The Fatal Englishman (14 page)

The paintings that resulted were basically landscapes and seascapes, characterised by the presence of sailing boats, Breton peasants, whitewashed churches and cottages, dark grass, fir and cypress trees on the cliffs edge and the day-to-day objects of the life of fishermen and their families. Within this framework, however, he introduced remarkable variations. Some of the figures were, as he intended, like drawings from Holbein, but in other paintings he worked in more modern ways. In the foreground of ‘Building the Boat, Tréboul’ the face of the old
woman seems to foresee the drownings the finished boat would bring: her head recalls ‘The Scream’ by Munch.

In the painting known as ‘La Plage, Hôtel Ty-Mad, Tréboul’ (in fact it depicted the hotel at a neighbouring beach, Les Sables Blancs), the foreground is occupied by monumental characters who might have come from an undiscovered period of Picasso. In the magnificent ‘Sleeping Fisherman, Ploaré’ (also wrongly catalogued: it was set on the Plage St Jean, Tréboul), the huge figure of the title seems less like a peasant than a Greek god, slumbering on the sands where he has stopped to rest. A French critic, Françoise Steel, commented: ‘Kit Wood was often a nostalgic witness to the rootedness of these Breton men and women who seem to have sprung up spontaneously out of their own patch of earth.’ This seems right. The ribs of the boat in ‘Building the Boat, Tréboul’ appear to be part of the same notional body as the skull of the old woman in the foreground: she nurses in her arms what first appears to be a baby but turns out to be a piece of timber from the boat. In the paintings of women drying the nets or decorating the inside of the church, Wood portrayed a mystical union between people and place. They were one and the same: they had ‘sprung up spontaneously from their own patch of earth’. Wood understood and realistically depicted this autochthonous quality of the people; yet he also made them look like gods.

The results were at best, as in ‘The Sleeping Fisherman’, powerfully moving: strange, beautiful, unsettling, with a taste and character not quite like those of any other painter. The naive elements, developed from Rousseau and Wallis, were now settled down into the painting; the landscape techniques taken from Van Gogh and Derain had been assimilated. The result was that Wood’s own vision at last came blazing out in all its curious and contradictory forms.

The landscapes without people had a similar sense of precarious harmony: the wild and the familiar, the romantic and the quotidian, set side by side in unsettling colours. The painting of the Chapelle St Jean, done from his bedroom window in the Ty-Mad, has a characteristic mixture of these elements: it is certainly beautiful, restful and realistic – all the pieties and reassurances of
rustic Catholicism have been observed; but it is also edged with menace. There is the sea behind; there are voyages to be made beyond the horizon. While the picture is faithfully Breton, it is also otherworldly. The achievement of it was that the transcendent aspect did not have to be read into it in some literary way: it was present in the actual manner in which the church was painted. This was finally painting of a gorgeously expressive kind; it was not what Modernism was concerned with, but it was what Wood had striven to do all his life.

Although Wood had tried to stop smoking for Frosca’s sake, he had not been successful. He relied on her to send him supplies from Paris, but she in turn depended on Tony Gandarillas, who was frequently out of town. In the creative frenzy of June and July 1930, Wood gave up any pretence of moderation: he smoked all night if he had opium to smoke, and failing that, he smoked the leavings or dross. His physical state therefore varied between intoxication and withdrawal. He didn’t care. He had risked everything to get this far; he was driven by forces he did not even wish to control.

This was what it had all been for: all the ‘progress’ he had so eagerly reported, all the ‘struggles’ he had so boyishly endured. He sensed that he had to make a ‘dash’ for it; there was a compelling urgency: it was as though he believed that he might lose what he had searched so long to find – that if he did not paint as much as he could while all the elements of his life were in propitious harmony, they might shift into a new configuration and he would have lost his dream or his ability to paint it. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ he told his mother, ‘how I have to hurry, hurry from one thing to another, but it’s just the one moment or chance I have to get on.’

Frosca came to stay but did not distract him. He was too tired to write letters; he had a wardrobe full of unanswered mail. He was painting one, sometimes two pictures a day and was obliged to rent a second room in the Ty-Mad because the smell of drying paint was so overpowering. Some of the painting showed recognisable scenes from Tréboul; some were fanciful mixtures, taking a building from one place, a beach or seascape from another. At night he smoked opium and sometimes still painted,
consulting his stock of local postcards. ‘I was always called hasty but I can’t work otherwise,’ he wrote. ‘It nearly kills me, the effort to get it done.’

At the beginning of July Frosca returned to Paris, because her mother had died. Wood worked on in unabated fury. The only other occupant of the hotel was Max Jacob. The two men met at mealtimes, then returned to their work. Jacob was charmed by Christopher Wood and by the innocent frenzy that gripped him.

On 10 July Wood wrote to Lucy Wertheim, whose purchase of his pictures, coupled with small loans, was helping him to exist: ‘I have quite run out of paper and have got into such a state with my work and the fact that I have not been out of my room for over a week that I can’t possibly go downstairs to get any more. My life is terrible here … When I have worked at one end of the room for four hours without stopping even to make a cigarette and go and lie down on the bed at the other and smoke perhaps a pipe of opium which is the only resource of quietness which takes my mind for the moment out of that awful turmoil of ideas and colours that go on in my busy head …

‘I have painted a good deal of architecture, churches in a curious lonely country by the sea, very restful but very strong, and determined. Max Jacob said that I paint
“des arbres pleins d’oiseaux”
which is a very beautiful way of expressing fullness and feeling and yesterday he saw a large picture I had done. He said
“C’est meilleur que fait mon vieil ami Derain”.’

Better than Derain … such praises goaded him on. ‘I am enjoying my work enormously,’ Wood told the Nicholsons, ‘and I haven’t the least idea of what is going on anywhere else, whether my house still exists or whether Paris is still in the same place as it was before.’

There were occasional visitors to Tréboul. One of them was a Swiss writer called C.A. Cingria, who was on a bicycling tour of Breton churches. He was astonished by Wood’s self-absorption. On Midsummer Day a celebratory bonfire was piled high in the square between the Chapelle St Jean and the Hôtel Ty-Mad. A light breeze made the flames surge through the dry branches and the resulting blaze was so powerful that onlookers feared it would engulf the hotel. But as the uncontrolled fire crept up the
sides of the building, Kit Wood lay stretched out on his bed by the open window, indifferent to the mounting blaze, drifting on the private fumes of opium.

A moderate opium habit can be sustained, with money and care in preparing the drug, with no adverse effects. The problems begin when too much is taken for too long, when a drastic reduction is attempted or when it is not properly prepared. It was in the state of withdrawal that De Quincey experienced his appalling dreams and visions, which, despite his careful explanations to the contrary, many people take to be a description of the effects of the drug rather than of unsupervised withdrawal from it. Jean Cocteau was disintoxicated in hospital at St Cloud in 1929, as was Tony Gandarillas, with the help of sedative drugs and close medical supervision. Even so, it was not easy, and much of what Cocteau wrote at the time (in
Opium
, 1930) had a bearing on Wood.

‘You cannot trifle, or mess about with opium. If you do, it will forsake you. You will be left with morphine, heroin, suicide, death.’ This was melodramatic: there was no absolute connection between opium and its less pure compounds, but it showed Cocteau’s respect for the drug’s power.

‘If you ever hear someone say “X killed himself by smoking opium” you can be sure it’s not true and that the death was caused by something else,’ he wrote. This was true, though Cocteau did not mention that ‘something else’ could include the side-effects of withdrawal.

‘Opium is a substance which defies analysis – living, capricious, and capable of suddenly turning against the smoker. It acts like a barometer for a weak personality. In humid weather the pipe leaks. The smoker arrives at the seaside and the drug swells up, refusing to cook. The approach of snow, or storms or strong winds makes it ineffective …’ Cocteau might almost have had Wood in mind when he was writing.

Cocteau was not always clear about the question of the ‘dross’ – what is left in the pipe after the smoker has inhaled. Graham Greene spoke disparagingly of its bitter taste, but Cocteau thought mixing dross with the raw drug might increase the
chances of getting a good smoke in difficult circumstances in which the drug for some reason would not ‘behave’. However, the addition of dross changed the nature of the pipe, and, as Cocteau warned, ‘It’s impossible to foresee the results.’ He came down against dross: ‘Some people tell you: “Experts throw out the dross.” Others say: “Experts make the boys smoke opium and only smoke the dross.” But if you ask a boy about the dangers of the drug he’ll tell you: “Good opium makes you fat, dross makes you ill.” The sin of opium is to smoke the dross.’

By the sea, however, the drug was hard to handle. On his own, Wood didn’t have the social aspect of opium-smoking to keep him respectful; nor did he have a supply that was equal to his craving. In these circumstances he was tempted to smoke the dross or even to eat it. The results of either would have been, as Cocteau emphasised, dangerous and impossible to predict; instead of offering increased intellectual control, the drug could become hallucinogenic. But Wood had no regard for his own safety: he was reckless, impatient and addicted; he was also in the midst of a creative storm.

‘Opium,’ wrote Cocteau, ‘becomes tragic only in as much as it affects the nerves which govern the personality … It is dangerous to smoke it if you are unbalanced … Never confuse the opium-smoker and the opium-eater. They are quite different things.’

The first, he implied, is civilised, desirable and, in the ‘majestic light of the intellect’, superior to his fellows; the latter is crude, inferior and self-destructive.

New, surreal elements appeared in some of Wood’s late pictures. He had shown almost no interest in Surrealism proper until this stage; in fact since his rejection by Diaghilev in favour of Miró and Max Ernst his attitude had been hostile. Yet strange figures wandered into the dark backgrounds of these paintings and, in the case of ‘The Yellow Man’, came striding to meet you. He appeared to be a
saltimbanque
, perhaps liberated from the tents of the freaks where Wood’s designs for Cochran’s
Luna Park
had first imagined him. ‘The Yellow Horse’, stranded in the mid-ground
of a moonlit landscape, was a fantastic creature, unrelated to the burly drayhorse of ‘La Foire de Neuilly’.

Some saw in these exotic additions to the late pictures the defining stamp of Wood’s achievement. Those who, like Winifred Nicholson, loved the simple emotions of his more earthbound landscapes, saw them as brilliant, but aberrant. In Winifred Nicholson’s eyes they were also signals of Wood’s increasing mental disorder. She described what she admired in the rapturous paintings of 1930: they were ‘very much more inspired than any he had done previously. He worked at high pressure painting forty pictures in a month … There were pictures of churches, of the sea, of women praying, the colour was very simple and of the utmost purity like Hope itself. Human passion is at its highest tension, thought is mystic, and the theme of travel beyond the horizon which had constantly recurred in all his work now reached a pitch of utmost intensity beyond which it is not possible to go.’

This assessment had a characteristic element of wishful thinking: Wood showed no interest in the spiritual life, and if there was a ‘mystic’ quality it was concerned not with a wordless union of people and god, but of people and place. But the minatory, fearful note struck by Winifred Nicholson at the end was justified: ‘Beyond which it is not possible to go’. It had taken Wood almost seven years to reach this stage, but when he got there he painted in such a way that he seemed to close off most logical avenues of development.

At the end of July Christopher Wood returned to Paris. He showed his summer’s work to Christian Bérard. The paintings were wrapped in packets. Bérard knelt down and cut the strings that tied them. He separated them and looked at them one by one. He was astounded. He saw landscapes of such light and purity that he felt as though all around him were in a deep fog.

While in Paris, Wood painted two of his best-known paintings: one depicted a tiger in front of the Arc de Triomphe, the other was called ‘Zebra and Parachute’. Both showed a mastery of composition he had not always achieved before, though the original unsettling elements of the Tréboul paintings were here exaggerated into outright incongruity. A tiger from the deepest
Rousseau jungle lay peacefully before the realistically painted Etoile, not far from where Wood had first stayed with Alphonse Kahn and then with Gandarillas. The background of ‘Zebra and Parachute’ was the Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier’s famous Modernist house near Paris. A placid zebra gazes left in the foreground; the diagonals of Le Corbusier’s design give a desolate air to the middle ground, reminiscent of some of de Chirico’s forlorn quays; and in the top right-hand corner a slumped figure, apparently already dead, floats to earth on a parachute.

On 19 August 1930 Wood set off for England to meet Lucy Wertheim, who was to mount an exhibition of his pictures in London. He took the train from Paris to Le Havre in order to cross to Southampton, from where he would travel to London.