The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  The bookshop was cool and discreetly lit. I hadn’t been thinking of very much but now my mind was racing. Danielle had marked me deeply, indelibly, but it seemed we had known each other in another age, in a different world. I thought of Danielle often, uneasily, wondering how her life turned out. But since I had taken up with Alice, my life had gone into an orbit further and further removed from the events of May 1968, the Union des Ecrivains, and our furtive assignations in one-night, or one-afternoon, hotels. Still, her name brought on a rush of emotions: tenderness, guilt that I hadn’t been in touch, sadness that our love had been doomed, I still didn’t really know why, from the start. I began to leaf through her collected notebooks, recognising right away the staccato cadence of her writings – short volleys separated by a hyphen – and immediately an anxiety began to spread through my body, as if in anticipation of something I dreaded. I heard Danielle’s voice reading the abrupt phrases out aloud, calmly and expressionlessly, and before I knew it was happening cold sweat had stuck my shirt to my sides.

  I’d last thought intensely, obsessively, of Danielle when I’d gone to the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence three years ago, in the summer of 1978, when they’d put on an unusually haunting exhibition of Alberto Giacometti. I think I was writing about it for the Financial Times, but looking at Giacometti, being in his universe, had long been a highly personal experience, like an encounter with and weighing up of a secret, personal truth. I remembered visiting the Giacometti show at the Orangerie with Danielle in the winter when the Tuileries were covered in snow and the fountains iced over, and I experienced a similar chill when I stepped out of the bright, warm Provençal sunshine to go into a re-creation of Giacometti’s studio that had been specially commissioned for the show. It was a small construction, even smaller than the original studio, and it consisted essentially of the carefully preserved, pitted walls that Giacometti had scratched and painted images on. I was alone in this strange, grey space which was as timeless as the prehistoric cave of Altamira and as confined as a prison cell with the haunted faces and emaciated bodies barely outlined on its crumbling surfaces. It could have been a burial chamber dating from any period, any civilisation. The essentials were there: the human image etched crudely into the walls, the inescapable sense of mortality, the overpowering presence of death. At that moment I might have been standing next to Danielle, sensing her mounting excitement that someone else, a famous sculptor, had seen existence as she saw it.

  I looked at the blurb on the back cover of the book and, for a moment, the word ‘posthume’ didn’t register. Then I read further: Danielle had committed suicide on her birthday in the summer of 1978. I blinked and read the phrase again. Danielle had killed herself, exactly, it seemed, when I had thought of her standing in Giacometti’s tomb-like studio. I put the book down in horror.

  Danielle had killed herself, in a hotel in the Latin Quarter, on the day she turned thirty-eight.

  Another death has overshadowed the year for me. I hadn’t seen much of Sonia Orwell over the past few years, but I was conscious that her life and fortune had taken a distinct downturn. There were murmurs of her having been swindled by a dishonest accountant out of large sums due to her from the George Orwell Estate, but Sonia herself seemed to avoid talking about it. Then suddenly she sold the house in South Kensington where she’d held countless parties and dinners for writers and artists from both sides of the Channel – in effect, a Franco-English salon – and moved to what sounded like almost penitential lodgings in Paris. On the few occasions we met at dinners around the city it was clear that she’d been drinking heavily and she appeared confused and disorientated. A few months later Francis Bacon, who’d already told me she’d been moved into a nursing home, called to say Sonia had died of a brain tumour.

  I’d been close to Sonia for a short moment nearly twenty years ago, in the early 1960s when I was still living in London, but thereafter she seemed to go out of her way to belittle me. Cyril Connolly once remarked that the whole point about Sonia was her unhappiness, and although I never really understood that remark I did see how frustrated she felt, partly because she herself wanted to be a writer and never achieved much beyond editorial work and the odd translation. At the memorial service for Sonia at the Dover Street Arts Club in London earlier this year, I thought it ironic that Mary McCarthy, whom I think Sonia envied as a well-known author and rather feared, gave what turned out to be a very underprepared, lukewarm tribute to her.

  At the end Sonia was so short of money that Francis had generously taken over her medical costs as well as making sure she was kept as comfortable as possible and well supplied with champagne. I think he felt indebted to Sonia because it was through her that he met Michel Leiris, whose friendship was to be such a key element in his success when he had his retrospective at the Grand Palais. But I don’t think he was as attached to Sonia, perhaps because he distrusted her intellectual snobbery, as he was to the other women in his life. Thinking about it, I realise that women have been quite as important to Francis as men. Right from the beginning, the two people who counted most for him were Nanny Lightfoot, the nurse who lived with him until she died, and his mother’s mother, Granny Supple, whom he confided in from boyhood on. Then, of course, Muriel Belcher, who ran the Colony Room, became an intimate friend and confidante: her club was his second home, and Francis was deeply upset when she died a couple of years ago. Isabel Rawsthorne has been another boon companion, probably the only woman who could keep up with Francis’s drinking, and in many ways, with her exuberant vitality and unconstrained appetite for life, a female version of him. Of course Francis has also made the most magnificent pictures and portraits of Isabel, as he has, in a different vein, of Henrietta Moraes, who’s cut a swathe through Soho thanks to her omnivorous sexuality and fondness for every stimulant.

  Then, last but certainly not least, there’s the enigmatic figure of Valerie Beston, who never appears on the wilder shores of Francis’s existence but who presides discreetly over many other areas, from every aspect of his career and finances to his doctor’s appointments and laundry bills. Valerie (or ‘Miss Beston’, as people generally tend to call her) is devoted to Francis, even oddly in love with him, and she will undertake any battle on his behalf. Francis himself makes rather light of her and her central role in his day-to-day affairs, but he relies on her instinctively – particularly when things go awry, as they did spectacularly, of course, when George Dyer committed suicide almost a decade ago.

  Francis has been coming over to Paris regularly and, apart from the occasional niggle about keys not working properly or odd noises (he’s convinced the people in the flat above him are constantly dropping marbles on the floor), he really enjoys living at rue de Birague. I’ve found out it used to be called rue des Vosges before it was named after the eminent, Italian-born Cardinal Birague, who became Chancellor of France. When Francis is here, we tend to see the same people, Michel Leiris, Claude Bernard’s sister, Nadine Haïm, the poet Jacques Dupin, the odd dealer or museum director. Fellow artists (apart from Lucian Freud) are generally not included in Francis’s inner circle, but since I’m working on an exhibition of the Paris-based British sculptor, Raymond Mason, for the Serpentine Gallery in London, it seems natural enough to get them together. They’ve known each other over the years, although Mason seems to know Bacon better and be more enthusiastic about his work than vice versa. I found just the right bistro, a little Lyonnais place called ‘Rabu’ just off rue des Archives, simple but quite chic, with starched white tablecloths and a proper patron (Rabu himself) serving the dishes that his wife has cooked in her kitchen at the back. I knew Francis’s mood could darken very quickly if he didn’t like the food so I made sure that their chicken with morel mushrooms would be on the menu, with a few bottles of Crozes-Hermitage at the ready. And I was feeling quite pleased with myself as the patron shook hands and brought out a platter of saucisson and a nice, chilled white to get things under way.

  But they didn’t. Eve
n though Francis couldn’t fault the food, his big, powerful jaw remained clamped when it came to talking. Raymond was bubbling over with topics to discuss, particularly his notion that art should have as much content as possible, that it should be filled with narrative – with the sort of stories Renaissance paintings had. I knew that whole notion of narrative would irritate Francis, who’s constantly asserting that his own pictures are about ‘nothing’, and I tried to head Raymond off, busily filling his glass and asking him what he thought of the chicken, but this seemed on the contrary to embolden him.

  ‘I mean, Francis, wouldn’t you say that the man in the street…’ Raymond goes on.

  ‘Who is the man in the street? I can’t think who you can possibly mean,’ Francis ripostes.

  ‘Well let’s say the general public then,’ Raymond replies enthusiastically, gobbling down his chicken. ‘They’re starved of content. All through the century they’ve just been given all this thin gruel, this art about art with nothing in it.’

  ‘I’m sure it must be very good for them,’ Francis says, pursing his mouth tightly.

  ‘But you most of all, Francis,’ Raymond goes on, ‘have given them something to think about. You’ve given them real content, real nourishment, because you’re a great narrative painter.’

  ‘I don’t think for a moment that I’ve given them anything of the sort,’ Francis snaps back without pausing.

  I notice his face darkening, and I signal discreetly for the bill.

  ‘And I’m certainly not a narrative painter at all. After all, I have nothing to narrate, and I haven’t the least interest in what are called “stories”. I’m simply trying to make my own sensations come off onto the canvas as directly as possible. Make my own sensations come back to me as poignantly as I can.’

  Raymond is about to rejoin the fray, but as the bill is presented on a little white saucer Francis tries to wrest it from my hand, initiating a strong-arm contest that, as the saucer veers in mid-air, brings all talk in the bistro to a halt. I feel Francis focus intently on me as he pulls, and I have to make up my mind quickly. It doesn’t take long. With the four bottles of wine, the bill comes to about what I earn in roughly two weeks’ worth of reviews. I’ve made my point in trying to pay, but I think Francis wants to have the last word. My grip slackens.

  ‘There!’ Francis says triumphantly. ‘I really wanted to pay.’

  ‘But, Francis,’ I protest, while Raymond looks on, suddenly speechless, ‘I already told the patron that the bill was for me!’

  ‘There it is,’ says Francis, taking out a wad of big notes and almost doubling the bill with a huge tip. ‘You have to pay for everything in life.’

  The following day Francis comes round for a drink before going on to a grand dinner that Michel and Zette Leiris have invited him to. While I’m opening the wine, he peers into the white plaster relief of The Crowd that Raymond has given me as a present for setting up the show he’s having at the Serpentine.

  ‘It looks just like the brains you see displayed on butchers’ counters here,’ Francis says acidly. ‘There’s something terribly coarse about it, I’m afraid. It’s coarse, just like Raymond himself.’

  Raymond, meanwhile, has called me to say how much he enjoyed talking to Francis.

  ‘I can see Francis is a bit resistant to the idea that he’s above all a narrative artist,’ he barks down the telephone. ‘But now I’ve planted the idea in his head I think he’ll come round to it.’

  Raymond has started pronouncing his name ‘Mazon’ so that French people stop confusing him with André Masson, the older, Surrealist artist whom I’ve visited in his desirable apartment in the Marais on rue de Sévigné. ‘Mazon’, for his part, is currently at work painting a huge sculpture in relief entitled The Grape Pickers, and he’s been complaining that the amount of work involved in ‘painting every last damn leaf, every last damn grape’ is overwhelming. Over the phone I suggest we go out for a drink, thinking that might give him a moment’s respite, and hoping we might iron out some of the problems we’ve encountered in getting the Serpentine exhibition on the road. But he immediately roars back: ‘Look here, Peppiatt, you don’t ask a man who’s halfway up the Annapurna to come down for a drink!’ So I agree, as usual, to meeting him in his studio on rue Monsieur-le-Prince, beside the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s never a hardship going over to beard Raymond in his lair because, although he can be extremely prickly and overprotective about his work, he often talks perceptively about art and, whenever he’s not banging on about some latest hobby horse, he can also be very funny. I can forgive anyone who makes me laugh, and I try to keep this in mind when Raymond interferes, as he does repeatedly, in the carefully considered arrangements the Serpentine has been making for his exhibition.

  When I get to the studio I find Raymond at the top of a huge ladder, painting in the details of his vineyard. He is clearly unwilling to take a break, but since he’s seen nobody all day he’s eager to talk, enumerating from his great height above me some of the artists that have meant most to him. ‘Giotto, Uccello, Michelangelo,’ he says. ‘Then of course Hogarth and Blake, and Bacon for that matter. But one always leaves people out. I have the greatest admiration for Tiepolo – not Giambattista, but the son, Giandomenico, and those wonderful frescoes he did at the Villa Valmarana.’ Then he goes on to his love of opera, his fondness for long novels, for things with ‘real content’ that he can ‘feel part of’, before getting into art-world gossip about people like James Lord who, he was convinced, had managed to steal drawings from Giacometti’s studio, and in what princely fashion Balthus insisted on living whenever he came to Paris. The light is fading now, but Raymond continues to dab away delicately between the veins of his leaves and the torrent of talk shows no sign of abating. I begin to think how I could ever get this kind of conversation – real ‘studio talk’ – into Imagination’s Chamber, and realise dolefully that it will have to await another occasion. Even if I manage to slip a reference to Mason’s atelier into the book, I’d have to use the text to explain how he worked up his big projects through countless drawings and colour sketches before making a cast out of epoxy resin and painting in every detail meticulously in acrylic so that the whole blended into an infinitely complex but completely coherent composition.

  The idea that I’m just standing here listening while my own book still remains to be written prompts me to take my leave of Raymond, who I’m sure would be happy to talk all night. But while he talks, he works, whereas I merely listen. Perhaps that will help me with my text, which I’ve now advanced as far as Delacroix, whose actual studio in rue de Furstenberg I’ve made much of as well as scouring his amazing Journal for quotes. I wish now I hadn’t proposed an ‘overview’ of studios rather than a kind of monologue (I could easily have included Raymond’s here) about the studios I know and how they have impressed me. What I like above all is the idea that the studio encloses, encompasses, not only the artist, his tools and materials, his sources (books, images and so on), but in a sense his ideas and all the reverberations of his conversations with his fellow artists, his friends and his collectors; that the studio, as it certainly was for Giacometti, is like the artist’s universe as well as a kind of microcosm, however personal, of its times. I think of Soulages’s orderly space, more like a large, superior workman’s tool shed, or the extraordinary cocoon of paint in which Frank Auerbach starts work every morning on a new image that will probably end up with so many others that have been scraped off, splashed against the wall and trampled into the floor… The bus taking me home stops at regular intervals under lamplight down the tree-lined boulevard Saint-Michel, and I wonder how many of these teeming ideas I will be able to catch and convert into cold prose on the page.

  Luckily another project is under way that allows me to dodge the demanding process of putting my best ideas into the best words without immediate pangs of guilt or self-recrimination. The director of a big museum in Germany has got in touch to ask whether I’d like to curate a Bacon ex
hibition, and I hope I managed to dissemble my utter delight when I wrote back formally saying that I would be happy to discuss the project further. Since the director (I take pleasure in addressing him by his formal title of Herr Professor Doktor) wants a different kind of a show from the traditional retrospective, I thought I’d try to interest him in an idea I’ve had for some time about Bacon’s ‘sources’, which are varied, unexpected and fascinating in themselves. Alongside a carefully chosen, relatively small number of Bacon’s own paintings (which would make the whole thing easier to organise), the exhibition would include an Egyptian sculpture or two, the Cimabue Crucifixion (although, even before its restoration, it probably never travelled), a few Michelangelo drawings, a Rembrandt self-portrait, a Velázquez portrait (the great Portrait of Pope Innocent X, if at all possible), a Monet Nymphéas, a Van Gogh, a Degas pastel and a Picasso beach scene from his Dinard period. This was, I conceded, a tall order, so I added several other, less rarefied and problematic loans that we could go after once we knew how many works from our initial ‘wish list’ would be available. Then, of course, to bolster the exhibition’s theme, there would be photographs galore, from Marey and Muybridge to war shots from Paris Match, with images of the Third Reich, of animals stalking their prey or wrestlers locked in combat. And if this weren’t enough, there would be documents of all kinds, Photomaton portraits of Bacon’s lovers while drunk, favourite books (from Aeschylus to Proust and T. S. Eliot) as well as catalogues with thumbnail sketches of ideas for new pictures in the flyleaves and blown-up photos of the studio itself with its incredible welter of images lying paint-strewn and ankle-deep on the floor.