THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 67
owner of Mereworth who had become blind
and committed suicide in 1949 by jumping out
of a sixth-floor window at the Ritz. “He liked
Waters to wheel him up to people he disliked
at races and insult them; which he could do as
he was going blind.”
In the new volume, Freud (whose
quoted reminiscences fleck the pages) is
at one point painting Andrew Caven-
dish, the eleventh Duke of Devonshire,
in the same cocktail of comradeship:
During one of the sittings a bailiff arrived
and having gained entry refused to go away.
“You can’t turn them out—anyway he was a
huge man—and I introduced them. Andrew
was a junior minister then and he asked, ‘Would
you mind leaving? We both work for the same
people.’ ”
This sense, of everyone working for, or
with, or around, the same people, was
exquisitely London.
L
ucian’s father, Ernst, was a remark-
ably admirable man; an architect in
Berlin in the early thirties, he spotted
the coming events and got himself and
his family out of Germany and to Lon-
don. (Four of Sigmund’s sisters were
killed in the death camps.) The move
was surprisingly calm. Ernst, in the man-
ner of Berlin’s grand Bildungsbürgertum,
touchingly asked what neighborhood
was most like living near the Tiergar-
ten—meaning, near a great park—and
settled in Mayfair. But he discovered
that London had a more dispersed up-
per middle class than Paris or Berlin,
and moved his family to a fine house in
St. John’s Wood. Ernst later in the de-
cade assisted in Sigmund’s relocation
from Vienna to London as well, in no-
tably comfortable circumstances. By spe-
cial favor, Ernst’s family were natural-
ized as British citizens, though late, in
- Had they not been, they could have
been interned or sent abroad as “aliens,”
as so many Jewish refugees were.
Sigmund was present throughout
Lucian’s life in a very practical way: roy-
alties from the Freud backlist were the
sustenance of Freud’s grandchildren for
a long time, not least the high-living
Lucian. After a brief and mostly happy
British schooling, and a comically inept
time as a merchant sailor, Freud set
out, in 1941, to become a painter. He
was discovered almost at once by Ken-
neth Clark himself, who, having perfect
taste, saw his gift. Although Freud had
BRIEFLY NOTED
Trio, by William Boyd (Knopf ). Following a producer, an ac-
tress, and a novelist, whose lives intersect during a film shoot
in Brighton in 1968, this novel proceeds at a brisk clip, cut-
ting from person to person. Boyd winks at the idiosyncra-
sies and vulgarities specific to each character’s métier, and at
the precarious process of artistic creation—its joy, torment,
stasis, and upheaval. Musing about the film, the actress says,
“I think it’s about how art imitates life. And life imitates art.
That’s the point.” “What on earth is that to mean?” her in-
terlocutor replies. Boyd addresses these questions with tart
humor and earnestness. When, after several gin-and-tonics,
the novelist starts to see her book taking shape in her head,
she feels that “life was suddenly worth living again.”
Hades, Argentina, by Daniel Loedel (Riverhead). A phone call
prompts the narrator of this haunting historical novel to re-
turn to Argentina a decade after the Dirty War, during which
he fled to the U.S. Back in a country where “there are no
dead ... only disappeared,” he is flooded with memories of
his life as a young man in the nineteen-seventies, working
for the military junta in a brutal detention center while slip-
ping information to his great love, a woman devoted to the
regime’s overthrow. The novel weaves betrayal and sacrifice
together so intricately that one cannot be disentangled from
the other.
The Mission, by David W. Brown (Custom House). Scientists
believe that any extraterrestrial life in our solar system would
most likely be found on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. This book
chronicles the work of a tenacious team of researchers who
have spent decades investigating that possibility, despite ob-
stacles both bureaucratic (NASA’s long-standing preoccupa-
tion with Mars) and physical: Europa lies within a “pulsing,
rippling” belt of radiation and is covered by an ice shell “ki-
lometers thicker than any hole ever drilled on earth.” The
effort is finally rewarded, in 2015, when NASA approves the
Europa Clipper mission, which may bring us closer to an-
swering existential questions: “What if there is life elsewhere?
How would the human psyche handle its discovery? And if
we find it, what do we do with it?”
Patch Work, by Claire Wilcox (Bloomsbury). This memoir un-
folds as a series of vignettes, each one as precisely constructed
as an exhibit in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the
author works as a curator of fashion. Wilcox evokes the sen-
sual and spiritual meaning in the fabrics we weave, wear, and
leave behind: antique garments, tailored for owners long dead,
whose linings and signs of repair provide conservators with
“vital clues for our ghost bodies”; naphthalene-perfumed me-
dieval felt hats and lost lappets from the eighteenth century;
a purple grosgrain tunic made for Wilcox by her mother. The
book also ventures far beyond the sartorial; Wilcox writes
piercingly about the death of a child and of her parents, the
delight and anxiety of motherhood, and the satisfaction of
work well done.
