The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks Page A

Liverpool still looked like a pioneer in 1921. The other remarkable fact of Wood’s move was that he did not have much personal interest in the artistic movements that were forming in Paris. His own interests included the early work of Picasso, but stopped short of Cubism. He was a figurative painter, and while he took little tricks and calligraphic details from Cubism, he never tried to paint in that style. His alliance of himself to Picasso and what he represented was quite a humble recognition that this was where the talent and the future lay. If he did not copy it, he had to be near it; and this knowledge, amid all Wood’s ignorance and confusion about public affairs and even about art, showed a shrewd instinctive judgement.
    This surprisingly sure-footed decision was connected to the emotional certainties of his ambition to be a painter. His polio, and the three-year convalescent period of being nursed by his mother, had coincided with the absence of his father at the Front.His illness changed the course of his life: from being an athlete he became a cripple. He was shamefully removed from the world of other children, and was in continual pain. At the same time he became handsome and attractive; puberty came to him as he lay prone.
    He turned his frustrated physical and sexual energies to painting, which became an acceptable vehicle for all the unassimilated emotions of this harrowing period. He continued in later life to see his painting in this way, as when he viewed the ending of his affair with Meraud Guinness in the same way as the rejection of his designs for Diaghilev and used them both merely as a spur for his ambition. When he found as a crippled adolescent that he could paint, that he actually had some natural ability for it, he clasped the talent to his heart. In his life there was only one other emotion that counted, and that was the storm of enduring gratitude he felt towards his mother. She had saved him and nursed him; by encouraging him to paint she had helped release in him some tender, appreciative feelings towards the world he saw. It was natural that he should then make the one further step and lock together the two most important aspects of his emotional life: his painting would become a way of thanking and honouring his mother. The little paradox was that to accomplish this, he had to leave her. He had to go where the real art was and to escape from the influence of ‘Huyton’. Always there was the half-formed idea that he would one day return when he had sufficiently proved himself and made for her a monument that could never be tarnished or destroyed.
    Clare Wood encouraged him to believe he had a special mission and that she was its presiding deity. She once wrote to a friend of his: ‘I adore him, as you know, and he must make a big thing of his life and use his talent conscientiously. I feel very seriously about that, as it is a thing that has been given to him to use.’ Clare Wood’s support of her son against the judgement of her husband took courage, but her emotional investment in Kit’s career as a painter was almost as great as his own. Kit was enabled by his gift and by the fact that he was a man to live and enjoy those aspects of life and feeling that she had had to subdue to the requirements of her unimaginative husband. Lucius Wood was adecent man, but despite all he had seen at the Front from 1914-18 he lacked the ability to imagine the inner lives of those nearest to him. Clare and Kit were bent on some mission of their own, and she loved him with the unforgetting passion of a mother who had nursed her only son back from death.
    In the Paris of the 1920s Wood was a rarity: an Englishman who painted. In a world of doubtful glamour his clean-cut innocence was a quality to which everyone could respond. He was always well dressed, usually in English clothes, though the cuffs of his Jermyn Street shirts were often frayed. He looked clean, even if he had been working all night and