Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  I’ve had enough of the dregs to last me for a while, which was why I called David to say I’d be working on my Balthus piece at home today. It’s very nice to have an ally like him in the office. If I feel so exhausted and bilious this morning, I just wonder how Francis can be facing up to another day. Did he go on drinking that very iffy brandy? Worse still, did he get beaten up and robbed? I’ve noticed once or twice he’s had difficulty walking or turning his head. I asked him once if he’d twisted something and he told me he’d slipped on the bathroom floor, but so tersely that I decided not to ask again. What could he see in those brutal-looking men? I thought back to the distorted, cream-and-pink bodies thrashing together in his pictures and felt sicker still. Each to his own, I say out aloud to my anonymous little room, and I go back to studying Balthus’s gracefully suggestive adolescent girls.

  ‘Would Francis have got any sleep at all?’ I wonder, a few long silent seconds later. It’s a very big moment for him. He’s got his opening tonight. If it had been me, I’d have probably been tucked up before midnight. He’ll be dealing with the first press interviews right now, then he’ll have to go to lunch with the gallery people and perhaps some collectors, then there’ll be more interviews right the way through until the vernissage starts. If he’s lucky, there’ll be time for a hot bath and a change into a freshly pressed suit. That’ll be the only luxury before more hard living through one more night. How does he do it? He’s more than thirty years older than me, and I’m not exactly a slouch when it comes to burning the candle at both ends. But I’m tired and liverish even before I’ve begun. The idea of more drink and rich food, to say nothing of the strain of finding the right thing to say to an endless variety of people, makes me dizzy with fatigue just thinking about it.

  But there’s no point in going around with Francis if you can’t stay the pace. However much you’ve drunk with him the night before, there’s never any question of drinking more sensibly the day after. It’s almost like a discipline, or a duty, with him. Where other people feel they should cut back and give their liver a rest, Francis seems to think that the only solution is continued, relentless excess. Back in London once, when I’d turned up green to the gills from the previous evening for a lunch with him at Claridge’s, I left my glass of wine deliberately untouched, until Francis noticed it and topped it up twice until it started overflowing. I knew he was watching me now like a hawk, but I stuck to my resolution to drink only water, even if the wine he had ordered was a particularly fine, expensive Pauillac to go with our rack of lamb. After a moment, Francis summoned the wine waiter and said, ‘My friend doesn’t like this wine. Could you bring the list so that we can see if we can possibly find something he prefers.’ And of course that was the end of it. I simply gave in and drank the newly chosen, priceless vintage and then whatever else was on offer until the hair of the dog really did work, at least until the next morning after.

  Francis appears to have some magic knack for dealing with alcohol, almost as if his compact frame contained a spare pipe he could open at will to drain off the gallons of drink that have piled up in his system. I’ve left him sometimes in mid-afternoon barely able to stand, only to find him the same evening in a collector’s apartment looking pink and fresh, complimenting the lady of the house on her exquisite taste (although on one occasion he was furious to find artificial flowers in an expensively decorated Parisian salon, and he hissed quietly to me, ‘Why can’t she have real flowers? The whole point of flowers is that they die’).

  So I’m not too surprised to find Francis alert and bright-eyed this evening, oozing energy and suavity in equal measure as he works his way round the throng at the Galerie Maeght. He knows he can ask a great deal of himself, and perhaps it’s his gambler’s instinct that makes him booze all night and consort with Algerian toughs just before a key event in his career. I know how much he’s pinned on this, working flat out not only to get the right body of work together, but to secure the right space – he foresaw how Maeght’s double-cube room would show off his pictures in a grand yet approachable, intimate way. He’s also pulled off the coup of having a major French literary figure – Michel – present his work in the catalogue; and it’s not by chance, moreover, that his show has been timed to coincide with the big Picasso retrospective at the Grand Palais. And now, having just been roughed up and God knows what else in an alleyway behind the Bastille, he’s being all things to all men, and women as well: I’ve noticed a couple of elegant Parisiennes first recoil in alarm from the paintings and then melt with pleasure as they are presented to the affable artiste. I’ve gone over to greet Sonia, who’s come to Paris especially for the opening, but she’s deep in conversation with a diminutive lady with large glasses and only pauses to look at me meaningfully and say ‘As I expect you know, this is Marguerite Duras,’ a name that’s vaguely familiar to me as someone who writes abstruse, ‘new wave’ novels.

  I also say hallo to Jacques Dupin, a poet whose work, although also abstruse, I admire for the sheer evocative power of its language. He looks after all the major artists at Galerie Maeght and he was very close to Giacometti. Last time I had dinner with him and Francis, he told us he was trying to start up a magazine with some other poets called L’Ephémère, and they were going to devote the whole of their first issue to Giacometti. I thought that was a fantastic idea, although if it comes out it will probably be so hermetically written in that particular French way that I won’t have much idea what’s going on. I haven’t got much idea what’s going on this evening, either, except that there’s a lot of expensively dressed, perfumed people chatting to each other and barely taking in the hotly coloured atrocities bottled up under glass in the gilt frames running round the room. There’s no one else I really know, apart from one of Francis’s irritating hangers-on, who invariably asks me, whenever I bump into him going round the galleries, how ‘our’ friend is doing, without even bothering to ask how I am.

  Francis, on the other hand, seems to know everyone. He’s talking to a couple of French art critics now with disarming phrases I’ve heard before, such as ‘I really don’t know myself where these images come from, they just sort of coalesce on the canvas,’ and ‘Painting has had so many possibilities cancelled out for itself by photography that it’s more and more a question of trying to deepen the game through instinct and chance.’

  I wonder what the critics scribbling down these gnomic statements will make of them when they’re sitting over their typewriters trying to hammer out a review of the exhibition. They won’t have much to go on because Michel’s preface, which they’re bound to take as gospel and quote widely, is pretty gnomic too. So they’re going to have to deal with the paintings head on, and they’ll find that a real problem because outside the earlier, overt references to Picasso (whose vast retrospective they will also be reviewing at far greater length) there are next to no references for them to follow up on. A hint of Surrealism in the nightmarishly suffocating pictorial space, perhaps, a touch of Abstract Expressionism in the horizontal bands of background colour, but not much else. The angoisse of contemporary man, that should do for a paragraph or two, and perhaps a few words about distortion of form and chromatic clash. But basically Francis is simply not known here. He’s not that fantastically well known back home, at least compared to someone like Picasso, but there have been regular gallery shows and a full-scale retrospective. In Paris, he had just one small gallery show about ten years ago and the odd inclusion in group exhibitions. So the critics are going to be up against it, I think, and just then, as Francis goes into a huddle with the sleek, extravagantly coiffed Monsieur Maeght, I spot George, buttonholed by one of the critics and looking desperate. I catch his eye and go over.

  ‘You are the subject of so many of these paintings,’ the critic is saying in English.

  ‘Yeh. Spose I am,’ says George, guardedly. ‘’Oo wants to know?’

  ‘And how do you react to this attack, this visceral attack on your person and personality?’ the critic
asks.

  ‘I dunno,’ says George, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. ‘I wouldn’t know, would I?’

  The critic presses a button on his bulky tape recorder, which clearly alarms George.

  ‘So how can you psychologically withstand such an assault?’ the critic asks. ‘It menaces your very existence, isn’t it?’

  George blinks, then squares his shoulders, as if preparing for a fight.

  ‘Why don’t you fuckin’ ask ’im?’ he says eventually, jerking his thumb over towards Bacon. ‘Ask ’im. ’E fuckin’ did ’em, din’t ’e?’

  ‘I’m sure Monsieur Bacon can explain the paintings more satisfactorily than his friend Monsieur Dyer,’ I intercede formally.

  The critic retires and merges back into the circle round Bacon, whom Maeght is introducing to someone with an authoritarian mien and even more tics than Michel who I think must be André Malraux.

  ‘I fink they’re fuckin’ ’orrible,’ George says, snorting with what sounds like pride. ‘Reely fuckin’ orful. An ’e’s getting all that money for ’em.’

  We turn round to look at a recent portrait of George sitting on a stool. His features have been whipped into a multi-coloured mush.

  ‘’E finks I look like this,’ George says, shaking his neatly barbered head at the folly of the world. ‘An’ he does loads and loads ov ’em an’ ’en he goes and sells ’em for thasans and thasans of pahns.’

  This point amuses him deeply.

  ‘An ’ese,’ he says to me quietly, confidentially, gesturing at the people standing round, ‘’ese cunts go and pay fuckin’ thasans of pahns for ’em.’

  I’m beginning to feel more at home in Paris as I get used to the office routine and pick up all sorts of little tricks that make life here easier. I’ve learnt, for instance, to insist on being in the right because admitting that you’re in the wrong, which often wins you points in England, just confirms that you’re dim and worthless in France. When I told my landlord apologetically that I’d knocked over the bedside light and broken it, he made me pay for a new one, even though the old one was held together with electrical tape. The next time round, having slipped in the treacherous tub and yanked the shower head out of its lead, I complained fiercely to the landlord about how run down the whole tiny, stinky bathroom was and he eventually stumped up for a partial refurb. I count this as a minor triumph in coming to terms with my new life, but in turn everything here has started to change incredibly fast because revolution is in the air and it’s affecting everybody, breaking down barriers and transforming old, ingrained attitudes. People are excited and bursting with opinions which they share confidentially with complete strangers. Paris and the whole buttoned-up Parisian demeanour is undergoing an extraordinary metamorphosis, virtually hour by hour.

  Even my concierge has started talking to me, something no one could ever have predicted. Until now, I’ve had to hang around every morning in the hope she would come to her door to give me whatever post has arrived. Now she beats me to it, opening the door with my letters stuffed into the pockets of the old flannel dressing gown she always wears, but she won’t hand them over until we’ve discussed the latest turn of events which she follows obsessively on her radio.

  ‘They’ve occupied the Sorbonne!’ she tells me, waving an enticing bundle of envelopes in my face. ‘I’m on the side of the students. France has to change. The police are disgusting.’

  I’d watched a big demonstration turn nasty in the Latin Quarter a few days before. To begin with it seemed like a bit of student fun that had grown spontaneously out of all proportion, then begun to take itself seriously. Perhaps it’s because it’s in Paris, there’s something that struck me as very romantic about the revolutionary look. You can wear a silk scarf or a bandana round your neck and use it elegantly to cover your nose and mouth when the tear gas starts exploding. And it did, the bombs landed all over the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and when the police charged, for a moment I thought they can’t do anything to me I’m English, then I realized they were hitting everyone indiscriminately, delicate girls as well as boys, and when the crowd ran I ran with them.

  Once I got home, I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. I’ve never been involved in an uprising and realize I don’t really know what it’s about, for all the slogans and pamphlets and the graffiti plastered over every available wall. I’ve never considered myself particularly oppressed politically, but others apparently do, passionately, and I feel ashamed at having stayed in my ivory tower rather than becoming more ‘engaged’. Again I try hard to forget the whole thing; it’s nothing to do with me, I am a foreigner, and these are internal problems. But I still feel the tear gas in my lungs and the excitement of chanting slogans and linking arms with comrades, some of them unbelievably appealing in tight, military-style shirts, others with their hair drawn back in a fetching ponytail.

  So I’m involved now, just like my new friend in her dingy loge, and now that I’m speaking to her I speak to all kinds of people I’ve never given the time of day to. From the mournful newspaper vendor and the condescending cheese merchant down to the beggar on the pavement just outside, everyone has an opinion about the ‘events’ that they want to share. There’s a pork butcher called Noblet just by the Alésia Métro station that has a pink neon sign of a pig winking day and night above its shopfront where I’m usually in and out in five minutes but have to queue now because the question is no longer which pâté to buy but a lengthy, generalized discussion about the latest demonstrations, the brutal repression and the likely outcome. Even the sullen, subterranean creature who punches your ticket every morning as you descend into the Métro’s stale air has revealed himself as a human being of strong political persuasions.

  French though she is, my new girlfriend keeps away from the demos and, when she’s not working on the layout of a new issue of Réalités, she stays at home with her Siamese cat doing her own drawings. But I’ve become swept up in the whole movement. Nobody talks about anything else, and since strikes have virtually paralysed the whole country, everybody is more or less obliged to take a position. If I were asked why I joined in on the occupation of the Odéon, I’d be hard put to say it was out of solidarity with the workers at Renault. I’m there simply because that’s where everything is happening, and I’m amazed, once we’re all crammed together into Jean-Louis Barrault’s theatre, at the eloquence of the speeches, some of them given impromptu by students who must be a couple of years younger than me. A few of them are ironic or even funny. One red-haired hothead in a torn windcheater has been berating us for the last twenty minutes for not being in the Renault factory, standing squarely shoulder to shoulder with our worker comrades, rather than sitting smugly in a bourgeois theatre, and as we begin to feel collectively guilty, another voice pipes up saying: ‘The question is not why we are not at the Renault factory, comrade, but why you are not.’ For a blessed moment, laughter dissolves political intensity.

  If I didn’t have much idea why we occupied the Odéon, I’m very clear about the reasons we have stormed the Hôtel de Massa, which is France’s most important literary society and whose corrupt, conventional values about fifty of us, all members of the newly formed Union des Ecrivains, are about to denounce and overthrow. We were prepared to fight to gain entry to the building, which sits in its own little park behind Montparnasse, but it turned out to be unguarded and empty. Such unopposed occupation feels a bit of an anticlimax, but it’s a perfect late-spring evening and some Union members have brought guitars and someone else has gone out to buy wine, and soon a few couples start dancing on the lawn outside. I’m sitting next to a founder member of the Union who impresses me immediately because she sees Beckett regularly and has had two books published by Gallimard. Everything seems to be going fine, like some marvellous unexpected party, until she asks me why I joined the Union. I’m about to come out with the usual slogans but caught in her steady, sympathetic gaze I can’t dissemble and I tell her that since I wanted to write it seemed better to
join than not to join, even though I didn’t think anything we did or said or wrote would change things much for the workers at Renault. I more or less expected her to drop me there and then but instead she leant over and kissed me.

  I go to every Union meeting now. Most of them take place clandestinely. We meet by prearrangement in another member’s often unexpectedly comfortable apartment or in one of the ‘safe’ cafés we know outside the Latin Quarter. We never refer to each other by name, which is easy enough since everyone is known as camarade. Unlike the haranguing that went on at the Odéon, our discussions are kept to an urgent whisper, with a comrade posted at the window to alert us to any sign of potential police intervention. We have all developed a habit of looking over our shoulder at odd moments during the day and we take strict precautions when we come to meetings to arrive singly and ensure we have not been followed. This has the unfortunate result of heightening my sense of insecurity, which has always been a problem and is now becoming all but uncontrollable since at the same time I have fallen desperately in love with my new writer friend, Danielle, and my movements have become doubly clandestine and furtive as I try to camouflage my visits to her in her room high up over the city in Belleville from my unsuspecting girlfriend at Réalités.

  Our Union discussions cover such a vast terrain, from certain members’ Maoist tendencies to sweeping social reforms or improving writers’ relationships with their worker comrades, that we have been separated into various cellules as a way of focusing on more specific issues. I am one of half a dozen members entrusted with denouncing by every available means the country’s corrupt, bourgeois system of literary prizes, which will be awarded when we reconvene after the summer holidays. This is an odd coincidence because the literary editor at The Times for whom I’ve started writing bits and pieces from Paris has asked me to do an article about the forthcoming Prix Goncourt. I tell the comrades this and before I know what’s happened a detailed plan has evolved whereby, as the Times’s Paris correspondent, I turn up at the awards ceremony with the other comrades from our cell disguised as my film crew. Then, as the Prix Goncourt is awarded, and all the other, real TV cameras are filming, the comrades will slap the new recipient and as many jury members as possible round the face and announce that the whole French literary establishment is putrescent with complacency, convention and corruption; one comrade is particularly pleased with the alliteration this achieves. Meanwhile, as the moment draws closer, I grow jittery to the point of illness about how the whole thing will end. Over the summer, as the May uprising has been brutally quelled, foreigners suspected of any political activity in France have been given twenty-four hours to leave what is patriotically termed the ‘national soil’ for good. So that would put paid to the life I’ve been trying by hook or by crook to create here. I’m also worried about the basic legality of the situation. I could probably be charged with something like entering on false pretences with intent to defame this, that and the other, and be handed a prison sentence. I can’t get any advice because we’ve all been sworn to secrecy, but the fact that I’m so vague about the implications makes me all the sicker with anxiety.