Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  So when the Polonaise announces she’s pregnant, I panic. Normally this would be something I would confess to Alice, who might even give some practical advice. But since I am attempting, painfully enough, to distance myself from her counselling it is out of the question. There are scenes with the Polonaise, whose biological clock is ticking very audibly and who believes the situation can be resolved only by our getting married. Mournfully I contemplate the prospect of a shotgun wedding followed by a union as increasingly joyless as my parents’, and the effect it would have both on us and on the child, all because of one small accident (despite all the precautions apparently taken). I try to communicate this to the Polonaise but she is deaf to what she dismisses as my pessimism. Tension grows as we both dig in our heels: I will not marry on this basis and she will not consider having a child out of wedlock. Eventually, feeling like an accomplice in crime, I accompany the Polonaise to a discreet clinic and try to be as supportive as I can. Afterwards, when I come to collect her, we sit in complete silence in the taxi taking her back to her apartment.

  I’ve barely opened the door in my place when the phone rings and an orderly at the Hôtel-Dieu informs me that Alice has been admitted to hospital with a broken back. She apparently lost her footing at the top of the free-standing circular staircase leading up from her study to her bedroom and her back hit the hard, sharp edge of the steps as she fell. It’s strange this should have happened now, because although the staircase was a potential danger from its very inception by a fanciful architect she knew, there has never been the slightest mishap before. I go down to the hospital immediately, clutching flowers, but Alice has been given a strong sedative and she’s out cold. I walk back bewildered through the old streets of the Marais, gazing blindly at the familiar sooty façades of the great townhouses as if they might provide some clue to why everything is going wrong. The blackened coronets and lions rampant on the crests indicate only the passage of time and the progress of decay, but a woman in dark glasses guided by a big, patiently plodding dog is coming along the pavement towards me through the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon. I remember the blind man in Marseille hitting me with his white cane, and the jinx, yes the jinx, and panicking I scuttle down a side street out of sight.

  My flat on the rue des Archives is like a sanctuary these days. I have all my books neatly aligned in a large alcove beside my writing table and my best pictures hung where I can see them while I work. For years I have been a useful single man, making up numbers at dinner parties in Paris and country weekends, and I rarely declined an invitation, particularly when the food and company were good. But I have started going out less, seeing far fewer people, and the entries in my diary are growing longer and more introspective as I grapple with the reasons why my plans for writing things and getting them published have gone so completely awry, and what in all the confused emotion welling up in me I really feel about Alice, the Polonaise and the lost child, and how I can live my life in a less disorderly, damaging way.

  The only bright spot I can find on the horizon is that Connaissance des Arts, a magazine that belonged to the same publishers as Réalités when I worked there, has asked me to review an exhibition called ‘Primitivism in 20th-Century Art’ that will open at MoMA in New York in the autumn. I’ve seen some of the advance material and, visually, it’s a knockout since it includes some of the most powerful tribal carvings and of course an outstanding line-up of modernist masterpieces. It should be an extraordinary show, and I’m delighted to have the chance to get away from Paris for a while and spend a few days in a city which, although it intimidated me on my first few visits, now seems the most exciting and stimulating place in the world.

  The idea is that my review should come out to coincide with the opening of the exhibition in several months’ time, so when I come off the hot, noisy Manhattan streets into the chilled calm of the museum there are no works to see yet but only photographs of them in an advance proof of the catalogue. I’ve heard that William Rubin, the chief curator, is very powerful in the art world and correspondingly imperious. But he receives me cordially and lays lots of photos out on his large desk to illustrate some of the highlights the show will include. Then, in a more professorial tone, Rubin gives me an overview of the theme, stressing his convictions about its groundbreaking importance, and I listen enthusiastically, make appropriate notes and carry away the bulky catalogue proofs so that I can absorb the concepts underlying the exhibition and their various ramifications before I begin to write. For a couple of days the sun shines, New York is filled with its characteristic, jolting energy, and I come back to Paris revived and begin straight away to plan the outline of my review.

  The trouble is that the more I read and, above all, the more I see the two totally different cultures juxtaposed – an African mask, say, paired off with a Picasso painting – the more sceptical I become about the exhibition’s underlying thesis. Once boiled down and simplified for what the curators clearly hope will be a wide audience, the show basically suggests that whenever a European artist came across this (an African mask or tribal fetish) in the earlier part of the century, he hurried back to his studio and painted or sculpted that (a Cubist portrait, say). Here was an idea that not only the man in the street but a child could readily understand: Picasso saw an exaggeratedly frontal Nimba mask from Guinea, then started doing female heads with big noses. Similarly, Giacometti may have wandered into the ethnographic collection in Bern and admired a slender, anthropomorphic Nyere walking stick in the 1920s (a pure supposition that the catalogue cannot confirm) and, hey presto, he begins to think in terms of long, thin people, eventually creating armies of them in what becomes his signature style. I am amazed that such a simplistic, fundamentally flawed idea can have become the crux of a weighty New York cultural event, buttressed by a two-volume catalogue brimming with scholarly disquisition and accompanied by the usual PR firm razzamatazz. It seems to me that it does a disservice all round: to the European artists who look like devious copycats; to the ‘primitive’ artists whose works have been taken completely out of their primarily religious context and function; and to the public, most of whom surely know that artists’ imaginations work in more unpredictable and subtle ways.

  But I’m embarrassed to have found this whopper out all by myself and feel like a dissident pygmy, about to wave its fist in the face of a vast, renowned institution. Truth to tell, I have never been a particularly critical critic and I usually manage to review exhibitions or write about artists that convince, interest or please me, which is one of the few prerogatives of being freelance. Occasionally I have a sideswipe at something I find preposterous, like a show I saw recently that consisted uniquely of electric wires ripped out of a gallery’s walls; and, no doubt partly under Francis’s influence, I wrote a sceptical essay, also for Connaissance des Arts, about the legacy of Jackson Pollock, which I was surprised to find won me plaudits whereas most of what I write disappears for ever into a silent black hole. I still feel enthused by the quality of many of the works on show, however, so there is no reason for me to wax scathing and write the whole venture off, especially as I have taken a few knocks myself recently and am not eager to go around trailing my coat, looking for a fight. I will put all the positive aspects forward while being duty-bound as a critic to speak my mind and say in as amiable prose as I can muster that the pairing of a big-nosed mask and a big-nosed Picasso, a slender African walking stick and a Giacometti Walking Man, is tendentious and misleading.

  I send the review to Connaissance diffidently enough, half expecting them to protest at the least negative comment about such a prestigious-sounding event at MoMA, but they respond enthusiastically to my argument. The magazine, which has been bought and relaunched since I first knew it, now belongs to an American, and his son, Philip Jodidio, not long out of Harvard, has been appointed to run it. We’ll put a tribal image on the September cover, Jodidio tells me, and it’s good the review raises important questions since it will be the lead story.
I’m delighted by this reception and forget what now seem like overscrupulous misgivings, especially since I have to look after Alice, who has moved into one of the smaller rooms on the rue des Archives side of my apartment to recuperate. She does not appear to have damaged her spine permanently but she needs to rest undisturbed and be looked after until the bone reknits. Several friends have offered help, and to give him his due Francis was the very first, calling to say that if I need money to settle medical bills he will wire whatever’s necessary right away. I still feel raw about his bizarre behaviour, a sort of senseless double-cross, over the book, but I’m touched and pleased by his solicitude. Meanwhile, I assume a carer’s routine, not displeased by the diversion it provides, but it’s clear that I now inhabit a parallel universe, still very close to and fond of Alice but unable to share any of my deeper preoccupations with her. After a couple of weeks, fortunately, Alice is well enough to return home.

  The summer goes all too quickly. I love the days that lead up to the longest day, then regret that the best is then over and that daylight is diminishing even as we enter the hottest months. I keep meaning to go away, to get back to the beaches in Brittany or Biarritz, but now I have no one to go with and, after a brief skirmish with the Club Med, I decide the only holiday I’ll have this year is with a friend from Kyoto who visits me every September. This is a curious liaison, begun several years ago after a casual meeting in a restaurant in the Marais, but I find it very soothing because, although we know each other well in certain ways, we have almost no conversation, Setsuko speaking little English and my Japanese being non-existent. She arrives as always with a strange present, a fan covered in ideograms, a table mat with a view of Mount Fuji or a pair of brown nylon socks which prove too small. I cook for her, and she is always very appreciative, except that anything she does not wish to eat, like fat or gristle, she slaps abruptly on to my plate. We never speak at meal times and only rarely at other moments, when our exchanges are brief and usually wreathed in smiles. Once, when I believed we had both just enjoyed an instant of bliss, Setsuko tugged my beard sharply and asked: ‘Mikkel, how you make your money?’ On another occasion, after breakfast, she giggled suddenly and said: ‘You want to be my honey baby?’ Then, more seriously: ‘What your policy regarding marriage?’ I am cautious with my replies.

  Setsuko has brought me a traveller’s English–Japanese phrase book in case there are any outstanding issues I want to address, but most of the phrases relate to requesting train times or buying a handkerchief. I ask no questions of her because I cherish the simplicity and freedom that being intimate with someone about whom one knows so little allows. We don’t talk much, which is soothing while allowing us, I think, to communicate what is uppermost on our minds. After one lengthy silent supper together, Setsuko takes my hand and confides to me that she thinks I look like Bob Dylan, only less sexy.

  It is almost time for Setsuko to go back to Japan and we’re spending a lazy morning in the apartment when the telephone goes.

  It’s my mother.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ she says curtly. ‘Your father’s just died. Massive heart attack while he was sitting with a drink in his chair.’

  I put the phone down and for the first time since she arrived I really talk to Setsuko and tell her what’s happened and what it means to me, and I don’t know how much she understands but she clasps my head tightly to her breast and holds me there in darkness and silence for a long, long while.

  Over the twenty years since I left home for good, my father became a shadowy figure. Very occasionally – for a marriage, a death or on a rare trip to Paris – we saw each other briefly, but mostly I only got news of him when I talked to my mother on the phone. I knew that his health was not good: he was overweight, he smoked and drank immoderately and all the pills he used to control his manic depression took their toll. There was also a period, not long ago, when he began bombarding my sister and me with rambling letters, full of asterisks and footnotes and arrows, and the overall tenor was that he was still searching for himself, since the necessities of life, of providing for a family while battling cyclothymia, had always denied him the time and tranquillity he needed to work it all out. He felt constantly on the cusp of this discovery, a breakthrough that would lead to a new clarity about himself and his bearings in the world. Latterly he abandoned my mother halfway through a holiday (begun grandly in a chauffeur-driven car until he suspected the driver of flirting with my elderly mother) and holed up in a small hotel in south-west France. There he devoted himself to long walks and prolonged self-analysis, which was recorded in an ever more disjointed fashion in the letters he sent me on yellow foolscap. I don’t remember ever replying, partly because the outpouring had no focus, merging past and present, but also because I did not want to get involved in this doomed search for my own father’s identity. To an extent he involved me willy-nilly, however, because he ran out of francs and instructed the hotel-keeper to call and ask me to send a cheque to tide him over. I saw him one last time on his way back through Paris when I was still angry with him for having abruptly ditched my mother, whom I had to shepherd back to London. We met briefly in a café on the rue de Birague, just outside the studio, and at one point while we were arguing I leant over, squeezed his upper arm hard and saw him wince with pain. He promised to reimburse me, which I knew he would. It wasn’t about the money. It had never been about the money. It was the fact that we were father and son and that since I was a small boy there had been no love or understanding between us, only growing anger, recrimination and scorn. Somehow I suppose I thought there would come a time when we would sort that out, just as he had been trying to sort his life out. Now, I’m still trying to take in all the implications of his death, which multiply day by day and crowd out any other preoccupation. But what is already clear is that all the unresolved misunderstandings and conflicts between us will remain unresolved, and for that from this point on I alone will bear all the blame and all the guilt.

  I go back to Stocking Pelham for my father’s funeral. All the relatives are there. It’s a fine day and after the church ceremony, where the new vicar is clearly uncertain how to pronounce the name ‘Peppiatt’ and settles for ‘Pippit’, giving the proceedings an extra ring of finality, everyone wanders down leafy lanes back to the house and a buffet lunch is served outside. One of the strange things about a death is the way the living group together as if to banish it in a moment’s jollity, eating and drinking in the sun. He’s there, wherever that is, but we’re all still here.

  ‘Will you come to mine?’ an ageing but sprightly uncle asks me, waving a glass of wine, as I leave.

  ‘Of course I will,’ I reassure him jovially.

  When I get back to London, I feel rootless. I belong less and less in England, but at the same time I am still an expatriate in France. My life has been very full after the first few scant years in Paris. But now it seems to be emptying out. I’m not in a relationship, I don’t have a book to write and now my father has gone, leaving only problems behind. Perhaps it’s cyclical, the thick and the thin . . .

  Oddly I’ve had that sensation of thinness, insubstantiality, about lots of things over the past few weeks. I was in a little restaurant the other day in Paris – by myself, between seeing shows at galleries on the Left Bank – and suddenly everybody looked strangely transparent, as if they might not really be there. And I myself felt very insubstantial, and I kept looking round to see if anybody else had noticed that something had gone wrong, that things weren’t as they should be. It was apparent everywhere. Even the walls weren’t quite what they seemed, they had a kind of liquid quality and seemed to shift in and out of focus very slightly. And everything that people were saying didn’t quite add up, and I began to wonder whether they had seen that I wasn’t quite real and I felt increasingly embarrassed and began to sweat heavily but then I realized it wasn’t embarrassment but fear, a piercing, intense but completely absurd fear because I could never explain what it is, just a terrib
le anxiety that seems to corrode everything, sap its substance and drain it of any sense.

  I’ve had several experiences like this, and to try to control the panic that envelops me each time I admonish myself: it’s alright, I’m just having one of my ‘turns’, I say, as though it’s just a little blip and it won’t last. But the turns have been getting worse, more powerful, and I’ve begun to question who this ‘I’ telling ‘myself’ actually is or are, because I’m no longer sure that either really exists. They’ve become like that white wall in the restaurant, a shadowy, shifting identity, as malleable as the colour white fanning out into an infinity of shades. I don’t feel particularly at home in London, but I wonder whether I shouldn’t stay, find a little boarding house and hole up there until I can sort some of these problems out, find a little clarity. But of course that would be like my father, my newly dead father. It would be like becoming him in order to escape him, and in any case I know full well I cannot escape him. And in any case that would be mad. Mad.