Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  ‘Been onnis cure, see,’ he says to me, pushing the glass of champagne he’s been served to the very edge of the table. ‘Been at one evvem ’omes.’

  A black-coated waiter has materialized at our side.

  ‘Messieurs,’ he says, ‘today we ’ave salmon with celery and black truffle or delicious duckling from—’

  ‘I’ll ’ave that,’ George says with an unimpressed snort.

  ‘What will you have, Sir George?’ says Francis, chuckling.

  ‘Nat fing wiv salmon. First one ’e said,’ George says. His eyes have roamed the room, noting the tables where the jewels glint. On an ample bosom at the table next to us, there is a diamond necklace almost within his grasp.

  ‘The real trouble about not drinking is the boredom,’ Francis says, following George’s glance at the necklace with detached amusement. ‘I went to one of those ridiculous health farms once to lose weight – I only have to look at food, you know, to blow up like an enormous balloon. Anyway, they give you absolutely nothing, just three glasses of water a day, and the boredom is indescribable, and you also begin to smell very bad. I used to take the train up and down to London, up and down, simply to pass the time.’

  George nods, sucking his cigarette so hard it crackles.

  Francis outlines the plans for the opening. I’d expected him to be a bit overwhelmed or nervous, but he seems very much in control and almost apologetic, as though we had much better things to do than to come to the exhibition and the banquet afterwards.

  ‘Of course most of the pictures are of George,’ Francis says genially, trying to draw George out.

  ‘Yeh,’ says George. ‘Mostovems of me.’ He’s pushed his salmon to one side and is busy flicking specks of ash off his dark suit.

  Another carafe of champagne is set bubbling on the table between us, but even Francis has accepted that the lunch won’t take off.

  White-faced and sober, George is waiting to disappear back to the hotel. He’s lost Francis, and now he’s lost the oblivion he found in drink.

  I walk with them down the Palais-Royal arcade towards the river. Then, impulsively, I turn back through the gardens and take a lingering look into the Véfour’s windows, half expecting to see the three of us still sitting round the table, but laughing now, like old times, our faces flushed with pleasure.

  It’s a perfect late-autumn day, and the sun is sparkling on the silver helmets and swords of the Garde Républicaine standing to attention on either side of the red-carpeted steps that lead up to the Grand Palais. President Pompidou has decided to open the exhibition in person, and as he mounts the steps surrounded by a group of dark-suited officials, Francis is waiting at the top to greet them and take them round.

  I feel a surge of pride as their backs disappear into the museum’s shadowy entrance. Francis could hardly have more luck or higher honours. Even the weather has held for him, and the French state has just acquired a particularly tough new triptych that shows George seated on a creamy white lavatory. The advance press has focused on the extraordinary power of the paintings, saying they’re like ‘a punch in the face’ and wondering out aloud why France has taken this long to recognize an artist of such overwhelming importance.

  The plane trees along the Champs-Elysées have lost some of their leaves, but the high blue sky overhead gives no indication that we’ll soon be plunged into winter. A long line of birds in perfect formation moves southwards over the Place de la Concorde towards the Seine. They look like letters in a sentence being written and unwritten, an indecipherable message etched for a moment on the void. Then they pass out of view.

  I’m excited to see the show, because it will fill in all sorts of gaps in my knowledge of Francis’s painting and above all give me a better idea of what he did in the earlier part of his career. Somehow I’ve come to feel personally involved as if, having studied the recent work, I now have an urgent need to know what came before.

  Getting here early means I’m in the first batch of VIPs and journalists waving engraved invitations to be let in. Francis has probably moved on with the official group. As we pour into the first gallery I don’t know quite what I’ve been expecting. The first few works are smaller and darker than I’d imagined. They don’t have the exuberant assurance of the canvases Francis has done over the past few years. They’re rougher and more tentative, as if the artist were still working in the shadows, unsure of what he was looking for or achieving. Blurred figures are isolated in dark enclosed spaces, dark moving on dark. Francis’s voice speaks out of each image. As I walk past it follows me, clearly, insistently.

  ‘Life is nothing more than that, I’m afraid. Simply this moment between birth and death. We’re like grass. We grow and we’re cut down. And then we go on to the great compost heap of the world. We don’t know much, but that I think we do know.’

  The writhing Popes. The great blood-red-and-black Crucifixions.

  ‘When I was young I needed extreme subject matter. Then later the subjects came out of my life and the people I knew.’

  A white face, its features half washed away, is screaming from one gilded frame to another.

  ‘Peter was hysterical, almost mad really, the whole time. We had these four years of hell together. I’d never been really in love before and I was utterly physically obsessed by him. In the end he just left me. He rang up one day and said, “Consider me dead.” And when that exhibition of mine opened at the Tate, among the telegrams, I got this one saying he had just died.’

  Screaming in pain, screaming in pleasure. White bodies humped on creamy sheets, abandoned in the grass sprouting through the canvas weave.

  ‘That side of life has always been disastrous for me. So many of my friends have been drunks or suicides. They’re all dead now.’

  Posthumous portraits rising mysteriously out of the fleshy metaphor of paint. Bring him back.

  ‘It seems mad to paint people once they’re dead. You know if they haven’t been incinerated their flesh has rotted.’

  In another room the first self-portraits appear. Francis twisted by Francis.

  ‘I’ve had a disastrous life, but in a way it has been more curious than my paintings. It’s gone deeper than what are called the moeurs of my times. I think I’m unique. Everyone’s unique, of course, it’s just that I have been able to work a bit on my uniqueness. I’ve tried to make myself profoundly artificial.’

  Then a burst of small heads of women, pulled every which way, anger-red in their deformity. Muriel, Isabel and Henrietta, as ancient and as regal as Nefertiti, attacked down to the bone.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do about death. Death exists only for the living. It’s working on you all the time. You can’t prepare for it, as they say. All you can do is to go on living.’

  More self-portraits. Himself attacked most furiously, a cheek excised, a cranium axed, an eye elided.

  ‘When I want to know what someone looks like I’d never ask a woman. I’d always ask a queer. They’re very accurate. After all, they spend most of their time pulling other people’s appearance to pieces . . .’

  Portraits of Lucian, caught close up, pinned on a sofa, coiled on a stool like a snake about to strike. Full figures or portable heads, done from photos, from memory, in the seething silence of the studio.

  ‘If they were sitting in front of me, they would inhibit me and I couldn’t practise on them the injury I inflict in my work. I like to be alone with the way I remember them. And then I hope to bring them back more poignantly and violently.’

  Then comes George. George caught in a black mirror, welded to a bicycle, corkscrewed to a chair.

  ‘George was down the other end of the bar and I was with John Deakin and all those others, and he came over and said: “You all seem to be having a good time, can I buy you a drink?” And that’s how I met him, I might never have noticed him otherwise.’

  The lover in the lover’s eye, cut in half, head split, sheared to a topknot, ringed by fag ends, capped with a cheese-cutter.
Poor George, so bashed around his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.

  ‘’Ees done masses of ’ese pic-yeres of me. I fink they’re reely ’orrible. All ’ese uvver people fink they’re terrific. I still fink they’re orful.’

  George dominating the last part of the exhibition, bobbing up bewildered beneath the battering.

  ‘He asked whether he could come with me and since he’s in so many of the pictures I could hardly say no. Even though there’s been nothing between us for ages now, I couldn’t say no.’

  So many cries and blasphemies echoing through the lugubrious galleries, so much outrage against the human form has taken the elegant Parisian public by surprise. They came in expecting some Hogarthian whimsy and leave having witnessed scenes of savagery so intense and yet so subtle they have no idea how to react. Far from the self-satisfied nonchalance with which most museum vernissages end, a shocked silence reigns throughout this vast theatre of cruelty. At the very end of the exhibition, Salvador Dalí in full fig, with a big blond transvestite in red hotpants on his arm, lies in wait, clearly intent on stealing the limelight. ‘C’est très, très rrraisonnable,’ he announces dismissively at regular intervals, rolling his ‘r’s loudly and waving his silver-topped cane at a couple of the most disturbing images in the whole show. Prized though Dalí’s clowning usually is in Paris, the well-bred visitors are so shocked by what they have seen that they barely glance at him, much to the Great Masturbator’s annoyance, before they make hastily for the exit.

  ‘Hey you, yes you, frogs’ legs, let’s have a refill, twiggez-vous? I know the bugger speaks English. Ah cahm on, let’s see you down this end for a fucking change!’

  The shaggy and the smooth drinking friends, rounded up at Muriel’s and brought over to cheer the home side, are making few concessions to being in foreign parts.

  I’ve agreed to join John, Dickie and Denis at a café beside the Gare de Lyon before going on to Francis’s big banquet at the Train Bleu, and word has clearly reached the whole Soho contingent that this is to be the pre-dinner meeting-point.

  ‘What a rabble,’ John says in urbane dismay.

  ‘All they’re interested in is getting plastered and abusive,’ says Dickie, casting an anxious eye on Denis, whose wine-lit countenance is twinkling at a riposte he has just shot. ‘I do hope they don’t think all Englishmen are like that.’

  We move to the other side of the bar in an attempt to dissociate ourselves.

  ‘Four, cat-rer, bee-airs, comprenny? And chop-chop while you’re at it!’

  The circle of red faces darkens with barely bottled mirth. Their spokesman is waving twice two fingers in the barman’s offended face.

  ‘Oh they’ll think we’re barbarians to a man,’ John sighs, sipping his pastis. ‘To think we’ll be stuck with this lot all evening. I had seen myself, au contraire, waltzing at Maxim’s until dawn, ospreys in my hair and my throat ablaze with diamonds. But that is clearly not to be.’

  A few more of Francis’s friends have come into the café. I notice Sonia talking rapidly to one of the beer drinkers. She’s looking distraught, pushing her hair back with nervous, jerky movements. The man she’s talking to laughs. Sonia slaps him round the face.

  We’re all looking at her as she comes over towards us.

  ‘Well, you must know,’ she says to me.

  ‘I’m sorry – what?’ I say, rolling the liquorice taste round my mouth.

  Sonia is staring at me with red, watery eyes.

  ‘That George is dead,’ she says.

  ‘Dead?’ I say. It has no connection with anything. Seeing John, the others, the exhibition. I’m staring at her now.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she says rapidly. ‘But it wasn’t that. It was a heart attack. The alcohol stopped his heart.’

  The others say nothing. They are looking down at the ground. In the silence, the café seems to sway in its bright yellow light.

  George was dead.

  ‘What about Francis?’ I say eventually.

  ‘Francis?’ Sonia says. ‘Well, you can imagine.’

  The tears run down her face.

  As the scores of guests settle into their places at the long tables going the whole way down the cavernous Belle Epoque restaurant the word begins to spread like wildfire. Michel and Zette Leiris, looking sad and dignified, sit on either side of Francis. Opposite him is Isabel Rawsthorne, whom Francis has painted almost as often as George, and whose majestic presence in the exhibition has the mesmerizing power of an Egyptian goddess. Her delicately beautiful face, reddened and pouchy from drink, swings from side to side, looking uncannily like Bacon’s blurred portrait heads of her. From her turning head a torrent of confused words comes pouring out as if beyond control. Now George is dead! First Peter, now George! George was found dead in the hotel! Slumped dead on the lavatory in their room! Dead from an overdose! Alcohol and sleeping pills!

  With the speed of bad news, the message reaches everyone in the huge vaulted room before the first course (filets de sole Favart) is served, and what had begun as a prestigious dîner de vernissage turns into a strange wake where nothing has been officially announced and there is no ceremony, but the death is on everybody’s lips. Poor George – I knew he was a terrible alcoholic and quite out of his depth in Francis’s world, but I had no idea! Poor Francis – on this day of all days! But remember the Tate opening, when Peter Lacy died! Can you see Francis – he’s behaving as if nothing has happened! What did you expect? He’s not the kind to collapse in grief. Did you hear that when Francis took President Pompidou round the show they stopped to admire the very picture where George is shown sitting on the lavatory because it’s just been bought by a French museum? What can Francis have thought – that he was being punished at the very height of his success, that once again the Furies had come to claim him?

  Isabel’s high, insistent voice rises like a rant, drowning out all whispered commentary in a stream of increasingly incomprehensible phrases that sound as if she were speaking in tongues, inducing an awed silence in every corner of the room. She is addressing Francis opposite her, as if he had asked her a question and she can no longer contain the truth now or for the future as it wells uncontrollably up in her. And everybody sits there, stunned, as she appears to be saying that this is what she had seen coming, fatally, and now that it was there it was final, and this was the price that had to be paid. And Francis sits there immobile, his head bowed.

  Silently and efficiently the waiters have been darting round the tables plying the numbed guests with the Rully Clos Saint-Jacques and the Côte de Brouilly Château Thivin, both 1970, as frequently and plentifully as possible. The wine first sharpens, then begins to soothe, the brutal shock. Towards the end of the evening, once the whispers and the knowing looks have faded and the dessert (tarte tatin/friandises) has been cleared away, Francis stands up, as if spellbound, and gives a simple vote of thanks to the Leirises for having hosted such a wonderful evening and to everyone for having been present.

  Having seen Francis go through that whole ordeal yesterday I can’t imagine he’ll take on any more engagements, but not only has he been at the Grand Palais all day being interviewed and filmed but he’s insisted that the small dinner party organized a while back by Miss Beston for this evening should go ahead. Francis does seem to be behaving as if nothing has happened, it’s true. He looks pale and strained, and he’s got a bad cut on his lip, but otherwise you wouldn’t have any idea that an intimate friend of his has just died and in a way to make him feel as responsible and guilty as possible. Could it be that he’s still on such a high, having just realized the greatest ambition of his life, that the fact hasn’t sunk in? It seems unlikely, particularly as he will have spent the day dealing with the police and the formalities surrounding a death abroad. I know Francis has an unusual capacity to withstand mental and physical pain, but when I arrive at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, the very scene of the death, I expect to see a broken man.

  Francis is sitti
ng in the lobby, drinking whisky and talking to a French couple whose solemn bearing, I realize, belies advanced drunkenness.

  ‘It’s not only the way you get that whole feeling of Dublin, but the way Joyce reinvented technique,’ Francis is saying animatedly. He looks quite relaxed and casual in a thick, cashmere sweater. ‘Even so I myself prefer Proust because in Proust you get something quite new as well as everything that’s gone before. It might be absurd to compare them. Both have genius. For me, genius is what breaks the mould of accepted thought. Will you have a whisky too, Michael?’

  It’s as if, to take him to whatever the next point in existence turns out to be, Francis has put on an old gramophone record, one he knows backwards.

  ‘They are marvellous, all those techniques that Joyce introduced, yet I think Proust was even more extraordinary because he invented within tradition. Is that the right time? I never know. Ah, here we are. Merci beaucoup, Monsieur. Voilà pour vous. Merci. Perhaps we should see if the taxi’s here. Here’s to you. What d’you say? No, I’ve never read Finnegans Wake, I’ve never been able to. By that time, I think, he’d made the whole thing too abstract. He’d sort of gone over the top with it and it became abstract – and that’s much less interesting, of course. Just like abstract art, which I always think of as free fancy about nothing, and of course nothing comes from nothing. What? Do you think we should go? What was the address? Ah that’s right, I think the others are meeting us there. What did you say the address was, Michael? I’m sorry, it’s mad, I’ll forget my own address next. Ah yes, rue Rennequin. Right. In the 17th. Perhaps we’d better go then.’

  The taxi drops us at La Mère Michel. Miss Beston and three other guests who have worked on the Grand Palais exhibition are already seated round the little restaurant’s central table. In between introductions, Francis orders several bottles of Muscadet and, with my help at the other end, sets about getting a maximum of drink into his guests. Then he draws attention to the restaurant’s celebrated pike in beurre blanc. Only his guests’ pleasure seems to have any importance. He recalls someone’s aversion to oysters and insists on a full dozen for those who like them.