Emil and the Detectives

"Freud was a Jewish Berliner by birth. These facts gradually impinged upon him once he was no longer a toddler and became a boy. I chose Emil and the Detectives although there are other books from childhood that he was also very keen on – the poems of Christian Morgenstern, for example. However, Emil has this vivid atmosphere of growing up in late 1920s Berlin, in which the protagonist and his young accomplices, rough-and-tumble working class boys, set out to catch a mysterious man in a hat who had pinched money from Emil when he fell asleep on a train. “Books and Lucian: the ties were close from the start” It very much reflects what Lucian’s imaginative life as a child actually was. He was brought up in a privileged part of Berlin, Regentenstrasse, which is near the Tiergarten and bang in the centre of prosperous Berlin. He went to an ordinary local school and it was only in the very early 30s, when his classmates were being enrolled in the Hitler Youth, that he became aware of the differences between him and them. Which makes this particularly apposite as one of the five books under discussion. It’s a charming and funny tale, wittily illustrated by Walter Trier, who incidentally ended up in London just before the last war and became one of the greatest illustrators in town, much admired by the young Freud. These are important connections – illustration and lively childhood activities. Also, Lucian’s love at the time for being part of a gang, going around pocketing chocolates from sweetshops and the like. He was. Lucian didn’t particularly get on with his mother’s two other children – his elder brother and his younger brother. He was bright, mercurial and imaginative and in the early years he was very much tied up with his mother: centre of her attentions and affection. She introduced him to books. In this pre-Hitler Berlin, Lucian enjoyed something of a magical childhood. She got him reading Alice in Wonderland in preparation for the family’s move to Britain in 1933, right after Hitler had come to power. Another book that loomed strongly in his early imagination was Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty , the biography of a horse, much of it woeful, written in the 1870s. Freud’s love of horses was a fixture throughout his life – a love of spending money on horses and losing money on them, and actually riding them too. Children’s books were stimulants in his psychological makeup. Books and Lucian: the ties were close from the start. Freud was extraordinarily versatile in his loyalties; his loyalty to people. I became a friend of his (as did others) however we were all compartmented. He liked conversations to be one-on-one, not two to three or more. He wasn’t good in a hubbub. A small table-load was okay, but not any more than would satisfactorily attune to his wit, his bandying of scandal, and of course his serious talk: never ponderous, always light-footed and self-deprecating, to some extent. This mix was a common feature I think among the painters, besides Lucian, that I became friendly with and involved with at an early age – the painters Michael Andrews, for example, and Frank Auerbach, whom I have sat for practically every Monday evening since 2003; the people I most admired as painters, who have been tagged the ‘School of London’. London is peculiarly important when it comes to appreciating Freud and the art of his times. Just as New York is and Paris obviously was before that, or Florence or Lascaux in centuries before that: locales for small groups of painters leading somewhat solitary lives, in that painting is a solitary pursuit, even if you’re doing portraits. These lives hinged very much on the nature of living in London, the whereabouts and the climate and indeed such events as cropped up around them."