Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

John enjoys my astonishment for a moment, then goes on mellifluously, ‘Yes, married, my dear. A long story – I wouldn’t dream of boring you with it.’

  Fill his glass and wait until he feels he’s built up the right suspense. There. Oh go on. Tell us.

  ‘Well, if you really want to know, it all began in Rome, where I happened to be shortly after the war. Things were not, I might say, going altogether swimmingly. Of course I was attempting, as always, to eke out a meagre living, to scratch a subsistence, with photography. Then I had to go and pick up some dreadful tough, and of course find myself the very next day, at dawn, lying in the gutter with nothing, ab-so-lute-ly nothing. All my money gone, need I say, but what was far far worse, the very tools of my trade. Not a sign of my beloved camera. Nor, of course, of that gruesome lout I’d had the misfortune to fall in with.

  ‘Well, as luck would have it, that same day, while I was at my wits’ end wondering what to do, a man I knew from Milan made me what you might call a proposition. Of course at that time, there were all kinds of women, uprooted by the war, who would do anything, and I mean just anything, to get British nationality. It turned out that this man was in Rome looking for a British subject who would be willing to marry an Eastern European lady temporarily living in Milan. He asked me if I were free. Mmm. Of course, I had precious little choice in the whole affair. Stranded as I was, with neither money nor the wherewithal of my profession. That ruffian, I might add, had stripped the very coat off my back.

  ‘In essence, what the lady proposed was the return fare, in first class of course, marriage and a cash payment. Who was I to decline so timely an offer? I thanked my lucky stars and got straight on the train to Milan.

  ‘The whole thing might have been acutely embarrassing, but it was arranged with such discretion that it turned out to be really rather enjoyable. The lady in question was absolutely charming. We met in that very good hotel in Milan and took tea together. Very civilized. When we’d finished tea and decided on the exact, mmm, details, we went for the civil ceremony. I need perhaps not add, my dear, that we dispensed with union at the altar.

  ‘My wife was quite marvellous throughout. We shook hands afterwards, like dear friends, and I got back on the train for Rome, clutching the money. The moment I got off at Termini, I went to my special little shop and bought the most marvellous new camera. But instead of going straight back to my miserable hotel room, I had to go like a fool to one of those unspeakable bars where I’d sworn I’d never set foot again. Of course I got quite hopelessly drunk. Exactly what happened, my dear, like many other events in my life, remains a matter of pure conjecture. The outcome, however, was quite clear. I was left virtually for dead in some stinking gutter, with everything gone – both money and camera having disappeared into thin air.

  ‘It’s what you might call a recurring pattern, one in two, at a highly conservative estimate, being a thug, my dear. Still,’ John concludes, his eyes rising in liquid appeal to the strange forces of love, ‘I suppose one should be merely thankful one doesn’t get beaten and robbed every single time.’

  If I ever need concrete proof that I now belong to Soho as much as to Cambridge I only have to look at my new Colony Room membership card. No one in Muriel’s club has ever asked me to produce it since I always get a welcome from the barman or from Muriel herself when I go in. So I’ve taken to leaving it prominently on my desk in the rooms in college I’ve been sharing this year with Magnus Linklater, rather like a spy flaunting his double identity. I’ve started telling Magnus bits about Francis and various incidents in Soho, like the one the other day when a literary critic called John Davenport, who’s as wide as he’s tall, picked me up under one arm and carried me along the pavement all the way to Muriel’s bar, which I think would have been impressive even if I hadn’t been heavy enough at school to have proved useful in a rugby scrum. I think I sometimes detect a passing glint of disbelief in Magnus’s eyes as I relate these exploits, although he’s too wary or polite to say anything. This look needles me a bit when I’m in full flow but I realize that I would probably do the same if I were regaled with such tall talk without ever being invited to join in and see for myself. So on my next foray into deepest, darkest Soho I turn up with a slightly sceptical Magnus who nevertheless warms to Francis and quite sees the point of the extravagant lunch he offers us at La Terrazza, where we are fussed over by Mario, one of the flamboyant Italian owners. Francis tells me he has to pick up some cash at his gallery afterwards and suggests we meet at Muriel’s, so I lead Magnus proudly up the malodorous staircase as if I were taking him to an enchanted realm and am sufficiently buoyed up on lunchtime wine not to flinch when Muriel, sitting erect and regal on her barside stool, says, ‘Does your mother know you’re out, dear?’, then with a condescending look at Magnus, ‘And who have we brought with us, dear, your blowjob?’ But luckily Ian, in a flowered shirt and dark glasses that do nothing to disguise his strawberry nose, stops giggling to open a bottle of champagne and pushes two foaming glasses towards us, which we grasp as symbols of having made it past Muriel’s Cerberus-like presence and into the murky green depths of her club in mid-afternoon.

  There are only about a dozen other drinkers propping up the bar or seated in the gloom. I notice Frank Norman, with the big white scar running down one side of his face, whose ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’ has become such a success. Then purple-faced Denis Wirth-Miller, looking more pleased with himself than ever, comes over to greet us exuberantly. Behind him, at the far end of the bar, looms the heavy-set frame of David Sylvester, deep in conversation with a slight girl who gazes raptly at him as if expecting a revelation. I become vaguely conscious of a certain unease in the room as I nod toward Sylvester, who looks through me and continues to talk urgently to the girl. Denis meanwhile has been prancing from one side of the room past the silent piano to the bar and back. He’s wearing a light linen suit and his head is thrown back in exultation, as if he were savouring some private triumph.

  ‘Do stop pooving around, Denis,’ Muriel shoots from the bar. ‘If you can’t keep still, why don’t you open your bead bag and buy all my lovely members some more champagne?’

  ‘I think it should be champagne, champagne all round,’ Denis rejoins, waggling his exultant head from side to side. ‘Now that I’ve exposed the fat critic for what he is, a fake and a smarmer who’s made it up the ladder by clinging to Francis’s coat tails.’

  Sylvester is breathing heavily and beads of sweat have begun to snake down his face and disappear into his beard.

  ‘You little worm,’ he says, his bulky chest heaving. ‘If I have never included you in a review, it’s because you’re a nothing. You can’t call what you do “painting”. It’s a travesty of painting, even if Francis once allowed you to paint some grass in for him.’

  ‘And such beautiful grass it was,’ says Denis, moving towards him. ‘I expect it’s what you liked best about the picture because Francis says you have no eye for painting at all. He says you only see things when they’re pointed out to you. Those I’m afraid are simply all the facts.’

  ‘When did you last have all the fucks, dear?’ says Muriel, sensing trouble. ‘I think it’s time you both piped down and stayed with the fucks.’

  But Sylvester is clearly not about to restrain himself.

  ‘You pathetic little pansy,’ he bellows, throwing the contents of his glass in Denis’s face. ‘How dare you try to come between Francis and me?’

  ‘Can’t face the truth, critic, can we? Dish out the criticism but can’t take it!’ says Denis, his face gleaming as much from the aptness of his remarks as from the thrown wine.

  But before he can continue the performance, Sylvester roars like a wounded man and with his pendulous belly swaying lunges out to punch Denis full in the face. Denis staggers back and collapses on the floor, face up, with blood streaming from his nose. As Sylvester retires heaving with emotion to his corner by the bar, Magnus and I approach tentatively, with not much in mind, trying despe
rately to remember whether you are meant to move the wounded or not. Meanwhile, Denis seems to be continuing his anti-Sylvester campaign from the floor, his mouth bubbling with blood but forming perfectly modulated fragments of conversation to which ‘You’ve always punched beneath your weight, you ghastly tub of lard’ returns like a refrain. Gingerly we prop him up, then help him to his feet, standing on either side of him and holding his elbows. Then we realize that behind the blood coursing over his lips and chin Denis is actually grinning, as ghastly a sight as it is incomprehensible. He actually seems to be enjoying the situation, and he totters over to the bar crying out: ‘Champagne! Champagne for everyone!’

  At which Muriel, who has been watching the scene from her stool in unconcealed alarm, turns to the barman quick as a whip and says: ‘Come on, dear, open the champagne before our bleedin’ heroine changes her mind.’

  ‘First blood, now wine,’ Ian pipes up. ‘Like a li-bation.’

  ‘More like a bleedin’ li-ability, dear. Now open the bottle and take the money.’

  Champagne served, Denis begins a tour of triumph, oblivious to Sylvester, still pouring out his grievances to anyone in earshot, as if he had been awarded a distinction – wounded in a fight for truth. No one begrudges him this self-conferred honour, especially as, in a rare departure from Colony Room convention, Ian has darted out from behind the bar to ensure the wine keeps flowing. Also very visibly flowing is the blood from Denis’s nose which has swelled to twice its size and taken on an even darker purplish hue than the rest of his face. None of this appears to concern its owner, however, who is weaving from group to group to receive his due and would no doubt have continued until evening had the club door not opened to reveal Dickie, his companion in what was well known as the longest queer marriage in the land, who strode over and took the situation in at a glance, saying ‘Your poor old conk will never be the same, cunty,’ enjoining Magnus and me to help manoeuvre Denis down the stairs into a cab to Hyde Park Corner and thence to the tender care of emergency at St George’s Hospital.

  4

  Mischief in Morocco

  ‘We go from nothing to nothing.’ I’m staggering around my room with its leaded windows overlooking Avery Court. ‘And in the interval between we can try and give our lives a meaning through our drives.’ Here I cannon into a wall and a roar of laughter goes up, but I recover just in time to steady myself against the table. ‘There it is. Life is all we have and since the whole thing is meaningless, we might as well be as brilliant as we can, as Nietzsche says. Brilliant even if it is being brilliant about nothing. I myself’, I continue, spreading my arms wide to take in all present company, ‘am probably the most artificial person you’ve ever met. I’ve worked on myself a great deal. There it is,’ I conclude, pretending to put on lipstick and mincing over towards the gas fire. ‘Those are just the facts. There’s nothing you can do about those things. I’ve always known I was totally homosexual.’

  This last bit is greeted with wild hoots from the group of friends, back from lectures and supervisions with their gowns dumped on the floor, who are sitting round the gas fire toasting crumpets on long forks. I’m now called on to do my Bacon imitation regularly by the group of us in college who go around together. This afternoon, in the fading light, there’s Magnus Linklater, Peter Webb, Max Wilkinson and Martin Kingsbury. We all moved into digs together last year and now we’re back in Trinity Hall, living in rooms dotted all round its medieval network of courts and lawns and libraries, constantly dropping in on each other for tea or a glass of sticky sherry. ‘Come on, do the Bacon,’ they say, and I’m quite pleased to oblige, since I’m always ready to fool around and I’ll do almost anything to get a laugh, but also because it’s a way of keeping in touch with them about the way my life is changing without giving too many details about what is going on there in deepest, darkest Soho.

  I try not to do it too often, partly because I’m enough of a ham to want to keep my little act in demand but also because I feel I’ve been stupidly sacrilegious every time I finish and lap up the merriment it provokes, a bit as if I were doing a parody of the Last Supper or the Stations of the Cross. Paradoxical as it might certainly be, Bacon has become a kind of religion for me, or certainly a form of belief.

  At boarding school, not long after I’d been through a belated confirmation, I became transfixed by the notion of infinity in time and space, but above all in space, which seemed marginally less abstract and easier to picture, an endless void that stretched over you like a night sky when you were trying to sleep but couldn’t because of the panic that thinking about nothingness, lit by a few cold stars, induced. Almost without realizing it, all dogma and any specifically Christian belief slipped at that moment from my consciousness as merely man-made and not cosmic – never to reappear. A year or so on, I recovered from the disturbing sensation of being a mere particle falling through infinity, and the more reassuring parameters of the here and now returned, thanks mainly to a sudden avid interest in sex and girls.

  The experience nevertheless left a significant question mark lurking behind until Bacon’s incessant tirades against the futility of life, the nothingness of existence, drew it back to the fore. Part of my chronic confusion stemmed I thought from the lack of any firm belief, and even though I was both repelled and unconvinced by the bleak finality of Bacon’s views, I was impressed by the vehemence with which he appeared to adhere to them, as if believing in nothing had in itself become a faith so strongly anchored in him that he felt bound to proclaim it wherever he went and make whatever converts he could. In his eyes it was bad enough, as I had witnessed several times, to prefer a Beaujolais to a Bordeaux, or Rubens to Rembrandt, but when he discovered some unfortunate with a hope of salvation and an afterlife he could not contain his scorn and anger and berated the believer as savagely as he could. If he had seen the light of nothingness, why should others stumble on in their benighted darkness? It was as if he had a sacred duty to open their eyes to the stark limits of the brief futility that made up their existence as it did his.

  I got a glimpse of just how closely Bacon kept to his faith, terrifying and comfortless as it was, when I was last with him in London on a bender that took us through to dawn. We’d had an excellent dinner with abundant champagne and red wine, but I noticed that George was particularly withdrawn and that Francis didn’t make any fuss of him. In a good mood, he’d usually call him ‘Sir George’, but there was none of that, and in the taxi from the studio to the Etoile on Charlotte Street he’d suddenly snapped at George, studiously smoking as ever: ‘Keep that filthy cigarette of yours to yourself.’ We’d gone to a few clubs after that, and as I hadn’t drunk much over the past week or so, I was pleased to be surrounded by so much excess. Then I noticed Francis’s mood darkening, almost from one glass to the next, and by the time we’d reached the end of the night in some dark basement club whose name I never even glimpsed he seemed barely conscious, not wanting to stay but unable to leave, and since the champagne was not to his liking we switched to whisky, and Francis was swaying in his seat, rimmed by a strange blue light, with his eyes closed, his face closed to anything outside the darkness in his mind, repeating like a chant, a mantra, over and over again, ‘There’s nothing, see. Nothing. Nada. Just nada, nada,’ until George and I got him up the steps and into a cab back to Reece Mews. But in that darkness I could see how he clung, as tightly as he clung to the black leather coat in his lap, to the core belief of his religion. And I wondered whether he had chosen it not only for the freedom it conferred but also because, in its unconditional harshness, it was the one that gave him the least hope and the greatest pain.

  If I can be persuaded to ‘do the Bacon’ a bit more freely at the moment it’s because, after a couple of years sunk in existential gloom and doubt, I can make out at least the semblance of light at the end of the tunnel. Cambridge Opinion has just come out. It’s taken an age to get all the texts and photographs together and see the whole thing through the press, but I’m ov
er the moon now it’s actually there, and I keep turning over the pages as though it’s not yet quite real and might disappear if I stop looking at it. Both Kitaj and Hockney came up trumps, providing very articulate commentary on their own work, with Kitaj producing a painting specially for the cover. There’s a lively exchange of letters between Auerbach and me, an interview with Anthony Caro by Lawrence Alloway and a rather wild text called the ‘History of Nothing’ by Paolozzi. We’ve also got Freud’s terse declaration (I had to call him repeatedly in London, then at some glamorous-sounding castle in Scotland, to get his final agreement to it just as we were going to print) and a distillation of my various conversations with Bacon opposite a striking portrait of him by John Deakin (whom I’ve thanked in the issue, but I expect I’ll have to buy him a few drinks at the French or the Coach and Horses as compensation). Then there are all the critical essays to counterbalance the various artists’ statements. Even the advertising, which my colleagues have rustled up from all over the place – including a whole back page from Paris Match – looks good.

  If this weren’t enough to make me feel I’m riding high, I get a flattering review of the ‘Modern Art in Britain’ issue from John Russell in the Sunday Times. It had never occurred to me that our little magazine would reach Fleet Street, let alone get a notice by a well-known art critic in a leading newspaper. Perhaps good things, like bad ones, come in threes, because shortly after that comes an invitation from Nigel Gosling, the art critic on the Observer, to drop in to see him next time I’m in London. I’m down there within the week, slightly suspicious he might just be angling for an introduction to one of the artists I’ve met, but he’s very affable and takes me to a packed pub near by. He clearly relishes a liquid lunch, and when he asks me whether I would like to choose a few of the most interesting shows on in London each week and write short reviews on them – a ‘gallery roundup’, he calls it – I wonder whether he hasn’t had a gin too many. I try to look as if I’m weighing pros and contras up for a few seconds, then jump at the offer. Even though I’m not sure I want a career in arts journalism (wasn’t my ideal supposed to be writing ‘for myself’, whatever that was, in some exotic location overlooking the sea?), I could hardly turn down such an alluring prospect before Finals are even on the horizon; after all, this could lead, my new journalist and drinking friend says, to a permanent position on the Observer. I’m also mindful that coming to London every week to snoop round the galleries means I will see more of Bacon and the people in his orbit as we all continue to revolve on his unique whirligig of posh restaurants, louche bars and kinky clubs.