Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  All kinds of people float in and out of these long evenings around Paris, from the Irish painter Louis le Brocquy, who has been doing portraits of Joyce, Beckett and Francis, to prominent writers like Susan Sontag, with the arresting white streak in her otherwise jet-black hair (which Francis likens to ‘shredded gramophone records’), and David Sylvester, forever finishing his big book on Giacometti, who pronounces the blanc de blancs we drink with our caviare one lunchtime beside the Madeleine as ‘so good it’s almost like water’.

  Because Francis counts a few influential lesbians in his entourage, we also gain access to the Katmandou, a discreet shrine to sapphism on the rue du Vieux Colombier, where we are the only two men present among several dozen women. There appear to be two distinct sexes among them, the aggressively dominant, butch types in leather and denim and ultra-slender, feminine creatures in tight silk blouses. Several couples are doing the latest dances like the Hustle and the Bump and another outlandish one I think is called the Funky Chicken. There is one girl doing the Bump so unbelievably beautiful that I can’t take my eyes off her until one of our lesbian companions whispers in my ear, ‘Honeybun, if you go on looking at the girl like that they’ll have the bull dykes on you,’ and I’m not sure what she means but it sounds a bit like bulldogs, which reminds me of the crotch-sniffing mastiff of Marseille and I quickly back off and resolve to try not to break any further taboos, however frustrating it may be not to lose my heart to some unobtainable lipstick lesbian.

  Fortunately we have just been joined by another tall, pale woman accompanied by a huge, male bodybuilder who I imagine would make even the biggest bull dyke tremble in her lesbian boots. As Francis talks to the woman, whom he seems to know, I chat to the bodybuilder, who has a gentle, high-pitched voice and who I begin to suspect as I scrutinize him anxiously in the darkness of the club might also turn out to be a woman until I conclude with relief he’s probably only queer. He tells me he’s called Fernando, originally from Colombia, and he’s a certified bodyguard, and to dispel any doubts I may have on the subject he half opens his leather jacket to reveal a neat little revolver with ivory grips in its holster. For the last year, Fernando says, indicating the tall, pale woman with a nod of his brilliantined head, he’s been working for Miss Watson. I take a pull of my vodka and think that all makes sense, she’s lesbian and rich, he’s queer and got a gun, they must get along just fine, and to keep the conversation going I ask who Miss Watson is. Why, don’t you know, Fernando says, Miss Watson’s the heiress to IBM – to I–B–M, he repeats, spelling the letters out slowly so that I take on board we’re not talking chicken shit here. I peer through the gloom to see more clearly what an heiress looks like. But some other, official-looking people have made their way over to the table and I haven’t even noticed that Fernando’s gone, interposing his considerable bulk between them and Miss Watson, and Francis seems to be indicating to me that it’s time we left and, as Fernando is parrying some questions about visas, Miss Watson looks up with a distant smile and says: ‘Fernando and I arrived in Paris two weeks ago. It’s been really neat but we’ve spent so much time in the clubs we haven’t seen daylight yet.’

  Francis’s new would-be dealer in Paris, Claude Bernard Haïm (known more generally as Claude Bernard or to his friends simply as Claude), gives some of the most lavish parties I’ve ever been to, whether they’re in his apartment beside the Arc de Triomphe or in some public space, such as the memorable evening he organized at the Musée Grévin, Paris’s waxworks museum, where his guests mingled among the lifesize effigies on display and quickly became barely distinguishable from them, so that while you could be fairly certain that, say, Elvis and Marilyn weren’t among us that evening you weren’t at all sure about numerous, less recognizable French stars of stage and screen, from Johnny Hallyday on. Claude’s own list is in itself so star-studded, with guests like Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger coming regularly to his parties, that as the evening progressed and the champagne flowed it grew even more uncertain who was in wax and who in the flesh. Certainly Andy Warhol could be a waxwork. I’ve chatted to him at a couple of these parties and he’s very amiable but as deadpan as his myth, responding mechanically to whatever you say with: ‘Gee, that’s great.’

  Francis has met Andy too, and he gets on with him better than he does with most artists. He’s intrigued by the Drag Queen series but he repeats, characteristically, that he’s far more interested in Warhol’s films than in his paintings, in much the same way that he prefers Giacometti’s drawings to his sculpture and Picasso’s Dinard period to anything else in his oeuvre. Francis put his admiration for Picasso very clearly the other day when we were talking about the handful of twentieth-century artists who he admits to being influenced by. He said he likes the way Giacometti’s portraits coalesce out of a mass of apparently random pencil lines. Interestingly, he also included Duchamp in the roll of honour, saying he found everything about him and his work ‘immaculate’, and that ‘even the way Duchamp died was immaculate’. However, ‘to find something that really interests me in this century’, he went on, ‘I always have to go back to Picasso. I don’t like the late paintings, even though people are now saying they’re among the greatest things he ever did. The period that interests me most is the late twenties and early thirties – you know, the beach scenes at Dinard where you see those very curious figures turning keys in the beach huts. And for me that is real realism, because it conveys a whole sensation of what it’s like to be on the beach. They’re endlessly evocative, quite beyond their being extraordinary formal inventions. They’re like bullfights. Once you’ve seen them they remain in the mind.

  ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I like things that shock and affect my nervous system deeply. But things are not shocking unless they have been put into a memorable form. Once you’ve seen blood spattered against a wall a few times it’s no longer shocking. You think, well, that’s just blood splashed against a wall. It must be in a form that has much wider implications. It has to have something that reverberates within your psyche and disturbs your whole life cycle. Something which affects the whole atmosphere you live in. Most of what is called art, your eye just flows over. It may be charming or nice, but it doesn’t change you. The same is often true about photos, even war photos. They are often violent, and yet it’s not enough. Something much more horrendous is the last line in Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, which is a prophetic poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” That’s stronger and more extraordinary than the horror even of war photos, because they are just literal horror, whereas the Yeats is a horror which has a whole vibration in its prophetic quality.’

  Francis has been working towards a new show at Claude Bernard’s gallery on the rue des Beaux-Arts. The space is smaller than the grand rooms that he usually prefers, but he says he thinks his paintings will be intensified by being closer together and enveloping the spectator more. Some of the work will already have been seen in Marseille but he’ll have several new works ready, including a spectacular triptych on an icy-blue background of which I’ve seen one panel in a transparency. No dates have been fixed yet for the show, and I’m not sure if Francis and Claude have worked out an agreement, since their relationship seems changeable. Francis operates very much on an in vino veritas basis when it comes to anyone he might have close dealings with, and sensibly enough Claude avoids drinking too much, so that there’s a bit of a tug of war going on between them. The other day the three of us had lunch and Francis wanted to go on drinking and expected to get his way, but Claude insisted he had to get back to the gallery, prompting Francis, who predictably enough doesn’t think much of Claude’s other artists, to retort: ‘Vous retournez, vous retournez à vos horreurs?’ I feel Francis is being unnecessarily controlling in all this, but it’s not my business, and in any case I am thrilled that Claude has told me he wants to strengthen the whole publishing side of his business and produce books on art alongside his exhibition catal
ogues. I immediately thought I might be able to interest him in a book about Francis, but he’s a step ahead of me, as if he’d read my thoughts, and he’s asked me whether I’d like to run the whole thing. Of course I couldn’t imagine anything I’d like more, especially as when I ask him what kinds of books he would see us doing he says, ‘Well, that would be up to you.’

  Meanwhile, knowing that Francis gets on extremely well and often gets drunk with his general handyman, Michel, who hangs the shows and fixes things round the gallery, Claude has hit on the idea that Michel and his family should organize a dinner for Francis in their house in the suburbs. For Francis, it’s true, Michel represents the typical, working-class Frenchman par excellence. He’s tough, bright and funny, as well as being very good with his hands. Francis likes the idea that through Michel he is in touch with a kind of grassroots France, which he thinks will be more ‘genuine’ and interesting than the etiolated, bourgeois art world that he usually deals with. Francis has been very generous to Michel, helping him pay off some bills and generally taking him out on the town. Michel, who thinks the world of Francis, recently came up with a comment – ‘les cuites avec Francis sont toujours voluptueuses’ (getting drunk with Francis is always voluptuous) – that shows he is far from your average workman. I suspect he thinks, as I think, that doing a dinner at home for him is going to be a bit weird and fake, particularly because Claude will be orchestrating the whole thing and basically hoping it will help him secure the Bacon show and the conditions he wants. Michel tells me that instead of the kind of dinner he and his wife would probably offer Francis under normal circumstances – a lapin à la moutarde or a pot au feu, for instance – Claude is suggesting that a huge plateau de fruits de mer be spirited down from a top Parisian shellfish specialist to the suburbs.

  I’m actually quite amused by the whole Marie-Antoinette-like notion of several taxi loads of fancy folk leaving their beaux quartiers to explore life in the humbler banlieues. I’m also mindful that I might be able to have another word with Claude about our books project, for which I’ve drawn up a preliminary list of ideas I’d like to get his reaction to.

  Any such plan has been shelved, however, because Francis and I met for lunch and he seemed bent on getting drunk so we’ve been out in the bars all afternoon and by the time we get ourselves down to Michel’s we are both pretty far gone. The house is modest but impeccably neat. As expected a couple of magnificent seafood platters are brought out, with varieties of oysters nestling on a small mountain of crushed ice decked out with seaweed and surrounded by clams, crab claws, whelks and winkles, while large pink prawns and langoustines have been wedged vertically in between them at strategic points as if poised to leap back into some illusory ocean. The kitchen door has been left open to the living room to accommodate two separate tables: one sort of high table, where Claude, Francis and other ‘grandees’ are dining, and a smaller one for Michel, his wife and family. I notice Francis’s face has darkened, probably because he finds this arbitrary separation uncongenial. He also appears to have sobered up completely, even though he is still drinking with a vengeance, and while I continue to babble on to all and sundry he is very guarded in his remarks. We set to but the meal seems to go on for ever, not least because it’s taking everybody such an age to crack claws and wheedle winkles out of their shells with tiny pins. Eventually ice cream is brought and to my alarm I see that Francis, who must now have drunk a good half-dozen bottles of wine since lunch, is completely missing his mouth every time he aims a spoonful of lemon sorbet at it, so that several lumps of the coloured ice are slipping down his beautifully cut herringbone jacket, leaving a urine-like stain behind. Conversation stops and an embarrassed silence fills the room. Someone titters. Francis seems to be elsewhere. Then he suddenly comes to, as if waking, and loudly calls out:

  ‘L’addition!’

  To say that you could hear a pin drop, even of the whelk variety, would be what the French readily call un understatement.

  ‘L’addition!’ Francis comes thundering again.

  The others look at me, hoping I’ll intercede.

  ‘Francis,’ I say. ‘I think the bill has already been paid. The bill’s been paid.’

  ‘Has it?’ Francis says, almost triumphantly, looking intently round our table. ‘Have I already paid? Well, there it is. You have to pay for everything in life.’

  The next day the dinner fiasco seems completely forgotten. Francis comes by my place for a glass of wine, which pleases me because he hasn’t been here since he decided he wanted a place of his own in Paris. I have the Aligoté on ice and my portrait of Michel Leiris on its nail. We talk about the new painting he’s been working on, but he dismisses any detailed discussion about it with his habitual disclaimers. ‘As you know, it’s impossible really to talk about painting, one can only talk round it,’ he says. ‘What one really wants nowadays in art is a shorthand where the sensation comes across right away. And of course that has become a very close and difficult thing to achieve now. After all, we don’t have that dimension of mythology that the Greeks had. We have to reinvent that, as well as reinventing the technique by which you can do it. I was just thinking today that in the situation we’re in now you almost have to make an art out of your critical faculties. But there it is. No one will know whether my things have any quality for another fifty or a hundred years. Time is the only real critic.’

  While saying this Francis has been sitting on my sofa looking fixedly, critically, at the Leiris portrait, moving his thumbnail to and fro over his lower lip. Eventually he says:

  ‘You know, Michael, I’ve been thinking I could make that head of Michel so much better if by any chance I could work on it again. Looking at it now, I can see exactly how to do it.’

  I’m dumbfounded by the idea. The picture has become my emblem, part of my identity, and more intimately so than the Pope because it represents someone I know. On the other hand, I reason confusedly, it’s only here because Francis gave it to me, and who am I to stand in the way of his working further on it? It’s obvious what I have to do, even though what I fear most, having seen it happen to other pictures, is that as soon as he gets going on it he will take the whole thing too far and end up destroying it, adding to the hollowed-out canvases I see from time to time in the studio.

  ‘Of course, Francis. If you want to work on it, you must have it back.’

  ‘Well, that’s marvellous. Thanks most awfully, Michael.’

  I wrap the head up in the green Harrods plastic bag I’ve been using to hide it in, and Francis walks off holding the portrait under his arm.

  There’s a space further up the rue des Archives I’ve had my eye on for quite a while. It’s a big rambling apartment on the third floor, with a series of smallish rooms on the street and one huge continuous space overlooking the courtyard which has a makeshift rooftop terrace outside. It used to house an anarchist printing press and it now serves as a studio for a sculptor I know called Daniel Milhaud. Daniel, who tells me the space was once blown up by rival anarchists, has found a more convenient, ground-floor studio and is ready to sell the lease to the place but he needs time to reorganize. To raise the money I put my studio on the market and soon find a buyer.

  While waiting to move into the Archives flat, which I’m supposed to use as a commercial space only, I have gone out on a limb and rented a small set of rooms in the imposing Château du Marais, less than an hour’s drive from central Paris. The château belongs to Violette de Talleyrand-Périgord, Duchesse de Sagan, whose mother, Anna Gould, was a wealthy American heiress who married into the French aristocracy. The building, which dates from the late eighteenth century, is an outstanding example of Louis XVI style, and as you drive up to it you can see its elegant façade shimmering in the huge ornamental lake – or ‘water mirror’ – that stretches in front of it. My quarters are in what remains of the old, seventeenth-century château that stands to one side of it and is now known as the communs since the building was converted into stables
and servants’ quarters. Snobbishly I have decided that my château is architecturally finer than the main château, although I have never let on about this of course to Violette, whom I met through friends and who is very easy and friendly, if somewhat scatty and short-sighted. Apart from the grandeur of the whole setting, with its discreetly hidden tennis court and heated open-air swimming pool, I love the forests that surround the château where you can walk and see a medieval pageant of hares, pheasants, deer and wild boar, which sometimes crash through the undergrowth in packs with their greasy black coats bristling with fear; I give the latter a clear berth because I’ve been warned that their fear can quickly change into aggression. Violette has a new husband, Gaston Palewski, a former cabinet minister once close to De Gaulle, who is also very cordial towards me. I’m intrigued by Palewski because he has had a long, well-known liaison with Nancy Mitford, whose upper-class self-assurance and quick wit impressed me when I sat next to her once at a lunch in Paris. I also like the fact that every morning, before the official Citroën DS sweeps in to the château’s cour d’honneur to take him to his office, Palewski has been down to the pool, naked under a black cloak, for an early swim.

  I no more belong to this world of aristocratic and diplomatic privilege than I do to any other, but I’m grateful to have been received into it, temporarily at least, so gracefully. I pay my modest rent to the maître d’hôtel each month and I am accepted as part of the château’s extended family, occasionally invited to an informal meal with Violette and Gaston, but more often left completely to my own devices. Occasionally there are receptions at the château where what they themselves call the ‘old families of France’ come together, with everybody braying jovially and addressing the other as cher cousin and chère cousine. The weight of historical precedent and the strange numbness it instils in contemporary relationships is so strong that, after a while, you imagine, for all the evocative princely and ducal titles bandied around, you have been included in a gathering of well-dressed mental defectives.