Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  ‘Do be an angel and open that whole case of wine,’ Sonia is saying to me. ‘I so hate it when there’s a good conversation going and I’m endlessly having to jump up and fiddle around with a corkscrew. By the way, do you know how to change a light bulb? Do you really? Oh, that’s absolutely marvellous. All the men I know are totally impractical. They may be wonderful looking or absolutely brilliant but none of them can change a bloody light bulb. Can you imagine asking Francis or Michel Leiris to change a light bulb? Thank goodness you’re here. Even if you’ve achieved nothing in life so far and can hardly be expected to make any worthwhile contribution to what people will be saying this evening, you can at least change a light bulb. Why would you want to write when there are so many people who have already written such important and wonderful things? You’d be of much greater use to mankind if you became a plumber or an electrician. Oh, the light that needs changing is over there, by the dining table.’

  This is the second time I’ve been to Sonia’s house on Gloucester Road. Rather pointedly, she had not invited me earlier to the soirée I knew she was organizing for Michel Leiris but to a small dinner party where, as she put it, ‘there would be no really important people’. But the Leirises are back in London and they are coming this evening as well as Francis and Lucian and David Sylvester. I am already feeling a bit overawed, I realize as I make myself useful, and it’s not much help when Sonia keeps reminding me what a privilege it is for me to be there. I suspect Francis must have said he wanted me to meet to Leiris, because Sonia, who has already introduced me loudly as ‘an obscure young man’ to her lesser friends, clearly doesn’t think I’m going to be much good at the elevated intellectual talk she expects around her dinner table. All the same I’m pleased she’s asked me early to give a hand because she’s one of the few women to appear regularly on Francis’s nightly round and although I’m amused and flattered to be part of it I sometimes find the homosexual atmosphere suffocating and I crave female company.

  I’ve found out quite a bit about Sonia from Francis, who often talks about her when she’s not there. He seems to be drawn to her mainly by her unhappiness. ‘She’s always been unhappy,’ he says. ‘I don’t really know why. Cyril Connolly once said to me, “The very idea of Sonia being happy is obscene.” She had two disastrous marriages. She married Orwell on his death bed when he had only weeks to live, and then she married Michael Pitt-Rivers, who had been charged with buggery during that whole Montagu affair. Sonia knew he was queer of course but decided she could change him or some nonsense, and of course that didn’t work. She was very beautiful and a lot of men have been in love with her. She had an affair with the philosopher Merleau-Ponty in Paris that lasted for a while, basically because he treated her just as a sort of English blonde. There’ve been all kinds of other people, but it’s never really worked. Most of her real friends are women, and I’ve often wondered whether she wasn’t au fond lesbian. She’s always wanted to be with artists and writers, you know she worked with Connolly on Horizon, and I think she wanted to write herself but it’s never worked either and so I suppose that’s also been a frustration. But she has found a kind of role by giving all these dinner parties where she brings English and French people together. That’s the rather marvellous, generous side to her. She’s created a kind of salon where people can meet and talk, and that is of course a very rare thing nowadays and a very valuable one.’

  There’s plenty of talk this evening. Sonia has been drinking all through the evening, and even when she was making her boeuf bourguignon she was pouring one glass into the stew and another for herself regularly, so now she’s a bit red-faced and bleary-eyed and argumentative. She keeps repeating things like ‘Mais c’est fondamental! ’ or ‘Il n’a rien compris’ or ‘C’est un faux problème’ very emphatically, although it’s less and less clear what she’s referring to. Leiris is very courteous to her and that seems to calm her down a bit. Lucian is polite, too, but he looks abstracted and a little bored and he has already announced that he has to leave straight after dinner. Sylvester I find rather ponderous, but he’s made some good remarks, first about Macbeth, which is one of Francis’s favourite plays, then about the rue des Saints-Pères which is apparently where Francis stays when he goes to Paris. ‘I often wonder’, he booms, as Sonia ladles another helping of the boeuf on to his plate, ‘why there isn’t a rue des Impairs!’ I wish I’d been able to say that, but I reason it would sound more odd than witty coming from a student. I also wonder whether Sylvester hadn’t prepared the remark or heard it elsewhere, and I focus more on following the conversation rather than trying to join in, even though I mentally prepare what I hope are a few fluent phrases in French. Whenever I do say something, however brief, Sonia rounds on me with a ‘Soyez pas idiot! ’, so I decide simply to keep mum. I’m fascinated by Leiris’s face, which is inhabited by numerous tics, but I’m also fascinated by how formal he is, tightly buttoned up in his suit and speaking in long sentences full of subordinate clauses and a regular use of the present and even the past subjunctive. Somehow I had imagined a kind of Left Bank intellectual in black clothes and possibly even dark glasses, involved to the hilt in the latest intellectual movements and snortingly dismissive of anybody who wasn’t, rather than this elaborately mannered, deferential older man dressed more like a Swiss banker than a bohemian.

  The real point of the evening, I’m beginning to realize, is for Leiris and Bacon to get to know one another better, and most of the conversation, which I’d thought would be so full of complex, subtle twists and turns I would barely be able to follow, is an exchange of what to any outsider would sound like outrageous compliments. ‘Votre dernier livre est tellement merveilleux,’ Bacon has told him several times, opening up his arms to demonstrate how wide the book’s appeal was, and Leiris, his face agitated by depth of feeling, has concluded his appreciation of Bacon’s paintings with a perfectly honed ‘Elles sont d’une puissance non seulement magistrale mais totalement réaliste,’ which makes Francis glisten with pride. He knows that Leiris has been closely involved with Picasso and Giacometti, and that praise from Leiris to some extent elevates him to their company. Sensing that the dinner has been a success, Sonia has fallen into a melancholy silence, her drinking and smoking still defiantly confirming her presence even though her essential role has now been played. Sylvester meanwhile, who has known both Bacon and Leiris for many years, has been following the mounting crescendo of compliments and fanning the flames of flattery, his corpulent frame heaving with the enthusiasm of an artistic matchmaker and the witness of a unique moment in cultural history as writer and painter see eye to eye on everything from realism to Surrealism (except for one brief moment when they touch on Beckett, whom Bacon dismisses, saying, ‘I loathe all those ghastly dustbins on stage,’ and Leiris defends mildly, saying, ‘There’s enormous charm in the work’).

  I stay behind to help Sonia clear up the mountain of plates, glasses and bottles, and while moving dutifully between table and sink I make a drunken, desperate and wholly inappropriate lunge at my hostess which I expect to be appropriately brushed aside. But, to my surprise, it is reciprocated, without a moment’s hesitation, as though it’s accepted that that’s what men do at this time of night, and all thought of clearing the dishes is suddenly, miraculously, suspended. I am further taken aback, however, when Sonia breaks out of my clumsy fumbling to say, ‘Everybody’s doing it like this in Paris,’ and proceeds with grim efficiency to move on to something I’ve heard of but more as a kind of dirty joke and certainly never done. I try to adapt to this turn of events with enthusiasm as well as a dash of what I hope comes across as Gallic nonchalance, but we both become aware of an urgent pacing up and down just outside the kitchen, and Sonia breaks off to say, ‘I told Cyril to go to bed,’ before we resume, and Cyril, about whom I have heard enough to identify instantly as the great man of letters and Sonia’s former boss at Horizon, continues to pad more and more noisily in the corridor outside. Standing with my back to the kitchen
door, I feel increasingly detached, imagining myself no longer as a footloose student but as an aspirant against all odds firmly sandwiched now between two great names in literature, Orwell and Connolly, and thus elevated, almost like Francis so recently risen between Picasso and Giacometti, to undreamt-of realms of achievement but in my case with no justification, particularly as the farcical side of the situation begins to overwhelm all else, undoing alas what was so well begun, and crestfallen but oddly relieved I realize that to all my other failures in Sonia’s eyes both intellectual and social I now have to add failure at this. Meanwhile, I repeat to myself, hastily dressing in case an irate man of letters bursts in, although we bit off more than we could chew we might get another crack at the whip, however mixed my metaphors are and however real my shame, although even now I’m rearranging the whole thing as a story in my head, as Sonia says despondently, gazing at the unwashed dishes and apparently unaware I am still there: ‘To think that Cyril’s still after me, after all these years.’

  Finals are over and Cambridge is fading, even though the summer light on the ancient courts is so mellow, the celebrations last through the night and the morning’s promise arrives undimmed. We are torn between nostalgia at leaving such a gilded haven and the world beckoning beyond, but all of us in our tightly knit little group realize that we are leaving for good.

  Real life, whatever that is, won’t start quite yet, however. For some months we have been planning to make a major trip together, driving the length of France and down to Barcelona, then the length of Spain to Algeciras, where we will board the ferry to Tangier. Our choice of destination hasn’t been picked out of a hat. From my tales of Soho and its master magician (the ‘magician of the night’, as I often think of him), Bacon is now part of our group myth, and some time ago I reported back that he would be in Tangier, where I know he’s been going for years. So that’s where we’re headed, since it seems as good a reason as any, though we are also going to make the most of the journey taking us there.

  France is pleasant and mild but unremarkable, a series of long roads bordered by plane trees, picnics in fields and efficiently run camping sites. Then Barcelona hits us between the eyes. There had been the odd, mainly chaste encounter on the way down, but what we hadn’t expected, once some ancient male instinct had guided us to the red-light district on the lower Ramblas, is the profusion of brightly dressed, amiably chatty whores. Far from the threatening, sleazy atmosphere of the doorway trade in Soho, the women here seem light-hearted and friendly, as ready to share a drink, a dance and a chat as to proceed to more earnest business between bidet and bed in a dark cubicle. We are entranced, as if we had stumbled on a local fiesta where the girls, while clearly not just out of the convent, nevertheless have a certain natural poise and charm. We are also daunted by the very availability of so much sex, since our experience hasn’t gone much beyond unfulfilled gropings with girls of our own background or the very occasional and usually depressing paid transaction. Here we seem to be in an entirely new realm where what is usually furtive and shameful resembles a celebration, with drinks and laughter. We practise our fledgling Spanish and in the badinage that ensues pick up a few memorable phrases, notably one girl’s clear demarcation of services rendered – ‘¡Fuckee fuckee sí, suckee suckee no!’ – that thenceforth becomes a war-cry regularly roared out of the windows of our trusty red Mini as we speed southwards to Grenada and get the first real impact of Arab culture. When we come to Seville, we make a beeline like pilgrims to a shrine for Bacon’s favourite hotel there, the Alfonso XIII (or ‘Alfontho Trethe’, as he calls it, just as in perfectly camp Castilian he calls his favourite painter ‘Belathqueth’), before beating a hasty retreat to an inexpensive hostel. Both the cities and the landscapes of Andalusia enchant us and we no longer see ourselves as tourists but as intrepid explorers as we continue barrelling across the sierra in search of the gateway to Africa.

  From the moment we get off the ferry in Tangier, things speed up even more. A couple of friendly bystanders in striped djellabahs who speak French and are about our age show us the way to the medina and actually take us to a run-down little hotel where they seem to know the owner. The rooms are on the basic, not to say grotty, side but the price seems reasonable enough so we unpack and wash and the two boys are still hanging around when we come down. They call us all ‘Ali Baba’, and me in particular ‘Ali Baba in glasses’, which is quite funny, and they say we should visit the kasbah right away, and it’s true it looks totally exotic when we get there with great pyramids of olives and spices in sacks and dates on the branch. We get a fantastic flatbread sandwich on the way to the carpet shop which the boys say their uncle runs and it turns out he’s sitting on top of this amazing pile of carpets which reaches almost to the ceiling and he’s very friendly and says we were predestined to come to his shop even before we set off from Cambridge. It’s really mysterious how he could have worked this out, it’s not exactly as if we’re wearing college scarves and he and the boys have only had a couple of quick, guttural exchanges in Arabic. Before we can ponder this much more they all very generously offer us some kief to smoke. That has been something we wanted to do anyhow but as we puff away, trying to look as if we did it all the time, it doesn’t seem to have much effect beyond making us feel pleasantly sleepy and amused. After a while, though, I feel I could lie right down on one of those carpets and doze off and the others feel just the same and in the end, giggling a bit among ourselves, we agree to buy one of the cheaper carpets just so the boys can take us back to the hotel which we’ve lost track of completely but hope to get to soon before we totally conk out.

  When I wake up the next morning I feel dazed and discontent and I become even more irritable when I find the garish, synthetic-looking rug we bought glaring up at me from the floor as well as some kief or hashish or whatever it is neatly tied up in plastic bags at the foot of the bed that I can’t even remember buying. A good chunk of our budget for the stay in Tangier has been blown on these stupid purchases for which we didn’t even haggle over like the idiots we are, probably could have got them down by half, so we realize we’re going to have to pull in our belts, which is unfortunate since the drug seems to have made us ravenous. As we pick our way through the maze of streets and the crowds of veiled women shopping in the souk, I am convinced a couple have winked at me, brown eyes flashing in a yashmak, but put it down to the lingering effects of the weed. We are hoping to find a good, cheap couscous with mint tea but the skewers of lamb are covered in flies so we settle for another tuna and olive flatbread and wolf it down while gazing at crudely painted earthenware dishes and piles of Moroccan slippers. At least we’ll get one good meal this evening, we tell each other, since I’ve called Francis at his hotel and he’s told us to meet him at a posh-sounding French restaurant in the ville nouvelle.

  Hunger makes sure we arrive at the restaurant promptly and as we troop in to the air-conditioned dining room I realize how rough we’ve been living between tent, hostel and street food. We look rough, too, in our crumpled shirts and baggy trousers, particularly as the head waiter in immaculate black takes us past waiters in immaculate white tunics with gold buttons to the table where Francis is already sitting. We’re also still a little woozy from the weed. I’m always glad to see Francis, but this time he appears like a saviour, lifting us out of scruffy travel and on to an altogether more sophisticated plane. I make the introductions, wondering uncomfortably whether Francis will sound at all like my impersonations of him to my friends, before I note that their attention is completely fixed on the menus they have been given and the expensive, French culinary treats in store. Francis encourages everybody to order lavishly, fills our glasses and also fills in a bit of background.

  ‘Tangier is a rather curious place,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit like Muriel’s club, Michael, on a large scale. People come here to lose their inhibitions, above all queers from England and America. I’m not sure it will last but it has been a very tolerant place. All the Beats, G
insberg and the others, were here, as you know, and they made a great thing of going native and living rough, drinking wine out of old tin cans and so on, but of course they always had a return ticket to America in the back pocket of their jeans. So I don’t think they were taking too many risks. I used to come here a lot to see a friend of mine, who’s unfortunately dead now. But that’s another story. I used to see Ginsberg a bit, and Paul and Janie Bowles and Bill Burroughs and people like that. Ginsberg actually asked me to do a picture of him and his lover having sex on their bed, and he gave me all these photos. So I said, well this could be a bit awkward if you want me to paint you as you’re doing it, Allen. How long can you hold it for? Anyway, the lover wasn’t very interesting, I’m afraid, but there was something about this striped mattress and the way it spilled over the metal spindles that was so poignant and despairing that I’ve kept the photos of the bed and used them ever since.’

  After our blowout we go on to the Tangier, or tangerois as we are already calling it since it sounds more hip than ‘Tangerine’, night life. Francis says there’s a bar called the Oasis which we might like but it’s full of middle-aged homos, all very affable, and we learn that our Cambridge tutor is a regular visitor which amuses us, and we talk to someone our age from London called Mikey Portman who’s sure Bill Burroughs will be in, but I feel I’ve already been waiting too long for Bill Burroughs and what would be much nicer is a cuddly girl to talk to. And Francis seems aware that this is what we’re keener on and takes us to a great bar with lots of smooth-looking people of both sexes and we are well oiled enough now not to mind if we look a bit rough, on the contrary we’re just following on the great Beat tradition that’s made this place what it is, and we’re chatting up the ladies like there’s no tomorrow and of course Pete has got the prettiest one, a willowy blonde very audibly from the East End, and I notice Francis looking a little concerned and he comes over and takes me aside and whispers: ‘Tell your friend Pete that the Billy Hill mob is in town and he’s making a play for Billy’s girlfriend and that could get him into real harm.’ And I try to relay the message to Pete, who’s remained more strung out on the dope than any of us, and he repeats amusedly to the girl, ‘I hear the Billy Hill mob’s in town,’ and before you know it she’s disappeared and Pete’s blinking into space and wondering what to do with himself.