Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  An hour later, with my idea of an interview already accepted as if it were a privilege for a famous artist to share his creative thoughts and process with a tiny student readership, Francis Bacon has swept me off, with Deakin and the others who are all apparently part of his inner circle, round the corner to lunch at Wheeler’s. As soon as Bacon pushes the door back and leads in his band of now visibly merry men, heads turn and the temperature in the murky dining room shoots up. Waiters are all smiles and the manager hurries past the oyster bar to greet his famous guest and lead him to his favourite table by the restaurant’s mullioned windows. More bottles appear, orders are taken, jovial remarks exchanged, then platters of oysters on ice and seaweed arrive in rapid succession as if time itself has accelerated. Buoyed by the Chablis and flattered by the attentions of my host, who includes me in every turn of the conversation, I watch surreptitiously to see how the others negotiate their oysters and soon follow suit, too caught up in the cut and thrust of the talk to wonder whether I like either the briny taste or their slimy texture. Then various exotic-sounding soles are served, sole meunière, sole bonne femme, sole Walewska, and the conversation opens out.

  ‘For some reason oysters are supposed to be terribly good for you,’ Bacon is saying between gales of laughter. ‘It sounds mad but my mother used to make a kind of mousse out of seaweed when we lived in Ireland. It was very delicious and apparently very nourishing. And I was in Nice the other day and they gave us these things, I’ve forgotten what they’re called, violets I think, and they’re like little leather pouches that are also full of iodine. You slit them open to eat them. A doctor down there told me they’re terribly good for you because they filter out what’s called all the impurities of the sea and they’re given especially to anaemic children. Well . . .’

  ‘Francis, you’re the least anaemic child I’ve ever known,’ says one of his guests, pushing his purplish face forward.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid with all the drink the goodness is probably just washed through,’ says Bacon with mock remorse.

  ‘You might not believe it now,’ Purple ventures, ‘but I once knew someone who was so in love with me that he said he wanted to lick caviare off the back of my throat. I had a large pot of beluga . . .’

  John Deakin, sitting demurely opposite him, rolls his eyes at me.

  ‘I can’t think who you expect to impress with that kind of rubbish,’ Bacon ripostes, suddenly looking cross. ‘The trouble with you, Denis, is that you’re coarse. The very texture of your sensibility is coarse. And I’m afraid it’s what shows in those ghastly little paintings you do.’

  Denis seems to relish the rebuff, exult in it even. He is about to come back with a further witticism, but a pale, wiry man called Lucian heads him off. Lucian’s wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up tightly and the sort of thin, blue-and-white-chequered trousers that chefs use in hot kitchens. ‘Did you know that for all their Dover soles and French recipes the cooks here are actually Chinese to a man?’ he says in a soft, lisping voice that sounds oddly foreign. ‘I met one of them just outside the other day and asked him how he was. Mustn’t glumble, he said.’

  ‘Well, he’s right,’ says Bacon, emptying his glass emphatically. ‘There’s no point. After all, life is all we’ve got, so we might as well enjoy it as much as we can. Nietzsche said that since the whole thing is such a charade we might as well be as brilliant as we can be. Even if it is only being brilliant about nothing. Because we come from nothing and go into nothing, and in between there’s only the brilliance of life, even if it means nothing. We don’t know much, but that at least I think we do know. Don’t you think, Michael?’

  I nod vigorously, old head on young shoulders, anxious to look as though I could be frequently brilliant about nothing. Just say the word.

  ‘I’ve been looking at Michael’s ginger sideburns,’ says Denis, his purple cheeks gleaming with suppressed innuendo, ‘and thinking they must be the exact colour of his pubic hair.’

  ‘Oh do shut up, Denis,’ Bacon says irritably. ‘The more she drinks, the more rubbish she talks.’ He takes a pink comb with half its teeth missing out of his jacket and puts it in his ear like a hearing aid. ‘What’s the silly old cunt saying now? What she say? Same old rubbish? Well, there it is, we might as well be brilliant, even though we have to put up with Denis’s stupidity, because there’s simply nothing else to do, even to pass the time. After all, life itself is nothing but a series of sensations. We just drift from moment to moment. My whole life has been like that, you know, drifting from bar to bar, person to person, instant to instant. And I think particularly when you’re very young and very shy, with all that talent welling up inside you, it’s what you have to do. You have to drift until you find yourself. Simply drift and see . . . There you are. I expect I’ve been talking too much. Now let’s have some more wine.’

  ‘The thing about Nietzsche’, Lucian says, softly enunciating each syllable with his faintly foreign accent, ‘is that he is terribly, terribly clear about our human predicament. He says that marvellous thing about all history being placed in the balance again when a genius is born with, what is it, “a thousand secrets of the past crawling out – into his sun”.’

  ‘Well, of course that is a marvellous way of putting it,’ says Bacon, opening his hands widely towards the whole table. ‘But then I’ve always thought that Nietzsche said everything that your grandfather was to say, that all Freud is contained in Nietzsche, even though I admire Freud very much, but more as a writer than anything else. I think he was a marvellous writer, but Nietzsche was this kind of extraordinary precursor. Every now and then there’s a writer or an artist who comes along and completely alters the course of things, breaks the accepted mould and reinvents the way thought and feeling are conveyed. Because you could also say that you get the whole of Cubism in Cézanne. That it was already there, like a distillation. And I know people say how marvellous Cubism was, but I see it almost as a kind of decoration on Cézanne.’

  Bacon pauses, to see if there is any reaction among his guests. Then he goes on:

  ‘When I was young Cézanne was the god, but I myself have always preferred Van Gogh. I think he was the more extraordinary artist and a more extraordinary man. You get everything in his letters, for instance. I reread them all the time. People make him out to be some sort of inspired fool, a naïf, but he was immensely intelligent and sophisticated, with ideas about everything you can think of, even about cancer and things like that.’

  There’s a moment’s silence as we all take a slow, reflective pull at our wine, evaluating and absorbing this compact statement. Halfway along the table there’s a powerfully built man in a formal suit and tightly knotted tie who’s said nothing but who’s been drinking steadily right through the meal. A large plate of pale smoked salmon with two wedges of lemon lies untouched in front of him. He looks like a retired wrestler or a nightclub bouncer. Alongside the white wine, he’s been ordering gin and tonics regularly, but otherwise he seems elsewhere, closing his eyes from time to time and just feeling for his glass. Even with his eyes shut, he exudes a kind of threat, and I sense he is someone to be wary of. But I am too excited by the wine and the exalted talk – Nietzsche, futility, Cézanne, drifting – to take much notice. It’s all much more than I could ever have expected. The interview seems already in the bag because Bacon clearly likes to talk and all I have to do is to make a mental note of what he’s saying and get it down on paper once I’m back in Cambridge. It couldn’t be easier, it seems, especially since Bacon often repeats the same phrase or comes back to something he’s already said and expands on it. It’s as simple as getting the gist of a lecture but without the complicated dates and developments, and much more exciting. Much more about life and about the way things are. Bacon also actually seems interested in what you have to say and responds to it, even defers to you, saying things like ‘I’m sure you know much more about this than I do’, unlike all those dons who simply talk at you and expect you to not
e it down. More vital to be here at the centre of things, in the middle of Soho, drinking and talking freely with someone creating images now, than sitting in a lecture room looking at slides of things done centuries ago in churches in Bruges or Perugia or wherever. Much more fun: life on another plane, speeded up, more glamorous.

  ‘Now why don’t we have just a little port with the Stilton,’ Bacon suggests, and at exactly the same moment the bouncer’s head crashes forward on to the table.

  ‘He’s passed out!’ Denis cries out exultantly. ‘I thought he might. Our friend here has clearly been on one mighty bender for days and days.’

  Once again, Deakin rolls his eyes, as if all the niceties of behaviour to which he is accustomed have been flung to the wind, and gazes over at me meaningfully.

  Scenting trouble, two couples finishing their lunch behind us move discreetly to another table. Still smiling, the manager comes bustling over, visibly unfazed by such a minor fracas.

  ‘Had the one too many, has he, Francis?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m afraid he has,’ Bacon replies, with his hands outstretched. ‘I am most terribly sorry. I had simply no idea he was in what’s called such an advanced state.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, we’ll soon have him right,’ says the manager, and with Lucian’s help he props the bouncer back in his chair and delicately peels off the fragments of smoked salmon sticking to his face. The bouncer’s eyes open unseeingly for a moment then close again as he slumps to one side.

  ‘I don’t really know who he is,’ says Bacon. ‘He just always seems to be there whenever I go into the French so I thought I’d better ask him to join us. I’m not even sure what his name is. There it is,’ he continues, with an apologetic chuckle towards me, ‘I suppose that’s the kind of thing that happens when you lead the sort of gilded gutter life that I do, constantly surrounded by nothing but drunks, layabouts and crooks.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is,’ Deakin intones solemnly. ‘I think it’s what’s called “the company she keeps”.’

  Everyone laughs, the port is poured, the conversation gets under way again, but more slurringly now. Bacon begins to repeat some of the same phrases, with growing emphasis, as if someone were contradicting him. ‘The whole thing is so ridiculous.’ But his guests seem to take no notice as they finish their cheese and savour the dark wine. ‘We might as well be absolutely brilliant.’ Even Denis nods dutifully in approval at what he clearly accepts as self-evident truths. ‘Bar to bar, person to person.’ Drunk as I’ve become, I want to make sure I don’t outstay my welcome, even though no one else makes a move and it looks as if the talk might go on through the rest of the afternoon and into the night. ‘Moment to moment.’ I get a rush of panic, not least because my glass has been filled once more to the brim and it occurs to me that, having got here and been so warmly embraced as the newcomer, the latest addition to the group, I may never get out again but be held there in ever-decreasing circles of words for ever. It feels as if all sense of time has been siphoned out of the air and replaced by repetition. ‘Drift and see.’ The room, even the ring of faces round the table, is closing in. ‘Drift and see . . .’ I’m desperate to leave, even a bit panicky, and decide I’ll say I absolutely have to be back in Cambridge this evening. I’ll thank my host very sincerely and ask him whether we might meet again to take the interview forward, but before I can struggle to my feet I realize Francis has turned towards me saying, ‘Dan Farson has opened this pub on the Isle of Dogs and he’s got a party on there tonight so I thought we might have a little more of this port, it’s really rather good, then get a taxi down to the East End. I don’t know whether you’re at all free this evening but there is something extraordinary about the people Dan manages to lure to his place, a kind of mixture of what they call villains and film stars. I took Bill Burroughs down there the other evening and I think he did actually find the whole thing quite curious. So if you’ve got nothing better to do why don’t you come along, you might just find it amusing.’

  I’d been eyeing the door as the only way out of this weird sensation of time circling and decreasing. But the very name of Bill Burroughs stops me in my tracks since at Easter I managed to smuggle Olympia Press’s banned edition of The Naked Lunch in its murky green covers back from Paris and, quite apart from the jolt its experimental techniques deliver, the very fact I have it prominently displayed in my college room gives me undeniable status as someone in the vanguard, abreast of the radically and dangerously new. The idea of meeting Burroughs – and even being able to think of him as ‘Bill’ rather than ‘William’ – is astonishing, barely more probable and certainly more exciting than the suggestion that I might rub shoulders with Botticelli, or even Michelangelo, whose terribilità makes him the Renaissance figure I’m most drawn to. But Bill Burroughs, as I suddenly feel empowered to think of him, has completely altered the way we think and write at this our very own point in time, just as Bacon is transforming the effects and future of painting and, even more importantly I’m beginning to sense, the way one feels about life itself. The 5.45pm back to Cambridge slips soundlessly away and I vaguely entertain the possibility of the milk train that I’ve heard leaves King’s Cross towards dawn, since the last late train will no doubt be long gone by the time we get down to the Isle of Dogs, which sounds more like a moated penitentiary than a pub, have a few drinks and manage to get back into town.

  I’ve never had this much to drink and so I’m pleased to see as we get up after punishing another bottle of port that I’m walking more or less normally, at least as far as I can make out, as well as feeling more confident and relaxed again. But John Deakin is insisting we go down to some wine cellar he knows and as Lucian slips off with barely a word I wish I could follow him, particularly since the sun’s still shining, it’s such a beautiful late afternoon you could be reading under a tree in the park, and when we get down to John’s cave it’s pitch black, apart from the candles guttering away on upturned barrels, and a sharp vinegary smell pervades the place. That doesn’t stop John from ordering what he calls his favourite Côtes du Rhône or Francis from paying for it, with John acquiescing without a word since Francis says, ‘Look, I’ve got all this money on me, what’s the point of having money if you can’t buy things with it.’ But when the wine comes Francis pronounces it ‘filthy’ and pours his glass on to the ground and we all follow suit, and he orders a fancy-sounding vintage which I can see in the flickering candlelight from a list chalked up on the wall costs several times as much, and which Francis, whose mood seems to have swung, deems possibly corked and barely better. His breathing has become slightly wheezy and laboured.

  ‘I might live in squalor,’ Francis confides in an undertone, ‘but I don’t see why I have to drink filth. After all, even if what are called one’s friends have no taste,’ and here he shoots a venomous glance at John, who flinches perceptibly, ‘I myself always want the best of everything, for myself and for my friends. I want the best food and wine I can get as well as the most excitement and the most interesting people around. The thing is I have known a few extraordinary people in my life,’ he continues, waving a meaty hand towards the ceiling which seems to exclude present company, ‘people with real natural wit and who were tougher and more intelligent than me. And of course when you’ve known one or two people like that, most of the others just come across as weak and dreary, poor things,’ he emphasizes, looking pointedly at John and Denis, but not I’m relieved to find at me, whose eye he catches now.

  ‘The thing is, Michael,’ Francis says, ‘I have known just a few people like that, who thickened the texture of life and took you out of the banality of existence just for a moment, as I believe Velázquez must have done for Philip IV, brightened his existence by his wit and his talent just for a moment. But there it is, life is nothing but a finite series of moments, so the more intense they are the better. Perhaps that’s why I don’t sleep very much any more even though I have got all these pills to relax me. I can’t see the point of relaxing or
going to sleep. I could never relax on a beach, the way people do, and just doze. After all, I’ve got such a big sleep coming up, it’s coming closer and closer, always closer and closer,’ he adds with a laugh, ‘that there’s no point in sleeping, c’est pas la peine. There it is. I decided early on that I wanted an extraordinary life, to go everywhere and meet everybody, even if I had to use everybody I met to get there. Life’s like that. We all live off one another. You only have to look at the chop on your plate to see that. I expect that sounds pompous, it probably is pompous. But there it is. I’ve always bought my way through life,’ Francis concludes, more exuberantly now, and pulling a ball of banknotes from his pocket he drops the price of another expensive bottle as a tip on to the wine barrel in front of us, ‘but then what else is money for?’

  We get to our feet again, and I see John, as imperturbable now as before, eye the large tip greedily as we clump up the steps into the evening, dark into dark, and settle ourselves in a taxi crossing first the heart of the city then some of the grimmest areas of London I have ever seen, with deserted dark streets, low black bridges and the occasional half-reclaimed bombsite on either side, followed by a long trip through a virtual vacuum eerily lit by towering overhead sodium lamps. Francis has insisted I sit in comfort in the back with John Deakin and Denis Wirth-Miller while he has the jump-seat opposite; he clings to the strap overhead with both hands as if his life depends on it. Francis seems to seek out situations where he is worsted or punished. He didn’t have to pay for John’s bad wine or to leave such a huge tip for the little service it took to plonk two dubious bottles and some glasses down. It’s like a sort of masochistic generosity, but I notice that it stops when he expresses opinions about other people which are harsh and apparently definitive. I’m glad to be on the right side of him and wonder if it will last once he gets to know me better and sees through me, as I’m sure he will, with those eyes that seem to pierce and take everything apart even when he’s being friendly. I’m cheered, though, to have passed the test this far. We all sit in silence in the jolting, creaking cab for a while; even Denis has stopped talking, numbed by the accumulation of wine which hangs over us like a pall. Drink is our element now, I think confusedly, we have to live by its rules. I lapse into sleep for what I think is a couple of minutes and only wake up as the cab comes to a halt in front of a large, brightly lit building with ‘THE WATERMANS ARMS’ announced in gold letters on a red ground running right around its top floor.