Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  One of the things I’m coming to appreciate more and more about going around with Bacon is that we talk so freely, even if the conversation tends to be mostly about him, his life and painting – which is of course why I originally sought him out. But he talks quite as willingly about the latest news or politics or medical research; at one point, apparently, he read every issue of the Lancet he could lay his hands on. It didn’t occur to me, though, that he took a deep interest in literature until he started passing on to me this or that odd book he had lying around in the studio. Of course, it’s true, and I picked up on that right away, that he has all kinds of writers and literary people among his friends or at least within his orbit, and not just art critics like David Sylvester, John Russell and Lawrence Gowing. Stephen Spender he sees quite a lot of (and I’ve met him with Francis, and to my embarrassment, and even more I imagine to his, I keep confusing his poetry with Auden’s, which I know much better; Auden, I soon found out, is someone Francis can’t stand because of what he calls his ‘Christian hypocrisy’). Cyril Connolly he met through Sonia, as well as the much loved Peter Watson, now dead, who put up the money for the review Horizon. Then he knows Burroughs, of course, and ‘Cal’ Lowell, who he says sometimes thinks he’s Hitler or Napoleon. And a lot of writers send him their books – I’ve noticed Elizabeth Smart, Paddy Leigh Fermor and Caroline Blackwood, and from Paris Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Gaëtan Picon and Jacques Dupin – and I get a glimpse of the latest ones whenever we go into the living room because they’re scattered all over the big table by the window.

  Out of the blue Francis has just handed me Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, saying ‘You might try this book, which I suppose you could say is about despair. Djuna Barnes must have been a very remarkable woman, living that lesbian life of American women in Paris in the 1920s. She’s very old now. Someone told me nobody’s been able to talk to her for years because she lives in this flat in New York behind a great wall of gin bottles.’ I’ve been finding it difficult to get into but since Francis has recommended the book I’ve persevered and now I’m fascinated by its rich perversity and realize it’s quite different from anything I’ve ever read. His tastes in literature are as definitive, not to say peremptory, as they are in art. Just as he goes in one bound from the Egyptians to Michelangelo, so there seems to be nothing in his literary pantheon between Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. He’s told me that some plays or poems have influenced him even more than painting by the power of their imagery. ‘Even in poetry I’ve always been obsessed by images,’ he said to me the other afternoon in the studio, as we were trying once again to conclude our interview. ‘When I was very young I found this marvellous translation of Aeschylus. It was really more of a free rendering I expect than a translation. But it had these images in it I thought so beautiful they’ve been with me ever since. There was something so extraordinarily vivid about them. “The reek of human blood smiles out at me” was one. Then there was this other one I can’t quite remember about Clytemnestra sitting over her sorrow like a hen. They are superbly visual. I feel myself very close to the world of Greek tragedy . . . often, in my painting, I have this sensation of following a long call from antiquity.’

  After Shakespeare little seems to have found Francis’s favour, in English literature at least (Racine and Saint-Simon are two of the French writers he admires most), until the twentieth century. ‘English literature in my lifetime has been made by Irishmen and Americans. Of course the Irish have always had this marvellous way with words. They talk marvellously, talking is really a way of life with them. They seem to exist to talk. I can’t read novels. I find them so boring. I really prefer either documentary things or great art, great poetry. I don’t think there’s anything between the two nowadays. I love poetry that’s a kind of shorthand about life. When you have everything there, in a most marvellous brief form. And I’ve always particularly loved Yeats, who I think becomes more and more remarkable as he gets older. I think Yeats is probably a greater poet than Eliot but in the end I prefer that whole atmosphere of Eliot. Even if he did go religious later on, I love the feeling you get in The Waste Land.’

  Just as he enjoys comparing Yeats and Eliot, Francis loves to discuss the respective merits of Proust and Joyce, both of whom he admires deeply, even though he sometimes misquotes them. The other day I came out with a definition I was quite pleased with about Proust’s having lived so he could write and having written so he could die, and that immediately set Francis off:

  ‘Yes, that’s true. In a way Proust’s was the last saintly life, wasn’t it? I’ve always thought of him as a great artist who left this profound record of his time – I think it’s the last great tragedy that’s been written, I think it’s a very tragic book, in the grand sense. I keep rereading the Temps retrouvé, it might be the morbid side of my nature, but there’s something so extraordinary about the way all these characters he’s made change. When Charlus falls on the cobblestones, he’s really reduced to nothing – after being so pompous and so on, he becomes completely pathetic, fallen there. And of course it goes on for pages. In the end all the people turn out to be kinds of cyphers out of which the whole book has been made.’

  ‘But Francis, you always say, like Ezra Pound, that you have to make it new,’ I venture. ‘So wouldn’t you think of Joyce, who after all, completely reinvented technique – like Picasso, with all these great stylistic fireworks – as the more important writer, the one who changed the course of literature?’

  ‘Well yes, Joyce is marvellous,’ Francis concedes, as I thought he would. ‘It’s remarkable the way you get the whole feeling of Dublin in Ulysses. It really is like that, you know. And the way he just invented one technique after another. It’s an extraordinary thing to have done. But I myself feel he went too far in that last book of his. He made it quite abstract, I think, and that of course is bound to be less interesting. Because abstraction can never convey fact in a precise way. It can’t be made to convey anything precisely. In that sense, I prefer Proust. I know it’s ridiculous to compare them, but for some reason people do. With Proust, you get this profound change within tradition. That’s what I love, and of course the fact that it is the last great document – a deeply edited document, it’s true – about social behaviour. You just get everything in it, it’s a complete record. I’m not sure that kind of thing is at all possible any more. People have tried it of course, but I don’t think it’s worked. I imagine things have become terribly difficult since Proust and Joyce, just as they’ve become so difficult in painting. I don’t know. But I do think there’s less and less nowadays between the documentary and great art, the art that returns you more vividly to life.

  ‘In painting, well, in all art I imagine, one always hopes to recreate experience in a way that makes it come back on to the nervous system with greater intensity. Makes it more specific and more direct. What one wants is that thing Valéry meant when he talked about giving the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. Ah, but whether one can actually ever get that is another story.’

  On other evenings we get caught up again in a round of bars like mice on a treadmill without stopping until exhaustion sets in and we part, grey with fatigue and barely able to stand, at dawn. I follow him now unquestioningly through secret Soho, from forgotten afternoon drinking dens to specialist clubs run by ageing lesbians, retired policemen or ex-prostitutes in marquise wigs. The Iron Lung gives way to the Music Box and the Maisonette. In one of them, presided over by a voluminous patronne with a black velvet beauty spot, they are playing Chubby Checker on the jukebox and to my delight, having delivered himself of a long, drunken diatribe against the futility of life, Francis is invited to dance by the bouncer figure who passed out at Wheeler’s and, without hesitation, he breaks into a supple, dainty twist that would not look out of place on a professional dance floor. In another crowded bar, while the evening is still young, a girl comes over to Francis and drops some little triangular capsules into his hand and he knocks them back w
ithout even looking at them. She puts some into my hand, too, with a knowing look, and I hesitate before discreetly dropping them on to the floor. I think of a story Francis has told me about how he rented a room in Chelsea when he was very young and found a large pill stuck in the floorboards and just swallowed it, and afterwards he needed to go to hospital to get it pumped out of him. (‘Why did you do it?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, a bit irritatedly. ‘Just for something to do, I suppose.’) So I’m relieved I’m not taking this risk, even though they’re probably purple hearts or bennies or some other upper, because I think, with all the new people, places, drink and talk, I’ve got about as many kicks going as I can handle. Francis says you always have to go too far to get anywhere at all, in art or in life. I guess he’s right, he’s certainly shown it in his own art and life, and it certainly sounds more exciting than the kind of middle-class values and behaviour that I’ve been brought up with and, beyond a certain general rebelliousness, have never deeply questioned. I’ve had vaguely existentialist attitudes, gone to the cafés in Paris and worn the clothes, but I’ve never gone off the deep end and radically contested things. Nevertheless it’s quite clear I’m drawn like a moth to the flame to this flouting of convention, this going off the rails and doing things people say you shouldn’t. You have to drift to find yourself, Francis said, and this is what I feel I’m doing even though at times I know I’m out of my depth, with no safety cord beyond an alcoholic, sadomasochistic homosexual who likes me, and I’m terrified . . .

  At the time, I didn’t question the reasons why I was drawn so strongly to this man and his world, apart from an anxiety that the attraction belied a homosexuality so deep and so repressed in me that it might at any instant erupt, fully fledged, in camp gear and shrieking. Nor did I know then that Bacon was attracted above all to young heterosexual men whom he thought were just waiting to be ‘turned’, and that his attraction to me stemmed in part from the fact that I was so straight it didn’t even occur to me there could be any ambiguity about our friendship. I see now that since an amitié amoureuse requires no consummation it tends to last longer than a sexual one, though at several points in our long relationship this would also be put to the test. Otherwise the fact that I was regularly lured back to Bacon’s world – from a needy student existence, in which one was forever hoping to become someone, to a life of being fêted with champagne merely for being who one already was – needed little explanation.

  Although I could not have formulated it clearly at the time, the lure did in fact go much deeper than that. I had found not only a more exciting mode of life but an older man whom I admired increasingly for his freedom, vitality and artistic brilliance. What I needed, way beyond the flattery and luxury that I lapped up as a threadbare student, was a father figure. And in Francis I had found him.

  My parents, Edward and Elsa, were neither monstrous nor wantonly cruel. But in their increasingly loveless marriage a bitterness and despair had set in that corroded everything within their sphere. This mismatch, held together by middle-class convention and always on the point of unravelling, brought out the worst in each of them: in my mother a frivolous, snobbish superficiality, in my father a brooding egotism. I was nevertheless close to my overbearing father as a boy (apart from a painful spell with foster parents while my father was hospitalized). But at the onset of adolescence my whole outlook changed: the docile child was replaced – as radically as my lank hair which suddenly bunched into curls – by an insolent, opinionated teenager whose main aim in existence was to oppose and wear down his father’s entrenched tyranny. Even though I was packed off to boarding school shortly thereafter, the war between us endured. I challenged his authority at every turn, mimicking him to my mother and sister and eventually – when he no longer dared hit me – to his face.

  But however hard I struggled to subvert him, my father always held the upper hand. Not only was he my father, but along with all his other sins he had inherited the family illness which he would, he promised, bequeath in turn to me. His father had suffered from ‘melancholia’ (which led, it was rumoured in the family, to his suicide); my father himself had manic depression – the same illness under another name. This insidious condition, with its aura of secrecy and shame, had been treated disastrously after the war with electroshock, which in desperation my father had undergone; and after bouts in clinics had yielded no improvement, the illness was supposed to be kept at bay – the violent mood swings held in chemical equilibrium – by the mauve, purple and sky-blue pills that he kept in clusters on his bedside table. Nevertheless our household knew only two totally distinct seasons: the brief, hectic, super-exuberant summer phase, then the never-ending depressive one, each of them so extreme that my mother, sister and I all wordlessly yearned for the change, only to regret it as soon as it got under way.

  The sense of oppression this illness instilled in the family came from never knowing what to expect, coupled with constantly fearing the worst. After months of my zombie-like father being barely able to make it through the day, let alone drag himself into the pharmaceutical company he ran – while keeping the whole family’s plans and hopes on hold – there would be a burst of activity in which suddenly nothing was impossible and no bounds known. Workmen would turn up to add extensions to house and garden, expensive holidays were booked, cars purchased, outlandish bills (intercepted by my mother) arrived from louche-sounding nightclubs, the drinks cabinet was filled to bursting and as regularly depleted.

  Similarly, where my father had been so withdrawn that it was impossible to get an answer from him, he now became so voluble no one else could get a word in. He shouted in restaurants, made scenes in shops and drove his latest car with aggressive speed and copious hooting; if no one laughed at his jokes, he would repeat them loudly until their wit was acknowledged. Money that had been hoarded morphed into overdrafts and any hint of caution was contemptuously brushed aside. As we cowered in fear and embarrassment, my father came into his own with a vengeance, making up for lost time – just before sinking once again into his long, sad, silent winter. And all this, he promised looking into my eyes, would be mine. I was his son, and he had seen the signs.

  So when I came across an older man in whom bleak despair and spectacular exuberance warred but were miraculously held in check, not by pills but through an iron will and startling inventiveness, I was entranced. It did not matter how warped or distorted the means if it helped me live with the family curse. My father had not known how to survive; he became the victim of his illness, and that gave me an example not to follow but to avoid. Apart from opening all kinds of tantalizing vistas on to the future, meeting Francis ignited a deep, secret hope . . .

  ‘It is terribly marvellous for you to be going around with him, seeing and hearing simply everything,’ John Deakin is saying in his richly enunciated, plummy tones. I’ve scraped together a little spare cash and, as a belated thank-you for his clever way of introducing me to Francis, I’ve taken him for lunch at a Soho trattoria where he says the tonno vitellato is divine.

  ‘I hope you’re getting it all down, my dear. One day it will be of such value,’ he remarks, nursing a glass of house red. ‘It’s incredible, but you’ve become a sort of Boswell to Francis. It’s simply marvellous. He talks to you about everything. Even I didn’t foresee that. Don’t screw it all up now, kiddo. Remember. Get it down.’

  Eyes go up in a down-drawn face.

  We talk about the people I’ve met with Francis and the places we’ve been to. John chuckles occasionally at my description of things getting out of hand, like the session with Snowdon, and fills the conversation in with reminiscences of his own.

  ‘When I first came to London before the war I used to go to a queer club where there was music and we all danced,’ he says. ‘Then one evening it was raided by the police, I think they were having one of their crackdowns on what they called so appetizingly the “filthspots” of London, and about twenty of us were carted off to the station for the ni
ght. Then in the morning we had to appear before the magistrate. And at one point the magistrate said to me, “Mr Deakin, did you not find it odd to be in a club where men were dancing with men.” And I didn’t really know what to say, as he stared at me with that perfectly frightful wig on. So I simply replied: “I’ve only just arrived from Liverpool, m’Lud. How could I possibly be expected to know how people in London behave?” In the end we all got off. But those sorts of thing used to happen quite often . . . Good thing they never came to the attention of my wife.’

  ‘Your what, John?’

  ‘You might well take on that look of aghast surprise, my dear. Who could say you haven’t every reason? But I am a married man.’