The second volume of William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud gives us a detailed portrait of the artist at his peak—but not the details we want. Frances Wilson reviews:

“Feaver takes us to the scene of their first encounter: ‘Lunchtime. He changed out of his chef’s trousers behind a chair and emerged in a green cord suit. We left Maida Vale in the Bentley at violent speed and talk turned to Chardin without any appreciable effect on his driving … Outside L’Etoile in Charlotte Street he parked unhesitatingly on a double yellow line and sidled into the restaurant.’ Returning to the Bentley after lunch, Freud threw away the parking tickets tucked under the wipers, headed at top speed to a street corner, picked up a waiting girl, took her to a bank where she went inside and emerged with a plastic bag bulging with notes. ‘Why?’ queried Feaver. ‘Oh, I’m going bankrupt.’

“Apart from the telephone, the Bentley, and watching sport on television, Freud might be living in the eighteenth century. His studio is a world of pugilism, personality and roughhouse. He loves, drinks and gambles like a frockcoated libertine; he roasts woodcock – or partridge, parsnips and parsley – for breakfast, paints race horses and whippets, frolics with pimps and aristos and enjoys the droit de seigneur: ‘nothing to do with me that they’re having children’, he said of his women. He sees his friends as Rowlandson cartoons: Andrew Parker Bowles is ‘staunch, downright and potentially good in a scrap’, Kate Moss is ‘slightly gangster’s moll’. We expect him to run into Isaac Cruikshank at the ale house, or spend the weekend shooting with Charles James Fox.

“It is easy to see why Freud is drawn to Feaver: he is a louche companion; mischievous, up for anything, prone to understatement. ‘In painting, as in writing’, Feaver notes, ‘understatement is a telling reserve.’ Feaver describes Freud as the invisible man but he too is invisible, speaking from behind the arras, controlling the story without interrupting the action . . .  While awed by the power of gossip (gossip is ‘only interesting’, says Freud, ‘because it’s often all there is about anyone’), Feaver withholds the gossip we really want. He has little interest, he says, in Freud’s ‘private affairs’ and if anything ‘appears like a hole’ in the narrative, it is this. Not only were Freud’s private affairs unusually interesting, they also propelled his work.”

In other news: Commentary celebrates 75 years this year. John Podhoretz interviews his father.

In The New Criterion, Anthony Daniels writes about the pleasures and insight of one of Agatha Christie’s less accomplished crime novels: “It must be admitted that The Moving Finger is not one of Agatha Christie’s finest works. On the contrary, it is obviously a potboiler. Given the date of its publication, I imagine that it was intended to lift the spirits of a population that was still under heavy bombardment with no victory in sight. But no amount of admiration for the author can disguise the fact that this is a bad book, even a very bad one. But a book does not entirely lack interest merely because it is bad, for every book tells us something. Fortune favors the mind prepared, said Pasteur with regard to scientific discovery; a mind must be prepared also to find things interesting.”

The Strand struggles; New Yorkers help: “For months, the Strand bookstore in downtown Manhattan, from its fiction stacks to its cookbook section to its rare books, has been nearly deserted. But on Sunday, half an hour before the store was scheduled to open, about a dozen people lined up in the cool fall breeze, waiting to get inside. They had come in response to a plea from the store’s owner, Nancy Bass Wyden, who announced on social media Friday that its revenue was down nearly 70 percent from last year and that the business had become unsustainable.”

But Douglas Murray isn’t sure The Strand should survive: “I loathe Amazon as much as the next person who relies on it. But on recent visits to The Strand I have left empty-handed and had to revert to the dreaded competitor-destroying behemoth. Because there are very specific problems with The Strand and if it doesn’t make it to its century then it will be its own fault. The book trade in America is badly screwed up, as it is everywhere. In part this is because many publishing houses seem to think that their role is not to give the public the books they want, but rather the books the publishing houses think the would be best instructed by. It is the nature of the publishing industry, and the way it hires, that the viewpoint diversity in the sector is narrow, blinkered and parochial. That same viewpoint is now replicated on the frontline. Increasingly bookstores are places where customer are force-fed books that the store’s employees think will be good for them . . . The Strand has become among the worst offenders.”

Remembering Jerry Jeff Walker: “The New York–born singer-songwriter got to Texas as soon as he could—and spent the next five decades changing the lives of seemingly everyone he met.”

Revisiting Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem: “Like Beethoven’s Mass in C major which is overshadowed by the mighty Missa Solemnis, Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem is sometimes mistaken for the War Requiem although the two works have nothing in common. The Sinfonia, a work for orchestra alone, last just 20 minutes and is riddled with personal ambivalence.”

Photos: Aerial photos