Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  ‘She and I used to tell each other everything. I suppose I was a kind of confidant for her – I used to take her to hunt balls and all those ridiculous things when I was sixteen. Of course I hadn’t the faintest notion what to do with myself when we got there. Just stood around and looked silly I expect. Because I was really gauche, and of course having been brought up in Ireland I knew nothing about anything. But she was a remarkable woman, with this most marvellous ease and vitality. My own mother was less remarkable, but she had that same kind of easiness with people. And she adored entertaining too – though while my father was there she didn’t get much chance. What was rather extraordinary about her was that way she managed to start a really new life after he died. I used to visit her after she moved to South Africa, and we got on much better then.’

  ‘But your relationship never got better with your father?’

  ‘It certainly didn’t. The thing is, Michael, from as far back as I can remember, I used to trail about after the grooms he had working for him on this horse-breeding farm. I just liked being near them. In that sense, I suppose, I’m what you might call completely homosexual. I don’t think there was actually any question of choice. It was there, right from the start. So when I was an adolescent I started dressing up in my mother’s clothes and her underwear and that kind of thing. And my father caught me at it. Of course he was absolutely disgusted to see a son of his going to the bad and so he decided to send me to this very manly friend of his, you see, to straighten me out. But I’m afraid it didn’t change anything, because a bit later we were in bed together. There it is. He was terribly odd, in his way, this man. A brute. Really tough – you know what I mean? Of course he used to fuck absolutely anything. The curious thing is I really don’t think he cared one way or the other who he went with.

  ‘He was going on a trip to Berlin and for some reason he decided to take me with him. At that time, in, well it would have been in 1927 I think, Berlin was absolutely extraordinary. It was so somehow open. I don’t know how to put it, but you had this feeling that you could get anything you wanted. Anything. Having never been outside Ireland before, you can imagine how exciting that was for me. I felt all of a sudden well now I can just drift and follow my instincts. Just drift and see. I always remember they had these streets of clubs, where people used to stand outside them and sort of mime the perversions going on indoors. After Ireland, I must say, the whole thing was absolutely fascinating! We stayed in this hotel, the, it’s ridiculous I can never remember the names of things nowadays, well it was the Adlon that’s it. I don’t suppose it’s there any more, or at least not in that way, because it had a kind of luxury that could hardly exist anywhere today. I mean I remember, it sounds so absurd now, but stretching my hand through the hangings of this four-poster bed and pulling the breakfast trolley, it was an extraordinary thing with a silver swan’s neck at each corner, well just grasping one of these swan’s necks and drawing the whole silver thing to the bed. And of course everything came in silver dishes with the toast wrapped in linen and that kind of thing. And all the time you knew that just outside this hotel there was the most appalling poverty all around.’

  ‘And then you managed to go to Paris?’

  ‘Yes, I did. After a while my father’s friend went off and simply left me, so I hung on for a bit in Berlin and then, since I’d managed to keep a bit of money, I decided I’d go to Paris. I remember being so ridiculously gauche and shy in Paris I didn’t dare talk to people or even to go into a shop and ask for something. Of course looking the way I do, with everything gone wrong, didn’t help. But there it was. I stayed in that little hotel in the rue Delambre in Montparnasse. Of course it’s been done up now and become rather smart. But it wasn’t a bit like that then. I didn’t keep myself to myself all that long – thank Gawd! Berlin had at least shown me how to follow out my instincts, and after a bit I started going round with this male prostitute. Well, round the bars, behind the Lido, and places like the Sélect, which was the homosexual café at that time. And for a while I drifted round with him, living that kind of life.

  ‘My mother used to send me an allowance of three pounds a week. That sounds ridiculous now, but in those days it did help a little. But most of the time I went about with people I picked up. By the time I got back to London, I still had no idea what I really wanted to do. I’d started to think about painting, and of course I’d been to see the Picasso show in Paris, but that was about all. So I just went on drifting. Well, in that same kind of way basically. I started putting advertisements in the personal columns of The Times, offering myself as a companion. The curious thing is that the replies simply poured in.

  ‘I had my old nanny staying with me at that time. She came and lived with me almost everywhere I went, from place to place, for over ten years. She understood everything. She’d come from Cornwall, and I was far closer to her than to my family. Anyway, when the replies came in, we used to go through them together, and she used to pick out what she thought were the interesting ones. I have to say she was always right.

  ‘I went back to Paris shortly afterwards, with a dreadful old thing who took this very expensive flat on the Avenue Pierre, what’s it called, Pierre-Ier-de-Serbie, yes. Well of course, I didn’t stay with him for very long. There you are. I used everybody I could. I was quite impossible then. I mean, with my sort of looks, everything gone wrong, and with that awful gaucheness from having been brought up in Ireland, things did seem terribly difficult. I’ve worked on myself a great deal since. Tried what’s called to present myself as well as possible. I always remember this very interesting man in Paris, saying to me the important thing is how you present yourself. Of course I didn’t know what he was talking about then, but now I do think it’s very true. The French are terribly conscious of that presentation – of making the best of themselves. There was a woman I met once in Paris who looked much younger than she was. And I said to her, how do you manage to look so young? And she said, “Ecoutez, Francis. Je me fais jeune. Voilà tout.”’ She was quite right. You have to remake yourself. I’ve tried in different ways to remake myself over the years. Of course it hasn’t really worked. But there it is. Nothing has ever really worked for me.’

  I sense Francis’s mood has changed. His face has hardened and his mouth is set in a bitter pout. I hadn’t seen the change coming, although I know it can happen between one glass and the next, and we have worked our way through five or six bottles of the Bordeaux. He sits there, eyes downcast, as if turned to stone. To break the silence I suggest, without much conviction, that we go on to Soho for a last drink, and I am relieved when he tells me he wants to stay put and get up early to ‘try to paint’. When he says nothing has worked for him, it’s almost certainly the relationship with Peter Lacy he has in mind. He feels responsible for his death, however indirectly, and needs to scourge himself, to alleviate the sense of guilt, I suppose, or is it to intensify it? The paintings brim with violence and suffering. Do they feed off this guilt, and does Francis nurture it because he knows the deeper the guilt the more potent the images will be? What the fuck, I know I’m drunk too and that I should leave before Francis begins a monologue of ever terser, more acid phrases. ‘In some ways I’ve had the most ghastly life.’ ‘There it is – there’s nothing you can do about those things.’ ‘Everyone I’ve ever been really fond of has always been a drunk or a suicide.’ I gather up fragments of our earlier talk in my mind like a spy memorizing secrets, then take my leave of Francis, picking my way gingerly down the steep stairs. Nightclouds scud overhead as I walk back through the dark empty streets to the basement on Tregunter.

  On other nights we might have moved from pub to bar, restaurant to club, up and down stairs, crossing landings, knocking on doors. All London would have opened up, from luxury hotel to the latest trattoria or the last shack dispensing scalding tea and doorstop sandwiches to cab drivers at dawn. With Francis life only takes place inside. We are condemned to a succession of rooms, the outside being no more than t
he interval between them. All human drama and interchange is concentrated here, in interiors closely sealed off, as in his paintings, with figures flailing. As we go around talking and drinking too much, we become the figures he has created, contorted, distorted, struggling to breathe in these airless interiors under the accrued weight of the drink and the words. We go everywhere with the magician of the night, from the cosy Maisonette to the uptight Rockingham, the Ritz to the seedy Coronation Club, the elusive Pink Elephant to the harsh, threatening but ultimately welcoming Iron Lung. When we are in one club, we discuss another, plotting our course through Soho’s tightknit grid. ‘There used to be something marvellous about the Gargoyle,’ Francis says, as we settle into a sofa at the Paint Box under the patronne’s benevolent gaze. ‘But I’m afraid it’s become a bit dreary these days. It has this extraordinary staircase with thousands of mirrors broken into the walls designed by Matisse, and when people came down it they looked like birds of paradise. And everyone went there. Even Sartre used to go there when he was in London. What? Well, he was very sympathetic, and he told me to look him up when I was in Paris but for some reason I never did. Anyway, the Gargoyle was a place where people could let their hair down, and it was famous for its rows. It was a club made for rows, and some of the members would come back every evening to continue their own row or to listen to someone else’s. Of course the rows were usually to do with unhappy love affairs, and what is more fascinating for onlookers than what’s called other people’s unhappy love affairs?’

  Since I have no particular hour to get up and no job to go out to, I am happy to stay the course for as long as it takes. Sometimes around midnight we have a second dinner, which always pleases me, as a kind of rest between the harder drinking bouts in the clubs. I’m always impressed by the fact that, whenever I leave him, Francis will be up in a couple of hours and into the studio, limbering up to project another big fearful image on to the canvas, or at least padding through the rags and photos on the floor, as I groan fitfully from under the covers, hoping against hope that my day won’t be devoted to nursing a hangover.

  Now that I’m used again to the rigours of the English weather, however, my life has become really quite acceptable. When not on the razzle with Francis, I concentrate on my love life which, in the wake of the Orwellian mésaventure, has grown agreeably varied and complex. As my flatmates sit in their offices, taking orders and tending to subaltern duties, I sit by the gas fire like some big fat sexual spider awaiting my latest victim and listening to a scratched version of ‘Michelle ma belle’ endlessly on the turntable. In between assignations I read widely and write fitfully, agonizing over the futility of my present lifestyle but not sufficiently to make any decisive move to change it. My mother continues to send me money, and I have even found a few honourable ways of supplementing this meagre income. I read books and translate some of them, as in Barcelona, for a variety of publishers such as John Calder and the strange, charming Tambimuttu (whom Francis can’t stand – whenever he comes round and knocks on Francis’s door, Francis puts his head out of the window and shouts down: ‘I’m not here’). Tambi has got me translating Henri Michaux, whom I find exciting to read but near impossible to render adequately in English. But the challenge gives my days another focus, and in any case it seems unlikely, with Tambi being so disorganized and on the verge of bankruptcy, that these translations will ever actually be published.

  Since I came back from Spain, I’ve had little contact with my parents but my father has found out that I’ve been getting regular handouts from my mother and, since he is in manic phase, he has decreed (my mother tells me over the phone) that if I am incapable of finding a job he will be taking up the cudgels on my behalf. ‘It is high time’, he has apparently been repeating over his pink gin, ‘that Michael stood on his own two feet.’ I’m not too worried because I reckon that as the summer fades so will his monstrous manic energy and I will be forgotten once he subsides into melancholy. Meanwhile he has had his secretary scanning the classified ads on the front page of The Times every morning for any job that might sound suitable, and I’m a bit put out when she comes up with a ‘Paris magazine seeks junior editor’, because I can hardly say a job like that wasn’t right up my alley even though I have no intention of leaving London, above all since I’ve just met a girl who’s part oriental (an ‘octoroon’, she calls herself) and could not imagine life without her.

  Mercifully there’s little chance of my getting the job because when I call the number on the ad I am told the editor will be interviewing over sixty candidates while he is in London. Instead of the sallow, superior Frenchman I vaguely expected when I turn up for the interview there’s a red-faced, blue-eyed Englishman called Garith Windsor who looks more like a camp naval officer or bluff character actor than an editor. He annoys me right away by asking a few trick questions, but since I’ve decided to be sufficiently aloof to make sure I don’t make it through to any short list, I give a few brief condescending answers clearly demonstrating that I’m not taken in and feel the whole thing rather beneath me. This makes him laugh, and I find myself playing up to this unexpected turn of events, thinking he doesn’t seem a bad sort and what a bore it must be to have to sit there for hours appraising a load of recent graduates. So we sit and chat for a while about Paris, which I haven’t visited since spending a Christmas vacation there, holed up in a cheap Left Bank hotel picnicking off roast chestnuts bought from vendors in the street and reading modern French poetry whose very impenetrability impressed me as a mark of its intellectual rigour and depth. I tell Windsor how little I care for the French even though I’m quite addicted to their culture.

  I think no more about the meeting over the next few days and resume my routine of recovering sufficiently from binges with Francis to further my afternoon amours by the gas fire’s flames in the blissfully empty basement. Then I get a rude awakening in the form of an official offer, first by telephone from Paris, then by telegram, to take up the post of assistant editor at Réalités as soon as I can get myself to Paris. I am dumbfounded at first, then intensely annoyed with myself for having been too clever in the interview. I can only think that I stood out as the one interviewee to be offhand and unenthusiastic about working in Paris, and this in turn must have invested some illusory qualities in me that Windsor did not detect in the other more eager to dead-keen applicants. I can’t think how else I could have got the job, but now I feel trapped. I can’t lie to my parents and I know that my mother’s allowance will be cut off if I don’t take the offer up. At heart I also know that, seductive as my daily round seems, I am not getting anywhere and that perhaps, after all, another stint abroad might be just the catalyst my lacklustre career requires.

  I think I have persuaded my new love to come with me although she will have to give up her steady secretarial job and I’ve no idea where we’ll live or what she’ll do. I sweep all her objections before me since I’m convinced we’ll find a way if we set our minds to it, but as the date approaches she seems increasingly evasive about giving in her notice. Meanwhile, I am letting all my friends know I’m about to leave, once again, and so soon it seems to me after getting back from Spain. Francis invites me to a last dinner before I leave, and when I go round to the studio to pick him up he opens a special vintage bottle of champagne to wish me luck.

  ‘Now who do you know in Paris?’ he asks me suavely as we sit there clinking glasses.

  ‘Well, no one, not a soul,’ I say, suddenly alarmed at the prospect.

  ‘Did you ever meet Giacometti?’ he asks.

  ‘Never,’ I say. I know vaguely he’s talking about a famous sculptor who lives in a dusty cave in Montparnasse, but he might as well be asking me if I know Michelangelo or Rodin.

  ‘Well, there is something terribly sympathetic about him,’ Francis says. ‘He took a great shine to George when he was over here for his Tate show. He said, “When I’m in London I feel homosexual,” and he suggested George go over to Paris and he’d teach him French and p
erhaps get him a job in a picture-framing shop he knows. That would at least give George something to do. I think you’d like him so why don’t you look him up when you get over there?’

  ‘But Francis,’ I say. ‘I can’t just go round and knock on his door and disturb him without any warning.’

  ‘Of course you can’t,’ says Francis rather formally. ‘I’ll give you a letter of introduction and you can take it with you.’

  He rummages round the books and papers on the table and comes up with a copy of Paris Match from which he rips a double page of war photos at the centre and with a thick green felt-tip writes: ‘Mon cher Alberto je voudrais vous présenter un grand ami Michael Peppiatt qui arrive maintenant à Paris j’espère que vous allez bien Alberto. Francis.’

  We finish our celebratory bottle and move on to a special feast of caviare, baby lobster and grouse at Claridge’s. It’s clear I’m going out on a high, although my spirits are already dipping as I wake up the next morning with an aching head and pack my scuffed little suitcase with the one suit I possess, a charcoal grey that has seen better days. My old friends Magnus and Peter are there to give me a stirring farewell as I board the boat-train at Victoria. Then the backs of houses and the allotment gardens beside the track start to flit by, taking me closer and closer to a new fate, whatever that turns out to be.