Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  ‘Ah,’ he exclaims triumphantly, as there’s a ripping sound and suddenly the wad explodes and the space around us is thick with large banknotes falling and fluttering. The room looks on in amazement at this spectacular cascade of money. There is a moment’s pause, then the waiters all move in, as if on a paper chase, reaching under tables, between ladies’ feet and the fronds of the plants. Whatever they bring back to Francis, he always hands over one large note as a munificent tip. He is clearly in his element, pink with enjoyment and drink, champagne glass in hand and laughing maniacally.

  The temperature of the room seems to have shot up. People are talking animatedly. The waiters are darting to and fro, cracking open more champagne. The small string orchestra has moved into a livelier, more confident tempo. Francis is still laughing.

  ‘It’s mad,’ he says, diving into an inside pocket. ‘I’ve simply got masses of it on me.’

  And suddenly another thick wad has appeared and it’s in my hand and for a split second I wonder whether it’s a peace offering and then how much of my mortgage and how many outings with Alice it will pay for before I slide it into my smart new jacket, a comforting bulge against my chest for the rest of the evening and an addictive resource for the wintry weeks to come.

  10

  The Inspiration of Pain

  My studio flat on the rue de Braque is compact and sparsely furnished but it has everything I want. It’s on the first floor of a seventeenth-century building in the Marais, with a high, beamed ceiling and one strikingly half-timbered wall. The street dates back to the Templars and over time my house would probably have lodged a few modest families or part of the retinue of a grandee occupying one of the big townhouses that dominate the area. At one end there are several imposing mansions on the rue du Temple and at the other the palace that belonged to the princely Rohan family before it was turned into a storehouse for the National Archives after the Revolution.

  I’ve loved this area since I first came across it in my early wanderings through the centre of Paris. What’s especially magical is the sense of fallen grandeur you get at almost every street corner. Most of these beautiful, aristocratic buildings are now in spectacular disrepair, since no self-respecting citizen would have considered living in the Marais once the detested ancien régime had been overthrown. Small artisans and other manual workers on the other hand moved in like mice, taking over the whole quartier, plying their humble trades in the grand apartments with their frescos and chandeliers and in the purpose-built, lean-to sheds they ran up round the privileged courtyards. Although it is still a fantastic place to get a frame regilded or a wrought-iron balustrade hammered into shape, the whole area is now generally considered a bit of a slum, and although a few free spirits can be spotted buying their fruit and vegetables from the stalls on the street, it’s certainly not a good address for anyone wanting to make a career in Paris.

  Le Monde, the heavyweight daily newspaper where I’ve been employed as a writer and translator for the past year, came up with a paternalistic but very alluring scheme offering its staff interest-free loans to buy property. Realizing how much better off I would be in the future if there was no rent to drum up each month, I didn’t hesitate. Since buying the room, I’ve been camping in its elegant shell wondering how to transform the space into the ideal bachelor pad. Luckily, among the friends I’ve made there is an odd character called Bernard, an upper-class misfit with a hangdog look who’s been to a couple of parties I’ve given and who makes a living buying and doing up property on a minor scale. He’s been visiting me at the rue de Braque and making suggestions about how to do it up in a clearly disinterested way, except for the fact that I’m pretty sure he’s been smitten by a girl I know and thinks that by getting on the right side of me he will further his suit, or whatever the phrase is. At all events we’ve been to the demolition site of an ancient house on the Place Dauphine and carted away numerous old oak beams for free. With these Bernard thinks he can construct a split-level bedroom for me. I willingly act as the fetch-and-carry boy and I’m amazed at how quickly we renovate the space, with the bed and clothes cupboard upstairs, and a small bathroom and kitchen below, leaving the rest of the floor for a full-height study and sitting area. Bernard finishes this transformation with a flourish by constructing a fireplace for me as the centrepiece of the room, adding a suitably blackened, cast-iron coat of arms which we found locally, and to which I make no ancestral claim, as a back to the grate.

  There’s next to no furniture. Between the two tall windows I have an old refectory table from the Puces to work on, then there are a couple of film director’s chairs and a nondescript sofa disguised by a mohair throw beneath the mahogany bookshelves that take up the whole of one wall. Against the half-timbered side I’ve put a classic bistro table. There’s one picture in the whole room: a fantastic small study for a pope which Francis gave me one evening, ostensibly because he liked a couple of things I’d written about his work. I think of it as a tribute to the decade that we have been friends, and for me its very presence in this new, hand-crafted space elevates my entire existence. It’s a quintessential Bacon of the early 1950s, a ghostly head on a dark-blue background with white and gold highlights. I love looking at it hanging on a nail I’ve driven into one of the vertical beams behind the bistro table. I’m also conscious that it’s worth more than my whole little apartment put together, and since it would be so easy to burgle the place with its flimsy front door I’ve had to come up with a few schemes for hiding it whenever I go out. I doubt whether there are many in the Marais who would even recognize a Bacon, but I should be devastated to lose it and I’m even thinking of renting a safebox somewhere to tuck it away when I’m travelling.

  At the moment, though, I have no plans to go anywhere. There’s plenty to do finding my bearings properly in the area and getting to know my new neighbours. Marie-Hélène and Bébert (which I imagine corresponds to our ‘Bobbie’) live next door to me and run the café on the ground floor which serves lunch and drinks all day until the evening. It doubles up as a bougnat and Bébert can be seen in sooty overalls from dawn to dusk delivering coal and other combustibles to clients in the area. I’ve become friendly with both of them and sometimes I go down for my midday meal and josh about with the regulars. There’s a mixture of stallholders from the rue Rambuteau, metal-workers, gilders and furniture-makers along with the odd artist or photographer. Day in, day out, there’s also a very old, white-haired Spaniard they call the ‘professor’ because he talks endlessly and unintelligibly in heavily accented French on any subject from nuclear submarines to the soups he ate as a child in Murcia. Marie-Hélène is fond of him as well as of a smartly dressed younger man who I think must be her lover since I’ve bumped into him a couple of times coming out of their room while Bébert was busy heaving sacks of coke around the area.

  I’m also having a lot of fun exploring the Marais in depth. It’s unbelievable how grand some of the courtyards and staircases are, and occasionally you come across an old formal garden as if forgotten for centuries, growing wild and full of stray cats, between the perfectly sculpted, classical façades. The façades themselves are often so grimy they look as though they’d been hewn out of basalt, and it takes a while to decipher the figures, coats of arms and other heraldic devices that embellish them. A young French film-maker doing a feature for television on the decaying splendours of the area has asked me to write and record a commentary directly in English for it, and we are constantly clambering over these sublime architectural hulks to get better shots and more information.

  I’ve got to know a few people in the area, unlikely characters for the most part. There’s David Leitch, a former war correspondent who puts away the drink and is writing a book about his early life called God Stand Up for Bastards. In the same house on the rue de Poitou there are a couple of other shadowy Englishmen whose occupations sound so nebulous I imagine they must be spies of some sort. Ever since Vera, formerly John Russell’s wife, an imposing grand
e dame I met through Francis, told me that spies are mostly engaged in relaying petty commercial information, I’ve started seeing them everywhere. A bit further along my own street, in the grandest and most dilapidated mansion of all, there’s Claude Duthuit, a Frenchman who speaks perfect English. We’ve been practising guitar together with an Irishman called ‘Spoon’ O’Dwyer (I’ve never asked why) when Claude isn’t travelling the world to indulge his passion for deep-sea diving and underwater exploration. It’s almost by chance that I find out that Claude happens to be Matisse’s grandson and so belongs, I suppose, to a kind of art-world royalty. I’m impressed by this, of course, and even more so when I get a glimpse of the Matisses he has inherited. But what really blows me away is discovering that Claude’s glamorous American girlfriend’s first boyfriend was Elvis Presley.

  At the moment I’m taking on whatever freelance work I can get, not only because I need the money to pay off the flat but because it gets me out of Le Monde’s office routine. I make a point of going to the more interesting vernissages, particularly at Galerie Maeght, and on the Left Bank Galerie Claude Bernard and Galerie Jeanne Bucher, where I know the owners and most of the staff. At Maeght I always talk to Jacques Dupin if I get the chance. I admire his rather stark, desolate poetry and he sometimes tells me memorable things about Francis. Jacques says he saw him recently in London when Francis was with some huge boxer into whose brawny embrace he disappeared regularly, only to reappear from time to time to continue the discussion he’d begun with Jacques about Velázquez’s ‘extraordinary technique’.

  During these private views I’ve come into passing contact with a wide range of artists, from Miró, Calder and Brassaï to Dubuffet, Max Ernst and Tàpies. I’m thinking of doing interviews with a couple of them, though I’ll keep quiet about that when Francis is around because he’ll be more fiercely disparaging about each and every one of them if he knows I’ve been seeing them. The only one I might have got away with is Picasso (despite Francis’s being very vocal about ‘loathing’ his late work), and while I’ve never been passionate about the whole Picasso phenomenon I am certainly fascinated by aspects of his extraordinary achievement and I’d been hoping to meet him at some point, possibly with Michel Leiris. But it’s too late because, immortal as he had come to seem, Picasso is dead now.

  One of the huge advantages of having a place you’re proud of is that it’s easy to invite friends there. I’ve done dinners and parties, none of them lavish but I think they’ve gone off well partly because people like the space and feel at ease in it. Francis has come round several times. I’ve never cooked for him, as I have often for Alice, because I know he prefers the ritual and glamour of expensive restaurants. But I always keep something drinkable on hand and he seems to enjoy having an apéritif here before going on to more serious eating and drinking in the Halles. I always make sure the painting is in its place, of course (even if I quickly bundle it up again behind the sofa before we leave), and I notice how critically Francis looks at it, as if he were taking it apart, just as he does when he’s in front of other people’s work. His eyes are always piercing, even when he’s in a jovial mood. He’s been looking up at my unmade bed on the split level, and when I make excuses for the mess, he stares back at me with a wide smile, saying, ‘I like unmade beds, but I like them unmade by love. Now how would you put that in French?’

  I think for a moment, always glad to be caught up in some linguistic game.

  ‘Well, probably something like J’aime les lits défaits, mais défaits par l’amour, or I suppose par la passion.’

  ‘No, l’amour will do,’ Francis says promptly, then repeats as if he’s learning a phrase in class: ‘Défaits par l’amour.’

  The object of this sudden attention is actually about to be made up because Marina, the cheerful Spanish woman who gives my flat a weekly clean, comes in around this time of the evening. If I hadn’t completely forgotten about it, I might have put her off, thinking that her bustling about the place might prevent Francis from talking freely, but from the moment she comes in the two of them hit it off, with Marina making a special effort with her limited French to exchange pleasantries with Francis, who is as elegantly amiable with her as he would be with an important collector’s wife.

  Having finished my two bottles of white Burgundy, we decide to let Marina get on with her job and see where we might go for dinner. It’s dark now and cold for an early-spring evening.

  ‘She’s got a marvellous smile, your cleaner,’ Francis says as we go along the rue Rambuteau, where the fruit is being packed away and the stalls dismantled, leaving a trail of rotting apples and cabbage leaves in the gutter. ‘I thought there was something very free and sympathetic about her, and then I realized she must have been a prostitute when she was younger.’

  I absorb this revelation cautiously because it has never occurred to me that Marina ever did anything other than housework, although I’m quite aware that she isn’t particularly interested or good at it. The idea that Francis is convinced she used to turn tricks for a living intrigues me, though, and I realize that this new interpretation might account for the equivocal way Marina looks at me sometimes while I’m trying to write and she’s ironing my shirts a few yards away. And if I’m totally honest I would have to admit that, although she’s no pin-up, I have had distinct stirrings when Marina gets down on all fours like an old-fashioned char to scrub the floor.

  I mention this to Francis, tentatively enough because, although I don’t often share such confidences with him, it seems only fair that I should open up from time to time to him as he does regularly to me.

  ‘Well, I think those sorts of things are very interesting,’ Francis says. ‘In some ways, they are the most interesting because there you are operating completely at the level of instinct, and that unlocks all kinds of different areas. I mean, pleasure is such a strange thing, really. And so is pain. We experience them the whole time, but it’s impossible to really analyse them or say clearly what they are. And then people make all kinds of moral differences about these things, mainly because of the Church, I suppose, but of course it’s ridiculous. You can only try to follow out your instincts, though of course I don’t think many people even know where their instincts lie.’

  We’ve walked past several restaurants, including the Chien Qui Fume whose name amuses me and which seems to have been there for ever, but it looks distinctly dowdy and unappetizing and we end up at the Pied de Cochon, an old standby for me since I often go at lunchtime to have their traditional dish of grilled trotters and chips, standing at the zinc-lined counter; with a draught beer thrown in, it only costs a few francs. Francis likes the place as well, even if it’s become a little too well known as the place people go to at the end of a night out to eat onion soup under its fluorescent strip lights in the hope they will stave off the hangover lying in wait for them next day. We’ve been here together quite often before, and once, when we were in a party of people from the Galerie Maeght having a late-night soup, I wandered drunkenly off into the night with one of the wives, and although nothing came of it, I was mortified at the embarrassment I might have caused Francis, to say nothing of the husband, although mercifully neither ever referred to the incident thereafter.

  We push open the door with its trademark trotter handle and find the counter packed with porters from the food market in their blood-smeared white gowns having a quick Calvados between hoisting sides of beef off lorries and humping them on to the huge meat hooks that line one side of the Halles’s cavernous iron and glass pavilions. I think back briefly to my contact with action directe and reflect how lucky I am to be living still in a city that, so far, has kept both its ‘belly’ and its Sainte-Chapelle intact. We’ve been sat at a table where we can watch the flow of clients to the bar. Francis seems particularly alert and I imagine the sight of so many powerfully built, bloodied men might have something to do with it. If he wasn’t so fascinated by the spectacle I suspect he would have ditched the thin, bitter Muscadet
we’re drinking, which tastes more like Gros Plant and compares unfavourably even to the modest Aligoté I gave him, but I can see he’s revelling in the atmosphere of a place where human appetite is so clearly displayed.

  ‘I often come here for a quick lunch at the bar,’ I say, trying to re-engage his attention.

  ‘Well, it’s so marvellous that you’ve managed to make your way in this city, which for me has always been the most beautiful and interesting city in the world,’ Francis says, detaching his gaze from the beefy backs at the counter. ‘And when you come to a place like this, you feel you can see the whole cycle of life being directly acted out in front of you. It’s the most marvellous spectacle with all that meat being carried around when you see the beautiful colour of it and everything.’

  ‘I’d never really been conscious of the actual colour of meat before you mentioned it. Now I see it not only at the butcher’s but in Soutine and Rembrandt and—’

  ‘Well, I think of all creative people painters have a particular clarity of sensation because of the particular artificiality of image-making,’ Francis says, signalling for another bottle of the Muscadet. ‘Being clear, after all, is so important. Was it Voltaire who said whatever can be clearly thought can be clearly expressed? Oh, was it Boileau? Ah but then Voltaire also said what’s too silly to say can always be sung . . . I suppose that German king, what’s his name, Frederick the Great, must have been in love with Voltaire. But of course one doesn’t know what Voltaire’s tastes really were.

  ‘As you know, I’ve always been what you might call completely homosexual. Nobody can say anything for certain about these questions, I know, but they seem related to the very pattern of one’s nervous system. I myself believe that at the very moment of conception you get a kind of blueprint of what the nervous system’s going to be. And then there’s not much you can do to change it later, not even with psychoanalysis and so on. It’s like having a limp, and you’re what’s called stuck with it. But I do think that the division between the sexes has largely been invented. Terribly few people are just one thing or the other. I think that was the case for poor George – he didn’t really know what he was sexually.’