Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  ‘It’s true he helped me a great deal. He encouraged me. Do you know how I met him? I’d put an advertisement in as a secretary—’

  ‘As a male whore,’ says Denis, glistening with the witty accuracy of his remark.

  ‘As a secretary,’ Francis repeats firmly. ‘And this man got in touch with me who turned out to be a cousin of Douglas Cooper’s. And he said, I think I know someone who would be interested in your work. And he took me to this club they went to in those days on Dover Street, the Bath Club, and that’s where I met Eric Hall.’

  ‘Eric Hall’s father had been a builder,’ Denis says, for my and Alice’s benefit. ‘He built things like Hall Road in Hampstead and he left his son a considerable fortune. Eric was deputy chairman or something on the London County Council and when he met Francis he was a family man with children. Didn’t you both go to visit his son at Eton for Speech Day or whatever it’s called?’

  ‘The Fourth of June. Yes, we did, to take him out to tea. I’m afraid it must have looked very odd,’ says Francis.

  ‘You were a monster, Francis,’ says Denis encouragingly. ‘I suppose you introduced yourself as Mrs Eric Hall? Didn’t the son go completely round the bend later?’

  ‘Unfortunately he did,’ Francis says musingly. ‘He suddenly attacked a woman in a hotel and they put him in one of those homes. He’s become very pathetic now. His arms shake the whole time. I haven’t seen him in a long while. He used to come round occasionally and stand outside the studio in London shouting, “It’s because of you I’m like this!”’

  ‘You should have been more considerate about his feelings,’ Denis chimes in. ‘There we are – you’re a pig in name and a pig in nature.’

  ‘That kind of considerateness comes later,’ says Francis. ‘When you’re young you don’t think about those things. You think about enjoying yourself.’

  ‘You must have met a lot of people,’ Alice says.

  ‘Well, I haven’t, Alice, I’ve never met anyone really. At least not those kinds of people – intellectuals, I mean.’

  ‘I remember you were invited to lunch by Virginia Woolf,’ says Denis.

  ‘That’s true. There was a lunch with all those people, like the woman she was supposed to have been in love with, Vita Sackville-West. She was a monster herself, Virginia Woolf. She shouted all the way through the lunch. She began by shouting and just carried on all the way through.’

  ‘But you’ve met everybody,’ Denis insists.

  ‘I haven’t. I almost never go out. I see a few people in Soho. And I see you, Alice and Michael. And that’s about it. I used to see Lucian Freud, but he doesn’t talk to me now. When I was young, I met one or two other drifters like myself. But I’ve never met anyone to talk to really ever. I always think of real friendship as where two people can tear each other to pieces.’

  Towards the end of the evening, Denis accuses Francis of having once put a dozen sleeping tablets into George Dyer’s hand.

  ‘I know,’ Denis repeats smugly. ‘John Deakin told me when the three of you came back from that holiday in Greece.’

  ‘Do you think I might put a dozen sleeping pills in your hand tonight?’ Francis inquires sweetly.

  Denis starts talking about where to find the best ‘waxy’ potatoes to make a ‘proper’ potato salad and he suggests opening another bottle, but Francis gets abruptly to his feet and thanks me for the evening.

  ‘Yes, that was a perfect evening,’ Denis joins in, struggling up from his chair. ‘And the food was delicious, Michael. I can’t remember ever having eaten a better blanquette de veau.’

  The two of them make their way cautiously down the staircase, briefly suspending hostilities, but only, I feel sure, until they’re alone again when they can continue ‘to tear each other to pieces’, as Francis says friends should, the whole night through.

  In my diary I’ve noted down the conversation between Francis and Denis because I want to be able to draw on it verbatim. For a long time I didn’t even question the fact that I jotted down what happened and what was said when I was with Francis. I even used to joke to myself that if I didn’t get it down the first time I’d record it the next time Francis said it, since he does repeat himself constantly, even though there’s often a different nuance made or an extra detail added. More recently, I’ve become conscious that all this archiving of sayings and events must be leading somewhere and that Francis himself could hardly be relaying all the information he passes on to me for no reason. Although I’ve wandered into the inviting pastures of art history and art criticism, I have always considered myself above all a writer, indeed, as time goes by, more and more as a frustrated writer, since although I earn my living by my pen I haven’t yet been able to do much of what’s called uninspiringly ‘writing for myself’. Put two and two together, and you’ll have me writing a book about Francis Bacon. I don’t have a better subject, and, though I say it myself, I have become something of an expert on the man, the work and the whole Baconian universe.

  That book, little by little, has been coming together. I’m not sure how good, even how coherent, it is – Francis says it would take a Proust to tell the story of his life – but the stack of pages, full of whited-out and typed-over sentences, is piling up and taking some kind of shape, even though the language tends to the purplish. I haven’t mentioned the whole venture to Francis yet, but now, on the eve of a big new gallery exhibition at Claude Bernard, is clearly not the time. I’ll have to wait until the show is up and running. It’s been over seven years since the Grand Palais retrospective opened, and the build-up towards this show in Paris is almost tangible. Francis has become a cult figure, not just in the art world but among the punks, who although somewhat more decorous than their alarming British counterparts will apparently be coming out in such strength that the police have cordoned off the rue des Beaux-Arts, where Claude’s gallery is. Incidentally, I’ve heard nothing more about the publication project from Claude, and when I made a point of reminding him about his offer, he merely said, rather sharply: ‘It’s too late.’ I don’t know what that means, beyond the fact that I’ve ceased to be of interest now that Francis’s new show is about to open. But I’m really disappointed, so it’s good that at last I have a book to keep me going.

  Francis has done quite a few new paintings, and the combined effect of so many Bacons in a relatively reduced gallery space is, contrary to what I imagined, incredibly powerful. Whereas at the Maeght gallery you had room to step back and consider, here you are hemmed in by Bacons on every wall. There is no escape. If you recoil from your reflection in the glazed surface of one alarming image, you bump into and are incorporated into another alluringly shiny horror scene. It reminds me of a house of mirrors I went into at a funfair once with my mother and wherever you looked you were so pulled out of shape you roared with laughter and became even more grotesque. Only here it’s not funny because you slip into someone else’s twisted world where the distortions are ominous and go deeper, deforming the body and then the mind. The punks have arrived and the crush in the gallery heightens the nightmarish effect, effortlessly blending business suits and spiky hairdos, dog collars and pearl ropes because the real, more insidious question is whether the mangled spectators are trying to get into the paintings or the mangled figures in the paintings trying to get out.

  Francis, meanwhile, is surviving the crush, glad-handing supporters of whatever stripe and signing catalogues and posters by the score. Eventually he disengages himself and like a praetorian guard a number of us accompany him in cars to the Halles aux Blés, the beautiful, covered grain market beside the meat and vegetable Halles, where Claude has laid on a memorable party, having invited people from across the globe to celebrate the event. Like several of Claude’s events, there is a hallucinatory aspect to it, since although we are no longer among waxworks here the very circularity of the neoclassical building where all the guests are wandering round with drinks entails coming across people from all kinds of places and periods in
one’s life eternally revolving in a continuum where time itself is altered, so that having greeted someone one hasn’t seen for yonks leads to seeing him or her again repeatedly and ineluctably, changing any surprise or pleasure at the encounter into a wry ‘I haven’t seen you in fifteen years and now I bump into you every five minutes.’

  Another event that has the punks jumping is a reading by Bill Burroughs at the brand-new Beaubourg Museum, a kind of Halles aux tableaux officially known as the Centre Georges Pompidou. As with Bacon, there’s a terrific turnout and the punks are visibly in the ascendant. Burroughs puts on his glasses and begins to read, in a reedy voice, from a work in progress. He is dressed in a grey suit with a grey hat and looks halfway between a dodgy accountant and a frail gangster. The performance does not impress the punks, many of whom don’t have a word of English between them and who in any case were expecting a livelier, more subversive event. Frustrated, several of them clamber up on to the stage where Burroughs continues in his grey monotone as they dance around him. At one point, one of them with a bright-yellow mohawk and chains waves his arms derisively behind Burroughs’s head, then very slowly tips his hat over his eyes. Once occluded, Burroughs stops talking and the crowd goes wild with applause.

  The day after Francis’s opening, anyone wandering down the street where Serge Gainsbourg lives, a place of pilgrimage for his huge army of fans, cannot help but see a prophetic phrase scrawled on to the wall of his house: ‘Seul Francis Bacon est plus merveilleux que toi’.

  ‘Your serve!’

  I pitch the little black ball high in the air and smash it on to the wall, winning the point outright.

  For the following serve, I try an underhand lob that loops through the air and should die in the corner, but the ball comes out a bit and my opponent uses the opportunity to drive it hard down the side wall. We play several close strokes straight down the wall until I hook the ball out into a gentle crosscourt shot which, satisfyingly, wrong-foots my opponent, grazes the front wall just over the red line above the tin and rolls irretrievably along the sidewall nick, taking the game to 9–7 and winning the set.

  In the changing room, my partner says, ‘I began to feel drunk on court myself with all those wine fumes coming off you!’

  It’s true I’ve come from an epic Bacon lunch and am frankly delighted not only to have managed to play squash in that condition but to have won, however amateurish the level of play. After sweating out some of the booze and a shower, I feel on top of the world and ready to go back to the Coupole where I left Francis talking to a big, beefy young man called René whom he’s picked up somewhere along the way and, I think, hopes to seduce. I doubt he’ll have much luck since René, whom Francis calls ‘une force de la nature’, looks as straight as a die, and he’s much more comfortable talking to me, as just another bloke, than to Francis, which in turn I suppose irks Francis. I should probably just leave them to it, but I’m drawn back because the wine is still flowing and I find René good company because he laughs easily, slapping his thighs, and doesn’t kowtow to Francis, who looks quite small and almost dainty sitting opposite him. I find them at the same table, but several bottles later and deep in conversation about Van Gogh, with Francis saying he prefers the Potato Eaters to all his other pictures. This strikes me as particularly reductive and I contend that the later works are greater and start talking about the Saint-Rémy period. I get a funny sideways look from Francis, who seems to have a bit of trouble breathing, but I’m high on my win and the new wine. Then a bit like a gramophone record Francis starts on all his usual slagging off of David Hockney, probably to impress René but also because he’s irritated by the increasingly international success David’s been having in Paris, where he has taken over a studio in the Cour de Rohan, an elegant courtyard behind Odéon well known in the Parisian art world because Balthus painted there from the 1930s on.

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised he’s been so successful,’ Francis says. He’s wheezing noticeably now, and I wonder for a moment how much Francis’s asthma affects his mood. ‘After all the paintings are like illustrations for Marie Claire, there’s nothing to stand up to in them and that’s why people like them. They may be pretty but when you look at them there’s nothing really there.’

  And I feel it’s time to stop the rubbishing and start saying how original the early work was and how skilfully ironical the California images can be and I don’t notice that the atmosphere has changed until Francis thunders:

  ‘Well, with a taste as superficial as yours I’m not in the least surprised you like them. You’re like all the critics who just go along with what everybody else says. And then of course you write it, just like all the others. And that’s why we’re stuck with all this dreary, anodyne art. Because of people like you.’

  Francis’s eyes are boring into me. His face has gone hard and pale.

  René shifts uncomfortably.

  I decide to leave them together and go out into the cold Montparnasse dusk, walking briskly to try to contain my confusion and hurt. ‘You didn’t see it coming, did you?’ I say to myself angrily as I go down into the Vavin Métro. Then out aloud, startling the other passengers waiting for the train beside me:

  ‘And what chance in hell does your book stand now?’

  12

  Primal Cries

  I’m trying to come to terms with Francis’s sudden bitchy outburst. It’s wounding, as it was meant to be, since he knows exactly how to find your weak spot. But although I’ve seen him go frequently for other people, he’s only done it to me twice, which given all the late nights and drink we’ve shared over the years means I’ve got off pretty lightly. I think Francis realizes that if he had a go regularly, as he does with Denis – but not, for instance, with Lucian, at least while the two of them were still talking – I wouldn’t stick around. I think it’s also fair to take into account that he is often under appalling pressure (usually of his own making) from work in progress, from gambling debts and occasional blackmail, from mammoth hangovers and exhaustion. There is also the pang, the stab, of jealousy, which Francis loves when he can watch it at work in others or reads Proust’s masterly analysis of its insidious effects but from which he also occasionally suffers. I wouldn’t have thought of the possibility had Alice not pointed it out when I described the scene at the Coupole to her, that Francis might have imagined René actually fancied me rather than him. This prompts a hollow laugh from me, but in fact having gone over the incident time and again has led to one positive outcome.

  Although I’ve been scribbling away since adolescence, I’ve become increasingly aware that writing things down and getting them into some kind of order or perspective really helps me deal with everyday misunderstandings and disappointments as well as my own contradictions. ‘One writes in order to have written,’ says my great friend in Barcelona, Jaime Gil de Biedma, but one also writes to survive the ‘slings and arrows’ and to give some sense to the persistent confusion in which we, or at least I, live. A great deal of what I write disappears into a series of black books which I keep as an intimate diary and where I can ramble on about whatever I happen to be thinking or feeling at a particular time without any forethought or framework, until even I am bored by what I’m saying and stop. Frequently of course I record what happens in my relationship with Francis, such as the Coupole incident, which has lost a little of its sting now that it’s been written down. This in turn has prompted me to go back to the book I’ve been writing about him and his effect on me and try to give it a clearer shape.

  At the moment it is still one long tract with no chapters or other subdivisions and little notion of a narrative moving forward. My head is too full of Joyce and Beckett, Borges, Kafka and Michaux, to think in such conventional terms. Rather I am looking for a form that will convey the strange circularity that characterizes all my encounters with Francis, who himself (quoting Gertrude Stein about Derain) frequently lambasts Balthus for trying to ‘do something new with an old technique’, which he sees as an i
mpossibility, adding that you have to ‘break the mould of accepted thought’ in order to invent. So I suppose that’s what I’m trying to do: find a new technique. Consequently there’s little sense of time or any specific ‘development’ in my account, which ends (as I sincerely hope it will before too long) with exactly the same words as it begins. This particular ‘in my end is my beginning’ is exactly how it feels when you start off an evening with Francis, having champagne in a grand hotel, dinner in a plush restaurant, then a tour of the bars, all of them increasingly similar and sometimes even the same because the Colony Room might lead to the Maisonette, the Coronation, the Iron Lung, but also back to the Colony and possibly even the grand hotel or restaurant for supper after a few hours’ hard drinking, and it’s not just the circularity of places and the deadening recurrence of bottle after bottle which in themselves gradually swallow up all notion of time but the circularity imposed by Francis himself as he repeats what he has just said, again and again like a mantra, until you feel imprisoned in a tightening circle of nihilism and finality.

  That said, however much I experiment with form and buff up the impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness content, agonizing over a verb here, a dialogue there, I have to admit that at one hundred thousand words and counting ‘Myself I Must Remake’ (the working title) is not exactly a breeze to read, let alone write, especially since the main theme is interwoven with an equally implacable account of my own inner turmoil and despair, including frequent vignettes of wasted mornings, blank pages and rampant literary impotence. On the bright side, however, the backbone of the book remains valid since I quote Francis a lot and it constitutes a kind of portrait of him in his own words. Given the keen interest in Bacon since the Grand Palais exhibition and Claude Bernard’s mobbed show, word of my screed has travelled through the incestuous Paris art and literary worlds, coming eventually to the ears of Georges Lambrichs, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, who gets in touch to ask if I would let him see some extracts to consider for eventual publication.