic figures. Since no works were signed, and only one fully documented, John could delight in the art of detection - as well as his penchant for part of a story remaining a mystery. Crossing the river via the ile de la Cite, he wandered along the quays and into Notre Dame and Saint-Chapelle - the thirteenth-century royal chapel and religious reliquary of majestic Gothic grandeur. One balmy June day, two months into his stay, he was shocked to find the great stained-glass windows being removed. War was plainly imminent and now he could no longer ignore the clamour from his parents to come home. In London he saw trenches being dug in Hyde Park. Six and a half years were to pass before John could resume his desired life on the Continent. For a few weeks he blotted out the warnings of war, thanks to family connections and precocious skills. The Craxtons were friendly with Russian emigre Lydia Kyasht. Described by one besotted critic as 'the world's most beautiful dancer', she had turned to teaching and formed a youthful company called Ballet de la Jeunesse Anglaise. Madame Kyasht must have seen John's decor for Acomb Lodge reviews because she now asked him to design sets and costumes for a ballet due in the West End's Cambridge Theatre in early September. He wrote to his aunts: 'It is the first big job I have ever done & you can be sure I am thrilled about it.' The astonishing break for a 16-year-old would be one of the first casualties of war. He consoled himself with a first publication - designing the 'Great Thoughts' calendar for 1940 compiled by Aunt Sylvia and printed by CW. Faulkner & Co. He also delivered to the family firm an engraved woodblock for a Christmas card, then reported to Bim and Amy that 'as they somehow destroyed half the design by burning it away the whole thing looked a mess'. Rather more burning and mess lay in store.

BEAUTIFUL VISITS

53

-

::_,, "

1/

~it'/;

t•

A PRIVATE WAR

On Monday 2 September 1939, the day after Germany invaded Poland, John sent an urgent appeal to Amy and Bim. He was stuck in Scotland, sketching in a ruined cathedral church and feeling as forlorn as his surroundings. Harold and Essie had left their son with an architect friend. 'I'm stranded in St Andrews with no money & with all my lovely antiques in London', he wrote. 'If I arrived in Dorset would [you] be able to put [me] up?' Where syntax failed, he hoped a drawing of himself with suitcases might win sympathy. A PS was unlikely to spur the Wallers into action: 'I shall probably be in London when this letter gets to you. How are you? Im simply flouryshing. Tell George I would love to take the cottage during the war even if mummy said no.' More of George later. Minutes after the declaration of war, on 3 September, air-raid warnings sounded in London - the first of many false alarms during an eight-month 'Phony War'. Civilians were issued with gas masks in stringed boxes, to carry on their shoulders at all times. John's was mostly forgotten while his art materials were always remembered. In the first year of conflict he was beset by family battles. After managing to reclaim his mother's attention and return to Acomb Lodge, he found the household even more mobilised than usual. Pupils had been lost, lodgers were enlisting and the Craxton finances were near to bombing. Essie hoped to take the younger children to Selsey, but the bungalow lease was nearly up and could not be renewed. At 16 Tim Craxton had run away to Croydon Aerodrome, begging to train as a pilot. Fobbed off by an apprenticeship with the de Havilland aircraft manufacturers, he joined the Royal Air Force at 19. Now he was having the time of his life - a Spitfire and Gauntlet fighter pilot at last. Tim left two dogs in Grove End Road: Hawker and Fury. Amid all the tensions of the Phony War, two ofJohn's brothers grew more and more hostile to his irresponsible way of being. As John admitted: The whole of my early life was just spongeing off my parents. Through thick and thin I was allowed to live at home, or subsidised to stay with friends and relatives, in order to paint. Only Antony and Robin thought that I should get a job and stand on my own feet. My mother did all she could to advance my career, but it was my father who really loved

56

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

having a visual artist in the family. We were part of an impoverished bohemia and being a painter came easily out of that. I could have gone to the bad very easily. Having that antagonism from my brothers was a positive help because this gave me a reason to work. It shouldn't just be handed on a plate. Perhaps his older brothers had also fathomed the state of John's personil affairs. Having turned 17 that October, he was picking up antiques and also starting to be picked up by antiques dealers in Lis son Grove and Kensington Church Street. A taste for erotic adventure was sharpened by the air of possibility in the blackout. His seducers - if such they were, given the readiness of the younger party in each liaison -were risking long jail terms. The age of heterosexual consent in Britain in 1939 was 16; homosexual sex was illegal, even in private, for anyone and this part of the legal code was enforced with vindictive vigour. John Craxton was far from alone in finding the illicit an added attraction. Given the threat of sudden death in an air raid, many became sexually active as never before and took their exciting and consoling pleasures where and while they could. Determined to paint above everything else, John knew that he needed help with the drawing that would underpin his art. Although his early resistance to art schools had produced a virtual veto on the St John's Wood Art School a street away from Acomb Lodge, he had come to admire the co-principal Pat Millard-tutor and mentor of John Piper and John Minton, friend of Harold and Essie. Early in 1940 he decided to join the patrician teacher in his new billet at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, now amalgamated with Westminster School of Art. What was known as the Central Schools occupied imposing purpose-built premises in Bloomsbury's Southampton Row- the building seeming ever more of a beacon for the arts, and for civilisation itself, as the nearby British Museum was shut, dark and empty. It proved a scary refuge since, save for twice-weekly trips with kind Mr Millard to draw animals in London Zoo before their evacuation to Whipsnade, John was taught by the acerbic Bernard Meninsky and near-mute William Roberts: All the boys and girls around me were in thrall to Meninsky and Roberts. They were marvellously good. I was so envious of the drawings and

A PRIVATE WAR

57

paintings they produced to mimic the work of our tutors. Later on they just sank without trace. Looking at one of John's feeble but imaginative efforts, Meninsky said: 'You can't draw at all, but I will help you because I admire your father.' On the student's mauled sheet of paper he sketched with swift fluency a female figure, which John kept for the rest of his life. This was a lesson in itself, as was being open and vulnerable - pared down to the bare, nerve-exposed essentials where true creativity began. His happiest times during months at the Central Schools were in the sculpture classes he took to increase his understanding of form and volume. They were led by Eric Schilsky, the son of a Polish-French violinist and a friend of Aunt Amy. Schilsky's sympathetic temperament gave a nervous student confidence. One day he pondered John's carving of a cellist, then said: 'You are an artist.' That was enough. Now John had one of the luckiest breaks of his life. James Iliff, a music student staying with the Craxtons, was a discovery of Peter Watson - the wealthy aesthete who had fled Paris and launched the Horizon review of literature and art late in 1939 with writers Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. In April 1940 Peter telephoned James to invite him to the London premiere of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. The piano pupil had a late lesson, so handed the phone to John, who gladly took the ticket. In the foyer of the Queen's Hall, he felt he was meeting an old friend. After the concert, deep in conversation, John and Peter walked to the Kardomah tearooms on Piccadilly, where string quartets entertained the customers. Peter had an appointment with another protege, who turned out to be the poet David Gascoyne - 'a wonderfully handsome, romantic figure with a faraway look, who was recently the toast of the Surrealists in Paris'. Peter left the painter and poet to talk while he bought John a yellow tie. David Gascoyne had introduced Surrealist poetry to Britain. He had mixed with avant-garde writers and artists in Paris, witnessed the Spanish Civil War and helped organise the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 -where Salvador Dali would have suffocated while lecturing in a deep-sea diver's suit had Gascoyne not been swift to find a spanner and unlock the helmet. Despite such quick wits, he held to the Surrealist ethos of the supremacy of dreams and the unconscious, and when John met him was close to completing his finest metaphysical poems. That faraway look hinted at a deepening dependency on amphetamines. For all the romance of the doomed poet, John was captivated by the life-enlarging appeal of a new friend and patron -who was introducing an artist named Lucian Freud in the latest issue of Horizon. Peter (born Victor William) Watson had inherited a fortune from a thousand margarine-retailing branches of the Maypole Dairy Company, which he was pouring into a collector's passion for beautiful things and brilliant young men. He had what Connolly called 'a genius for gracious living', and his tall, slim, svelte-suited

58

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Peter Watson, 1944 Conte pencil on paper, 31.5 x 21 cm. Private collection

elegance was heightened by the glamour of the exceedingly generous. Peter had impeccable taste; his favourite word was 'delicious'. He gave out pleasure - sharing a 'wonderful feeling for food, painting, architecture, music, literature, poetry and style' -while saving an underlying melancholy for himself. Funding Horizon, and serving as its art editor, he was to prove the perfect connector for John Craxton. But not just yet. John now decided to decamp to Dorset, for life-drawing classes at Salisbury School of Art and Crafts. Amy and Bim had bought the next-door cottage, where Sylvia was already installed and John was to follow. He had no intention of remaining in the care of his watchful aunts and uncle. One of his first flings was with an artistic gay man called George Parker, who lived near the Wallers and was sufficiently camouflaged to be presentable to them.

A PRIVATE WAR

59

Trelawney Dayre/1 Reed by Augustus John, c.1918 Oil on canvas, 61 2 x 41 cm. Private collection

In the late summer of 1939 there was the suggestion that John might rent the Parker cottage for the duration of the war. The more attractive option was for George to stay put, in part as a decoy. Soon after bicycling over the hill for 'tea with George', John was taking off with his disreputable friend Trelawney Dayrell Reed to tour archaeological sites across Dorset and Wiltshire. This wraith-thin, darkly bearded and sometimes becloaked giant looked like a pantomime villain - and relished the risks of playing such a role to the full (right down to inflammatory red socks). How much of it was a comic act and how much the real thing was never quite clear. John adored him on sight (and sported brightly coloured socks ever after). Amateur archaeologist, poet, painter and authority on the pub game of Shove-Halfpenny, Trelawney had called on Augustus John in Dorset's Alderney Manor one teatime before the First World War, then stayed on for several years in a manner surprising to all save the Johns and the Craxtons. He modelled his character on the rumbustious artist host and also sat for a roguish portrait. When finally persuaded to move out, he bought nearby Wood town Farm -where he painted some artistically and sexually vigorous murals, and where he and a low-flying airman nearly came a cropper. In April 1927 it was reported that 'a gentleman farmer and artist aged about 38' stood accused of the attempted murder of Squadron Leader W.H. Longton. Trelawney had fired two cartridges into the air when an aeroplane called Bluebird shattered his rural peace. In May he was cleared of reduced charges of common assault on the pilot and malicious damage to the aircraft: farm workers swore that he had not aimed at the aeroplane; the fact that Bluebird was peppered with shot-holes matching the Reed ammo was discounted. The gentleman farmer also convinced a jury of his kind that a policeman had misheard him confessing to being 'half mad' at the Easter incursion. His cows had been left semi-demented and his mother and hollyhocks were upset too. The blameless gentleman's view was not recorded when, a month after the acquittal, Squadron Leader Longton and another ace racer were killed in an aerial collision within earshot of Wood town Farm.

60

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Trelawney was a wonderful friend and his own worst enemy. He could leave a pub full of soldiers rolling with laughter. In a bar-side discussion about class he had won John's lasting admiration by avowing: 'There are only two classes: the people you like and the people you don't like.' He was also prone to declare with incendiary wit: 'Buntin' does give one the opportunity of dressin' like a gentleman, but I've always thought the real test was how to undress like a gentleman.' When asked whether he had pigs on his farm, he notoriously replied: 'No. The boys have the pigs. I have the boys." Such flippant bombshells were bound to land the Wildean figure in tribulation, and he had been sacked as the Pitt Rivers Museum curator amid rumours that he did indeed have the boys. Allegations went no further than the local police station - continuing the defendant's lucky streak with the law. But word was out and Amy said: 'There's no smoke without fire.' Retreating to his farm, but not altering his behaviour one iota, Trelawney opened a plc!)].t nursery. His lorry was exempt from petrol restrictions and so, with his gardener serving as chauffeur, he gave John joyrides into ancient history and a new social circle. They motored to see fascinating figures such as Alexander Keiller - the Dundee marmalade millionaire who lived at Ave bury Manor, close to the stone circle whose study he financed - and Tancred Borenius, archaeologist, connoisseur and Apollo magazine founder. Also O.G.S. (Osbert Guy Stanhope) Crawford, a cranky old Marxist and archaeologist of the Ordnance Survey mapping ancient treasures of Wessex and beyond. O.G.S. was working on a critique of contemporary material society entitled 'Bloody Old Britain', an

Pots from Criche/ Down, Dorset, 1940-1 Oil on board, 24.5 x 34.5 cm. Private collection

A PRIVATE WAR

61

excoriating account never to be published. In 1938, as head of the Prehistoric Society, he invited the Nazi-persecuted Gerhard Bersu to England to excavate an Iron Age roundhouse at Little Woodbury, on the Cran borne side of Salis bury. John and Trelawney visited often, although the dig had been abandoned when war began since the Jewish Bersu was interned on the Isle of Man as an 'enemy alien'. In 1934 Mortimer Wheeler had started digging at Maiden Castle, near Dorchester - the biggest Iron Age hill fort in Britain. A stream of visitors over successive summers included T.E. Lawrence just before his death, Augustus John and archaeologists ranging from the esteemed Sir Arthur Evans, uncoverer of Minoan Crete, to Trelawney Reed and John Craxton. All were drawn by vivid newspaper reports of a battle of Britain from antiquity. The headline Wheeler discovery was a cemetery claimed to reveal the slaughter of Celtic defenders by Vespasian's forces after the AD 43 Roman invasion. It made for a powerful monograph in 1943, when Britain struggled again. In 1944 Trelawney was similarly to seize on the excitement of D-Day with his stirring book The Battle for Britain in the Fifth Century: An Essay in Dark Age History. That was also the year when his luck with the law ran out: he was fined half a crown for failing to carry an identity card - an ironic verdict since he proclaimed his inimitable identity wherever he went. Through Trelawney, John became friendly with Stuart Piggott, who lived with his wife, Peggy, on Cranborne Chase at Rockbourne. Both had been involved in important archaeological digs in the Ave bury area. Through Stuart he then met the British Museum curator (and future director) T.D. Kendrick, whose wit and breadth of interests - from Anglo-Saxon art to Victorian stained glass - made for an excellent guide and companion. Injured in the First World War, Tom Kendrick limped on long hikes to country churches, where John sketched and incorporated charcoal rubbings of medieval brass memorials into evocative, time-bending compositions. Already he found an affinity with Max Ernst and his experiments in frottage. In wartime Blandford oranges and bananas vanished from market stalls, then the market closed altogether. As a Dig for Victory movement engulfed even the wild reaches of Cran borne Chase, vast swathes of grassland on the downs were ploughed for barley, oats and wheat. On the Eastbury estate an assault began to clear 700 acres of 'derelict' woodland, with an arsenal of heavy machinery ultimately to include demobilised Sherman tanks. Local landscapes around the Chase and Salisbury Plain were strewn with air bases, army camps and training grounds, and the sinister Chemical Defence Experimental Station at Parton Down was close enough for discomfort. For John the most traumatic change was in people. He saw the innocence of Minchington villagers perverted by war into mean suspicion and fear. Since spies could be anywhere, as an official campaign reported, everyone was being spied on by their neighbours - and John by his relatives most of all. Amy and Bim then did a strange thing. Fearing that John was being

62

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

corrupted byTrelawney, they tried to tighten their hold via formal adoption. This was such an odd move that their daughter Elizabeth, born in 1941, would later wonder whether it revealed a closer bond than that between aunt and nephew. The indomitable Amy had suffered a 'nervous collapse' in the early 1920s, and retired to remotest Wales until returning, as feisty as ever, several months later. Could John have been Amy's son? It is highly unlikely, and in any case Essie - though happy to give all her children away for long periods -was not prepared to surrender her most indulged boy entirely. The takeover bid was dropped. Family conflict through the spring and summer of 1940 muffled dire news of wider war. When German forces overran the Low Countries from 10 May and defeated France in six weeks, John was personally affected by the fall of Paris. Like other Jews all over Europe, the Milkins had tried to emigrate as the Nazi threat intensified. Sophie was granted refuge in Britain but Jacques was rejected. Forced to choose between life with her daughter and other kin in England, and her husband, Sophie chose her spouse. Ahead of the German advance, the Court family moved south to the Free Zone of Vichy France, to which thousands of Jews were now fleeing. Admiral Court became a powerful area prefect. The indebted Milkins, possibly hoping that they might have French military protection, stayed on as caretakers in Villa du Pare de Montsouris -waiting for history to swallow them. Now joined by his sister Janet, John found the war with Hitler reaching as far as Minchington once the aerial Battle of Britain began in July. He was out sketching when a sniper plane opened fire in the lane, sending Bim into a hedge, Janet into a barn and Sylvia into hysterics in the garden. The local grocer, delivering bread, was thrown from his horse and cart and knocked out cold. When John came home one head was being bandaged and calm restored to all with cups of tea. Bim persuaded John to paint East bury House - the surviving service wing of a lost mansion designed by Sir John Vanbrugh in the early eighteenth century. After gaining permission from the resident squire, Ronald Farquharson, and setting up his easel in the drive, John was swooped on by the police. His picture was torn up and he was taken into custody as a suspected enemy agent. Amy secured his release and eventually an apology. Days after the incident a local farmer stopped supplying the Wallers with milk. The Meaden family, in the farmhouse across the lane, agreed to sell a daily pint - squirted from the cow into Amy's tin can. For unconforming incomers, rural areas in wartime gave uncertain refuge. A few weeks after John's arrest a policeman arrived on a bicycle and remained all day outside the Minchington cottage. He reappeared for several successive mornings, but even Amy knew better than to ask the nature of his surveillance mission and arouse more suspicion. When the Wallers learned later that they had been reported as spies they were all

A PRIVATE WAR

63

the more indignant because in 1937 they had snubbed George Pitt Rivers (grandson of the general) when he tried to recruit them into the pro-Fascist Wessex Agricultural Defence Association. As an air of paranoia prevailed, a couple of harmless eccentric neighbours went completely off their heads on hearing that they, too, were suspected traitors. Mrs Wilks turned up one day asking Amy to 'return my other eye as the German Colonel is coming to tea'. Mr Wilks patrolled the lane in his nightshirt, ringing a dinner bell and warning that the Chinese Red Army was in the vicinity. Deep in the countryside, demons were being unleashed. Trelawneywas now bombarding John with infatuated notes. 'No normal man writes so many letters a week', fumed Bim. The enclosures included drawings of John as a long-haired Adonis and Trelawney as a naked Pan drinking from a goat's horn amid his garden foxgloves. The sender was beside himself when no word came in prompt reply. In one posted envelope he sent a stamped and addressed card to himself and wrote on the reverse: I am {alive dead '' Kindly strike out whichever of these words is inapplicable to your condition. He must have received the longed-for answer before mailing because he himself struck out the word 'dead' and added 'laudate domini'. By 24 July 1940 he was hysterical, writing: 0 wanton John! I am so angry with you - FURIOUS. In twenty long years I've led a beautifully balanced life & then along you come with your clumsy cloven feet & kick the scales over ... You are THE MOST REVOLTING BOY THERE EVER WAS. What ages it is since I saw or heard of you. I keep looking in your crystal - and all I can see is a vivid flame darting about in an amorphous milky circle -which is - the flame, I mean - I suppose - YOU - but that tells me nothing I didn't know already. I must see you soon. I will think of a plan & let you know! Are you an unnecessary luxury?? - (see Interim Budget) - are they going to put a 24% tax on you? - I can hardly bear the thought -what a dilemma choosing between you & a glass of beer. He added a picture of John outweighing a pint of beer on a set of scales and the caption 'you see which I choose'. On 1 August - the day Hitler's Directive No. 17 vowed to intensify air and sea warfare against England 'to establish the necessary conditions for the final conquest' - Trelawney was euphoric: I've got your letter - Hurry! Hurry!! Hurry!!! ... Good Trelawneys go to heaven - I can make no promises - I am a Reed shaken by the wind -

64

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

I shall be just as obscene as opportunity demands - neither more nor less - so there! -you can't think how hungry I am - I chomp & foam at the thought of Saturday's rations. Amy and Sylvia wailed warnings like a chorus in a Greek tragedy- and fired back accusatory postcards. Then Bim confronted Trelawney when finding him with John in a Blandford street. He followed up the assault by dashing to London to inform Harold and Essie. Trelawney had already replied defensively to a card from Sylvia: I am sorry you disapprove of John's going about with me. I like him enormously & have a very high opinion of his potential capacity as an artist. My aim has been to encourage him in his work & to introduce him to such people and things in this county as would, I thought (& think) i assist in his mental development. ~ Now he went on an all-out offensive against Bim, charging him in a letter copied to Harold and Essie of a 'cowardly malignant lie' delivered from a 'morbid & abnormal state of mental instability'. His counter-attack alleged that Bim's real motive was jealousy over John's superiority as an artist. As tensions with his aunts and uncle seethed, John went to London with the allegedly wicked Trelawney plus a Mrs Joey Macdonald to show Essie the breadth of the Reed circle and conceal its actual focus. Joey drove them in her car with Trelawney's petrol. Essie found John's flamboyant friend amusing and charming. Since he was also an accomplished painter, she thought him a splendid mentor to her artful son. But then Trelawney could not resist sending his beloved a private poem of killing wit. If exposed, John's Secret would have exploded the poet's last secrets too: In Gussage Vale the hills are steep. (Mr Wilks was air warden there.) And the Gussage Brook runs still & deep. (Green beetles nested in Wilks's hair.) It was there I dwelt with my aunties twain

(And Mr Wilks he lived next door.) And I'll tell you how my aunts were slain. (Mr Wilks was the son of a whore.) After the flicks we thought it best, As the hour was late and petrol short, I should rest till dawn on George's breast And my two aunts said I hadn't ought.

A PRIVATE WAR

65

So I seized my two aunts by their hair (Old Wilks was ringing his dinner bell.) And took 'em and drowned 'em then and there (Old Wilks was tolling his death knell.) I held them down with a forked ash stake (Old Wilks's feet were echoing near.) Till the bubbles ceased to rise & break (Old Wilks was hollering out 'All's Clear'.) I pulled them out & bore them back (Old Wilks was snoring as loud as hell.) Their hair was dripping, their limbs were slack: I dropped them deep in old Wilks's well. Next day at eve policemen came To Wilks's house for to enquire. Said: 'You old bugger, you're to blame.' And they took him away in a Black Maria. They stood him in front of the Blandford beaks (0 Ronald squints at the tip of his nose.) And the squire said 'Grill 'im till 'e squeaks.' (What the squire says in Blandford goes.) So now I cultivate all my vices With never an aunt to interfere And indulge with George when a film entices (Old Wilks was hanged at Dorchester.) So there is peace in the Gussage Vale. No tongue nor bell affronts the quiet, Only a rattle & smell of ale As Trelawney approaches in Joey's Fiat. One ofTrelawney's letters ended: 'I long to see you. I've got 400000000000 things I want to talk to you about - & a book I want you to read.' Perhaps that tome was Richard Hull's best-selling darkly comic novel The Murder of My Aunt. From early in the war it was one of John's favourites. While his aunts remained unslain, the clan war continued. In the end John was forced to seek peace in London. At Acomb Lodge, on 9 September 1940, ongoing anger towards his Dorset kin was expressed in a letter addressing the 'malicious scandal engineered entirely by yourselves':

66

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

It is not uncommon for people who live most of their life cooped up in a cottage and without the chance of social life to think as you do ... you are desperately jealous, so jealous in fact that you do your best to prevent me going out. you invent suggest suspect and talk filthy lies and scandal in a vain effort to get my father and mother to sympathise with you and forbid me from enjoying myself...

As I am coming down as soon as I can, I realized that it was my duty to let you know my feelings in this matter. Lots of love, John PS The raids here are awfull. I sleep from 10 to 6 in an air raid shelter they: have bombed Tussauds into a heap of rubble theres not a pane of gl.iss left in Baker Street

A PRIVATE WAR

67

10) BANG IN THE BLITZ

Cocooned in his family drama, John had got himself home to London for the start of the Blitz on Saturday 7 September. Over 57 consecutive nights, in raids involving an average of 200 aeroplanes, the Luftwaffe dropped 18,291 tons of high explosives and countless incendiaries on the capital. Close to the Royal Academy of Music, Madame Tussauds was one of the first hits -with John Craxton among crowds finding a model of Adolf Hitler disappointingly intact amid the surreal carnage of severed wax limbs and smashed heads. He had yet to learn when he wrote his angry note to Bim and Amy that the 9 September toll through blast and fire included stores, offices and warehouses at 1-79 Golden Lane - the paper-packed premises of CW. Faulkner & Co., Essie's family firm, among them. Tim Craxton had been flying Spitfires in France - returning to England on 13 June, with a Distinguished Flying Cross, as German troops entered the Paris suburbs. When hailed as a hero he married photographer Pamela Booth, whose father taught with Harold at the Royal Academy of Music. The Battle of Britain could have done for Tim, had he not been headhunted for the Photographic Development Unit seeking out bombing targets in occupied Europe. He ended as a squadron leader on nocturnal North Atlantic crossings. While ever fearless, he found that his stomach was perfectly settled before each operation by a champagne cocktail. Unlike his marriage, Tim survived the war. Michael Craxton, aged 15, collected shrapnel during the bombing and stored the pieces in a tin - lifting the lid many decades on still unleashes a whiff of cordite and the stench of the Blitz. He also collected live ammunition. The most placid Craxton sibling later entertained his children by throwing bullets into a bonfire. Rather than chopping down an unwanted tree in his London garden, he blew it up. For John Craxton the war was really background noise. By October - and his eighteenth birthday- he was roaming around the Kent hamlet of Reading Street, near Tenterden. In half-timbered Ebony Cottage, he was being palmed off on yet more friends of Harold and Essie: the Shakespearean actors Harcourt Williams and Jean Sterling Mackinlay. They had been part of Ellen Terry's set and still lived next to her home at Smallhythe Place. John was intrigued by the shrine to the leading lady of Victorian theatre, then preserved by her stage producer daughter Edy (Edith) Craig, who lived in neighbouring Priest's House

68

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

with dramatist Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall) and artist Tony (Clare) Atwood in a lesbian menage atrois. The now-elderly trio and their distinguished neighbours were all involved in the Barn Theatre Society and its plays in Dame Ellen's converted barn. More drama lay in a rural setting, where John wandered with his sketchbook. That March, he had admired Graham Sutherland's painting Association of Oaks 1 as reproduced in Horizon, where two abstracted and anthropomorphised tfees seemed to lean together in whispered conversation. Now he was taken by a Monster Field feature by Paul Nash in the October issue of the Architectural Review, revisiting surrealistic photos the artist had taken in 1938 of two lightningstruck and storm-toppled elms: the jagged ogres prefigured crashed and burned aeroplanes. John tackled his landscape pictures with renewed vigour, depicting a ruined barn and felled trees when convinced that metaphor could convey more than a documentary image. Above all, however, the uprooted tree was an emblem for his sense of self. Torn from his creative life in continental Europe, he now fretted about conscription. The noise of war was coming nearer. Later that October he manoeuvred his way back to Dorset and sprang a sly plan of escape from claustrophobic Minchington. Amy was now pregnant, so the problem ofJohn was no longer the priority. After a stint in the Blandford Food Office, Bim Waller would be mostly absent during the war. Injured as a despatch rider in North Africa, he was invalided back to England where his leg wound festered - until Amy denounced the hospital doctor as a Fifth Columnist. Bim was then posted to the Bletchley Park decryption centre for enemy codes and ciphers. With everyone else preoccupied, John plotted with Trelawney so that

Monster Field by Paul Nash, 1938 Photograph, 8.5 x 12.7 cm. Tate

BANG IN THE BLITZ

69

he could live with Stuart Piggott at Priory Farm in Rockbourne. Essie approved, since Stuart and his wife Peggy were well-connected, erudite and pleasant with wealth enough to feed an evacuee for free. Unknown to Essie, the Piggotts lived in a mariage blanc. While possibly not quite a disinterested party, Stuart became a benevolent guardian for John's desired development. Stuart took John to meet his neighbour, David Cecil, at West Hayes - a historic house spread around a large library. The perfect host, David Cecil (Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil, second son of the 4th Marquess of Salisbury) looked like a Modigliani portrait. A literary historian and fellow of New College, Oxford, he exuded sympathy, curiosity and wit. Asked to describe Virginia Woolf, he replied: 'A cross between a Madonna and a horse.' Here John met the writer L(eslie) P(oles) Hartley, who had been in love with David Cecil since a first meeting in Oxford in 1919. Their intimacy ruptured with Cecil's marriage to Rachel Maccarthy, but the friendship was lifelong. Hartley had a fortune built on his father's fenland brick business, and he had been living as a socialite novelist in Venice when war forced him home. He rented the medieval Court House in Lower Woodford, Salisbury, with a landing stage to the River Avon; but the gondola lover was dismayed to find boating now forbidden. Deep in the melancholic life of an exile, and his most productive period as an artist, L.P. Hartley was presently working on The Shrimp and The Anemone. It would lead to his masterpiece, The Go-Between, with the deathless opening line 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' In the summer of 1941 he moved to West Hayes as the Cecils wanted the house for only a few weeks each year. Hartley was a close friend of the novelist Leo Myers -whose daughter, E.Q., was currently lodging with the Cecils at Rockbourne together with her three small children. Leo was begging her 'not to be too frivolous, as it is unsuitable to current events' when, as David Cecil remarked, it was the one thing they were all trying hard to remain.' John was instantly drawn to E.Q. when they met at West Hayes. Her mother was an American heiress - her railway-pioneer grandfather founded Colorado Springs - and Leo, her father, a high-living leftist who, John said, had the Daily Worker delivered by a butler on a silver salver. She had married into the Nicholson family of artists: her architect husband, Christopher, known as Kit, was the son of William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, brother of Nancy and Ben Nicholson and brother-in-law formerly of Winifred Nicholson and currently of Barbara Hepworth. E.Q. trained in textile design and then worked with Kit on interiors. With similar wiry hair, round glasses and electric energy, they looked more like siblings than spouses. Theirs was a marriage of shared taste, where coolest modernism was warmed by a crafted, humanised and individualised touch. In Kit's constructions it was as if the Bauhaus school of Walter Gropius had been tempered by Edwin Lutyens - builder on tradition and friend of the Nicholson family. Now, with Kit away in the war, E.Q. had brought their children to shelter in a Dorset bolt-hole from the Blitz. Although she was 14 years older than John,

70

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

they met as youthful equals. He adored her restlessly creative energy and drive to mould life as she wished - including a vehement rejection of her birth names, Elsie Queen. He helped her to look for a wartime base, and together they found Alderholt Mill House, beside an old watermill still grinding corn on an island in the River Allen near Fordingbridge. They were both amused that the owner was a Mr Bacchus - imagining the wild parties he might throw in their honour. Not a bit like his Roman mythological namesake, he did at least have a daughter called Daffodil. Bacchanalian revelry was more likely to occur at nearby Fryern Court, where Kit Nicholson had designed a studio for the painter and carouser Augustus John, but invitations were not extended. In late November, bang in the middle of the Blitz, Grove End Road was hit. Amazingly, Essie was home alone when a bomb fell in the next garden. The blast wrecked the house that had been Number 6. Antony, having stepped outside to watch the unfolding raid, leapt for his life. With pipes and winqows shattered, Acomb Lodge sustained further structural damage demanding eventual demolition. Essie and Antony escaped unscathed, as did Harold's two concert grand pianos on a floor of smashed glass. The Craxtons were lucky and John was luckiest of all. When E.Q. and her family moved to Alderholt Mill House in January 1941, he was allotted the attic. Domestic harmony with the Piggotts had been strained by black ink spilt on a valuable carpet. John and E.Q. set to work painting over the chocolate-brown woodwork and dreary wallpapers of the previous occupant in bright white and blotting out red-brick fireplaces too. E.Q. was an 'instinctive transformer' and in no time she had created a haven of 'optimism and light' with Nicholson paintings (by William, Mabel, Winifred and Ben) on the whitened walls, and sofas and chairs, cushions, curtains and bedspreads in fabrics with mostly organic motifs designed and printed either by E.Q. (who had studied batik in Paris) or Nancy Nicholson working from her own lino blocks. What John enjoyed as a 'glorious nonconformity' - making for an air of joyful freedom - came through inspired juxtaposition of the antique, austere, hand-made and light-hearted: The furniture in the large living room was an unlikely mixture of distressed, painted Regency chairs, strictly functional Alvar Aalto tables and stools, a Breuer chaise-longue and a large Marion Dorn carpet. Along one wall was a huge architect's plan chest, above the fireplace a superb Winifred Nicholson and on the fireplace E.Q.'s amusing collection of white kitsch rococo vases which looked at their best filled with snowdrops.' What the new tenants called 'the Millerie' was also a house of music. E.Q. introduced John to twentieth-century works by Berg, Poulenc, Roussel, Satie, Tippett and Kurt Weill, and converted him to jazz via the Benny Goodman Quartet, the Gramercy Five, Lionel Hampton and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. Mr Bacchus may have disappointed in the party department, but soon E.Q.'s dance music drew American airmen from a nearby base -who taught

BANG IN THE BLITZ

71

their hosts to jitterbug. John became addicted. His only public statement save for his art during the war was to be a sardonic letter in the News Chronicle after the athletic partnered dance was decried as debauchery. E.Q. had grown up with 16 servants; so caring, with scant help, for two evacuees, three children and John Craxton was a tall order. Not naturally maternal, she overflowed with fun by way of compensation. And further to escape the strictures of war, she took up painting- producing, under John's influence, simplified images of pots, fruit and flowers as well as garden views and landscapes strikingly like his. She said: 'We really had rather a pleasant war ... Looking after the chickens and gardening and painting. Looking after John Craxton and the children.' 3 Thanks to E.Q., John was now getting into his artistic stride as a landscape painter. 'It was in her hospitable house that I really started to find myself', he remembered - adding: 'The great elemental landscapes were too monumental for me at the time, and I preferred the more intimate places: metamorphic fallen trees, mill-houses and cart-tracks were closer to my temperament.' 4 He now made a first sale of a drawing - to an illustrator of children's books and china, and friend of E.Q., who lived in Wiltshire's Savernake Forest. Mabel Lucie Attwell and John enjoyed the joke when her innocent captions acquired double entendres in more knowing decades to come. Through the menaced spring and summer of 1941, John moved between Alderholt and London. The Craxtons had regrouped round the corner from Acomb Lodge at 8 Abbey Road Mansions, in a four-room flat plus kitchen and bathroom. John's tiny bedroom overlooked recording studios opened by Edward Elgar in 1931, where musicians could be seen chatting and smoking in the yard. He was now working on his first solo show, thanks to a neighbour who ran the Swiss Cottage Cafe. An emigre from central Europe, she aimed to re-create grand continental cafe culture in what the artist called a 'peeling stucco greasy spoon'. He supplied seven paintings and told E.Q. that prices of up to six guineas had 'caused a sensation in the family'. It would have been more sensational had anything actually sold. That August - nearly two years into a war bringing nothing but retreat and siege, and with a lull in air raids only because Axis forces were now sweeping through the Soviet Union - no one was in a buying mood. John did at least meet a young Greek Cypriot actor named Michael Yannis. Later he would become Michael Cacoyannis, director of the film Zorba the Greek. Cultural London had virtually shut down at the outbreak of war, with museum, theatre and concert-hall closures. It was a call to action for Kenneth Clark, who would become one of John Craxton's most loyal patrons. Born into enormous wealth and isolation, he had taken refuge in pictures - emerging as a collector and connoisseur who held that art was the preserve of all. Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from the age of 27, where he arranged an extension funded by an anonymous benefactor (actually himself), this phenomenon was appointed director of the National Gallery, in 1933, at 30. A liberal humanist -who once said 'We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and

72

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

disillusion just as effectively as by bombs' - he went on to fight a shining cultural war against Fascist darkness. Once the Trafalgar Square gallery had lost its treasures to a disused Welsh slate mine, the director oversaw an unparalleled enjoyment of beauty in a building of empty frames. He set up the War Artists Advisory Committee, allowing 200 creative talents to work as official war artists and some to exhibit on freed-up National Gallery walls (though his main motive was to save their lives). Here Henry Moore unveiled his uplifting drawings of nocturnal shelterers in the London Underground. The sleeping figures were cast like petrified volcanic victims of Pompeii, except that these reclining human forms were still resolutely living, carrying on in a new normal in the eye of the Blitz: everyman and everywoman at our most extraordinary. John Craxton saw this and other displays of contemporary art - admiring work by Graham Sutherland and Joh~ Piper in particular - in the marvellous, makeshift schedule of wartime. ~ · From 1942 the popular exhibition series ran alongside a rolling 'picture of the month' programme where a single work from the permanent collection was reclaimed from subterranean safety to hang amid unprecedented illumination, with removal to the basement each night. When in London John never failed to soak up the instruction in a solitary masterpiece from the past. He would always remember his arrested astonishment on first seeing the Nicolas Poussin painting of a bacchanalian revel before a statue of Pan - a vision of Arcadia in a world of war. John was introduced to Kenneth Clark thanks to the wider musical family of the Craxtons being enlisted into what became the National Gallery's foremost wartime campaign. Pianist Myra Hess, an old friend of Harold and Essie, organised 1,698 morale-raising lunchtime concerts and performed in 146 herself - a Jew of German origin airing German music (Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann) through the Blitz and beyond, when the Trafalgar Square gallery was hit nine times. At the debut recital she expected to be booed for her alien name and programme, but everyone cheered. Harold made several appearances and his pupils many more; Nina Milkina played Mozart-whose birthday she shared. As well as the musical menu, John recalled tea-and-sandwich lunches served by 'la-di-da ladies from Chelsea'. Asked later why an audience above 750,000 had relished such an uncompromising score, Dame Myra said: 'Everybody was very busy during the war and there was nobody to tell the people that this sort of music was over their heads. So they came and liked it.' 5 Only a few would have recognised, among all the visiting musicians, Kenneth Clark occasionally playing the triangle. Now everything was coming together for John Craxton just when it was in prime danger of falling apart. Still, there were significant near misses. James Iliff, the Craxtons' lodger, had been at Bryanston School in Dorset - on the estate whose groundsTanta Waller landscaped-with Lucian Freud. Told by James that John was someone he should meet, Lucian had turned up at Acomb Lodge. John was in Dorset at the time, so Lucian had left a note - but they were not to meet

BANG IN THE BLITZ

73

until many months later. In the meantime, John had dropped a line to Peter Watson from Alderholt. The patron replied with ideas and advice on painting: I am sure the only really important thing is to submit to a certain discipline in drawing when learning and then to do exactly as one feels naturally inclined. In such a time as this everything is permissible: the difficulty is to do anything successfully... Great painting must have a synthesis of conscious & unconscious, of prose as well as poetry. Also the poetry in a picture is not necessarily in the execution or in the subject. It is an essence which only the superior painter can impart ... I tend to admire works by those who have great experience oflife (Goya, Michelangelo, Delacroix, Picasso). It shows in their work. I agree that each new work must be a new adventure, a new discovery. Life renews itself every day and always comes back to strengthen the creator however much he may despair at moments ... Yes, telephone me when you come up. I will be happy to see you again: we will talk Hurrying back to London, and dispensing with the phone call, John made a beeline for Palace Gate in Kensington -where Peter Watson lived in an ultramodernist flat designed by Wells Coates, a follower of Le Corbusier. The door was opened by a 'swarthy, Spanish-looking gentleman' whom John took to be the butler. This was in fact the painter Robert MacBryde, whose artist partner, Robert Colquhoun, appeared later. The two Scots exiles were lodging in the one-bedroom flat, testing the largesse of their momentarily absent host to the limit. They slept and worked in a long living room amid art by modern British makers Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Christopher Wood, John Tunnard and the unknown Lucian Freud - alongside others by Klee, Renoir, Soutine, Picasso, Miro and Max Ernst. At Palace Gate the Watson boys saw Horizon proofs and kept up with recent artistic developments in France and the rest of Europe via Cahiers d'Art, Verve, Minotaure and Revue Blanche magazines. There was new music to hear (Bart6k, Berg, Schoenberg) and books to borrow - John catching up on missed reading through steadily devouring works by Kafka and Rimbaud, Ovid's Metamorphoses and illustrated art tomes on topics ranging from the late Gothic German Renaissance and Giuseppe Arcimboldo - the sixteenth-century court painter who constructed bizarre imaginative portraits via gorgeously rendered assemblies of fruit, vegetables and flowers - to Poussin, the North African journal of Delacroix, and Picasso's neoclassical period of the 1920s. All this, and then the art education regularly altering on the walls. Like Peter Watson, the two Roberts disdained the basement shelter during air raids, preferring to risk it amid the art and artists - or out on the razzle in the world of waifs and strays. Deciding that John needed to be taken in hand, to

74

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

complete his social education (he retained a look of deceptive innocence), they guided him around the pubs and clubs of Soho. All hell could break loose in their drunken company, with punches and glasses thrown. John was treated kindly- the Roberts approved of his art and he had the protection of their patron, who paid for their beer and their breakages along with everything else. The heart of Soho lies in four parallel streets - Wardour, Dean, Frith, Greek -with Old Compton Street running across them. Home to the illicit and exotic for centuries, this unsquare mile is bounded to the north by Oxford Street, south by Shaftesbury Avenue, west by Regent Street and east by Charing Cross Road: a compact centre of artists and artisans, poets and prostitutes, craftsmen and criminals; a sensory world of otherness whose traits and flavours have been ever changing (French, Italian, Jewish, Greek, Cypriot, Chinese). Through all the changes, the childhood home of William Blake, in Broadwick Street, , survived until the 1960s. ~ · For the two Roberts and so many more, the bohemian glass overspilled beyond Oxford Street into the pubs ofFitzrovia and north-east to Bloomsbury and the Museum Tavern opposite the British Museum. John Craxton was an eager explorer here, though for him the main attraction was always the talking rather than the drinking. He found further appeal in the foreign foods served in and around Soho - also being taken by Peter Watson to Wheeler's in Old Compton Street, where home-grown oysters (Pyfleets, West Merseys, Whitstables) went unrationed through the Blitz. The twin wobbly pillars of Fitzrovia were Augustus John and Nina Hamnett, painter friends born in the sedate seaside Pembrokeshire town ofTenby and in revolt against its Victorian conventions ever since. John Craxton had already bumped into Augustus in The Greyhound pub in Fordingbridge when with E.Q. Nicholson. That had been an ordeal because the art celebrity was 'sozzled on gin - pink rats were jumping out of his eyes'; he had focused sufficiently to rail at E.Q. over the leaking roof of his Kit Nicholson-designed studio. Now in the Fitzroy Tavern, John listened as Nina talked of cavorting in Paris with Modigliani, Picasso, Diaghilev and Cocteau - trading memories for the next drink. Her current predilection was for sailors 'because they leave in the morning'. Augustus proved an even better raconteur; his enthralling memoir was being serialised in Horizon. At a Cezanne exhibition, with an arm around John's shoulder, he said: 'Wonderful to know when to leave off.' As John turned 19, Peter showed him the proofs of two sepia drawings from 1825 by Samuel Palmer, lately acquired by the Ashmolean Museum and now being reproduced in the November issue of Horizon with an appreciation by poet Geoffrey Grigson. John had never heard of Palmer and even in dull proof form Early Mornin.9 and The Valley Thick with Corn, inspired by the Kent village of Shoreham, were revelatory: exultant images rendered with crisp linear clarity and an enfolding light. The impression of bucolic abundance had a special potency in the nadir of war. Such a vision also demonstrated the might of the imagination, for Palmer-like the Norwich School artists John Crome and

BANG IN THE BLITZ

75

The Valley Thick with Corn by Samuel Palmer, 1825 .• :

Ink on paper,

18.2 x 27.5 cm. Ashmolean Museum,

Oxford

John Sell Cotman, whom the young John Craxton also came to admire - had produced his paradisal pictures amid rural unrest in the hardship following the Napoleonic Wars, when light in the countryside was fuelled by torched barns and hayricks. That October David Cecil asked John to paint a fireplace in his Oxford college rooms, prompting a turning point on a personal and painterly journey. A resulting tree in grey, yellow and green met the artist's aim for 'realism through abstraction'. Peter Watson went too, and they shared a hotel bed - leaving Peter to coin the word 'Kraxy' for sexy. John met friends of Peter, including the photographer and designer Cecil Beaton and Lord Berners composer, novelist, painter and grand eccentric. When John left to stay with E.Q.'s father, Peter went to the Arts and Crafts Wilsford Manor, near Salisbury, for a house party hosted by aesthete Stephen Tennant. Deeply smitten with his latest discovery, the patron wrote: My dearest Johnnie, How sweet and Kraxy you were in Oxford - even the awful bridal suite was quite transformed ... Here it is lovely. The house is more amazing than ever - pink & blue marbling everywhere, camellia trees in full bloom, Stephen Spender, E.M. Forster and Elizabeth Bowen to talk to - delicious. The war might not exist - in fact I think there is a conspiracy to keep Stephen Tennant from realising its existence. I hope I will see you on Thursday when I come to London. I hear you have been sleeping foal-like on the sofa. How nice. But please do not get me into a row with Mrs Craxton ... If you go to the flat remember to look at the

76

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Picasso and Altdorfer books. Take them away if you would like to borrow them as I want you to see them. Fondest love Peter But John Craxton had just found the book of his life. In Oxford he had dazzled the don Nevill Coghill, W.H. Auden's former tutor. Tall and leonine, Nevill was leading John along Broad Street in a beguiling spell of talk when he dived into Blackwell's Bookshop. Emerging minutes later, the magician presented a birthday gift - William Blake's Poetry and Prose from the Nonesuch Press, edited by Geoffrey Keynes and reprinted in 1939. John read the book from cover to cover, marking (and learning to recite) appealing passages and adding comments of his own. It was the ideal moment to come upon William Blake: He was the perfect person to latch on to in a war because there was this determination to do what he believed in. He was a romantic artist re-creating the world in his image, and a linear artist too. How true his words that 'the great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art'. John picked out a particularly appealing sentence championing art of the imagination over imitation: No Man of Sense ever supposes that copying from Nature is the Art of Painting; if Art is no better than this, it is no better than any other Manual Labour; anybody may do it & the fool often will do it best as it is a work of no Mind. Then his pencil found the passage that reflected his exuberant spirit but would land reader and author in trouble. They both loved to laugh, not least in mockery of the less enlightened. When repeatedly provoked, their targets were more and more likely to retaliate: Frequent laughing has been called a sign of a little mind -while the scarcer smile of harmless quiet has been complimented as the mark of a noble heart - But to abstain from laughter, and exciting laughter, merely not to offend, or to risk giving offence, or not to debase the inward dignity of character - is a power unknown to many a vigorous mind. I hate scarce smiles: I love laughing.

BANG IN THE BLITZ

77

11 DREAMER IN LANDSCAPE

John stopped laughing late in 1941 when a dreaded letter arrived at Abbey Road Mansions. Ordered to report for a medical examination, he was being marched into the machinery of war. His brother Tim was an airforce hero and Robin joined the army as soon as war began; but Antony - 6ft 3in and barely eight stone - had been ruled unfit for armed service and was now starting a BBC career. John was almost as tall and only slightly heavier, and for all his nervy energy he was often out for the count. He longed to be exempted from the army but, for once, doubted his luck. Summoned to a cold and crowded hall in Bloomsbury, on Tuesday 16 December, he awaited his turn in a cubicle made from suspended and battened sheets. He had with him the Blake volume and a pencil, and soon added two lines to the end of the text: The doctors come My hope is insignificant Then, over the last three pages and endpapers, he was driven in hours of extremis to compose four surreal poems. Each owed something to David Gascoyne in a nightmarish stream of subconsciousness. Two without titles were written in the queue to see a doctor: some concocted dream fantastic in its simplicity spectacles spectacles bare arms bare feet is this Crete this maze of whitened screens battened like a maze is the Minotaur walking this cotton maze this ersatz maze. He came out. He tried to keep himself up his lips were weak

78

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

my heart is weak Christ I am weak my heart sweats my mind breathes backwards like some bad dream the processes go on & forward. Where? In the big room lined with sheets to waiting sections sinister Hell? trial? Christ when will it end am I resigned the waiting heads crowned with matted Brilliantine expectant eyes - frightened sinister for us paper souls on paper futures in the ink pot pens that change a lifetime. Waiting it seems for nothing murmuring voices deathly padded movements Am I alive or is This death a dream The third poem, 'The Journey', was written after the examination, while John awaited judgement: walking jogging pushing forward to the turning point the made up death point - surely not death

DREAMER IN LANDSCAPE

79

on poppy day?The one Flanders poppy triumphant red glowing on every button hole on every breast an ersatz flower behind the flower an ersatz soul. Through the green[???] mind the Bloomsbury Drama draws nearer. The staked The abrupt ending suggests the moment that John was called to hear his fate. In his state of panic the military jargon made no sense, so a sergeant spelt out the medical verdict: 'You'd be as much use to the war effort as a three-legged horse.' While hanging on again for his exemption papers, on the grounds of supposed pleurisy, an elated John Craxton had time to convey his feelings in a poem called 'The Finish': my soul is at rest the play is ended the Hero comes through triumphant now he will go forward! onward! free! Rushing to the National Gallery to celebrate deliverance, he bumped into Eric Kennington. His old mentor was an official war artist for a second time, but John could not resist sharing his relief at being spared conscription. The shrewd Kennington said: 'You have to prove yourself an artist worth saving.' So John went home and, over Christmas week of 1941, produced his first masterpiece. Poet in landscape is an ink and watercolour drawing of complete conviction - the assurance of the artist proclaimed in every detail, and in the eviction of the indefinite article from the title. The foreground figure, modelled by Janet reading a book while seated on a chest of drawers, really refers to the artist himself studying William Blake during his army medical. The view of Samuel Palmer is here reversed: rather than finding refuge in a rural landscape, the closed-eyed poet is escaping from a field of menace into his own interior vision. Palmeresque corn sheaves have given way to seeding onion plants -whose skittle-like shapes the artist practised on endpapers of a second Blake volume - and they are being mown down by a marauding tree. Like the toppled yews of Kingley Vale, the horizontal trunk appears to have thrashed across the scene, where it has certainly punctured a leaf in a corner of the picture. Scythe-like branches reflect a crescent moon whose illumination reveals vulnerability and violence. Such romantic symbols were now known as 'Bomber Moons' for defying blackout rules and letting the Luftwaffe in. The

80

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Poet in

Landscape, 1941 Ink and watercolour on paper, 53.5 x 75 cm. John Craxton Estate

poster image for British Neo-Romantic art created months before the term was coined by critic Raymond Mortimer, Poet in Landscape was bought by Peter Watson. The following week, the first of 1942, saw a second tour de force of imagination and draughtsmanship. Dreamer in Landscape depicts a boy modelled by Felix Braun, a 16-year-old Jewish refugee from Vienna then lodging with the Craxtons. He and a brother escaped via Kindertransport; their sister was murdered. The figure, with eyes shut and fingers placed reflectively on face and temple, is retreating into himself from a position of moonlit peril. Twisting and writhing foliage seems to have been caught in a strafing searchlight and an exposed tree is echoing the defensive stance of the human model by hugging its branches around its trunk. Both drawings appeared in Horizon in March 1942, with the artist paid £lo for the honour. In February Peter Watson wrote: My dear Johnnie, I thought you would like to see your proofs ... Do me a nice white ink drawing will you? A big one - full of mystery. It's the only thing left which is not ersatz ...

DREAMER IN LANDSCAPE

81

I am sending you a cheque because I feel that you may need it and that you really deserve it. Those two pictures we are reproducing are really most remarkable - perhaps I have not been emphatic enough about them. You can be quite sure that there is no younger artist in this country or elder for that matter of your generation that can produce such work. In March he wrote again: My dearest Johnny, I sent off a copy of the mag and I hope it has been forwarded to wherever you may be ... I am pleased with the reproductions. I hope you will be too and that everyone including James will be proud of Johnnie. Your nice letter from Wales arrived. I am so glad you went there - it seems to be having a highly stimulating effect on you which is always good for one. There is little news to send you. I feel I die a thousand deaths every day but that is getting quite usual for me. Please let me know when you come back: London is even greyer when you are away. Fond love, Peter PS I have photographed the Sutherland gouache as I want to put it in the next number. PPS I have a new Picasso water-gouache, delicious. PPPS Read the Kafka story in the Horizon ['The Penal Colony']. It's marvellous. Appearing without comment, the reproductions alone announced a terrific talent. Horizon now packed a big cultural punch, with a circulation far weightier than its 8,000 monthly sales suggested. Limited by strict paper rationing, every issue sold out swiftly and copies were widely shared. Its main rival, Penguin New Writing, edited by John Lehmann and printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, had ten times as many sales thanks to big paper stocks. But Horizon would be better regarded and remembered. If the journal depended on the Peter Watson wallet, it was defined by the critical tastes and paradoxical personality of Cyril Connolly, who made most of the editorial decisions and whose social contacts became contributors. He entertained in style both at work and at home. John never knew who he might meet in Cyril's company, but could be sure of intriguing,

82

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Dreamer in Landscape, 1942 Ink and chalk on paper, 55 x 76 cm. Tate

influential arts practitioners and patrons - and unbounded hospitality bankrolled by Peter. The two illustrated images set a wartime Craxton pattern, where a solitary figure - called poet, shepherd, dreamer or dancer -was an emblematic selfportrait. But, however frustrated and dissatisfied, the artist was never lonely, let alone hermetic: throughout the Blitz - thanks in large part to Horizon's founders - he was in a social whirl. Art was from the imagination; life was for the living: Between 1941 and 1945, before I went to Greece, I drew and occasionally painted landscapes with shepherds or poets as single figures. The landscapes were entirely imaginary; the shepherds were also invented - I had never seen a shepherd. They were my means of escape and a sort of self-protection. A shepherd is a lone figure, and so is a poet. I wanted to safeguard a world of private mystery.' He had in fact seen shepherds in Sussex and Dorset but was also willing to erase any figure from an image to concentrate the power in the scene. In March 1942 E.Q. managed to save enough rationed petrol to reach Llanthony Priory in the Black Mountains of Monmouthshire. The Norman and Gothic priory,

DREAMER IN LANDSCAPE

83

Left: Moonlit Landscape, 22 March 1942 Gouache and ink on paper, 45 x 54.6 cm. John Craxton Estate Right: Photograph of Moonlit Landscape showing overpainted shepherd and dog

ravaged in Welsh and English battles long before the dissolution of the monasteries, was a metaphor for destruction and decay in depictions by artists from J. M.W. Turner to John Piper. John Craxton added a dramatic twist by conjuring up a tree to bear down like a battering ram on the ruins. This metamorphic war machine has every branch as a weapon - catapult, sickle, lance -with a lost limb on the ground a thrown spear. The split trunk seems poised to crush the priory shell like a walnut in a nutcracker. The overt human element is off-picture. It may have been a moment when John was least inclined towards the solitary figure. His relationship with E.Q. became so intense for a time that Lucian Freud suspected an affair. Another work from 22 March 1942, made in Alderholt, reveals a rocky Welsh or Dorset wasteland with oddly animal-like topography. When held up to the light one painted-over hill is shown to be a burial mound for a crouching shepherd and his dog, erased from the original composition and left to sleep beneath the pigment. On the same day John annotated a postcard of a hilly landscape with birds, cow, moon and foliage, and then he mailed it to Essie with the dashed off message: Thank you much for letter - hope to see razor soon. Could you post as soon as able - my clothes coupon book need 16 coupons - for cord trousers & new jersey which I have paid for & are still in Wales. Had a lovely time - doing a few pictures I need my old ration book -yes? love always John. An artist of rare independence remained a demanding son and sorely in need of further sponsorship.

84

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

JOHN AND LUCIAN 12

Shortly before Grove End Road was bombed, Essie Craxton had opened the door to a blitz of a youth with a German accent and 'long hair like Struwwelpeter' - the unkempt character in the nineteenth-century German children's story. His name was Lucian Freud. Told that his quarry was in Dorset, he left a note in a deranged scrawl promising to return. To a more conventional parent it would have read as a threat. ~ Lucian was evidently distracted even before blagging his way into the Merchant Navy and joining a North Atlantic convoy to Nova Scotia. His contribution to the war effort was really a quixotic bid to reach New York and track down Judy Garland due to a passion for The Wizard of Oz. Ill after a perilous crossing, and with no yellow brick road in sight, he decided against desertion and instead completed the dangerous homeward journey. He was then discharged with acute tonsillitis. After hospital treatment, he was relieved to be weak enough, and mentally alert enough, to fail an army medical. Legend claimed that examiners were spooked by his concern for a

Lucian Freud

JOHN AND LUCIAN

85

(non-existent) kitten and his fondness for fire. Someone once asked Lucian why he hadn't joined up and he replied with characteristic wit: 'Don't you know there's a war on?' In the meantime, John had tried repeatedly to contact Lucian -with the assistance of their mothers but without success. Now an amended compliments slip from the Cafe Royal arrived at Abbey Road Mansions. The monogram of the grand Victorian relic on Regent's Street, once the haunt of Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm and still an oasis for artists with a yen for faded glory, had been embellished into a heraldic shield incorporating vividly drawn horse, elephant, bird and human head. The printed message had been extended in a child-like script to read: 'With Mr Freud's wishes of wellbeing and of course The Cafe Royal's best compliments!' What an enticement. Then came the letter: Dear Jonny, How terrible that we kept on missing even the phone number at which you told my mother to ring you, when I rang they said one line has been out of order for six month! Thanks for your letter! I am just doing just finishing a picture of the hospital which is GOOD! I am going to ring you ... Monday before lunch at mai 1992, this little game that fate and the older generation of Craxtons is playing must be put a stop to ... My best compliments to Mrs C! When I ring my name will be Mr BRAHMSKATZ which I think sounds pretty musical and respectable. Love to Pete! if he's there Lucian As the letter was posted when the sender was about to leave for a Suffolk art school, the pen pals continued to keep a distance. Their paths finally crossed in London. And all at once John and Lucian were thick as thieves - co-conspirators against any kind of conformity or commonplace tedium; crazily creative and intelligent; allied artists working entirely as they wished. As John remembered: I was in Peter's flat one evening towards the end of 1941 when Lucian turned up, wearing a chic brown suit and looking very handsome ... He had incredible eyes and was very quick witted. He had a fantastic, riveting personality. When Samuel Palmer was 19 he had a seminal meeting with the 67-year-old William Blake. John's first meeting with Lucian was still more significant, since both raw visionaries were 19, John being the elder by just 66 days. Closer to lovers than brothers, they were spirited twins - although, even at their closest,

86

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

The Cafe Royal's compliments slip amended by Lucian Freud, 1941 Drawing: ink on paper,

17.5 x 11.3 cm

too individual to be anywhere near identical. Just then Lucian was working in the attic of a flat rented by the newly married Stephen and Natasha Spender at 2 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead; his own family lived downstairs. Now he took to dropping in at Abbey Road Mansions at all hours, to be taken under Essie's wing. Raised in Berlin until three months from his eleventh birthday, Lucian was famously the grandson of the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. He and his elder brother, Stephen, and younger brother, Clement, were born at 16-month intervals and given middle names of archangels (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael) by their parents, Lucie and Ernst. By their teenage years in England any sense of divine or mortal order had dissipated into rivalry and devilry - due chiefly to the tearaway nature of Lucian. Before he could articulate his talent, he was liable to express himself by lashing out with fists and feet.

JOHN AND LUCIAN

87

Like John, he had crashed through formal education, until removed from Bryanston after dropping his trousers in a Bournemouth street. He feuded with or froze out his brothers until they ceased speaking at all. Lucian chafed against the yoke of being his mother's favourite - flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, name of her name - and he was aware of the rumour, spread by Stephen and Clement, that he was the fruit of his mother's affair with an artist during a brief rupture in the parental marriage. Here the parallel between the two friends broke, for John was never remotely burdened by a primary claim on Essie's attention. Despite a lightweight reputation among his children, Ernst had rare foresight - arranging his immediate family's flight to England by September 1933, when the Nazi writing was on the wall in Berlin but few were minded to read it. A table of his design followed, with money in a hollow leg. Eager to replicate past happiness, Ernst, a Bauhaus-style architect of some note, created the Hidden House in Walberswick (after a holiday retreat on the Baltic island of Hiddensee), that Lucian alone came to hate. He loathed the Suffolk village's summer art colony- scorning 'all the amateur lady artists wearing amber necklaces'.' Lucian preferred the radical, French atelier-style East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, formed by artist-plantsman Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines in the Essex village of Dedham. When Ernst protested at the unsavoury pictures being produced, Peter Watson offered to pay the fees. Morris's portraits had been ridiculed as 'shrieking likenesses' and Lucian worked in a similarly strident mode -with roots far closer to German Expressionism than to France. His incendiary talent proved exactly that when, painting late one night with fellow student David Carr, smouldering cigarette butts were added to paint rags in a wastepaper basket and by morning the school had burned to the ground. Lucian continued to be welcomed, or at least tolerated, by the founders for a time and he went on to the school's final base at Benton End in Hadleigh, where John Craxton was a visitor too. Ernst's parents and other relatives had to be prised from Austria after its annexation by Germany in 1938, with a ransom paid by disciple and former patient Princess Marie Bonaparte -the super-rich wife of Prince George of Greece, who had been Commissioner for Crete during its transition from Ottoman to Greek rule. She then used royal connections to get the Freuds naturalised as British citizens in time to avoid wartime internment. Safe in 'lovely, free, generous England', the ailing Sigmund was installed at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead by September. Amid a careful reassembly of his Viennese flat, he wrote, saw a few patients and Salvador Dali, cherished his antiquities and died from jaw cancer a year later, three weeks into the Second World War. His ashes were left in an Ancient Greek funerary urn in Golders Green Crematorium. His estate was divided between his children, with Lucian and five other grandchildren sharing publishing royalties and each receiving a leather purse filled with gold coins.

88

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Lucian took John to Sunday lunches with his parents - then on to the Spender flat in the same building. The painters were snapped on the balcony with Tony Hyndman, Stephen's erstwhile partner, who hung around despite the Spender marriage to concert pianist Natasha Litvin in the spring of 1941. John already knew Stephen through Peter Watson and Horizon, and Natasha was familiar to the Craxton family since she was the illegitimate daughter of Harold's collaborator, the music critic Edwin Evans. Her piano playing won praise at Acomb Lodge, and she would always be grateful to Essie for cycling through the Blitz, formal dresses stuffed into her bicycle basket - riding to the rescue of young performers with severely rationed wardrobes. John designed a beautiful bookplate for the couple as a belated wedding present. Natasha, who had cause to feel excluded from so much of the life of her questingly homosexual husband, was grateful that, to the scorn of Cyril Connolly ('who thought you should never share your library with anyone, least of all your wife"), John had given the Spenders a joint dedication. From Lucian's family flat, he and John then went on to his late grandfather's house, nine doors away. Already the future museum resembled a secular shrine. Lucian's grandmother, Martha was now also grieving for her sister Minna, who had helped run the household in Vienna and London. Her devoted Austrian maid, Paula Fichtl, had lately been released after nearly a year's internment on the Isle of Man; her chow, Jofi, had served six months in quarantine. The house of mourning and exile felt hugely burdened but Sigmund's analyst daughter, Anna, and her friend Dorothy Burlingham, were keeping the Freudian legacy alive - seeing child patients, running the Hampstead War Nursery and tending the flame of psychoanalytical research. Lucian and John had access to the combined ground-floor study, library and consulting room containing Sigmund's personal relics. They took turns to lie on the legendary couch covered with an antique Persian rug, and inspected the late patriarch's extensive collection of ancient things - principally Egyptian, Greek and Roman figures. Loving the sense of harmony and healing in those perfected forms, he had compared the psychoanalyst's penetration of the human psyche, through layers of buried memory, with an archaeological dig. Among the 'old friends' facing Sigmund on his desk, so strokable as he talked or listened, John admired a statue of Athena smuggled out of Austria by Marie Bonaparte weeks before she returned for her mentor. Lucian was further drawn to the Freudian library of textbooks on medicine and criminology, and especially to illustrations of syphilitics and murder victims: he always had a taste for the macabre and grotesque. Meanwhile, back in Vienna and beyond rescue, Sigmund's four aged sisters were destined for death camps. For John and Lucian life was electrified in the present moment -with the promise of a bright future alongside the bracing daily risk of annihilation. They bicycled everywhere, with most danger seemingly posed by bits of metal from anti-aircraft guns. 'You heard them pinging all over the place.' Every morning and evening brought a new adventure. Jane Howard found out what that could

JOHN AND LUCIAN

89

mean when she and John went with Lucian to the seedy Mayfair enclave of Shepherd Market, where he knocked on a door: A lady answered the door of what even then I could see very clearly was a brothel. He said, 'Get us all a cup of tea dear, will you?' And she said, 'Of course, Loochie.' So we sat in a downstairs waiting room and had tea. 3 In the New Year of 1942, Peter Watson read an article by Joan Miro called 'Je reve d'un grand atelier' and concluded that John must also be dreaming of a large studio. So he wrote: 'How much do studios cost in this awful place? Anyway here is £50 for a start. Look for something delicious and let me know all.' With so many fleeing the London Blitz, rental properties abounded- and John found ideal premises at 14 Abercorn Place, round the corner from Abbey Road Mansions. In a stuccoed early Victorian terrace with Ionic columns framing the front door, a light and airy maisonette was available for £40 a year. A first-floor layout of front studio with balcony, back kitchen and storeroom was mostly reprised on the second via a front studio and back bedroom, and with a bathroom on top. Peter approved the discovery but had reservations on learning that Lucian was pressing to share it. ('Yes, perhaps it would be nice to have Luxic up top but you must be quiet or the muse will never call.') The benefactor backed the plan after John promised that the new base was for painting rather than partying. While John slept in the Craxton flat each night, Lucian seized the chance to escape from his family and moved into his new studio. John arrived early each morning and the pair worked separately in north-facing rooms until lunchtime, when they bicycled to the Warrington Hotel in Maida Vale -with a tiled, moulded and marbled interior reputedly a posh Victorian brothel - for its beer and jukebox. Then another prolonged work session until pub, club or cinema outings in the evening, and probably supper with the Craxtons. Of course they partied. The boon companions toured Soho, which Lucian already knew well. Dressed in baggy Merchant Navy-style blue jeans, they called at the Ritz bar on Piccadilly or the Cafe Royal on Regent Street, but their main haunt was the Coffee An', an

14 Abercorn Place

90

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

all-night cafe in an alley off Charing Cross Road. Boris, the chess-playing Russian proprietor, used the cryptic title for a suggestive promise (coffee plus talk, snacks and sex). John said: 'It was a rough house with porno-erotic pictures on the wall and an incredible range of customers: intellectuals, draft dodgers, people looking for a pick up.' During one police raid John and Lucian were briefly arrested as suspected deserters. Here they mingled with louche artist exiles from Paris: Surrealist painters Toni del Renzio and John Banting - Lucian being fascinated by the latter's syphilitic nose - and painter, model and muse Isabel Delmer. John tasted future freedom here: 'I went upstairs to a Cypriot gaming house and they gave me Greek coffee ... in this quiet place of escape from all the clamour below.' When the Coffee An' closed, Boris opened the Mandrake Club in Meard Street, where he held up the resident cat and bawled: 'The only virgin here tonight!' And they loved the York Minister in Dean Street- better known as the French House -with its benign patron, Victor Berlemont. 'Will you cash a cheque?' John asked. 'No', said Victor. 'I will lend you a pound.' Everyone smoked: John puffed away on Gauloises while others wheezed on Woodbines. At the French pub he developed a taste for Pernod. The lure for Free French forces stayed open while Soho became pocked with bomb craters. John was in the French pub on 8 March 1941 when, falling through a ventilation shaft, two bombs exploded in the basement ballroom of the Cafe de Paris in nearby Coventry Street. The blasts stopped the song 'Oh Johnny Oh' dead- killing crooner Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson and more than thirty musicians, diners and foxtrotting dancers. 'We all felt the shudder', John said. 'But it wasn't us, so we carried on.' 4 Opposite the French, St Anne's, Soho, a church consecrated in 1686, was reduced to a shell by three direct hits - leaving a remnant of Dean Street fac;ade and a tower on Wardour Street. The last blast also shattered every French pub window. James Pope-Hennessy called St Anne's 'the most melancholy and so the loveliest of all the air-raid ruins' but for John and Lucian it was a playground after drinks chez Victor Berlemont. They climbed the tower and, with Dutch courage, walked on exposed rafters like tightropes. They drank at Le Petit Club Franc;ais in St James's, ate patisserie at Maison Bertaux in Greek Street, and thought they had made another clever discovery next-door, in Rosa's restaurant, when joining French soldiers and sailors ordering steak and chips. On the fourth visit the steak was found to be horsemeat - Lucian's favourite animal. After that it was boudin and mashed potato at Chez Auguste in Old Compton Street. Seeing themselves as renegades, they enjoyed the company of outcasts and outlaws at a time when the blackout provided a cover for villainy. 'Lucian had great originality and devilment', John said. 'With steel-capped boots he would kick in plate-glass windows and yell in pubs about "Filthy Yids!"' He was responding not just to Hitler but to casual anti-Semitism in London. When wearing tartan trousers on the Tube, he was asked the name

JOHN AND LUCIAN

91

of his Scottish clan. 'I have no clan', said Lucian. 'Looks like the Jordan Highlanders', the questioner murmured to a companion. Lucian would sprawl in a gutter while John pretended to kick him until a passer-by cried 'Shame on you!' In thrall to movies, they were given a wide berth when re-enacting, in darkened streets, scenes from the German silent horror film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. As for money, Lucian had found and steadily spent the bags of gold coins left to him and his brothers by their grandfather. The emptied purses were brought to Abbey Road Mansions where John burned them. Soho held a peacock circus: the self-styled King of Poland, the racing tipster Prince Monolulu, red-haired model Quentin Crisp ('one of the stately homos of England') and Tamil editor/publisher Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu - also known as Tam bi or Tuttifrutti -who piloted the Poetry London periodical from 1939 with great flair, until drinking himself into disorientation and deceit. Tam bi was full of ideas and fantasies, expressed in a torrent of words, given further impact by staring and widening eyes and the bending back of big double-jointed fingers. Lucian's first printed work was for him - a drawing of a lyrebird as fierce as a phoenix. He liked the bird's gift for mimicry; still more the pun in its name.

92

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

BROTHERS IN ARTS 13

Very soon John and Lucian were inseparable - each being the first to comment on the other's art and drawing together in John's Abbey Road bedroom of an evening. Lucian was always scrounging materials. From using different sides of the same piece of paper they took to working on the same drawings, one continuing and finishing the other's preliminary efforts just for fun. At ~ times they seemed to be playing the Surrealist game 'Exquisite Corpse', where each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, having not seen what went before, to construct something weird and possibly enlightening. Lucian's random associations of imagery could look as if he were playing the game alone. The pair became so interwoven that it was unclear whose art was being influenced and how. John seemed the more proficient draughtsman. He certainly worked with greater speed and spontaneity, yet each had an original wit that spurred the other to fresh imaginative flights and feats of invention. Their bond bore out Oscar Wilde's dictum: 'Artists, like the Greek Gods, are only revealed to one another.' They admired and assisted each other enormously, enjoying differences as well as affinities. John longed to flee abroad but Lucian found England exotic. His foreignness was a further attraction. We respected our diversity. And nobody bothered us -we could just get on and paint. Lucian was the perfect antidote to London during the war as he had great joie de vivre and dedication to his painting. That we both influenced each other should be clear from the work of this period. It certainly wasn't an influence of style but of method and subject matter. He had a gift for scrutinising which I tried to adopt. He would never plan a painting, either in his imagination or on the canvas, before he started; there were no preliminary studies. He just put things in as they came along, hoping for the best. It often produced extraordinary results due to his exceptional personality. Both artists were drawn to avian imagery as emblems of freedom in an era of human entrapment since birds migrated across war zones to and from besieged Britain. The falcon-like Lucian would later keep hawks, pigeons and hummingbirds. John was drawn to nightjars seen at dusk on heaths and

BROTHERS IN ARTS

93

Landscape with Paet and Birdcatcher, 1942 Ink, watercolour and gouache on board, 51 x 76 cm. Private collection

woodland clearings across Cranborne Chase. He admired them as eerie symbols, with a mythic ability to suck milk from goats in the dark. They embarked on a series of portrait drawings and paintings of one another; loving images: sometimes near likenesses, sometimes more symbolic, and often fired with an erotic charge, particularly on Lucian's part. The Freud drawings of John could have a commanding presence, while never looking exactly like him. Early in their relationship John produced Landscape with Poet and Birdcatcher, where two figures appear as if in an allegory- in a moonlit ruin like Llanthony Priory. John is the seated poet and Lucian the standing bird-catcher. The poet-painter has signed and dated a fallen block of masonry as if it were a milestone - and this haunting picture was just that. In Landscape with Poet and Birdcatcher, Lucian holds a white bird with a broken wing. This may refer to Paul Gallico's novella The Snow Goose, published in 1941 and dealing with a bird-befriending lighthouse keeper who dies rescuing British troops from Dunkirk. A bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, the sentimental story helped galvanise public opinion in America in favour of entering the war. Now the goose has evolved into a gull or dove -with an obvious visual metaphor further blurred because

94

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

the catcher is wearing the pith hat of an African game hunter. It is unclear whether the holder is aiding an injured bird or has broken its wing in capturing it. With Lucian a lingering potential for violence often became actual. His taste for low japes and high jinx, fully shared with the pacifist John Craxton, was similarly prone to eruption. The Abercorn Place boys were amassing a collection of caps, hats and helmets as props for paintings and to hang in the hallway as part of the plot to unsettle visitors from the world of normality. In the life he wanted so passionately, John continued to be plagued by poor health. In a 1942 photo, where he is seen painting the walls of Lucian's studio bare-chested, he looks skeletal. Bim, staying overnight with the Craxtons, wrote to Amy: 'I saw John next morning at breakfast. He is more weedy than ever - but seems to be doing some very good work.' Often breathless and coughing, he was sometimes confined to bed with mysterious 1 debilitation; his energy seemed ambushed by all the excitement. Over each English summer he was afflicted with hay fever. In 1943 Lucian drew him in bed in Abbey Road Mansions during a bout of jaundice -with quinces savoured by both painters for legendary associations and symbolising the patient's yellow skin. Jaundice passed, hay fever came and went; but, late in life, lung X-rays revealed scars from youthful tuberculosis, almost certainly the true cause of his failed army medical. Craving Greece spiritually and emotionally, he needed a dry, hot climate physically more than he knew. He also needed to marshal his resources more than he did rushing for the midnight bus from Piccadilly to get home to St John's Wood or taking the last Tube from Oxford Circus. The two Roberts and other gay friends drank late then slept in all-night Turkish baths in Russell Square or Jermyn Street, but John was too nervous for that. On the Tube he might see George Orwell, known from Horizon parties, going home to Langford Place, off Abbey Road. Their chats continued in the Orwell flat. The novelist had published Coming Up for Air just before the war began and his masterpiece, Animal Farm, would appear soon after it ended. Pessimistic about politics, Orwell deployed an irreverent wit - daring to champion in Horizon the bawdy seaside cartoon postcards by Donald McGill that John loved. They had more in common than they realised, since both were consumptive. One would barely survive the 1940s; the other would be saved by Greece. Meanwhile, John was making the best of wartime London. Before the war he had trawled the capital's art galleries and, among Graham Sutherland paintings admired at the Lefevre Gallery he had loved a work called Steep Road. Now here it was, hanging in Peter Watson's Palace Gate flat, along with Sutherland's Entrance to a Lane: I couldn't believe it. I said to Peter, 'I remember that picture very well' and he said, 'It's for you' and he gave it to me. I was never more excited in my life. I went back holding it tightly under my arm on the bus.

BROTHERS IN ARTS

95

Self-Portrait, 1942 Ink on paper laid on card, 48.2 x 38.7 cm. Private collection

B ,v ,·n Bed with Fruit 0 by/ Lucian Freu d ' 1943 Ink on paper, 33 x 22.3 cm. Private collection

96

JOHN CRAXTO N·· A LIFE OF GIFTS

Graham Sutherland by Lee Miller, 1943 National Portrait Gallery

John had a 'total crush' on Graham Sutherland from first sight of his art. 'I felt such sympathy with the anguish in the pictures'. he said. 'His war . drawings were very exciting, too. His ---~~-( was a wonderful use of colour, so ·-~personal to him, impossible to copy. But he was hugely influential.' After gifting the Sutherland painting, Peter presented the painter too - arranging a lunch with the artist and his wife in The Ivy restaurant. Wearing a black woollen suit, pink shirt and green tie, the handsome hero was dressed like one of his pictures. 'I sat next to Kathy and she spent the entire meal talking about Graham, when all I wanted to do was talk to him', John said. They met again in Palace Gate, where the older artist paid close attention to the Craxton drawing Poet in Landscape. 'I wish I'd been able to do something like that when I was your age', he said. Graham Sutherland's manners were as good as his appearance, but beneath the surface charm he was more contradictory, with all the later prickliness of his pictures in his nature from the start. His warming to a young painter was a compliment since he tended to be wary, moody or worse where others were concerned. As Peter wrote to John in February 1942:

'

'.(.

Graham came to tea yesterday. He disconcerted me by stating his hatred of people in general. This is of course the reason why he never wishes to paint people. It is an attitude I am convinced is wrong. We must attain a new humanism or else the world will collapse into slavery for years and years. As you said, there is no man in the street. Everyone is very terrible but very wonderful too. Just as life is. Peter then set up visits to the studios of Paul Nash in Oxford and John Piper near Henley-on-Thames. John loved the symbolism and mysticism in Nash imagery, but most of all the individuality defying rigid labels. He also admired the way in which Piper's modernist sensibility had been drafted from abstraction in the late 1930s to record an architectural heritage in danger of being destroyed by war. John stayed with the Pipers at Fawley Bottom soon after the famous royal inspection of the painter's dark views of Windsor Castle - metaphors for Britain at war. The artist had been amused by George Vi's comment: 'You've been pretty unlucky with the weather,

BROTHERS IN ARTS

97

Mr Piper.' Pointing to blank paper sheets protecting the watercolours, the king had then asked: 'Snow scenes?'The blackened and blazing drama of Piper's depictions were echoed in Craxton pictures of this period. He acknowledged a lasting debt in lifelong friendship with the artist and his wife, Myfanwy: His marvellous enthusiasm for colours, textures, inks, was a revelation. He showed me colours that I had not known about, monastral blue, etc. How to lay paper down, where to buy bamboo pens ... I know of no one then or since who had a more penetrating understanding of what it was all about.' With the power of the Watson chequebook, John was able to act on a belief that his inventive art needed the best equipment and materials. He patronised Lechertier Barbe, at 95 Jermyn Street, a French company founded in 1827. The store supplied finest brushes, papers and colours still hand-ground by Newman's, a family firm operating in Soho in 1784. When flush with funds he grandly ordered a gross of bespoke pen nibs from Perry & Co. in St Paul's Churchyard. Even if shared with Lucian, 144 would have lasted out a very long war. He and Lucian also liked to buy up antique pictures from Lisson Grove saleroom at ten shillings (sop) or so for 50. They wanted the carved and gilded frames, the better if battered. The glass was strewn on the Abercorn Place entrance hall floor, where it gave them a frisson of pleasure for the disconcerting effect on visitors, who had to crack, splinter and smash a path to the stairs as if braving thin ice on a frozen lake. They also delighted in producing new works on old canvases - John once painting over a Landseer. But three Samuel Palmer etchings bought for 7/6d each (37.5p) were Craxton studio treasures. The two young artists stayed regularly at Alderholt Mill House. On 30 December 1942, E.Q. wrote to Ben Nicholson: John Craxton and the friend he now shares a flat with in London - Lucien Freud-were both here for about 3 weeks just before Xmas. It was v. great fun but quite impossible for 3 people to work in one house. Lucien is a painter too. He draws v. beautifully sometimes -I got on with my knitting. 2

AtAlderholt, Lucian drew Tommy the donkey and a study of John composing an illustrated letter with Kit's architectural plan chest in the background. The hash made of the Craxton hands confirmed Peter Watson's view that his proteges needed further training in draughtsmanship ('You need to know how to draw a hand before you can distort it'). Graham Sutherland recommended the life classes at Goldsmiths College. Peter paid the fares and fees. Under sympathetic principal Clive Gardiner, John progressed with fresh explorations of the tinted paper favoured by Renaissance and Old Master draughtsmen. His key discovery, in a New Cross art supplies shop, was a hoard of pre-war Conte pencils. He bought the lot and at once and forever

98

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

found his preferred drawing medium. Lucian, previously working with a mapping pen, caught the new enthusiasm. As John wrote to David Attenborough so years later: Of all the pencils it is for me the most sensuous and versatile. It was in direct revolt against the accepted HB and 2B lead pencils favoured by most art students and teachers at that time to draw models with. They stroked and smudged the outlines producing a sfumato line that gave the eye plenty of options. Both Lucian and I were determined to at least try one line right or wrong. They were taking their cue from Ingres, Seurat and Picasso. But since their shading was done with dots, the two artists were treated to derisive remarks l such as 'How's the measles?' As well as student mockery John was now subject to irate knocking on his studio floor from the tenant below. He was appalled to discover that this American man of wrath was the music critic Clinton Gray-Fisk, who, as a piano student rejected by Harold, nursed a grudge against the Craxtons. Even Essie noted that 'Clinton Gray-Fisk isn't as white as driven snow'. He had been driven by penury or prurience or both to act as chauffeur to 'prostitutes' padre' Harold Davidson - the defrocked Norfolk rector turned travelling sideshow performer who, as if a modern Christian martyr, was mauled to death by a lion in Skegness. Old Gray-Face was also becoming incensed with Lucian, whose girlfriends and malefactor pals arrived late at night and rang the wrong bell. Possibly it was jealousy. Anyway, he had good grounds for suspecting the Luce living that prompted the artist's later admission: 'You couldn't go out in the blackout without getting the clap.' 3 The friends were barely installed in what Lucian described as 'a most delishiouse flat' when he further reported: 'I had to dial 999 this morning in order to ask Scotland Yard to remove a threatining gangster.' 4 Even without a ruffian rumpus, Mr Gray-Fisk was disturbed by much crunching over broken glass. Soon John was hated most of all: He was angry that I wouldn't put a carpet on my floor to mask the noise coming through his ceiling. Also, he objected to my war work ... I depicted still-lives with croissants, liking their crescent-moon shapes. But I would arrive each morning to find my models had been eaten by mice. I decided that the answer was to feed the mice so that they wouldn't go to the trouble of climbing on to the table. This worked very well - so well that news got out and the mice brought in family and friends from the neighbourhood. In the end I was running a British Restaurant for rodents. Wasting food in a time of wartime shortage was shocking enough, but entertaining vermin was consorting with the enemy. For all his charm, John Craxton could be a neighbour from hell.

BROTHERS IN ARTS

99

Joan by Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1946 Charcoal drawing on paper, c.24 x 16 cm. Private collection

At this point he met a neighbour from heaven - the photographer Joan Eyres Mansell, who lived across the landing from Peter Watson. Six feet tall and willow slender, she had a light golden colouring save for eyes so blue they seemed like 'two bits of sky, and looking very far awayhorizon gazing'. 5 Elegant, empathetic and intellectual, Joan was the rebellious daughter of a Tory peer, independent thanks to money from her mother that she shared with her circle. One of a series of older women with whom the young John conducted intense relationships and perhaps fleeting affairs, Joan (ten years his senior) would prove the most loyal friend of his entire life -ultimately helping him to get to Greece, but for now taking him dancing. Estranged from her journalist husband John Rayner, Joan led the painter she and others dubbed Johnny (some preferred Cracky; he himself stuck with John) to chic London nightspots. They danced in Le Boeuf sur le Toit behind the National Gallery in Orange Street, named after the cabaret-bar haunt of avant-garde artists in pre-war Paris. Joan brushed aside the manager's protests that her guest was wearing sandals. 'It was a dream', he said. 'She was so sexy, so attractive; slightly aloof but the hint of bed.' Joan and John also went to David Tennant's Gargoyle Club - a Soho institution since the mid-192os, ranging over three upper floors and a roof garden at 69 Dean Street, on the corner with Meard Street, whose decor had been designed in part by Henri Matisse. The adventure began in a tiny lift, giving passengers the sensation of a jerky descent into the basement while they were in fact ascending. They arrived at a gleaming steel-and-brass staircase, rising to the clubroom modelled on the Moorish Alhambra palace in Andalusia - a now shabby vision in red set off with a gold-leaf ceiling. Thanks to Matisse, walls were studded with mirrored fragments from an eighteenth-century chateau; there was a fountain on the dance floor, and lanterns in suspended wooden gargoyles. Supper was served until midnight, but the main attraction for many was Alec Alexander's dance band. John would have preferred jazz. He loved overheard snatches of conversation - as when Graham Greene asked philosopher A.J. Ayer: 'Can you talk me out of Catholicism?' He played deaf when gay diplomat (and Soviet spy) Guy Burgess invited him to his flat: 'Would you like to be whipped, wine thrown in?' One of two major Matisse paintings hanging in the Gargoyle Club until

100

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

the Blitz, The Red Studio, was now with the Redfern Gallery after Tate trustees rejected it for £400. Peter Watson wanted the picture but it was too large for his Palace Gate flat, so John offered a wall in Abercorn Place. Peter, fearing a fatal impact on the young painter in his workspace, advised the Redfern Gallery to raise the price from £700 to £900, apparently aiming to deter his protege from somehow finding the money to buy it. Since John was pleased to sell Landscape with Poet and Birdcatcher for £15, there was practically no chance of that. Perhaps Peter's real purpose was to stop himself from relenting and giving his favourite young artist an amazing present. Amid Peter's well-meant machinations, one of the twentieth century's greatest pictures slipped away to New York and the Museum of Modern Art. Matisse drawings of ballet dancers remained in the Gargoyle Club bar, dubbed by David Tennant 'my unpaid cabaret'. For one night only, John was about to sleep with a modernist masterpiece, courtesy of a man in a modest Sussex flat who had 'a small but marvello4.s collection of Picassos'. On 7 April 1942 Peter Watson wrote: 'Don't forget that if you want to go to see Hugh Willoughby's pictures with me we have to go before the curfew descends again on Britain's south coast -April 15th.' They duly beat the cordon around Brighton and Hove, to John's delectation. For Willoughby was a most discerning art collector and dealer; he had lived in France and, by the late 1930s, was thought to own more Picassos than any other Britontwenty or so pictures - as well as works by Matisse and Derain. Athough some had been removed to the rural home of Sacheverell Sitwell for safer wartime storage, the core in the Hove flat included a coloured drawing for Weepin9 Woman - greatest of the pendants for Guernica, depicting Picasso's lover Dora Maar. John studied this study very carefully. Peter was seeking pictures for an Aid to Russia exhibition he was helping to organise in the modernist house of architect Erno Goldfinger at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead. The June 1942 show, opened by Madame Maisky, wife of the Russian Ambassador, would comprise 68 sculptures, paintings, drawings and prints by many of Europe's leading avant-garde artists, some on loan from the Watson collection. The roll-call included Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Barbara Hepworth, Paul Klee, Fernand Leger, Andre Masson, Joan Mir6, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Roland Penrose, John Piper, Kurt Schwitters, Graham Sutherland and Julian Trevelyan. There were also three Craxton drawings (Sawn-up Trees and Trees and Ruins sold, with John receiving half of the 22-guinea proceeds). Plus, Picasso's magnificent La Niroise oil portrait ofNusch Eluard, lent by Hugh Willoughby and insured for a colossal £1,500. John went by train to Brighton to collect La Nifoise, and then had the bonus of sleeping with the painting above his bed in Abbey Road Mansions overnight (not that he slept much through that exciting night with a picture whose colours were 'pinging and twanging like Spanish music'). Lucian was allowed to return it. All did not go smoothly, Hugh Willoughby being forced to make an insurance claim since somehow the frame was damaged in transit. Both John and Lucian were careless enthusiasts. Even so, that November Lucian

BROTHERS IN ARTS

101

was entrusted by owner Roland Penrose with delivering the Weeping Woman painting from Hampstead to Hove, where it was to be hung alongside its study drawing for an exhibition in the Willoughby flat. Lucian sent John a letter illustrated with a cigar-smoking lounge lizard in an armchair of Brighton's Norfolk Hotel as a waiter approaches with a tray of drinks: My dear Cragx What a swell lounge for a lounge lizird at the norfolk Hotel Brigton. Wee Giz! Quel Comfortiowent to see Willoughby is he mad why hes craad-mazy. Hes arranged to show his collection of Picassos in London the moment the bombs stop ... The address at the top of the page revealed that Lucian had pursued Lorna Wishart, the first real love of his life, to her marital home in Sussex. Youngest of seven beautiful, impulsive and implacable Garman sisters, Lorna had gravitated from the Black Country of the West Midlands to bohemia by way of

Letter from Lucian Freud, 1943 Waiter and lounge lizard drawing: ink on paper, 38 x 45.7 cm

102

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Bloomsbury. One sibling, the bisexual Mary, married roving and raging poet Roy Campbell; another, Kathleen, was the long-term mistress of sculptor Jacob Epstein (holding tight even when shot by Mrs Epstein - the bullet missing her heart but hitting below her left shoulder). Now Lorna was married to the Marxist publisher Ernest Wishart with whom she had two sons; an infant daughter was from her ongoing affair with writer Laurie Lee. Like Lucian, she knew no barriers to her desires and in this unfettered expression of will, wish and whim theirs was a perfect match - of the kind that when lit (by a spark of jealousy) could cause conflagration. John said: Lorna was the most wonderful company, frightfully amusing and ravishingly good-looking: she could turn you to stone with a look ... She had a kind of mystery, a mystical inner quality. Any young man wouldi have wanted her. 6 Eleven years older than Lucian, Lorna had married 'Wish' when she was 16 and had long since tired of his devotion. Soon after the lounge lizard sent John that letter, he and his lover were surprised in bed by her husband who, while hurt by a lack of tact, remained polite to Lucian. Laurie Lee was less magnanimous when he came across the couple hand in hand in a London street. Speeding to town in her open-topped Bentley, Lorna gave Lucian gifts that he worked into his art: garden quinces (reputed to be Aphrodite's golden love apple and the forbidden fruit of Eden); a dead heron found in an estuary; a stuffed zebra's head from a shop in Piccadilly. They gave each other an obsession, while neither was ever quite obsessed enough to dispel other opportunities. Lorna modelled for Lucian, as did her teenage son Michael. The influx of sitters into Abercorn Place included Nigel MacDonald, a future antiques dealer of whom Lucian produced especially sexualised images, and, in a sign of desperation, the aptly named Gerald Wilde. Another protege of Peter Watson, Gerald fibbed about being related to Oscar and the only survivor of a bomb disposal squad. He dressed in suit and tie while living a vagrant life. For a month he was put up in John's storeroom. His luggage was chiefly drawings, the best removed by his hosts for an exhibition plotted on his behalf. Gerald tracked down the framer, reclaimed the pictures and sold them in pubs for drinks. Around this time John returned to the family flat to find a note signed by Antony and Robin on his bed. In a Tube carriage while Robin was on leave from the Signals Corps they had seen a young man goading a teenager in a 'sadistic homosexual' manner; the assailant had been Lucian Freud. The authors wrote that unless John ended such a sordid association forthwith, they would cease to regard him as a brother. John told his parents and a family conference was called at which Harold said there would be no expulsions from his family while he lived. John then quizzed his would-be non-siblings. What had the

BROTHERS IN ARTS

103

victim of the train attack looked like? Robin and Antony described a podgy, rosy-cheeked Clement Freud- just as John had expected. He knew how far Lucian could go, in public and in private, to bully his younger sibling. The fact that Lucian had no behavioural boundaries was a big part of his appeal. On New Year's Eve 1942, John told E.Q.: I expect soon you will get to hear about [Oliver] Brown of Leicester Galleries arriving round at the flat at 9 in the morning, he found Luce opening the door completely nude. Never mind these artists! He picked out an oil & two gouaches for show this Sataday oh dear I will never be ready in time. 7 The pictures were for one of the Leicester Galleries' regular mixed shows featuring established and emerging talents under the title Artists of Fame and Promise. To John and Lucian the exhibitors were known as 'Artists of Shame and Compromise' - but John was glad to number among them. All the more so when he was singled out by the New Statesman critic Raymond Mortimer and made a first sale to a stranger (architect Ian Phillips). Oliver Brown returned to select works by both artists for the New Year exhibition of 1943. John's drawing of a solitary figure in Landscape with Rocks was reproduced in The Listener, whose critic, R.H. Wilenski, commented: 'Craxton gives us formal inventions conducive to some mood.' Attention like that was conducive to some celebration. Even Lucian was impressed.

104

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

EXQUISITE CORPSES

Tim Craxton had been stationed at RAF Duxford near Cambridge where his girlfriend of the hour, Joan Bayon, lived locally with her family at Little Shelford. Tim had introduced her to the approving Craxtons with every temporary intention of marriage. Her canny parents, Peter and Nelia, who liked Tim but saw long-term limitations, said they would consent to the wedding ifhe could save £100. The suitor lost the challenge after introducing Joan to his pilot friend Bill Smith. They fell for one another and Bill sold a sports car to meet the Bayon bargain. As Mrs Smith, and the mother of two small children, Joan remained a friend to all the Craxtons, and John in particular. From 1943 John took Lucian to Little Shelford to stay with the Bayons at King's Farm - a rambling house with a seventeenth-century core once owned by King's College, Cambridge. Outside there was a dovecote with a secret passage to the church, two Jersey cows and a field for horses beyond gardens rife with chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks and pigeons. The resident family and their dogs completed a spell of enchantment. High spirits had free rein; at mealtimes adults, children and canines cantered in the garden between main course and pudding. The Bayons stood out in a dour and insular rural neighbourhood riven by wartime suspicion. Of Swiss descent, Peter was an animal pathologist who spoke 14 languages in a foreign accent. That was enough for him to be reported as a spy- final proof being the red ribbon Joan and her sister put in a crab apple tree, surely as a signal to the Nazis. The suspect scientist specialised in chicken diseases, and corpses of fowls and other creatures were sent to him for dissection. If his autopsy revealed death from natural causes, the object of interest would be roasted for a family lunch - until John and Lucian came to stay. They had a new passion for stillest-life studies and a supply of dead animals was just what they wanted. Pheasants meant for the Alderholt Mill kitchen were also intercepted. Lucian worked so meticulously, stressing every scale, nail and feather, that the model was liable to putrefy before depiction. The energetic Joan Bayon fled from Lucian's entreaties to paint her portrait- fearing death by boredom. r

EXQUISITE CORPSES

105

Goose,

1943 Ink and gouache on paper, 47 x 64 cm. British Museum

Both John and Lucian splashed paint and ink on bedsheets, and Lucian set fire to his bed after falling asleep while smoking. Warned that a wild horse named Alice could not be ridden, Lucian took up the challenge: since the task was going to be so easy, he would ride her bareback and backwards. Alice reversed under a washing line, throwing an angry Freud on to the grass. He was irate when paintings he gave to Joan were stored in a stable and ruined when the roof fell in. For Joan's children, Ranald and Francis, John and Lucian were objects of outlandish interest. The visitors talked a private language known as eggy-peggy, so Ranald and a cousin invented a nonsense tongue of their own called boggledoze: We were very small and they were all terribly bright. Talk and laughter flowed. There seemed to be no silences. One morning we were having breakfast and the windows were open. A bantam flew in. John had a lot of cream in his porridge from our Jersey cows. She walked the length of the table and stepped into John's porridge - warming her feet. Very carefully he continued to eat around the bird, rotating his plate until she was standing on a little porridge island. Then he returned the bowl with the bantam still in it to the serving hatch to the kitchen.' Joan Bayon had a moment in the spotlight in May 1945, when Noel Coward's ghostly stage comedy Blithe Spirit, set in a country house, was released as a

106

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

David Lean film. She painted decorations for the opening titles. Her fairytale pictures feature a castle on a mountain unknown to flat Cambridgeshire, with a cast of creatures including unicorn and dragon never native to the fenlands. But the blithe spirit conjured up in Joan's paintings is that of King's Farm - a citadel against a world of conflict, an Ark in a flood. While war raged around them, a wall inscription in the entrance hall read 'Et in Arcadia ego' the title of two Nicolas Poussin paintings depicting classical shepherds grouped around a tomb. And in Arcadia I am: death in the midst of life. For the hedonist John Craxton it would always be the other way round. In the midst of death there was life - and, however fleeting, pleasures were to be fully savoured and painted. In Cambridge, John was directed by Peter Watson to the transcendent Wren Library of Trinity College, but his most significant discovery occurred in 1 a second-hand bookshop. Here he bought seventeenth-century emblem books, with engravings derived from medieval allegories and bestiaries, that fed his art. He also caught the eerie atmosphere oflocal fen landscapes, where bent and pollarded willows lined rivers and drainage dykes. The trees with lopped limbs could be construed as truncated monsters, and the artist further imagined their hollow interiors as hiding places for lost boys - like the rocky caves with sheltering shepherds also depicted in this period. 'I was influenced by Surrealism', he said, 'which let in a sense of paranoia and allowed for metamorphosis.' Craxton trees could look like old people, but back in London he got into trouble for portraying old people as trees. The elderly men were in a civil defence unit patrolling the area below Regent's Park They were drawn snoring during breaks in the Royal Academy of Music basement, with resentment when they awoke and found they had been recast as wizened lumps of wood when their guard was down. John also quipped to his commanding officer that, while he would defend the Regency terraces of Regent's Park to the death, the Luftwaffe was welcome to bad inter-war buildings in Baker Street. He was lucky not to be arrested rather than dismissed. Although his work was too personal for any official war art propagandist purpose, Kenneth Clark and the Horizon grandees were always ready to plead his cause as a painter of exceptional gifts. He continued to require protection from his own droll sense of humour. Even in the depths of constraint, he was an innocent abroad. Now his work was claiming serious attention and he was still only 20. Two 1943 commissions began a six-decade career as a book decorator - he objected to the word 'illustrator' since the link between words and pictures was at best oblique. John Craxton would never be an artist with a prosaic message. A fine jacket for (Charles) Wrey Gardiner's poetic memoir The Once Loved God showed a fallen moon-face held in a tree's embrace. The title referred to the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus, now boarded up but still the hub of a homosexual cruising ground. Indeed, the area had hotted up with ebbing and flowing tides of horny servicemen on leave. One of John's

EXQUISITE CORPSES

107

Jacket for The Once Loved God by (Charles) Wrey Gardiner, 1943

THE

ONCE LOVED GOD uniformed pick-ups, for an afternoon in the Pastoria Hotel off Leicester Square, was the future Soho and Vogue magazine photographer John Deakin. The moon had become a more potent romantic symbol since the obliteration of artificial light during the blackout lent the starry night sky an unaccustomed visibility. The animated Walt Disney movie Pinocchio, seen by John in a packed cinema in an early stage of the Blitz, popularised the song 'When You Wish Upon A Star'. WREY GARDINER Most pre-war Londoners could not see to think such a thing. Now Geoffrey Grigson walked in the evening across Russell Square and exulted in a London moon, a crescent in a green sky seen for the first time. The Grigson green revealed that the peril of pollution still hovered among protective barrage balloons over the capital. The second Craxton decoration of 1943 was for Ruthven Todd's fantasy novel The Lost Traveller (published early in 1944), whose central character was transformed into a bird. A cover and frontispiece design showed a fresh variant on the solitary sleepers who resemble Endymion - the shepherd of Greek mythology, cast into youth-preserving sleep for his moon-goddess lover, Selene -while also being projections of the artist's wartime self. John was literally a lost traveller, held against his will on a blockaded island. He signalled a shift in allegiances by exchanging his image for a 1935 Miro pochoir, Woman and Dog in Front of the Moon. The Todd story, like the Gardiner memoir, was also an exercise in literary Surrealism playing to the dislocated and disquieting air of the Craxton pictures: Lucian and I never wanted to be involved in group art or needed a readymade style to conform to. But we both cast a shrewd eye on Surrealism if it suited us - the juxtaposition of strange objects that disturb one by their ambiguity. Being a Surrealist didn't make you a good painter and the trouble was that an awful number of second-rate painters became good Surrealists. Ruthven Todd recalled going about with John and Lucian as 'a crazy experience'. He took them to Tilty Mill House, near Dunmow, which he was beautifying with choice furniture, books and pictures. They were a surreal

108

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Frontispiece for The Lost Traveller by Ruthven Todd, 1943

sight in rural Essex: 'Lucian was wearing a most peculiar cap and he explained, in my local pub, that he had taken it off the head of a drowned Dutch sailor he had found on a lonely beach." The two friends were now mixing in a Surrealist milieu, having been introduced to the Belgian painter and art dealer E.L.T. Mesens by critic Robert Melville. This singular eccentric and close ally of Rene Magritte hosted weekly Surrealist dinners in Soho's Barcelona restaurant, where John and Lucian met Roland Penrose and photographer Lee Miller, painters Eileen Agar and Conroy Maddox, and Jacques Brunius, assistant director to Luis Bufmel on the film L'dge d'or. These and Horizon parties were highlights amid a social and cultural blackout. From 1943 there were also dinners at Upper Terrace House in Hampstead hosted by Jane and Kenneth Clark- amid grand company and glorious pictures, gifted young artists were always welcome. Edouard Mesens was talent-spotting John and Lucian for the time when he could reopen his avant-garde London Gallery. A peculiar Craxton 1942 oil showing a stuffed bison head in a church vestry, preceding the Freud motif of a zebra's head, could well have appealed as the art of ambiguity. Meanwhile, Oliver Brown was accepting less challenging Craxton pictures for mixed shows at the Leicester Galleries - hence the encounter with the nude Lucian in Abercorn Place. When the Clarks announced a Sunday teatime visit to see the latest Craxton work, a plot was laid to include Freud pictures too. Arriving in tweeds as if for a grouse shoot, the Clarks praised John's English Delft plates bearing Lucie Freud's apple strudel. John then asked Kenneth ifhe knew Hans Calmann, Lucian's Old Master dealer uncle. He said he did but was xenophobic against 'Middle Europeans'. Lucian had been listening at the door and John heard a retreat upstairs. So he blurted that his artist friend was living there and a second studio call was readily agreed. For once Lucian had taken care not to unnerve his visitors. He obtained animal corpses from a Camden Town pet shop and his current model - a rotting monkey -was hidden out of sight and smell in the kitchen oven. The tour went well, though John and Lucian collapsed in hysterics on parting from a transported National Gallery director who, back in the street, and back to earth with a bump, pointed at a block ofluxury flats and declared: 'Strange lives.' The strangeness was all in No. 14.

EXQUISITE CORPSES

109

Kenneth Clark had bought his first picture, when a schoolboy, from the Leicester Galleries, and grew close to Oliver Brown through shared passion for art and fondness for artists. Oliver had joined his father and the Phillips brothers in 1903 in a building off Leicester Square whose fa~ade had a touch of Venetian Gothic and whose record in presenting modern art was now unrivalled. The gallery had hosted first solo displays in Britain for Cezanne, Van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Klee and many more. In an era when museums did not hold special exhibitions, a programme of monthly shows, often by single artists, was a novelty; catalogue notes by George Bernard Shaw, Anatole France and Ezra Pound were themselves works of art. According to John Craxton an entrance fee and turnstile 'kept out touting tarts'. Oliver Brown was now steering a steady wartime course, with impressive shows by Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland. Most galleries closed down for the duration, but the Leicester sailed on even after a bomb in October 1940 blew out the main window. The shop front was then covered in drop scenes painted by John Piper and others. This satisfied blackout rules but left the mild-mannered Mr Brown saddened that he could no longer peep out through the curtains to enjoy the horrified faces of passers-by at the latest modern art monstrosity. In early days Oliver Brown had bought watercolours from a shabbily dressed caller at the gallery: the elderly son of Samuel Palmer selling off his artistic inheritance. How dearly John Craxton would have loved his choice of the spoils. He was forever an ardent collector, who relied on visual and mental cleverness since he was usually short of cash. He hunted in junk shops, street markets and salerooms - buying and selling antique china to augment limited funds; spying a fifteenth-century Burgundian carving of St Anne in Lisson Grove during the Blitz and bagging it for 6/6d (32.5p). He picked up for five shillings (25p), from a stall in Church Street, Marylebone, what was believed to be a third-century Roman head of Janus. This marble evocation of youth and age became a model for John and Lucian. It featured in the Freud painting Still Life with Chelsea Buns, while the more abstracted and mask-like Craxton version was later bought by the singer Peter Pears and hung in the houses he shared with composer Benjamin Britten. John hunted for prints with Ruthven Todd, especially in refugee Ernest Seligmann's bookshop in Cecil Court off Charing Cross Road. Given the proprietor's kindness, as well as his expertise, John bought works by Marcantonio Raimondi, master engraver of the Italian Renaissance, very cheaply. A sale of his 1942 painting Old Man in the Rocks, for 15 guineas to Lucian's lover Lorna Wishart, allowed him to obtain - from a second-hand bookshop in Marylebone High Street- one of the most exciting finds of his life. Turning over a picture with its dirty face to the wall, he recognised an 'exquisitely painted' work of William Blake:

110

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Satan Exulting over Eve by William Blake, c.1795 Colour print, ink and watercolour on paper laid on canvas, 43 x 53.5 cm. Tate

When I had cleaned it with my clean handkerchief it looked so lovely_there was Satan hovering over a prone figure of Eve apple in one hand & the serpent twisting round her with its scaley head on her breast. 3 He could scarcely believe that such a treasure as Satan Exulting over Eve could really be his after what was effectively a swap for one of his own pictures. The gem had already been spotted by Ruthven Todd but he was too broke to buy it. All he could afford were a few 'enthralling' Craxton drawings at prices barely covering the cost of materials. John was later saddened to find these virtual gifts sold on, before he discovered thatTilty Mill House had been robbed and wrecked when sub-let to the two Roberts. In the meantime he was further heartened by a friend taking 11 of his drawings and paintings to New York to show Jimmy Ernst - son of Max and now director of Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of this Century gallery, newly launched with a bold Surrealist emphasis. E.Q. was told that 'he liked them and wanted more' before the moment passed, along with the Craxton brush with Surrealism. Ill-health was also being turned to good effect. A doctor calling at Abbey Road Mansions to treat the artist for jaundice knew the manager of a nowshut London paint factory- not just any old paint but the Ripolin household enamel paint used by Picasso. An appointment was made in a Drury Lane office, where John helped himself to out-of-date sample tins: I went off with bags and bags of tins and then Lucian got in on the act too. The idea is that you put on masses of undercoat and then Ripolin on top which doesn't discolour. We mixed tube colours with the Ripolin and they have retained a luminosity where other paintings of that period have not. In thrall to the new medium, John painted over several watercolours - one being the seminal Alderholt Mill, where a ground of rich olive greens gives way to a bold geometric structure of white, red and black beneath an Aegean sky.

EXQUISITE CORPSES

111

Alderho/t Mill, 1943-4 Oil on board, 48.5 x 61 cm. John Craxton Estate

The picture lit up in the darkness of Craxton wartime work like a flare, signalling future intent. What began as an impression of Dorset became a long-distance love letter to Greece. Another bright image shows Alderholt Mill below a sky with what seem to be cirrus clouds forming the outline of a white bird of paradise, but are in fact the contrails of two aeroplanes probably engaged in a dogfight. This is the nearest the artist came to an overt depiction of the war. The Ripolin effect was a blast against grey England. John loved the paint for allowing 'the statement without the brush-strokes', in contrast to the prevailing fashion of William Coldstream and the Euston Road School. Seeing the movement of naturalism, realism and social relevance as the official school of English painting, he deplored its 'academic brushwork, dingy colour and dull illusionism of tonality'. Exploding in a letter to E.Q., he berated the group as timid &Weak & ineffectual for being the essence of English boredom for ... failing to notice Michelangelo Picasso Blake El Greco Lucas Cranach Christopher Wood oh Christ for being so appallingly small minded, so rotten, so decadent, so worthless. 4

112

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

WELSH ARCADIA 15

In September 1943 Peter Watson thought that John needed a holiday and a change of painterly scene. He himself grabbed any excuse to leave London, where he felt at his most depressed. John was thrilled when it was agreed that he and Peter should join Graham and Kathleen , Sutherland in Pembrokeshire. After a long jour1:_ey, they arrived at dusk at Lleithyr Farm, below the Carn Llidi and Carn Lleithyr hills, within an easy walk ofWhitesands Bay and a mile from the tiny cathedral city of St Davids. It felt like a foreign country, and not only because their hosts, the James family, spoke Welsh. Mrs James had just rewhitened crosses and curlicues on corners of the farmhouse to ward off witches. John sensed a much older stratagem for keeping evil spirits away. Next morning he started to explore a landscape known only from Sutherland paintings: isolated white farms among dark trees; streams pouring through wild flowers and sunken lanes through hedges; the harvest reaching to cliff edges and promontories of thrift and heather; buzzards overhead rather than aeroplanes. The painter was struck by a network of small circular fields, many with a standing stone used as a scratching post for cattle. John believed these menhir monoliths to be ancient phallic symbols invoking the spirits to propagate crops, and they were to loom as mysterious presences in his Welsh pictures. In a place of peace and plenty, John and Peter felt freed from the war. Lleithyr Farm still served the traditional Welsh fried breakfast: laverbread fritters of boiled seaweed rolled in oatmeal- cockles and thick, home-cured bacon. There were seemingly unlimited supplies of eggs, milk, honey, and home-made butter and bread. Rationing was a distant rumour - far further off than the barrage balloons suspended over the little port of Milford Haven like tiny toys. Mushrooms were being gathered in the fields and woods, and the figure of a farm worker holding an edible, or perhaps poisonous, fungal growth became a motif in the visitor's ensuing pictures. Mushroom growing was a popular activity on the Home Front, but John Craxton was drawn to the symbolism of a living thing forming in the dark. The dampness of hastily constructed and poorly ventilated air-raid shelters in millions of British back gardens or basements encouraged mould and mildew and prompted many civilians, and not only the rheumatic and arthritic, to remain in their beds when sirens sounded.

WELSH ARCADIA

113

Peter took John to visit Sir John Philipps. King of the Welsh castles, he lived in Picton Castle and owned two more. But the best part of this captivating first visit was Graham Sutherland being on hand to act as a guide over, and beyond, local topography. The point was to look further and deeper than the literal to reach the heart and soul -with intense feeling altering the appearance of things. 'Would you say that paintings were made of two facets, flesh and bones?' John asked. 'No', replied Graham. 'Flesh and spirit." The two artists set off together on sketching expeditions each morning, then parted - John going armed with his tutor's advice to paraphrase a scene. He adopted the Sutherland working method of using a sketchbook to make linear notes for paintings likely to be produced far from their inspirational subjects, and then tried a more direct exercise in emulation. Seeking the source of Sutherland's Entrance to a Lane, he was guided towards the estuary along a path from the road to Sandy Haven and left there. Numerous drawings ensued to ensure a disciple's exactitude when he came to produce his own version of the picture. But the Sutherland green tunnel into light could not be truthfully replicated, since overhanging brambly vegetation in the original image had never existed. That was a vital lesson for an imaginative artist - as was Sutherland's candid admission that one of his most admired compositions 'nearly didn't come off'. Both the setting and vision of the man John rated as Britain's best living painter produced a sense of bared idyll: The land was reduced to basic elements of life: rocks, fig trees, gorse, the nearness of sea on all sides, a brilliantly clear light. Everything was stripped away- all the verbiage, that is - to the essential sources of existence. 2

He was content until a walk on St David's Head when Peter Watson remarked that, for all the clarity and pared-down beauty, this stark stretch of coastal southwest Wales was still a pale imitation of Greece. That was it. John became more determined than ever: when the long war finally ended, he would somehow reach the real thing. The widely travelled Peter continued to prod and provoke such yearning- turning the word Mediterranean into a term of high praise for a painting, as in 'It has a lovely light; it's very Mediterranean'. Now the art was rapidly advancing. The influences of Palmer and Blake were eclipsed by those of Sutherland, Miro and Picasso, and information from the natural world was being transformed by greater distillation. A dislodged tree root on the estuary at Sandy Haven spurred a series of drawings and paintings, leading to the largest and most complex Craxton composition to date: Welsh Estuary Foreshore. This fresh statement evolved from salvaged material. John had got to know the Surrealist artist Julian

114

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Welsh Estuary Foreshore,

1943 Oil on burlap, 112.5 x 180.5 cm. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Trevelyan and was now invited to Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race parties at Julian's Thames-side studio home in Hammersmith Terrace. On another visit he was shocked to find antique frames suspended from a window and waiting for the tidal river to remove gilt and gesso. His amused host retrieved the still-golden relics, wrapped them in burlap sacking and gave them as a gift. The wrapper proved the greater present, for Mir6 in his youthful poverty had shown how effectively such coarse fabric could be used instead of conventional canvas. Working with black and white, and the sand colour of burlap, John created an extraordinary foreshore assembly of rocks, plants and tree root - plus a mutant creature on the tideline. He already admired Andre Masson's metamorphic paintings of animal and human forms. Now, almost lost in abstraction, the flotsam figure refers to Picasso's Weeping Woman painting of Dora Maar seen in the Hampstead house of his new friend Roland Penrose, artist and avant-garde champion (as well as the sketch in Hugh Willoughby's Hove flat). By some peculiar process of metamorphosis, Dora is turning into a cuttlefish recalled from Selsey holidays, by way of a mythical sea monster known as a kraken. And kraken - in a Peter Watson joke - is a pun on Craxton. Back in London John was invited to visit the Sutherlands in their converted oasthouse in the Kent village ofTrottiscliffe. 'Do bring Lucian', Graham said. 'We so want to meet him.' The two friends put their bicycles on the train and cycled from Wrotham station, asking directions in a landscape

WELSH ARCADIA

115

with all the road signs removed. After a tour of Graham's studio, Kathy cooked a quiche lunch and they all walked to the Coldrum Stones Neolithic long barrow. John and Lucian had no idea that pretty much bedridden in nearby Tonbridge lay the doomed epitome of Neo-Romantic art, Denton Welch. This painter-writer shared their burning energy though eight years into the debilitating and ultimately deadly impact of a bicycling accident. At the time of his catastrophe he had been a Goldsmiths art student working on a painting of a Corinthian capital surrounded by London weeds. Moving from hospital to nursing home, he wrote: 'Now we were passing Trottiscliffe where I often stayed as a child. I strained across the fields to see the white cowls of the converted oasthouse. I imagined I caught a glimpse of them twinkling back at me.' 3 It was as if the oasthouse transmitted a message of artistic success and solidarity but not to Denton Welch. Graham Sutherland, although befriending the isolated invalid by this stage, had another introduction in mind for his two visitors. 'I want you to meet this fantastic painter, Francis Bacon', he said. 'He's a cross between Vuillard and Picasso.' Soon seeing the art, John missed the artist until after the war. By August 1944 the Sutherlands felt so warmly towards John and Lucian that they followed them to Pembrokeshire, where the two friends were staying at the Mariner's Arms in Haverfordwest. The anarchic high spirits of the young men proved less congenial in close and sustained proximity, so Graham and Kathy moved to a cottage at Sandy Haven. Shared sketching trips continued. Having drawn Boat in an Estuary, John added a pastel image Boot in an Estuary. The once-sturdy piece of footwear lost to the sea is a metaphor for war, but the artist also enjoyed a punning title. Graham was working on studies for his Horned Forms painting, inspired by a beached tree stump. If not the same stump that John had worked from since the previous summer, there was still a firm suggestion that a mentor can learn from a pupil. John asked Graham why he never painted a blue sky and was told that such rendition would be too literal. However, the Sutherland thorn tree images begun in Pembrokeshire the following year had sky-blue backdrops. John longed to buy the best but a £50 price was beyond him. So another prized picture entered Kenneth Clark's collection. John and Lucian hired a pony and trap to take the Sutherlands to meet Sir John Philipps - a great service as Graham would have many dealings with the Philipps family in later years, and for a time Picton Castle held a Sutherland museum. But now the castle was requisitioned as an army hospital; eccentric, engaging and gay Johnny Philipps had to make do with a few first-floor rooms. His ancestral home remained a romantic vision in medieval masonry, with exotic fruits and flowers in Victorian glasshouses and sheep-grazed grass beyond. John and the baronet also met in London until, in 1948, Johnny Philipps died in a hot bath after taking a sleeping pill in his Piccadilly flat.

116

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

,

~.. i

.._____,,. ~-.

ti

Welsh Landscape with Sleeping Reaper, 1944-5 Conte pencil and gouache on paper, 27.5

x

37 cm.

Private collection

In Craxton images of the wild outdoors based on a Welsh Arcadia, the bronzed farm labourer holding a scythe, hoe or mushroom now takes on an authentic Mediterranean air - for the fieldworkers of Pembrokeshire were often Italian prisoners-of-war, marked out by crimson disks sewn on their shirt-backs. Swarthily handsome and very friendly, they laughed, joked and sang as they laboured far from their native vineyards and olive groves. At some point John saw a ferocious guard dog or heard the legend of a demonic hound. It was then embroidered into his Welsh pictures as a wolf-like beast of the night howling at the moon. This nocturnal savager of sheep - a visual metaphor for war - might be contrasted with a reaper or sleeper in an idyll on the opposite side of the composition. The human model for freedom was probably a prisoner.

WELSH ARCADIA

117

16 THE POET'S EYE

In June 1943 John received a postcard inviting him to tea with the Australianborn poet and critic W.J. Turner, an uncle of the Craxtons' lodger Noel MewtonWood and a force of nature. The sender of the card, Sheila Shannon, was doing her able best to harness artistic electricity from a whirlwind. Walter James Turner was also a musicologist, novelist, dramatist, biographer and, when John met him, literary editor of the Spectator and general editor of the Britain in Pictures books. His poems were praised by W.B. Yeats, but his friends could turn to foes - the writer Siegfried Sassoon preferred to think that they had never actually met. Lack of musical training did nothing to temper what a fellow critic called his 'racy dogma' in print. He and John hit it off at once through their wicked wit. John relished sweepingTurnerverdicts such as 'German composers go down deeper but come up muddier'. Now Sheila and Walter, as well as having a passionate affair, were editing a bravura venture in illustrated verse anthologies for Walter Neurath and the book packager Adprint. To be published by Frederick Muller as New Excursions into English Poetry, each volume would be decorated by a different artist. John Craxton was among the first to be enlisted. Seven volumes, printed by W.S. Cowell between 1944 and 1947, also involved Michael Ayrton, Edward Bawden, Robert Colquhoun, Mona Moore, John Piper and William Scott. In a strong field the Craxton work, on what was originally to be titled either 'Objects of Vision' or 'Moments of Inspiration' but became Visionary Poems and Passages or The Poet's Eye, is the strongest. All depended on the diplomatic diligence of Sheila Shannon (soon to marry the poet and translator from Ancient Greek, Patric Dickinson, after Turner's sudden death). Plots were hatched in Kardomah cafe meetings -with text selector Geoffrey Grigson a late arrival at the party. A Cornish vicar's son, Grigson was another one-man maelstrom. He was the youngest of seven brothers: three had been killed in the First World War, three more would perish as a result of the Second World War. His first wife had died from tuberculosis; his next marriage - to an au pair he met in Hampstead Tube station and rescued from Austria during the Munich Crisis - was now disintegrating. Bitter personal experience further soured his trenchant criticism: he could veer from exultation to excoriation within a single elegant sentence. He had championed the W.H. Auden generation

118

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

in his New Verse, the most influential and combative poetry magazine of the 1930s, ending when he published his own first volume of poems on the day war was declared. Geoffrey passed on a big sheaf of possible texts from which John chose the ones he liked. They discussed a shared love of William Blake, and still more of Samuel Palmer - so that John's help was noted in the Grigson biography of 1947. In the meantime, words by both Blake and Palmer appeared in The Poet's Eye (whose leading contributor was Dorset poet William Barnes). John insisted, however, that no design should be a direct illustration. As he wrote to E.Q. from Little Shelford on 10 April 1944: There are to be numerous black & white 'vignettes' & 16 s"-8" lithographs in 4 colours how it will all end god knows I am collecting data like mad ... my bias is on the inspired moment with a Pastoral leaning ... I have been drawing dead birds and rabbits but I really want to go on holiday to Sicily. The willow trees are nice & amazing here but I would prefer an olive tree growing out of a Greek ruin ... ' The previous July Michael Tippett, already acclaimed as a composer, had experienced a similar vision -writing: 'I dreamed of a green flowering olive tree in spring last night. Good." He was serving a jail term at the time for pacifism, after refusing the Non-Combatant Corps alternative to military service. Corps members, comprising conscientious objectors and those failing army medicals, were compelled to work in bomb disposal, transport, agriculture or forestry. John Craxton had big allies but a smaller reputation, and a lucky escape from gruelling physical labour. Kenneth Clark was unable to persuade the War Artists Advisory Committee to buy his work, or to find him a job painting camouflage; but he was left to his own unmobilised ways. Fickle Greek gods continued to smile on him. John had been attending concerts arranged by Michael Tippett for London's Morley College, and now the composer asked him to provide a cover design for a double motet, Plebs An9elica, to be published on 26 May and premiered in Canterbury Cathedral in September. John produced a sinuous border of trailing ivy linked to several vignettes in The Poet's Eye (see title page). Appreciating the work of both Tippett and Britten, he was struck by their contrasting natures:

THE POET'S EYE

119

Graham Sutherland's favourite lithograph from The Poet's Eye

Michael was charming, a warm, interested, open character, while Britten was tight and difficult. I got on all right with him but it was like talking to an oyster. One longed for him to sit back and roar with laughter - I wonder ifhe ever did? 3 After returning to the Central Schools to make a trial lithograph, of a tree growing out of a rock, he set to work on design ideas. Initial proofs were sent to Graham Sutherland, who responded with great enthusiasm: ... most of them are really terrific. I like best perhaps the one of the estuary with rocks to L.H. [Little Haven, on St Bride's Bay, Pembrokeshire] foreground. This is enormously good I think, & you have found a series of outlined symbols which so exactly paraphrase reality. The colour is lovely & it is technically fascinating. Quite superb. 4 When required to work in Cowell's Suffolk printshop, John stayed in the Stour Valley with Ida Affleck Graves -who a decade earlier had celebrated her sexual union with wood engraver Blair Hughes-Stanton in Epithalamion, a fine-press book complete with her partner's erotic prints. Poor Blair had just had a terrible war, being captured in Greece and shot in the throat and head in a camp in Corinth. Repatriated to Britain, he was keeping a convalescent distance from Ida. Always in search of a party, John bicycled to a nearby aerodrome where one of Tim's friends was based - but the airman was absent. He fell gladly into the merry company of American aviators, who steered him, early the next morning, to an empty billet:

120

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

At 7am the missing pilot returned from London, opened the door and found me in his bed. He was so sweet about it - putting me on the back of his Harley-Davidson motorbike and taking me off for breakfast. He sat me down for cornflakes while he smoked a cigar. Cycling to Ipswich Buttermarket -where W.S. Cowell had begun in 1818 and was now a state-of-the-art printer and wine merchant - he paused at the post office to send telegrams to Sheila Shannon: 'COULD YOU MANAGE TWO QUID HAVE TO STAY ON INTO NEXT WEEK; COULD YOU PLEASE WIRE THREE POUNDS TO GPO IPSWICH DOUGHLESS; OH SHEILA THANKS MILLION AM SAVED.' Fortunately, of all the anthologists and artists she had enlisted for New Excursions into En9lish Poetry, Sheila loved John best. He loved her too, presenting her with the sketchbook and scrapbook for his evolving work compiled in an estate accounts book from 1810. By mid-April he was back in Pembrokeshire - taking a cottage at Maenclochog in the Preseli Hills to produce more preliminary drawings and ink an incoming flow of plates. Sheila funded the trip and sent on weekly postal orders. A plan to stay in the grand John Adam-designed house of writer Leo Walmsley, a friend of Harold and Essie, failed because a departing wife had taken all the furniture. Absorbed in his creative task, the artist now lost all sense of time until summoned to Ipswich by a note of exasperation: Dear Craxton, Please come down on Monday as early as possible in order to complete the work on the plates for the publication 'Objects of Vision', which are urgently wanted. The work is being held up and so are the printing machines. Yours faithfully, forW.S. Cowell Ltd. Geoffrey Smith, DIRECTOR. Even when installed with the printers, he continued to cause havoc by ignoring guidelines and deadlines and working up to the last minute on many more pictures than were needed. Innovatory images were finally perfected. They were drawn from imaginary shepherds (one hiding in a hollow tree, another with his face reflected in the moon), metamorphic fenland willows, Welsh scenes (the estuary at Sandy Haven with and without tree roots, St David's Head landscapes, Haverfordwest Castle) and the river at Fordingbridge near Alderholt. The opening lithograph of a boy in a wood derived from a 1943 chalk study on the back of Lucian's drawing Man with a Horse on his Head. Green, blue or yellow plates were overprinted in opaque white for a chiaroscuro effect inspired by sixteenth-century Italian

THE POET'S EYE

121

Cover of Visionary Poems and Passages or The Poet's Eye

woodcuts owned by the artist. For the cover design -where most of the book title was abandoned, along with the apostrophe - John presented an outsized eye in a beached cuttlefish. This was repeated on the dust jacket and then reimagined again in an ink-drawn text divider. In the only direct link between image and text, the drawing preceded a note by Alfred Lord Tennyson: I found a strange fish on the shore with rainbows about its wild staring eyes, enclosed in a sort of sack with long tentacula beautifully coloured, quite dead, but when I took it up by the tail it spotted all the sand underneath with great drops of black ink, so I suppose it was a kind of cuttlefish. The black ink was the point: an artist could draw with it, a poet could pen a poem with it. Moreover, the chameleon-like cuttlefish - mimicking floating vegetation or seafloor stones - shoots out jets of black ink when threatened, as a decoy or smokescreen. The mysterious marine creature was a symbol for the blackout. While broadly homophobic, Geoffrey Grigson included a bittersweet W.H. Auden ballad of homosexual love in a witty private dedication to his

Two figures in a thorny landscape drawing from The Poet's Eye

122

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

collaborator. The editor titled the poem 'Johnny', although the author did not. The artist responded with a pen and ink vignette depicting two enigmatic figures in a thorny landscape for a poem ending: 0 last night I dreamed of you, Johnny, my lover, You'd the sun on one arm and the moon on the other, The sea it was blue and the grass it was green, Every star rattled a round tambourine; Ten thousand miles deep in a pit there I lay: But you frowned like thunder and you went away. The lines reflected a lonely yearning in the Craxton art of this conflicted era. The heartsickness of a romantic artist was essentially a longing for escape to the Mediterranean and all the adventures that would bring. There was also a homoerotic element in the hero-worshipping of Graham Sutherland, whose spirit hovers over The Poet's Eye. The hero relished this frisson. On one occasion Graham wrote: I think your suit as you walk by the Orwell at Pin Mill most becoming. Pockets bulging a bit perhaps, but the trousers most becomingly narrow: really very chic & who wd guess a utility garment? A good travelling collar of stiff white is such a foil for caressing locks which curl over it. Let us meet soon. I hope to be not quite so busy. 5

Poet and Moon lithograph from The Poet's Eye

THE POET'S EYE

123

New Excursions into English Poetry caught the mood of the moment, with the first volumes in kitbags for Allied advances across Europe and the Far East. It also appealed to the shell-shocked - drug-befuddled David Gascoyne annotating his copy while in West Middlesex Hospital in January 1945. Looking back in 2013, David Attenborough wrote: In 1944, in the middle of the austerities that were gripping embattled Britain, a series of really remarkable poetic anthologies began to appear in bookshops. They were illustrated in a startlingly new way, with full-page coloured plates that were quite unlike any of which I was aware. Printed in a limited number of poster-like colours, they nonetheless conveyed even the tiniest detail of texture in a way that gave them great immediacy. You could almost feel the impress of the artist's pencil... Craxton's drawings captivated me ... In several, a young dreamer appears, trapped in a landscape that is spiky, hostile and savage ... In the spaces between the poems, Craxton added little pen-and-ink-drawings. He called them embellishments. Several of these convey the same hostility of the full pages. But just one or two are gentler. There are glimpses of distant paradisal mountains and plants that look almost tropical. Craxton seems to be dreaming of a time when he could escape from the austerities of a war-torn prison to a more relaxed land. 6 Visiting John in Ipswich, Lucian had been given a plate to work on. Now he drew decorations for The Glass Tower by Nicholas Moore, poet son of the philosopher G.E. Moore, in a Poetry London volume funded by Peter Watson. As with The Poet's Eye, any link between words and pictures is loose at best. Lucian's arresting images of dead and fantastical animals display an inventiveness all his own, and a new assurance of line owing a lot to John Craxton.

124

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

LESS THAN LIBERATION 17

U,,,, . . :··s

C..!....C::..-=

... any act or thing (including singing and the playing of musical instruments) which may be or become a nuisance or cause scandal or annoyance to the other occupiers of the Building or to the Landlords and the neighbours or cause damage to the adjacent properties, but to be quiet and orderly at all times.

LESS THAN LIBERATION

125

Next door was Adrian Allinson, a 'friendly man and good amateurish painter', with whom John was on amicable terms. Adrian, in truth a more accomplished artist than John allowed, had a ceramicist lover called Molly Mitchell-Smith. So marginal a figure in John's story was to prove a spy and in due course threatened to become his nemesis. Peter Watson sent a note in early May to say that he had recommended John for a show at the Buchholz Gallery in New York, where Henry Moore had lately exhibited, and owner Curt Valentin had replied to say that nothing could be done immediately but asking for more details: I wrote back and told him that you are the painter of your generation and that your only danger was (possibly?) your success! However I expect he will be stimulated ... I hear you've moved. I hope it's nice & snug! Do you want me to pay any rent for it? Will you be up next week? I must get clear of the other place so some white washing will have to be done and May 15th is the day! Clearly the outgoing tenants were distracted because, on 26 June, Peter wrote again: 'Is the flat ready? I must hand it over next Wednesday for better or worse.' Among paint flecks on the walls, artworks were also to be whitewashed. Both John and Lucian used any available surface when denied paper, canvas or board. With an outpouring of public sympathy for Russia in the wake of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, a coffee kiosk off Leicester Square did roaring business as the Anglo-Russian Cafe. One night the emigre owner asked the two artists to decorate the stall's two main walls. Lucian took one and John the other: each did their own thing with idiosyncratic designs seeming neither Anglo nor Russian. Anyway, looking forward to John's next studio, Peter now sent £20 to cover the first six months rent. The Leicester Galleries had offered John an entrance hall show, with displays ofrecent work by Jacob Epstein and former Tate director James Bolivar Manson in the more prestigious Gainsborough and Hogarth rooms inside. In all the opprobrium heaped on modern artists, none faced such hostility as Epstein the level of abuse suggesting anti-Semitism. Still, the sculptor and draughtsman certainly drew attention, and from 18 May crowds flocked to Leicester Square. Pausing in the entrance hall, they came upon paintings and drawings by a young and practically unknown artist. Many liked what they saw. More than thirty pictures - almost everything on offer - sold to the likes of Kenneth Clark, shipping line director Colin Anderson, Pen9uin New Writin9 editor John Lehmann, E.Q. Nicholson, Peter Watson and The Poet's Eye collaborators Geoffrey Grigson, Sheila Shannon and W.J. Turner. A 21-year-old artist was staggered to clear £300 (virtually the London average annual wage). He celebrated with Guinness and oysters at Wheeler's - and by buying, for £15, a Max Ernst painting from the Surrealist artist's 'Loplop' dove-in-forest series. With its air of claustrophobia

126

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Tree Root in a Welsh Estuary,

1943 Ink on paper, 31.5 x 51 cm. Tacita Dean Collection

and disorientation, La Foret was just the sort of thing to disgust people passing the Leicester Galleries. Despite the melancholic nature of the Craxton subjects - dead animals, loners in dark landscapes, torn-out tree roots - there was the panache and vigour of a fresh creative vision. The overall effect was uplifting, with an intimation that something big was about to happen. Waves of excitement from the D-Day Normandy landings on 6 June engulfed John Craxton too. A week later, German V1 rockets were fired from bases near the French and Belgian coasts. Such unmanned doodlebugs or buzz bombs whined over southern and eastern England like aerial motorbikes until the sudden silence of an imminent plunge. Nerves that had withstood the Blitz now shattered. When V1 launch sites were overrun, the menace was replaced by even deadlier supersonic V2 rockets; exploding before the sound of their arrival, they carried on falling into the final weeks of war. Amid the bombardment John penned a pictorial letter to E.Q. in which, on the vertical edges of the paper, a smiling zebra on a golden plain looked across to a V1 rocket and shrieking bird. The centre of the page comprised a snake-like question mark -with the top a pipe-smoking face of comic irony and the dot at the bottom horribly expanded: a human head had been turned into a bomb crater and signed with the name John. Between these images he wrote: ... After the jugging long sleepless nights even when the all clear has gone indigestion through fear and worry prevent real sleep the day next morning is strange and one feels cut off from everything its terribly bad really

LESS THAN LIBERATION

127

because I all ways was rather that way ... just received proofs of the last lot oflithos after about a month or more of persistant waiting & hell they are as hopless as aunties split bloomers only more skitsoprenick. .. An amazing thing happened when I last went down into the Bouillerbaise Looch & I took annie goosens [from the family of classical musicians] who jitters like an orange fritter suddenly the whole floor cleared & everyone clapped & yelled & the band hotted up & we were alone it got faster & faster & everyone got more & more excited it was horrible I was so hot - quelle exposition! never again .. .' The Bouillabaisse Club in New Compton Street was one of several swing-and-jive nightclubs in and around Soho catering for American troops - and black troops in particular. With more money than Blitzed Brits, they were out to have fun while they could. Bohemian London joined them. From May 1944 the Caribbean Club swung rather decorously on Denman Street, off Piccadilly Circus. Climbing two floors above the Argentina Restaurant, the party-minded rang a bell and a speakeasy-style shutter slid open so they could be accepted or rejected before the door was opened. The big draw was dancing to the Dick Katz Trio - not a quartet since club owner Rudi Evans drew the line at drums. John and Lucian may have bumped into John Minton at the Caribbean Club near the war's end, just as they had seen Roberts Colquhoun and MacBryde in Soho throughout the conflict. There was no mingling in the painting. On one studio visit John had been dismayed to find the Roberts rubbing dirty varnish into their pictures for an 'Old Master look'. Their semi-Cubist images would anyway never appear remotely like his. He respected Keith Vaughan, but from an artistic and social distance. Michael Ayrton was loathed for general bombast and increasingly virulent attacks on Picasso and Stravinsky. 'It is terrible how he really has a physical effect on me and how his persistence upsets me', Peter Watson wrote in 1942. The patron then added: 'Ayrton is the purest PETAIN'. 'He was so puffed-up with his own importance', John said. 'He was the last barrage balloon over London that never got taken down.' So, from the start, John dismissed the Neo-Romantic movement of artists with whom he was most often linked. Later he muttered: 'Can't I at least be a Post-Neo-Romantic?' In public he explained: You are either Romantic in spirit or you are not. You can't be 'NeoRomantic'. There was never a Neo-Romantic group as such ... There were two groups during the war: the artists around John Lehmann and Penguin New Writing such as Michael Ayrton, John Minton and Keith Vaughan, and then on the other side, with Peter Watson and Horizon, there was Lucian and myself, Sutherland, Colquhoun and MacBryde. When you're 19 or 20, and somebody is five or ten years older, they have their friends and you have yours.'

128

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Not that those two cultural armed camps were wholly hostile to one another. John Lehmann admired the work ofJohn and Lucian enough to want to buy it, and both artists were promoted in Penguin New Writing and invited to its parsimonious parties. In Paris, after the August 1944 liberation, the painter and naturalist Peter Scott, Jane Howard's then husband, searched for the Milkins - John's sweet hosts from only five years earlier and another world. While dreadful details remained unclear, Peter confirmed Nina's fears that her parents had disappeared in the Holocaust. As 'stateless persons of Jewish origin' they were most vulnerable to the Paris round-ups from July 1942. Eventually it was established that Sophie had been murdered in Auschwitz that same year. Jacques had been ill in Compiegne deportation camp when a doctor wangled his release. Arrested again in March 1944, he had died in Auschwitz months before France was freed. John could only ever say that Jacques and Sophie had 'died from the horror of it all' - for the shock of 1 learning their vague but hopeless fate was so terrible to Nina that she was n~ver · able to talk of them, or her Jewish identity, again. Of her life in Paris, her children were told nothing except the name of her piano teacher. She drew a curtain over the war years and, at unfathomable cost, determined to speak only as a pianist, and through the universal and eternally life-affirming language of music. In September John told E.Q. he was painting like a 'crazi mad man' after returning to his London studio and finding that a burst water tank had soaked a lot of pictures, including a borrowed Epstein nude. Having spent half his exhibition profits in ten weeks, he was postponing a trip to Wales to make good his losses - not least to Lucian: I gave him £10 to help him financially yesterday, today he rushes in & says hes just bought two rugs which fool I told him about & are certainly not worth £12 oh dear its 'could you 'lend' me some more' now ... never mind the great thing is not to lose ones temper even if everything else goes. 3 Not yet 17when the war began, John turned 22 in the embattled autumn of 1944. It seemed that the conflict would never end, and there was a terrible winter and spring to come with Allied advances won at huge cost at home and at the front. The inevitability of victory was less palpable than the impossibility of peace. The emerging enormity of concentration camp crimes, and the revelation of weaponry that could destroy humanity, ruled out calmness for thoughtful minds. Through last months of war in Europe, John worked in his Clifton Hill studio and revisited old haunts in Dorset, Cambridgeshire and Wales, to refresh his spirit and imagination. While at Alderholt he, Lucian and E.Q. arranged a short seaside break in Swanage, where the two men drove fairground dodgem cars - crashing into each other again and again at full pelt until the operator gave them a pound to scram. Lucian worked ever so slowly on a portrait of a lobster in the hotel room he and John shared-until John threw the stinking model over the roof tiles where it broke into putrid pieces. The exquisite picture sold at the Lefevre Gallery in November to Wheeler's restaurant. Lucian's West End debut show of paintings

LESS THAN LIBERATION

129

and drawings, six months after John's, ran alongside displays for Felix Kelly and Julian Trevelyan. The 27works included Quince on Blue Table, lent by John Craxton. John carried on missing deadlines, as Peter Watson continued to promote his paintings. Late in November 1944 the patron penned a postcard: 'Now I must insist. Edge [maker of half-tone and colour blocks for Horizon] can start on your pictures right away so please take Moonscape & Lanes or Moonscape & Reaper to him immediately.' The New Year opened with a Leicester Galleries' show of twentieth-century romanticism, in which John participated. Under a sub-heading of 'Danger Ahead!' the Observer critic noted: 'A picture of a hermit among rocks by John Craxton, full of feeling and remarkable in colour, has a literary flavour which unless watched may well strangle the new romantics as it did the old.' But literary friends could be useful commissioners - and now Cyril Connolly wanted a pair of doors decorated in the grand house on Sussex Place, overlooking Regent's Park, that he currently shared. The deal was long on delivery. Horizon's editor finally begged: I have Raymond [Mortimer] & Clive Bell dining with me on Wednesday 5. Is there any chance of being able to present them with a 'fait accompli'? I know you are in a 'state' but it is exactly for such states that the practise of an art has been found so efficacious! What about a nice vine and no more across the top part?' In the end, in order to complete the task and enjoy the surroundings - and the sumptuous hospitality ordered by Cyril, paid by Peter and served by Lys Lubbock - John stayed in the house for several weeks. He would have been happy to move in permanently. On a brilliantly sunny day late in the war, as bombs fell around his Tickerage retreat, Peter wrote: 'Art & Beauty are all that matters really.' In truth he was becoming more and more depressed. As Allied forces surrounded Berlin, John went to stay with Johnny Philipps in Picton Castle to recover from another bout of jaundice -working on a self-portrait drawn on green paper. Peter wrote on May Bank Holiday, a week before the German surrender. He longed for 'a united Europe from Lisbon to Danzig to Athens'; but pessimism prevailed: The world is today much too small to stick to a system which died with Napoleon in 1815. And why wont they? Because people have no vision. Are afraid of being daring & imaginative therefore all the big changes are made by the wrong people such as the Communists or the Fascists for the wrong reasons. And if we don't make them, they will be made again for the wrong reasons. Sorry to go on but I feel so strongly about this, more strongly than I feel about ART & you know how I love that. Altha' there is nothing quite like ART is there? But the claustrophobia is increasing & I can't stand it. Je n'en peux plus.

130

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

THE GREAT ESCAPE 18

.. •

..• - •. ·

.

••

r,;

••••

--

After the Victory in Europe party came the reckoning- and the remembering that war in the Far East went on. Ruined London reeked of soot, ash and dust; rationing was severe and worsening. All looked grey and dreary at a time of making do and mending, and of drab 1 utility that, for John Craxton, rhymed with futility. ~ · Tim Craxton had one more act of valour to perform. He plotted with a friend to spring her starving sister from a Dutch prisoner-of-war camp by claiming that they were engaged. Meeting on either side of barbed wire, they were quickly married. After that, as for so many war heroes, peacetime proved disappointing. Tim became a car salesman before moving to America. A general election campaign - bringing a July Labour landslide - saw a popular faith in politics that John could never share. Bicycling to Lucian's studio, he hated the hectoring Labour loudhailers in Paddington South (a party agent would be fined for outdoor megaphone decibels likened to 'a brass band in the room'). Delamere Terrace and nearby mean streets in a generally well-heeled constituency provided scenes for the 1950 film about urban violence, The Blue Lamp. The seat stayed Tory. On 13 June John reported a crime drama to E.Q.: ~

'·

.....

~

Oh oh such goings on around Lucian Sunday last I finished drawing Lucian at studio & I byked off to his place just in time to catch three young gangsters clearing out Loochies flat of clothes guns money etc they whizzed off like lightning with his money & pistol thank heaven left his clothes all neat in cases ready. Now Ive been body guarding (as ifl could) Lucian as we make furtive and tense rendezvous in back allies of Paddington. They are all armed with razors & things & they are all amazingly young about 14-15- though they look 22 or 23. There are rival gangs and all is brewing for a terrible feud over Freud - but trust me I wont be there. Two of the gangsters were evidently trailed by C.I.D. today and they found Loochies gun on them. Loo has no document for it so now is in a terrible state - really these Romantics ... ' In August the dropping of two atom bombs shook the world but spurred a formal Japanese surrender on 2 September - six years and a day after global hostilities began. Everyone was exhausted. In a long hot summer, John and

THE GREAT ESCAPE

131

Lucian yearned to be abroad but foreign travel was still impossible. Julian Trevelyan recommended the Scilly Isles, as did John Wells, a painter then practising as a doctor on the main island of St Mary's. So they went - calling on Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in St Ives en route. Repelled by backbiting in the Cornish modernist art colony, John was to have a lasting friendship with E.Q.'s brother-in-law and admire his personal journey into abstraction. Wherever John travelled, Essie sent packages - cheques, forwarded letters, art materials, clothes, food, ration books - in his wake. Her note in the latest relief parcel added an ironic touch: 'It is good news to hear that you are having such a very enjoyable time. You mention food and weather but not a word about work. Are you able to combine the three?' For once she need not have worried. The Scillies proved a creative turning point for her pleasure-seeking son. Forty-five kilometres from Land's End, the Scilly Isles are an Atlantic archipelago that seems to have drifted to the Aegean on the Gulf Stream - with rocky landscapes, white beaches, cobalt blue seas and sub-tropical vegetation. At first the two painters stayed at the Mincarlo guesthouse overlooking St Mary's harbour, with yuccas in the garden and stones like dinosaur eggs set in the garden wall. Through a telescope, Lucian watched a girl undressing in a neighbouring house - until he saw her father looking in another telescope back at him. John and Lucian then made haste for the most exotic island, Tresco. Here they lodged with the Locke family in Point House, where Julian Trevelyan had stayed. His Surrealist's commendation of the place ended: In the sitting room there are two armchairs and a sofa. In the morning the fleas are on the armchair by the window, in the afternoon they move to the armchair by the fire and in the evening they all meet up on the sofa. John painted while Lucian drew, side by side in their bedroom - the only studio they ever shared. Both wanted outdoor days: exploring, sketching and pursuing a new object of fascination. On the Scillonian ferry, during a rough crossing from Penzance, they had fallen for beautiful Sonia Leon, who was turning 17. Lucian's attention was diverted from another girl since she was being sick. Sonia's father, a Harley Street doctor, had been glimpsed by his wife and daughters one day hurrying along Oxford Street and never seen again. Mrs Leon remarried, to a shipping line owner, and moved to Park Lane. Now they were to holiday on the Scilly isle ofBryher. John and Lucian crossed from Tresco in a little boat to find Sonia; she returned with them and was unable to get back that night. Her mother was furious, but probably not surprised. Born a Montefiore, Mrs Leon had set her daughter on a bohemian path, packing her off in the Blitz to stay in Brighton with her friend Gertie Millar, star of Edwardian musical comedies but by then widow of the 2nd Earl of Dudley. Sonia studied fashion design at the local art school but, on a lifelong flight from boredom, her passion was for jazz. Back in London, she, John and Lucian danced to music by Django Reinhardt, when many thought that she and John were lovers. At Le Petit

132

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

0

Red and Yellow Landscape, 1945 Oil

-----

on canvas, 30.5 x 40.5 cm. Private collect1on

Club Fran~ais in St James's John introduced 'Soni' to Clifford Coffin, who photographed her for Vogue. He hailed a dream model, with clothes hanging from her as if from a pencil. For now, on the Scillies, she was resisting all appeals from both painters to sit for a portrait. Thwarted artistically and sexually, Lucian turned again to the girl who was no longer being sick Tresco - 'less organic than Pembrokeshire ... but more full of poetic imagery' -was an awakening for John Craxton. Dark imagery from wartime Wales was now rendered luminous by Mir6-like red, blue and yellow lines flashing around the black bulk of Point House and its stony setting like rainbow lightning. Inspiration from banded colours on tarred French fishing boats led to an explosive Tresco scene wrought in red and yellow, with black cut to shadow. Lean male figures with enormous feet - large enough to cross continents now stalked dislocated landscapes. John worked on island memories for months, with a glowing study of spiky vegetation in green and blue a jacket for Geoffrey Grigson's The Scilly Isles and Other Poems. A small oil, given to E.Q. Nicholson in the New Year, expressed his prevailing feelings with an image of a lobster-catcher on a Scillonian shore. It was called Greek Fisherman - from a body of men the artist had yet to meet. John and Lucian had been welcomed aboard Breton fishing boats, to drink

THE GREAT ESCAPE

133

Jacket for The Scilly Isles and Other Poems by Geoffrey Grigson, 1946

Calvados with the crews. Such vessels had been used for wartime missions to the French coast and the visitors had already been impressed by the heap of empty gin and whisky bottles left behind by agents staying in Point House. Now they plotted to become stowaways to get to Brest and then Paris, to see the Picasso Libre exhibition and even the artist himself. Two escape bids were foiled by harbour police. In the end they returned to London, after John wrote to E.Q.: 'you may think that England's a Free Country it is perhaps until you try & leave it!" Three years later, with artist and model so easily diverted by life, John embarked on his magnificent Portrait of Sonia. It was incomplete in 1956, when Sonia married the writer Peter Quennell, after they met on a train. She was his fourth wife and gladly gave way to a fifth. They parted as friends, Sonia taking the portrait that John had eventually finished as a belated wedding present (the background foliage like a bridal garland) and the nickname 'Spider', given by Peter because he thought she looked like a spider monkey. Spider had been a great success with Peter's friends such as Cecil Beaton and Cyril Connolly. 'I had no pretensions', she recalled, with habitual candour. 'I was completely superficial and it charmed them.' She claimed never to have read a book- prompting Cyril to declare, 'I'm going to do what Spider does, and arrange all my books in colours'. 3 She was to live in Munich and Rome with the producer and screenwriter Wolfgang Reinhardt, who bought the rights to The Sound ofMusic for $9,000. The couple lived in style until Reinhardt's death on profits from the stage and screen adaptations though, typically, Spider saw neither. Based latterly in New York and London, and dabbling in interior design, she remained the image of her Craxton portrait - the youthful, jazz-

134

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

loving figure with the briefly penetrating gaze before the renewed flight from boredom. In their eighties, decades after they had ceased to see Lucian, Spider and John shared a birthday party. The trip to the Scillies had dire consequences for Lucian Freud. Letters from the girl he pursued when Sonia rejected him were discovered by Lorna. She dropped him when he had also taken up with the actress Pauline Tennant, and refused all entreaties to renew their affair. 'I thought I was giving you up for Lent', she said. 'But I'm giving you up for good.' In John's opinion, Lucian seduced Michael Wishart, Lorna's son, in a bid to get at Lorna. He was certain that his friend vowed thereafter never again to love a woman as much as she loved him. Near the end of the war, through the ever-helpful offices of Horizon, John and Lucian met the Greek Surrealist writer Nanos Valaoritis, whose first poe~ had been published in 1939 when he was just 18. Plans for a rendezvous i!_l a · Piccadilly restaurant were muddled by messages passed to the wrong people, so the trio swapped identities to match the errors for surreal entertainment. Nanos anyway had amazing stories to tell - from his recent escape to London via Turkey and Egypt to the family saga, or myth, of how the Venus de Milo statue lost her arms in a tussle while being stolen from one of his ancestors. The friendship flourished. John decorated the 1947 Valaoritis poetry collection

Portrait of Sonia, 1948-57 Oil on canvas, 76 x 76 cm. Tate

THE GREAT ESCAPE

135

Punishment ofWizards (seep. 164) with a drawing of a girl framed by fig leaves. His then wife, actress Anne Valery, claimed it as a portrait of herself. Late in 1945 Peter Watson showed John some photographs posted by an unknown Greek painter called Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika - Nico Ghika - for possible inclusion in Horizon: We both immediately recognised an exceptional mind and talent, & it was our delight then that here was an artist who had combined the liberating philosophy of Cubism with the landscape of Greece. The Mediterranean had claimed back what it had inspired in the first place. The two artists met at a pre-Christmas dinner party hosted by Cyril Connolly. Nearly 40, cosmopolitan Nico Ghika was paying a first visit to Britain. Born in Athens and descended from a line of Greek admirals, he had been drawn to Paris at 16-just like John. He had then returned for lengthy studies, a first solo show and collaborations with avant-garde figures such as artists Jean Arp and Jean Helion and architect Le Corbusier. Back in Athens he was at the forefront of the Greek modernist movement. He stayed in London for several months - painting cityscapes (one Soho panorama delighting in the name of Greek Street), sorting exhibitions and conducting a clandestine love affair. Nothing like as austere as photos suggest, he was passionate and playful - translating Edward Lear's nonsense poem 'The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo' into blissful Greek. Looking back on nearly fifty years of friendship, in notes for Nico's obituary in 1994, John applauded a restless painter-philosopher, forever embracing new ideas: He could turn his mind to architecture, sculpture, the nude, still lives, landscape, portraits, theatre designs - his exhibitions showing a subtle mastery of every medium. His complex and astonishing visual & verbal memory never impeded his natural gift for painting & colour but were the means for a freedom & joie de vivre that left him alas a rather lonely figure in the hierarchy of modern Greek art.4 Ghika appeared like an Odysseus, bringing hopes for an invitation to join him on the voyage home to Greece when John and Janet, on a cycle ride to Hampstead Heath, found their lifelong London anchor. A bayed and turreted artist's house was now empty and shell-shaken, with broken door, smashed windows and a For Sale sign in the garden. Atelier - 14 Kidderpore Avenue - stood between St Luke's Church and the lodge C.F.A. Voysey built for his father. The Arts and Crafts house had been designed in 1901 by Arthur Keen for the plein-air painter George Hillyard Swinstead. Behind the extravagant street fac;:ade, an enormous studio ate into a small plot prompting Swinstead's 1910 book The Story of My Old World Garden And How I Made It in a London Suburb. Harold could teach here amid a warren of family, students and strays, so the Craxtons

136

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Architect's drawing of 14 Kidderpore Avenue by Arthur Keen

pushed the boat out and bought the place for £4,250. To deter squatters, John repaired the door and slept on the floor. A 'ghastly' seventeenth-century German painting of children holding animals, bought in a bundle from Lisson Grove, plugged a hole in the linoleum. At last, in a bitingly cold January of 1946, John was able to revisit Paris with cash, entry permit and contacts provided by Peter Watson. From his patron's plundered Rue du Bae flat, he headed for the Rue de Seine, where Picasso and Miro dealer Pierre Loeb was reviving his Galerie Pierre after wartime exile. The gallerist expressed interest in showing works by John and Lucian but gave no firm commitment. Tipped off by Peter, John went to Le Catalan restaurant. Across the room he saw a stylish woman smoking a cigarette and knew this was Dora Maar, the model for Weepin9 Woman. However distorted, Picasso's portraits were recognisable likenesses. The sculptor Alberto Giacometti walked in, then Picasso, acting 'like a king and child mingled'. He drew on the paper table covering and when he left, the patron carried off the picture for his collection and his pension. John hadn't dared move. Soon afterwards he wrote excitedly to Lucian: Saw an epileptic fit in Monmartre as dramatic a performance as to delight you 20 cloaked gendarmes chasing in mad circles the mad stampede the gestures of a madman - & then tea with Picasso and Pierre Loeb both of whom you will meet soon for they are completely charming & young in spirit ... I eat with Picasso & Co in a little restaurant called Le Catalan ... They want me to live with them in the summer & their daughter stays in town at our place. 5 Craxton chickens were being counted in Le Catalan. When Picasso was met again with Lucian the great man's fleeting interest lay in the famous Professor

THE GREAT ESCAPE

137

Freud rather than the two novice artists. Far more than these brief encounters, the work was the thing: 'From Picasso I took danger. He made you walk a tightrope. He made you relook at nature and rethink what a painting should be.' While walking in a Parisian street Lucian was to have a chance meeting with a Catalan artist called Javier Vilat6- an encounter that was to bring John a lasting friendship over many later visits to the French capital. Javier, an excellent printmaker, had followed his uncle to Paris, where the two men remained confidants. The uncle was Pablo Picasso. Meanwhile, John had a passing relationship with a gay man called Hans Ulrich Gasser, with whom he shared a hotel bed. Gasser, a Swiss art dealer known to Pierre Loeb and Peter Watson, had a more interesting proposition: a Craxton show that spring in his Zurich gallery. Meanwhile, he opened his contacts book and produced an introduction to Christian Berard who, in a room filled with opium smoke, wept while recalling Christopher Wood. The dealer then accompanied John to London, where Essie opened a tin of chocolate biscuits saved through the war for a special occasion, but now reduced to sawdust. Luckily Gasser was more impressed with John's pictures. There was much to see in London that New Year, starting with a Victoria and Albert Museum display of Picasso and Matisse paintings. A major show at the Lefevre Gallery mixed recent works by Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland with others by Bacon, Colquhoun, Freud, MacBryde and Trevelyan - plus nine Craxtons (Scillonian pictures and a self-portrait). February brought the Royal Academy's Exhibition of Greek Art 3000 BC to AD 1945 - a survey from Cycladic figures to Ghika paintings attracting 72,000 visitors. A Minoan stone bowl base and Cycladic marble jar were lent by the widow of John Pendle bury, the dashingly romantic Knossos excavator executed by the Germans during the Battle of Crete. Kenneth Clark lent several ancient and Byzantine pieces. Eight works by El Greco included Mark Oliver's figure of a saint drawing. Ghika also featured in a Modern Greek Art show at Greek House, Grosvenor Square, and five of his pictures appeared in the March issue of Horizon. Having been such a poor student, John was now persuaded by Clive Gardiner to teach at Goldsmiths. He needed money and hoped to appropriate materials for his own art, but teaching proved a nightmare. Classes of 'suburban girls' giggled when told to draw a cabbage. 'Think of it as a green rose', he pleaded. There were yawns when he took in an Ancient Greek pot for another still-life study. And then a bearded, thickset and bellicose older man exploded in a life class when told that he was placing the head on the model's neck incorrectly. 'Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?' the student stormed. 'What did you do in the war?' When John said that he had failed an army medical, the aggressor yelled: 'Bloody cheek! Don't bother me again.' John informed Clive Gardiner, who said: 'He's just out of the navy. His name is Tom Keating.' 'He couldn't draw for a toffee', John recalled. 'He just copied everyone else.' And that was his encounter with the future art forger. Through the Courtauld professor and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt he also came to know

138

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Hare an a Table, 1943-6

Oil on board,

51

x 63.4 cm.John Craxton Estate (on long-term loan to Pallant House,

Chichester)

another masterly faker, Eric Hebborn, who was eventually murdered in Rome. John was relieved to be asked to leave Goldsmiths after barely a term when he sought time off for foreign travels - and delighted that Cecil Waller replaced him. As part of his preparations for departure to the Continent, John finally completed the oil painting Hare on a Table that had been forming over three years. Also wrought in Durer-like Conte and pastel, the image encapsulated his feelings about Britain: no still life was stiller than this dead animal, the embodiment of speed reduced to limp fur, stiffened sinew and clouding eye. It stood for every atrophying thing he wanted to leave behind. With all his pictures produced, framed and packed - some reclaimed from a small show in a rare books shop known as the St George's Gallery, most being ever barer and brighter reflections on light in the Scilly Isles John left in the spring for Switzerland. Pausing in Paris, he renewed creative acquaintances - especially with the mayfly that was Olivier Larronde. Turning 19 and already acclaimed as a poet, a golden youth would decline into drugs and destitution. For John Craxton, pleasure was always a protection. The pleasure seeker thought he had disembarked on a different planet in a Swiss railway station cafe serving coffee and croissants with lashings of black

THE GREAT ESCAPE

139

Self Portrait at a Window, spring 1946 Conte pencil on paper, 22.5 x 26.5 cm. A gift to Olivier Larronde. Private collection

cherry jam and butter. He marvelled at a country with crisp air and clear views, where everything was spotless and pristine after the smog, dust and debris of London. When the spell had dulled, he wrote to Aunt Sylvia: The Swiss deep down are like all races denied access to the sea impossible & so snobbish & uneasy going but what a wonderful country really & so well run & incredibly clean ... Horizon was putting together a Swiss issue and everyone seemed to have time to spare, so John joined Cyril, Lys Lubbock and the magazine's New York agent Tony Bower on a tour. Peter Watson wrote: 'I don't envy you lying on a mattress with Tony Bower but maybe it's delicious!' Peter advised visiting art collector Robert von Hirsch in Basie. Better still was John's two-day inspection of the late Paul Klee's Berne studio, guided by the artist's widow. On the second afternoon he recognised a small work as half of a painting seen on the first morning. As a reward, the astounded Lily Klee-Stumpf offered him the reunited picture of a city at night for the equivalent of £8. 'She might as well have asked £8 million', John said. For all the Watson benefaction, he was being forced to sell his Max Ernst painting to fund his travels. Lily had been a pianist and Paul a violinist, and John enjoyed her company despite her sad air. Five months later she suffered a fatal stroke when her only son, Felix, returned from a Soviet labour camp. On 17 May John sent a postcard to Janet just before the Craxtons moved to Kidderpore Avenue. Now studying oboe and piano at the Royal Academy of Music, his favourite sibling learned that the appeal of Switzerland was fast waning:

I'm writing this in a tiny canoe on the red hot sunny lake ... Zurich is not really a nice town despite its Garden of Eden look. The people here are too German Swiss and don't understand the Craxton attitude to life.

140

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

He was staying at Belp, near Berne, with Rolf and Kathie Biirgi - art collectors and friends of the Klees - and things had got rather sticky. In a rowing boat on the red hot lake he had kissed Mrs Burgi while a jealous husband watched on the shore. Back at the house he found his host cleaning a gun with ominous deliberation. It was time to leave. The Craxton attitude to life was based on tremendous luck and synchronicity- gifts that did not desert him now in another hour of need. At a dinner to launch the Zurich show, John sat next to Lady 'Peter' Norton (nee Noel Evelyn Hughes), who with her diplomat husband had narrowly escaped from Poland at the start of the war. Sir Clifford Norton served as a British envoy in Switzerland during the conflict and was now Ambassador to Athens. Lady Norton was a gift from the gods. She had co-founded the London Gallery in 1936 and staged shows by Naum Gabo, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Edvard Munch before resigning to join her husband in Warsaw. Peter Watson 1 said: 'She's even more art mad than I am.' Now she asked John about his plans. He said that he longed to be in Greece - and the sooner the better. Then he mentioned the name of Joan Eyres Monsell, who was working as secretary to the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster for his job as press attache in the Athens Embassy. Joan and Peter Norton were great friends. That clinched it. Lady Norton had left a borrowed bomber in Milan during a mission to buy curtains for the threadbare embassy. She would give him a lift. The Craxton exhibition had barely opened when the artist vanished. He left behind all his unsold pictures - some to cover the bill for fine new art materials. He never saw most of them again, despite numerous attempts at reclamation. In Milan the ambassador's wife took him to a Modigliani show in a whitewashed garage; then, on 11 May, to a box at La Scala for Arturo Toscanini's return from exile in America. They were crowded among guests of the conductor's contessa daughter, in an opera house rebuilt after bombing and now filled beyond capacity. The Italian programme - Rossini, Verdi, Puccini; novice soprano Renata Tebaldi -was rapturously received by an audience including tens of thousands listening via loudspeakers in the cathedral square. Happiest blending high and low life, John filled his scorecard in Milan by running into Raymond Mortimer and smoking Greek hashish in the critic's hotel bedroom. Lady Norton joined them - she liked a full life too. With Liza Paravicini, Somerset Maugham's daughter, they raised glasses of absinthe: toasting freedom in a spirit that Fascism had banned. Finally they were in the air and on a journey the 23-year-old painter had longed for practically all his life. Suddenly he was in no hurry. 'I've never seen Venice', he announced wistfully. 'Could we take a little detour and have a look?' 'Lovely idea', said Lady Norton. That is how, a year after the war, a Boston bomber came to swoop so low over St Mark's Square that pigeons 'flew up like confetti' as the aeroplane 'shot up the piazza ... just missing the campanili'. 6 Nerve-shattered Venetians also scrambled for cover.

THE GREAT ESCAPE

141

PART THREE

19) SPRING IN ATHENS

Far below the borrowed bomber, Italian terrain gave way to Greek in a shift of tone and colour as if in an abstract painting. Thick plantings in dry yellow fields turned to the older, wilder, paler and purer. The rumpled landscape now appeared barely cultivated and almost unmarked by roads. Islands looked like terracotta shards mottled with grey vegetation and rimmed in white marble. And the land was held within a sea-and-sky spectrum of brilliant blues: aquamarine, sapphire, azure, violet, indigo. These Aegean hues would have been the defining glories of Greece but for the greater impact of light and shadow- signalling that everything under the sun would be in sharper focus here. The aeroplane landed in Attica, at the military airfield of Eleusis. What is today an industrial suburb of Athens was then an ancient settlement separated from the capital by 25 kilometres of olive groves, market gardens and natural landscape. The birthplace of Aeschylus and thus of Greek tragedy was connected to the big city by the Sacred Way, the processional route for the ancient cult of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This was the path John Craxton followed in May 1946, in a British army vehicle laid on for the ambassador's wife. When Lord Byron first saw Athens, in 1809, it was a mouldering town of 10,000 people. Now the population was a hundred times bigger, lately swollen by refugees from war destruction elsewhere. In the six years before John's arrival 400,000 of the seven million Greeks had died, with many Athenians starving. A collision starting in 1940 with Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas's refusal to surrender to Mussolini, had moved through atrocious Nazi occupation to the most savage conflict of all: civil war. In December 1944 Communist-led resistance fighters had battled with British troops for control of the city, the contest determined by greater firepower and, following a Christmas visit by Winston Churchill, a treaty to hinge the king's return on a plebiscite due in September 1946. The city John entered was sprawling across the central Attic basin between the four mountains of Aigaleo, Hymettus, Parnitha and marble-quarried Pentelicus. It was largely a low-rise affair of baked red tiles and white, grey and yellow plaster, with pastel-shaded buildings in poorer districts, all set amid the greenery of yards and gardens. Modest and graceful structures swirled around several hills, with Lycabettus the highest, and the Acropolis the most imposing given its Parthenon crown. The American writer Edmund Wilson, taking the Craxton route into Athens the previous summer, described his first glimpse of the fifth-century BC temple to the goddess Athena as 'astonishing, dramatic,

144

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Self-Portrait, 1946-7 01I on paper, 32.3 x 23.2 cm. Private collection

SPRING IN ATHENS

145

divine, with at the same time the look of a phantom'.' Further ruins, ancient and modern, lay all around. An impression of both spaciousness and wreckage hardened in streets with broken profiles where buildings had been blown to rubble. John's arrival coincided with the opening shots in the main phase of the Greek Civil War, which was to be fought beyond Athens and mostly on the mainland from the Peloponnese northwards through Thessaly to the border provinces of Epirus, Macedonia and Thrace. Athenian political circles were a verbal minefield. John seemed scarcely to notice any of this, given an immediate and permanent assault on his senses. The devastated city was bathed in spring light and perfumed with citrus blossom and honeysuckle. Malnutrition was still rife but tin cans on steps and windowsills bore aromatic sweet basil to flavour meals of tomatoes. Fingers of wilderness stretching into the city centre smelled of pine, thyme and sage. John arrived with returning nightingales. A natural sensualist was utterly seduced. On 20 May he wrote to E.Q. Nicholson: Oh Queee! I cant tell you how delicious this country is & the lovely hot sun all day and at night tavernas: hot prawns in olive oil & great wine & the soft sweet smell of greek pine trees. I shall never come home. how can l? 2

They drove amid trams, buses, taxis, bicycles, horse-drawn carts and donkeys to the British embassy- on the corner ofVasilissis Sophias Avenue and Loukianou Street. This neoclassical mansion, painted pale pink, had been bought from the widow of Eleftherios Venizelos, the Cretan revolutionary leader turned Greek national statesman, in 1936. The building was under Swiss protection during the German occupation but in the front-line of December 1944 battles. From the spring of 1946 it was being brilliantly revived as Lady Norton adorned the walls with major paintings of international modernism and filled reception rooms and garden with gatherings of artists and intellectuals. Sir Clifford Norton was aiming to build Anglo-Greek political and economic ties, still with the military element fostered by his controversial predecessor, Rex Leeper, but increasingly with the persuasive weapon of culture. However, the ambassador was less than delighted by John's unexpected arrival, so Lady Norton lodged him above a garage. Here, thanks to embassy gardeners, he began learning the demotic Greek that would make his eventual mastery of the language so distinctive - an earthy vocabulary spiced and spiked by Craxtonian wit, shocking some but charming many more. He loved mimicry and swear words, puns and subverting formal masculine, feminine and neuter associations for expressive and comic effect. Once, when he called a friend who was staying with a grand Athenian family, a maid entered the drawing room to announce that a lorry driver was on the phone. By then John had long concluded that fluency in everyday Greek speech flowed best via 'one bed and two pillows'. During the upheavals in Athens of late 1944, a battalion of leftist women rifles over shoulders, fists hammering the air - had marched along Andrea

146

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Syngrou Avenue shouting 'Down With Virginity!' Their slogan was an assault on the whole social system. It failed: feminism was then vanquished in Greece for decades. In ongoing Orthodox society women spoke quietly, if at all. Girls were cloistered until arranged marriages, usually while still teenagers. Virginity was part of the wedding dowry. A corollary of the segregation of the sexes is greater homosexuality: young men who prefer to be with women have sex with other men in order to ease the pressure and pass the time. In Greece, as John Craxton encountered it, same-sex physical romance and release was just another dimension to the warmth of masculine friendship - a fact of life perfectly attuned to his open nature and sunny spirit. What lay in store was a lot of fun. On 22 May Peter Watson wrote from London: I envy you Athens. Other days, I have been so happy there on several visits ... 1 Greek art still makes everything else trash. Just soak it all in as much as you can. If you get the chance go to Epidaurus and Olympia the most magical place in the world. Peter pressed John, as he was pressing Lucian ('he leaves tomorrow Seine-side'), to find time to draw in a Parisian art school. Lucian himself was already looking beyond France, towards joining his friend in Greece. Europe was reawakening in a new dawn, with the sun-drenched south beckoning most beguilingly. The sensuality of resurgent life was captured at this moment by the great Greek poet, essayist and public servant George Seferis. He looked on as treasures of the National Archaeological Museum were dug up once more, following reburial during the German invasion. Divine classical limbs, torsos and buttocks emerged at random as the statues were unearthed. 'It was a chorus of the resurrected, a second coming of bodies that gave you a crazy joy', the poet wrote. 3 Just 17 months earlier, Churchill's forces had held little more of Athens than the central Kolonaki district, between the British Embassy and the Hotel Grande Bretagne on Syntagma Square. The landmark hotel was still ventilated with bullet holes, though dynamite laid in the sewers for the war leader's visit had not been detonated. Between those two unlikely fortresses, the bastion of the British Council offices stood on Kolonaki Square. Since Greece was effectively the first battleground of the emerging Cold War, even though Stalin tacitly conceded its place in the UK-US sphere of influence in return for Soviet sway over the rest of the Balkans, culture was a propagandist priority. An illustrious operation in Athens was headed by the Byzantine historian Steven Runciman and included the writer and traveller Maurice Cardiff and the classicist and experimental novelist Rex Warner. Rex's assistant - as Deputy Director of the British Institute of Higher English Studies -was Patrick Leigh Fermor, a romantic figure with the looks of a matinee idol and a life from an adventure novel. The live wire known to all as Paddy had failed spectacularly in formal education, before taking a meandering walk, at 18, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Learning by looking, reading and talking, he fast became

SPRING IN ATHENS

147

Paddy at Lixouri, Cephalonia, by Joan Leigh Fermor, 1946

a walking encyclopedia able to speak, sing and bedazzle in numerous languages. Setting out on his marathon trudge with high-powered introductions and potent personal charm, but next to no money, he had slept in barns and stately houses with similar delight - his exultation in being alive matched by John Craxton. The outbreak of the Second World War had found Paddy living in a lemon grove with a Romanian princess, above a Peloponnesian shore with a view to Poros island. Enlisting into humdrum army life, he looked like failing again until joining the Special Operations Executive and the partisans on Crete. Together with Billy (W. Stanley) Moss and a small band of Cretan fighters, he kidnapped the island's German commander, General Kreipe, and spirited him over the White Mountains to a waiting British boat. The glory was terrific, the reprisals terrible. While pulling off the next to impossible, Paddy could be fatally clumsyaccidentally killing a resistance comrade while oiling a rifle. The dying man forgave him, but the bereaved family did not; so a Cretan war hero became the target of a blood feud. At a party in Cairo late in 1944 Paddy met Joan Eyres Monsell- still taking photographs but now helping the war effort via a clerical job at the British Embassy. The next September Joan was posted to Athens and Paddy followed her. When John arrived they were embedded, despite many separations then and later, as lovers and lifelong companions. Although not marrying until 1968, they were always the Leigh Fermors. Joan had been the first person John had contacted in Athens. So he was able to correct Lady Norton's take on Paddy's habit of sharing his rooms with visiting Cretans with whom he caroused late into the night. She drew the inevitable conclusion until John informed her that his new friend -with whom he was now partying in Grande Bretagne bars, Kolonaki cafes, hashish dives and bare-earthed tavernas in Plaka lanes below the Acropolis -was a tireless hedonist. Sexually he was open-minded where others were concerned, while being basically (but perhaps not absolutely exclusively) straight himself. Paddy's alter ego was Alexander Wallace Fielding, always known as Xan and very soon known to John. These glamorous free spirits were irrepressible and unemployable. Xan, born in India and raised in Nice by his grandmother,

148

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

had been running a Cypriot bar badly when the Second World War began. He had gifts for friendship, languages and subversion, and excelled in ridiculously daring resistance activities in Crete and France where he was much loved and never forgotten. Ever a traveller, he became a writer and translator. Paddy and Xan directed John to Crete and provided crucial contacts. John introduced Lady Norton to Nico Ghika and his characterful wife, Tiggie (short for Antigone) - a poet who, after spirited conversation over taverna suppers, might lead the room in communal singing. Most importantly, John was instrumental in cementing the bonds between Nico, Joan, Pad_dy and himself, and from their first meetings in Athens the cosmopolitan quartet -with no children to distract them, though many friends besides -would be joined forever in a grouping of emotional and creative support. The time and talents of each member of this private party were to be always at the service of the others, to the immense enrichment of all their lives. The sole tensions - and these only in1 passing-would be between John and Paddy: they had a striking similarity, with reckless charm that could become a dangerous liability. There were times when Paddy thought John went too far - though he himself went farther. Just as Paddy was on course to be sacked from the only peacetime job he ever held, charged with having too good a time at government expense, John's joie de vivre soon fell foul of closing minds and doors at the Athens embassy. There was a disastrous dinner at which Sir Clifford's patience ran out when the insouciant artist displeased the guest of honour: Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. Earning a reputation as the Spartan General, that was more fitting than the friendly nickname of Monty, Bernard Law Montgomery had served with doughty distinction in two world wars. He had gained a bullet through a lung at the First Battle ofYpres in 1914 and a formidable record as a driven and egomaniacal commander scoring vital victories over Hitler in North Africa, then in the fore of the Allied advance through Western Europe until taking the German surrender. Churchill said of him: 'in defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable'. At the embassy dinner the military martinet's interrogation ofJohn over his nonexistent war record and suspect moral fibre drew flippant retorts, and they in turn sparked umbrage. Although the friendship and patronage ofLady Norton would continue (first off with a £15 monthly allowance), it was only diplomatic that John should be evicted from the embassy forthwith. On an aeroplane, after his Athens visit, Montgomery wrote a note of thanks to the Nortons for liberal hospitality within which he had felt wholly at home and 'able to be myself'. 4 It was a privilege he did not extend to others. Paddy recommended the nearby island of Poros. Carrying little more than art materials, John took a bus to the port of Piraeus, separated from Athens by wasteland and still fairly blitzed from German parting shots. He boarded a steamer ferry and, in a crowd of conscripts, salesmen and peasant families with babies, bundles and livestock, headed out past Salamis and Sounion and into the blue Saronic Gulf. He was almost certainly the only non-Greek on the boat.

SPRING IN ATHENS

149

RITES OF PASSAGE

Poros is hardly an island. It resembles a hip of rock hacked from the side of the Peloponnese then cut in two: Sphairia, with the port town; and larger and wilder Kalavria - the mismatched pairing linked by a narrow isthmus like a yacht and dinghy roped together. The strait between mainland and island has been fancifully described as a Greek version of the Golden Horn or Venice's Grand Canal. The American writer Henry Miller waxed yet more fantastical when he likened arrival here to floating through the town in amniotic fluid: 'To sail slowly through the streets of Poros is to recapture the joy of passing through the neck of the womb.' Perhaps his travel memoir The Colossus of Maroussi was the more lyrical for having been published in the fateful year of 1941. Looking back decades later, to 'the happiest place I have ever known', Lawrence Durrell wrote: Poros is a most enchanting arrangement, obviously designed by demented Japanese children with the aid of Paul Klee and Raoul Dufy. A child's box of tricks that has been rapidly and fluently set up against a small shoulder of headland which holds the winds in thrall, it extends against the magical blue skyline its herbaceous border of brilliant colours, hardly quite dry as yet ... ' Alighting on the quay, John rejoiced in his first Greek island - its name translating, appropriately, as 'Passage'. Moreover, Poros is a rarity among the 6,000 islands of Greece with a name taking a masculine form. The distinction is apt since the naval headquarters of the modern Greek state were established here in 1828. Much of the appeal of Poros for John Craxton was the old base turned naval training college. A stream of potential models and companions now flowed. Asking a bystander about lodgings, he was directed to a house in the street above the harbour. Here, as usual, he landed on his feet- moving in with a family much like his own. His new landlady, Efstathia Mastropetros, had known better times in Addis Ababa until her husband was defrauded by a business partner shortly before his early death. All that remained was a house on Poros, to which Efstathia returned with her children in 1930. The first floor was rented to a priest and half of the ground floor was also let, to leave a family of six sharing two rooms. The four sons and one daughter of

150

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

The Mastropetros house, Poros

the house - Yannis, Dinos, Maria, Petros and Grigori, aged 16 to 24 became John's Greek cousins. The Mastropetros residence, a compact neoclassical house from 1893, had an impressive outlook. John was · awarded a first-floor room with the best views. When Lucian arrived in September he got the room behind John's, with connecting doors between what became their bedroom studios. Other rooms on the upper floor were closed off and supposedly locked filled with the belongings of the absent priest. At some point the inquisitive visitors acquired a key. In the meantime, John had more than three months to settle in and claim the territory as his own. His room looked out over a lake-like stretch of sea busy with boating: naval vessels; wooden fishing and mercantile caique schooners; pleasure craft; ferries plying between Piraeus and Saronic Gulf ports and rowing boats criss-crossing the 350-metre straits between Poros and the mainland town of Galatas. Beyond ranged light and dark green slopes of Kalavria - a sparsely populated wilderness with deeper shades being pine forests yielding resin as a preservative for retsfna, the staple Greek white wine. One of few visible buildings, just above the waterline, was Villa Serenity, belonging to the Dragoumis family. Designed by Anastasios Metaxas (architect in Athens of the 1896 Olympic Stadium and the Venizelos house turned British Embassy), the Italianate mansion stood proud on a stone plinth, painted Pompeiian red and extending into bay, balustrades and terraces. For John's first Greek landscape painting, Hotel by the Sea, the villa was pared back to basic building blocks and bleached a searing white. True to the Sutherland dictum that an artist should use sources only as a starting point, in this declaration oflove for Greece the 'hotel' is also the steamer that brought him to Poros, while the ghost of the bay barely visible in an end wall echoes the apse in the lime-washed Byzantine churches of Greece that were already a source of fascination. Five years later, Villa Serenity became a hotel for a decade.

,

RITES OF PASSAGE

151

John produced Hotel by the Sea in an ecstasy of discovery- diving at once into the faceted and fractured planes of light and colour that would define his early Aegean pictures. The strong blues and greens and dazzling whites were a stark contrast to the blur of murky London. The penetrating light revealed everything in art as well as in life - exposing all character traits and emotional longing, striking flesh and bone: the essence of the physicality of life in Greece. Moreover, almost lost in the geometry of the abstracted landscape, a goat forages on a fig tree. The first living thing in a Craxton painting of Greece will appear forever in charge of the scene. Linked to Pan - horny Greek god of shepherds, flocks and wildness - goats have been domesticated since Neolithic times for milk, fibre, meat and hide. The animal element adds tension to the picture, being a symbol of resilient life and a plunderer in paradise. As John said: 'Goats are essential domestic animals in the Mediterranean and yet they destroy the landscape, nibbling away at the trees and devouring every green shoot. My paintings comment on life but it is all implicit.' Hotel by the Sea is a visual poem. It was swiftly followed by a more prosaic Beach Scene rendition of the Glamour Hotel - then a 12-room pension having the sandy strand at Askeli, on Kalavria, all to itself until mass development from the 1960s. The artist would have joined the Greek families frolicking in the water, save for the fact that - despite all those Selsey summers - he still could not swim. He was further motivated to set down initial impressions by the promise of an Athens exhibition thanks to new friends at the British Council. He would work all day then wander along the quay in the evening. Watching the sunset behind the Peloponnese, he savoured the rocky silhouette of Methana as it lived up to its local name of 'The Sleeping Maiden' most vividly. Eventually the female profile would feed into his art, notably as a backdrop to a ballet (p. 209). Although John generally ate with the Mastropetros family, he sought sustenance of another kind late into the night in sailors' bars and tavernas joining the steadily more riotous assembly and carrying on with his lightning sketches as musicians played, conscripts danced and plates and glasses flew. Now began the multitudes of black-and-white snaps of young men, usually in naval uniforms, posing singly or with John at taverna tables laden with bottles, glasses and cigarette packets. Diminutive and drained of colour, they remain bright with electric energy and possibility. Names such as Andreas, Christos, Giorgos, Nikos and Vassilis proliferate, and among the changing company there are formal portraits of John's special and more upper-class friend at this time: Yannis Athinaios. Also, he was now helping an untrained 17-year-old painter called Rigas Despotopoulos, who had grown up on Chios and seen only icons and illustrations and whose work was 'full of intensity and drama like Chagall'. John would take him to London and assist his later career in Paris. Even then, a cadger was a patron too.

152

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

Hotel by the Sea, 1946 Oil on canvas, 49.5 x 61 cm. Tate

Villa Serenity

RITES OF PASSAGE

153

Drawing portraits, Salonika

In glorious high summer weather of mid-July, John learned with sadness of the death of Paul Nash. He had died in his sleep while revisiting favourite scenes in Dorset. Aged only 57, the pioneering creative spirit was killed by heart failure due to long-term asthma. This mysterious threat to breathing occurs when irritants cause constriction of sensitive airways - possibly worsened, for Paul Nash, by an allergic reaction to art materials. John, in contrast, now felt that he was breathing freely at last. Until he found himself in Greece, almost every Craxton portrait had been emblematic - near to far distant - likenesses of himself. Now, as if by magic, he became a consummate portraitist of others. Youthful self-absorption was blasted away by Aegean light and life. Preferring to record specific portraits in swiftly made drawings, rather than within the more distilled, imaginary and gradually evolving elements of his paintings, he said: I arrived in Greece knowing I couldn't draw but I would sit down in front of a man, say in a marketplace, surrounded by hordes of children, and somehow think myself into the man, allowing his image into my personality and then drawing almost unconsciously. I got amazing likenesses in 20 minutes. They thought it was uncanny. I'd made myself into a machine - a camera. Greek people loved posing for portraits - though they might also be caught unawares. One youth was sketched in court defending himself against charges of stealing 63 pumpkins from a blind man. However deep the

154

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

hardship etched int~ the lines of prematurely aged faces, there was an essential gaiety in the Greeks; even the most serious countenance seemed on the point of breaking into a smile - if not bursting into laughter. John Craxton noted that winning tendency and reflected it in his own character. The resulting portrait could prompt astonishment and alarm. On 7 June John dashed off a drawing oflong-haired, wide-eyed Tasia. The likeness was so exact, and so sublime, that the girl's parents feared her soul was being stolen and they wanted to lock the image away. Poros, like the rest of Greece, was in thrall to primeval superstition -with a bedrock of pagan beliefs poking through the plethora of Orthodox churches and attendant Christian rites, rituals and festivals covering much of the calendar. Now John took great pains to convince Tasia's father that the teenager's soul was safe in his hands, since he would never part with the picture. The promise came back to haunt him when he sold the drawing to Anthony West, writer son of authors Rebecca West 1 and H.G. Wells. The buyer hung the image in his study but his wife became-so jealous that John had to exchange it for an innocent landscape. Usually in Greece, the act of drawing was a welcome intimation of the divine: Greeks, and I also include those Greeks who sat for so many fayum portraits that have survived, seem to regard a portrait as a passport to immortality. Often in the presence of a painter they assume a pose with the eyes winging their way into an idealised future. They are in their prime, and so they would always remain. The portrait photographers of Greece when I first went there were kept busy retouching the faces of their sitters - removing double chins and unshaven five o'clock shadows.' Amid civil war a compulsory 30-month military service for every young man could mean a death sentence. Youthful portraits acquired a period pathos. Parents with any clout kept their sons out of the army, where tours of duty might be summarily ended by injury or fatality- or else extended. The air force was safest but closed to all bar the luckiest and best protected. Naval conscripts were fairly fortunate; apart from the interception of caiques with arms for the rebels, guarding the seas was a relatively peaceful affair. There was a lot of marching to brass bands in the training college grounds, and sauntering arm in arm along the quay. In the tavernas youthful high spirits soared, after alcohol, into singing and dancing as records or live musicians played. Greek poets entered popular culture with lines set to music and then learned and sung by young and old alike. Thousands of folk dances, from the pan-Hellenic syrtos to the Cretan pentozali, had been handed down the generations, with the hassapiko originally a medieval battle mime by the butchers' guild of Constantinople. In the sailors' bars of Porns, the star turn was a conscripted Cretan butcher called Kostas Alexakis. Swarthy and impressively moustached,

RITES OF PASSAGE

155

An Acrobatic Cretan Butcher, November 1947

Oil on canvas, 66 x 91 cm. Private collection

he had large, lazy and slightly bloodshot eyes. His speciality was not the hassapiko but a solo dance called the zeibekiko - and any idea of sloth ceased when he took to the floor. Clicking thumbs and fingers, and with carefully controlled steps, he circled an upturned chair in his white uniform like a seagull. Then, with a firm forward thrust, he grabbed the top two legs and somersaulted backwards over the chair, to land cleanly on his feet and continue dancing. John sketched the performance and befriended a fellow artist. The Craxton goal was to mix with all strata of society. He returned frequently on the ferry to mingle in elite Athenian circles, where he conversed in the French favoured by the Greek upper classes above their own native language. And he was soon friendly, after an introduction from Mrs Mastropetros, with the leading hostess on Poros. Hailing from the powerful Tombazi family, Mina Diamantopoulos looked in her own imposing person like a Greek Valkyrie (and was actually a quarter German). The Diamantopoulos house, at Love Bay on Kalavria, was reached by a go-minute row or two-hour walk west from Poros town. A nearby Russian naval base, though abandoned by the early 1900s, was a reminder for Mina of her four-year-old self attending Tsar Nicholas H's coronation when her father was Greek ambassador to the imperial court in St Petersburg. She married an Athenian pharmacist and poet of delicate health, who wanted to retire to Poros

1S6

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

and the companionship of his library. His stalwart, sociable and multilingual wife, who long outlived him, embraced a spirit of adventure - swimming to a family estate on the Peloponnesian shore and back again, regardless of prevailing currents. When the Germans came, she rose valiantly to the challenge - confronting the authorities and running a clinic and a soup kitchen that saved many lives. In old age she asked: 'What is fear? I have never known it.' John grew closer still to Mina's sister-in-law, the painter and resistance heroine Aleca Stylou Diamantopoulos, and her paediatrician husband, Stamatis, who had looked after the children of the late King Paul. They lived in a neoclassical villa with a scented garden in Plateia Mavili in Ambelokipi, then on the edge of Athens, and this became John's base of first choice during city visits until the end of the 1950s. John and the sisters-in-law had not only love of the arts and other people in common. They shared a passion for cats: 1 Aleca had as many as six; Mina had at least twenty. · On Porns John began to relish some of the deepest satisfactions of Greece -what he termed 'the persistence of myth in everyday existence'. Names seemed to confirm this, being handed down from grandparent to grandchild (Sophocles, Pericles, Achilles; Demetra, Phaedra, Electra). Ordinary people in rural areas still eked out livings in confined landscapes; but, in an expansive storytelling culture, with a view of the cosmos recognisable to Homer. The young Englishman had only to enter a simple rustic church to glimpse the glories of Byzantium, while appreciating that old centres of Christian worship were likely to have been built on older temples - and that caves dedicated to St Anthony were once sacred to Pan.

I

L____ ----::---aL...J'-1..-.A,.!-"".

Cats Playing, 23 November 1955

Conte pencil and charcoal on paper,

34 x 49.5 cm. Private collection

RITES OF PASSAGE

157

A modern artist alert to history roamed to two sites on Kalavria. On a wooded slope running down to the sea, monks at the eighteenth-century Monastery of the Life-Giving Spring welcomed him with sweet water and a spoonful of preserved fruit in syrup, and showed him icons and graves of naval commanders from the Greek War of Independence. One midnineteenth-century icon was painted by the Italian artist Raphael Ceccoli in memory of his daughter who had been cared for at the monastery until succumbing to tuberculosis. The parallel was lost on John Craxton, since he was unaware of his own underlying medical condition. Consumption, a disease of damp and crowded conditions, was rampant in a Greece whose swamps were also breeding grounds for malaria. More evocative still was the ghost of the sixth-century BC Temple of Poseidon. Constructed on a high plateau catching morning sun at the most propitious moments, it was long since dismantled for building projects across Poros and Hydra - pines now growing where columns once stood. Here the Athenian orator Demosthenes, who had opposed the expansionist Macedonia of Alexander the Great, sought asylum in 322 BC then drank hemlock to avoid capture. Best of all was the coastline with its deserted coves and inlets and offshore isles reached by rowing boat. The smallest islet turned out to be the top of a ship's funnel. The rest of a three-masted schooner used as a naval supply vessel, and scuttled during the German invasion, was clearly visible below the surface of the water as a lure for boy divers. It was called Kichli -Ancient Greek for thrush.

158

JOHN CRAXTON: A LIFE OF GIFTS

LUCIAN AGAIN 21

In late August Lucian sent a telegram care of Lady Norton. It announced that he was sailing from Marseilles on the Corinthia, arriving at Piraeus on 5 September, and directed John to meet him. Such an instruction caused instant offence at the British Embassy since it was addressed to 'HMS Norton' - confusing an art patron with a warship. The relationship never recovered from that torpedo at the start. Already the ambassador's wife had written to John to send him his monthly allowance and complain: ~ I have had a somewhat peremptory telegram from Julien Freud about his visa for Greece. This is something I cannot help with and especially as I do not know ifhe has made any financial arrangements. People coming from England arrive with £5 and I cannot undertake to help anyone more at the moment.' The diplomatic irritant was put out in turn to find himself in Piraeus with no John Craxton awaiting. In their friendship each had always put his own interests first; now John was detained in Athens planning his December exhibition. After that bumpy start, an old amity quickly resumed. They were coming together in a week when the Greeks were pulling further apart. More than 68 per cent of voters in an 88 per cent turnout were now said to have ~ backed the return of George II. Even with the fraud ~1. , I I by pro-royalist and anti-Communist forces that .\

.A

;'t,)\

,

~-