A touch of commonness
Alastair Forbes
High Diver Michael Wishart (Blond arid Briggs 27.95)
The painter author of this book tells us that his godfather was Graham Sutherland, to whom 'I shall always be grateful for the encouragement he offered me in Illy youth ... when I was a student he was by far my favourite painter,' and saucily confesses, 'I still have some "Sutherlands" which I painted when I was twelve.' But the embarrassed executors of Clementine Churchill, whose outraged Scottish genes ('Infirm of purPose/Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead/Are but as pictures . .9 not to mention 'This is the very painting of Your fear') took such passionate possession of a normally highly civilised superego, nurtured on respect for such artistic companions of her impoverished Dieppe girlhood as Sickert and JacquesEmile Blanche, can perhaps take comfort from the fact that when 'he began his Popular series of celebrity portraits' Michael Wishart 'rather regretted the disappearance of the beautiful elegiac line and earlier range of autumnal PalIneresque colour chords', and 'his tortured lyricism'. Though perhaps not yet recessive (caveat any pictor commissioned to immortalise Sir Christopher Soames's bluff Eurobod) these Ogilvy genes can at least be classified as recidivist, Sir Harold Acton having quite lately recorded how, at about the same period as the Clemenceau, Chartwell or Kensington cremation of the Sutherland, on the other side of the Channel naughty cousin Nancy Mitford, with a shrill 'It's so unflattering that you have to burn it', confined to the cheerful flames of a Paris fireplace the just unveiled study of the late Princess Dolly Radziwill by the distinguished artist Derek Hill — 'perhaps not flattering, but forceful, like Goya', the latter had judged his own work — which had also been purchased and presented by a third Party, in this case not Parliament but the equally talkative Violet Trefusis. And Wishart writes too that he agreed at the time with Alberto Giacometti who, when asked what he would save from his home on fire, replied: 'If there were a cat and my Works I should save the cat. Life is more
important than art,' but later preferred to go along with Jean Cocteau who, asked the same question, chose to answer 'I should take the fire'.
Although there are no less than thirteen pictures of the author (from a curlyfringed four-year-old Petit Prince through romantic Radiguet poses to his present rather Ubuesque self seen by Hockney and Procktor) interleaving the ten score pages of this book, the only one of his paintings to be displayed is on the jacket and by no means shares the brilliance of his earlier work, some of which was not unjustly compared to Andre Masson's and which began with a prodigiously precocious London exhibition when he was only sixteen, well coached by Nommie Durrell, the art mistress at Bedales, where he also printed the first poems of his closest schoolfriend, the ageing Oldie Golden Gate Gay Thom Gunn, at the same time managing much to broaden his mind in that coeducational establishment's unusually good library. But the same xenomania, which prodded him into selecting a German prisoner-of-war as the first victim-accomplice of his evidently considerable powers of sexual seduction, led him to the only outpost in London of l'Ecole de Paris where the teaching was provided by Lhote, Lurgat and the like. His landlady was Roy. Campbell's wife, that is to say his Aunt Mary with whom, it seems, Vita Sackville-West fell passionately in love, perhaps because 'her exceptional beauty was enhanced by her habit of wearing velvet knee-breeches, patent-leather slippers with diamond buckles, a cream-coloured lace jabot .. . charming apparel that inspired Augustus John to remark "Here comes Little Lord Fondleroy".'
Soon he reached Paris itself, the city he has most loved in his life, where he at first shared a room but not a bed with Lucian Freud in the Rue Jacob at 25p a night, breakfast included. He went cruis ing in the murky, rum-reeking waters of the Bal Negre in the Rue Thomat and even donned drag in the shape of a riding
habit and whip to get a welcome in a dyke dive called Le Monocle. He also got taken to lunch with Marie-Laure de Noailles in the Place des Etats-Unis and there saw for the first time a painting by Balthus, whom he rightly sees to be 'in direct descent from Courbet' but surely wrongly believes `to be among the greatest of our century'. It was also his first experience of finding, at table, a liveried. footman behind his chair and it evidently muddled his memory for he writes, 'I was surprised that Marie-Laure used "vous" when addressing him [her husband], not then aware that it is a French Royal custom'. Royal custom, my foot; it is one commonly enough observed, just as contrariwise in Spain Royals and aristos use it only to inferiors. Nor, I'm quite sure, did Marie-Laure ever say, as reported, 'I call everyone "tu" except my husband and Monsieur de Paris" sic]', since the latter is the title given in •France to the Public Executioner and not to the Pretender descended from the despised Philippe Egalite, the Comte de Paris. But through, her he met the late Christian 'Bebe' Berard and most perceptively judged him to be 'one of the few important portrait painters• of our time' and who 'not surprisingly, was a great admirer of Lucian Freud's work'. One wonders what has become of Freud's 'very beautiful drawing of him with his dog' with which he made such a scruffy, smelly and inseparable pair. Like Berard, whose penchant for squalor also belied a wellheeled bourgeois background, Wishart became involved with the ballet. Jean Babilee, unforgettable as the Wunderkind of Volinine's pre-war classes, was 'the first great male dancer' he saw. (He has since become very thick with others, either as friend or lover.) Certainly Cocteau's Le Jeune Homine et La Mort, choreographed by Roland Petit, rehearsed to the jazz of Frankie and Johnnie and danced to Bach's Passacaglia by Babilee and his wife Nathalie Phillipart, was an astonishing experience.
The author deplores en passant Jean Babilee's brief flirtation with opium before turning to his own longer affair with it, much encouraged by his friendship with Berard and Cocteau. There
is a suggestion that the author's beautiful seventeen-year-old mother, who, to calm the panics of her childbride pregnancy, consumed gallons of Dr Collis Browne's then notoriously hypnotic paregoric, might have bequeathed to her son a pre disposition to les Paradis Terrestres. Opium had certainly between the wars become the religion of a number of beautiful people, some of whom thought, not always without an appearance of reason, that it gave a lift to their faces as well as to their spirits. Yet one cannot agree with the author's view that the rav aged beauty of Brenda Dean Paul, as he watched her dilute her heroin fix from the flower-vase on a restaurant table, 'was a good advertisement for drug abuse'.
Nor is Wishart's own prose style, in the
bulk of a book that took him seven years to slough off, exactly a good advertisement for his years of chronically on and only intermittently off dipsomania. It tacks wildly from poor man's Palinurus to poor man's Dempster, though there are fortunately many illuminating intervals between, in which his poetic painter's eye and imagination become more rewarding, yet correspondingly make the rest seem disappointing, alternately repetitive and contradictory when not merely silly. We are a long long way from Delacroix's Journal, for which, as for his Moroccan .sketchbooks, I share the author's admiration. Booze sure makes a lousy muse, whatever Truman Capote may now slurringly assert in.his lecture-circuit swansong.
The reader will hardly be convinced by Wishart's statement that 'the biggest problem of my life ... remains my inability to decide whether I prefer boys or girls sexually', for on his own showing here, notwithstanding a friendly shrink's early advice to enjoy all the spices and vices of variety, it's a landslide or pushover win for the boys, despite his ten sometimes very happy years of marriage ('the most worthwhile thing I have ever done') to Anne Dunn, now Mrs Rodrigo Moynihan, perhaps herself an even better painter and etcher. The lovable, eccentric, intelligent and admirable Francis Bacon, dear friend of the author who here succeeds in describing him delight
fully well, sent him in 1950 to deliver a loan of money to Anne, since become a generous multi-millionairess, then just a neurotic girl with good prospects. Her careful brushwork impressed but her palette-knife seemed reserved for cutting her wrists, with the bandage on which Wishart 'fell in love on sight'. In Paris, their Marais studio reminded me of a worn-out Boheme, set in an extinct provincial opera-house. They unerringly searched out the seediest and filthiest pads and there are complacent descriptions of mice, scorpions, mosquitoes, lice, germs and hangovers plus a single shared toothbrush, punctuated by 'frantic transatlantic cables' that 'brought money from my father-in-law', the Canadian tycoonadventurer Jimmy Dunn, hero of the book Courage by Max Beaverbrook who married Dunn's very very rich but not very merry widow, whom Anne Dunn had first known as Miss Christoforides, the secretary-a-tout-faire sent out one day from the Daily Express office in London.
Wishart makes reference to his wife's pre-marital affair with the late Aly Khan who, he writes, confided to him that 'he suffered so badly from premature ejaculation that he had consulted a specialist'. His wife could easily have told him that Aly's idea of premature ejaculation was about the same as Father Christmas's, i.e. one should only come once a year, so that any girl not in a multi-orgasmic mood would end up feeling like Michelangelo after a hard day's work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or just as sore and stiff and twice as bored (Cunctator not Khan should have been his princely suffix).
Surely few girls would have had the patience and sweetness to put up with Wishart's dissipations for quite as long as Anne. In Lausanne, the capital, as it happens, of her own income and capital, she found Cyril Connolly, who had been much more than slightly in love with her since girlhood, present with his third wife to help her and Michael through the trauma of their first divorce, which, though what the Swiss authorities call l'amiable, failed to exclude a final pathetic suicide attempt by one party, absolved by both in bed. There is a sympathetic portrait of Connolly — 'Cyril was not a great artist. Being so nearly one was the cause of his distress ... People feared Cyril which made him lonely', and a less sympathetic one of his second wife Barbara Skelton-Connolly-Weidenfeld, King Farouk's favourite British subject, of whom there are also some quite appetising holiday snaps taken in the company of the author who 'almost fainted' when he first kissed her. Later, after travels together in Spain and Morocco, in which Barbara CI still love her a lot') 'gathered material for a short story about an innocent girl's bewildered failure to convert a drunken homosexual', he remarked to her that he had never before found phy sical perfection sexy, to which she replied, taking his hand in hers, 'A touch of commonness is absolutely indis' pensable, don't you think?' Alas, there 0 a touch too much of it in this book. though it is also as full of easily assimil' able gossip as it is of absurd mistakes. Of the latter I shall bother only to correct the glaring mis-statement that the work of the remarkable French painter Franot Gruber is unknown outside France, for I well recall attending the Tate Gallery's retrospective exhibition of his work in the company of his widow, the daughter of the famous playwright Henri Bernstein.
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