Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  So I take the return flight to Paris, unsettled, knowing that the flat will be empty, that autumn will lead to winter and that I have no particular prospects. When I get home, I see there are a couple of pale-blue telegrams pushed under the door and some messages on the phone. They’re all from Connaissance, asking me to call. That’s encouraging, I think. Perhaps they’ve got another story for me, who knows, it might even mean sending me somewhere where it’s still warm.

  I call next morning and have to wait a moment before being put through.

  Philip Jodidio’s voice is very cold.

  ‘I’ve had Bill Rubin on the phone ranting and raving about your article that he’s just seen in the new issue. He says they called an emergency meeting of the whole MoMA board last night to decide what to do about you. He’s got MoMA’s president Blanchette Rockefeller right behind him and they’re taking two firms of lawyers, one in New York and one in Paris, to see what they can find out about your past and whatever else they can dig up so as to build a case against you. He thinks you’ve criticized the show he’s spent years putting together because you’re in the pay of African art dealers. Anyway, he feels confident that if they can’t get you on anything else they can sue for plagiarism because you quoted extensively from the catalogue.’

  I sit by the phone completely stunned. This can’t be happening. I must have misunderstood. Perhaps I’m having another turn.

  ‘What do we do?’ I say weakly after a while.

  ‘Well, there’s not much we can do. Rubin’s insisting on a lengthy right of reply, with a ton of photos. We’re looking into that. But we’re not going to back you up, if that’s what you mean. You’ve caused enough trouble as it is.’

  ‘Well, what should I do?’

  ‘You’d better get yourself a lawyer.’

  I’ve been going back and forth and round and round every angle and detail of this whole thing. It’s obsessive, I can’t think about anything else. I had no idea that my review would cause more than a tiny ripple, since most reviews simply disappear into the ether and are never heard of again. The show’s bound to attract hundreds of reviews, including the New York Times, which is what really counts in New York rather than some little art magazine in French in far-off Paris. How can it be that my mildly phrased critique has become so pivotal? I suppose it must have touched a raw nerve, a fatal flaw even, and it’s the first comment to be published. But who’s ever going to see it, and why is Rubin so incensed? He’ll get plenty of plaudits in the press. Why has he decided to go for me? And what will the lawyers find out? That my girlfriend had an abortion, that Francis turned down my book? Or that I’ve been late with my tax return and pay my cleaner in cash? What will they use against me? That I never made it up in time with my father?

  Somehow, I suppose, I had all this coming to me. It was bad enough agreeing to an abortion, it was a sickening thing to do, but to have upbraided my father shortly before his death is even more unpardonable. That guilt will always stay with me, and the punishment has probably only just begun, in this completely unexpected guise. That’s how real punishments work, subtly, silently, in ways you can never foresee. My father is punishing me through Rubin. They’re even similar in some ways, righteously loud and overbearing, and they share the same capacity for rage. I can just see Rubin pacing up and down, like an Old Testament prophet, ranting and raving and cursing me. And I deserve it. I’ve wronged him, I come to see slowly, as I wronged my father. And he’s dead, he can’t kick back. But Rubin can, he’ll kick me for all he’s worth and I’ve had it coming to me.

  I’ve heard again from Connaissance that MoMA has decided to take a series of full-page ads out, especially in the Herald Tribune, to denounce me as having attacked the show because I was paid to do a hatchet job by African art dealers. I’m terrified. I don’t know what it means, I don’t know any African art dealers, but if I’m accused what can I say, how can I prove it? How can I prove I don’t know people? How can I prove anything? There’s no one I can ask. I don’t know any lawyers either, I’ve never needed a lawyer and couldn’t afford one now that I do. It’s funny they should have chosen the Trib because I used to write art reviews for them and it’s the only newspaper I subscribe to. I’ve been scanning it nervously for the past few days to see if the ad denouncing me has come out, but I can’t bring myself to do it any more and when the Trib arrives I just put it quickly, unopened, into the rubbish, hoping that what I don’t see won’t harm me.

  I’ve wanted for years to take off a couple of kilos but it’s starting to go a bit too far. My weight is about the same now as when I left school and it’s still going down, rapidly, as if I can’t stop it. I’m trying to force myself to eat but I can’t get beyond a couple of mouthfuls before feeling nauseous. Even wine tastes bad. It’s also become increasingly difficult to sleep, and I think being so tense and lying awake at night is taking the weight off too. And not eating or drinking makes it even more impossible to sleep, so it’s a sort of vicious circle. I suppose I had it coming to me, I can’t think how else to explain anything. Whatever made up my life before is crumbling and there’s nothing to hold on to. It feels like I’m falling. Falling, falling, falling.

  There’s no end in sight, just crumbling and falling. Of course it’s punishment, punishment for having had it too easy, having had too good a time, the carefree bachelor, always free, always available, always after the girls, the laughing, curly-headed boy. Well, he’s not laughing now, he’s going somewhere else, he doesn’t know where, into the dark, falling.

  I’ve stopped going out for anything that’s not absolutely essential. I’m terrified when I’m in here, terrified of the phone ringing to tell me things have got worse, what the lawyers have dug up and what further revenge Rubin in his righteous rage is going to take. But I’m far more terrified outside. Even on the bright winter afternoons which I used to love, when the buildings and trees cast long, low shadows, like a mysterious, parallel universe on the ground, I don’t want to go out. The streets frighten me, and I have to make an almost superhuman effort to cross them. Crossing the street feels like deliberately stepping out in front of a bus, inviting another disaster, because disaster dogs everything I do. So if I have to cross, which I used to do just jaywalking and dodging the cars like a real Parisian, now I go and wait at the lights until they’re red and even then I’m afraid.

  I used to be frightened of death, but this is like death and I’m still afraid of it. Sometimes I think of George, of the handfuls of pills, but I don’t think I could do it, I’m too frightened of the idea of killing myself to actually kill myself, but the fact that I entertain these thoughts makes me more terrified still. I try to put them out of my mind, both the thoughts and the pills, but at the same time I wonder whether I haven’t lost my mind, gone out of my mind, leaving only this welter of weakness and terror behind. Perhaps I won’t have the guts to kill myself, but if I keep going on in this downward spiral, in this agony of guilt and tension and anxiety, I might of course die. It’s been weeks now that I haven’t eaten properly and I can see my face pale and drawn in the mirror and my ribs have started sticking out. I have to do something, I don’t know what to do. I’ve never seen a lawyer and I’ve never seen a psychiatrist, I’ve always made fun of seeing shrinks, it’s what weak people and nutters do, well I’m weak now and a nutter, and I have to talk to someone soon, I can’t keep going down any more.

  There’s a couple I know who both see an analyst. They’re a good deal older than me, and they’ve always been very nice, almost parental, to me. They have a very fine collection of modern art and they often invite me to come and see their latest acquisition, even though we don’t really have the same tastes in art. So they’re not surprised when I call them and they ask me round right away for lunch because they’ve got a big, new Twombly, and even though I intensely dislike Twombly, it makes no difference now, and I go round and peer at their new acquisition and nod several times thoughtfully as if I approve. My collector friends have a l
ot of mirrors in their apartment and I see how ghostly-looking I’ve become as I flit from time to time through them and it scares me, but what scares me more is the frightened look in my friends’ eyes as they watch me and take on board how far I’ve fallen. But they are good-hearted and patient. I tell them a little about what has happened, a plain condensed version, and they arrange for me to see their analyst.

  She’s a Freudian, whatever that really means, and I’ve been to see her a couple of times. She’s very formal and distant, perhaps that’s Freudian, and she says very little. Before each session, I rehearse the ground I want to go over, a bit as though I were going to write it or, more accurately, put it on as a play – a little play about my own misery. I have main characters, such as my father and Rubin, Alice and the Polonaise, but there are others, and sometimes the others become more important as the plot develops, often in ways I haven’t foreseen. I want to give things some shape rather than just deluge her with all the black thoughts that keep going through my mind. I want structure, and I want to keep it short because it costs an arm and a leg every time I have to inch several large banknotes on to her desk in payment. Perhaps that’s Freudian too.

  I spend most of my time at the moment constructing what I am going to tell her. I concentrate on bringing out the funny side of things as well, since misery is always full of potentially amusing details. I present them as sketches and when the analyst laughs I have the first feeling of pleasure that I’ve had in months. I make it my ambition now to make her laugh, it’s always what I’ve preferred because I’m a clown at heart, and sometimes I find myself making up things simply to make her laugh. ‘Vous avez beaucoup de ressources, Monsieur,’ she says to me at one point, and I take this in the context to mean I have bounce-back. I feel about as bouncy as a punctured ball, but I am oddly flattered if I can interest or amuse her, and I kid myself that she prefers listening to me rather than to all the other weedy-looking patients sitting around her waiting room.

  Over the past few days we’ve had an infestation of rats in my building. It’s spread all through this side of the Marais, like a plague. Untold thousands of them were sent fleeing when they did eventually dislodge the Halles marketplace, and most of the rats of course went underground. I don’t know what’s disturbed them again, perhaps new excavation in the area, but at night I hear them scuttering under the floorboards and gnawing at the wainscot along the walls. Sometimes I think I’ve imagined it and it’s my mind playing tricks, but I see them in the daytime too, darting behind the radiators and then down some hole best known to themselves. They seem to be getting bolder by the day, and some of them cross the floor now in front of me, quite casually, as though I’m not there. They almost make a game of it, crisscrossing from different directions, sometimes running, sometimes merely ambling, out for a stroll, leaving an insolent abundance of their little turds behind.

  They’re right, I am barely there, and they must sense I’m no threat, but I did come to resent how much I had to pay the Freudian just to amuse her, and I’ve found someone else I can talk to who’s very different, she’s a Brazilian therapist who charges very little and we’ve been doing breathing exercises together in her little flat in Montmartre. I do everything she tells me to do, even absurd things like imagining I’m a baby again and crying, but I do cry, with the tears pouring out of me in a great flood of pent-up pain, even though I know that before all this, before I became so desperate and submissive, I would have laughed and refused outright. The Brazilian is very beautiful, with dark, flashing eyes, and I admire her, I am even falling in love with her, but I can’t make her laugh. She is aloof and very determined, and now that she thinks I have reached the appropriate level we go out to the forest of Fontainebleau to have the space and the air and the solitude to let out the primal cry that she tells me will release all my deeper fears and tensions, and I can hardly believe it but I’m standing there opposite her in a clearing way into the forest, just the two of us, the therapist and the patient, and I’m taking great lungfuls of air and screaming with all my might at the sky, the impassive pale cloudy sky overhead, and she is screaming too, louder than me, her screams are far more piercing and terrifying than mine, and as we pause, panting, to get our breath back I get a glimpse of her beautiful, fanatical eyes staring fixedly up through the branches of the pines and as she breaks into another bloodcurdling cry I know beyond doubt that, sick as I am, she is mad, madder than I could ever be, and I have to get out, out of this forest, out of Paris, break this circle, away from her, away from Rubin, away from the rats, away from myself, anywhere.

  I still have one place to go, a last place I can crawl into like a rat. My old friend David Blow has had his ups and downs, too, and I know most of them, just as he knows mine. He comes from a family full of strange eccentrics, including the famously reclusive Stephen Tennant, and he’s very tolerant of his friends’ oddities and misfortunes. It’s been a while since I’ve been in London, and when I arrive at David’s large, comfortable flat, he looks at me, and while he jokes about taking me out for a few decent meals, he can see something has gone badly wrong. I give him the brief outline, it comes quite easily after doing it for the shrinks, and we relax and have a few drinks, and when I lie down on his sofa, which is somehow more reassuring than my bed in Paris, I manage to get a few consecutive hours’ sleep for the first time in months. Being in London is doing me good in itself, because the distance helps me get a bit of perspective. After all the threats, I haven’t heard from the MoMA lawyers and, as far as I know at least, there has been no full-page denunciation of my evil deeds in the press. Rubin has however published his riposte, bristling with references and footnotes, to my review in Connaissance, but it is so long and involved, and so seemingly unconnected to what I actually wrote, that I haven’t been able to take it in. I just stared at it and felt sick. Apparently he’s had a whole slew of negative reviews – I’ve seen one of them, by Thomas McEvilley, that goes far further in taking the show apart than I did – and Rubin is charging around like a maddened bull having a go at all of them. He must have garnered a lot of praise as well, so I wonder why he has to try to silence all semblance of dissent. Somebody suggested to me that he’d slipped works from his own private collection into this landmark show so as to sell them at an increased price afterwards, but I’ve no idea if it’s true.

  I can’t be in London and not call Francis. I haven’t talked to him since this whole thing blew up because, even though I know he would give sound advice and be ready to help, I’m still upset by his volte-face over the book and I don’t want him to know just how wounded and stricken I’ve been. I go round to the studio, which I’m always pleased to see because all the chaos of photos and paint and stuff on the floor is like a kaleidoscope of what’s been going on in the latest paintings, and it’s oddly comforting, as if I’m not the only one to have so much mess slopping around inside me. We share a couple of bottles of champagne, which loosens my tongue, and I give him the briefest overview of the run-in with Rubin. To begin with I can see a certain cruel amusement, even satisfaction, in his face, perhaps because he thinks I’ve had the comeuppance I deserve, but also, when I come to think about it, because he hates the press, and probably has done ever since, way back, they dismissed a couple of his very earliest paintings as ‘a piece of a cheese on a stick’ and ‘a pair of dentures on a tripod’ or some such facile nonsense. But as he takes in how much I’ve changed, and how desperate I probably sound as well as look, his tone alters and he suggests we meet for dinner tomorrow at the Ritz.

  Plush hotels seem almost designed to make you feel a bit shabby but I find I don’t much care as I hand my crumpled mac in at the Ritz’s cloakroom. I’m also pleased, once we’re seated in the elegant restaurant, that after weeks of barely touched pasta the Whitstable oysters and steamed turbot slip down so easily. I’m a bit drunk already, because I’ve been off the bottle for a while and I’m trying to pace myself for what I imagine will be a very boozy evening ahead when Francis, wh
o’s been topping up my glass with the claret, suggests we go to Crockford’s. I’m intrigued by the idea, not only because I’ve never been gambling with Francis before, but also because I’ve virtually never been gambling – apart from once at the casino in Monte Carlo, where I wanted to see the salons privés Francis often mentions and where, in about ten minutes, I stupidly lost half the money that Alice and I had earmarked for our subsequent holiday in Corsica.

  That won’t be a problem this time because I don’t have much more than a cab fare on me, and when I mention this to Francis as we’re ushered very cordially into the roulette room at Crockford’s he nods and, as if it were customary in the circumstances, he hands me a wad of large banknotes, which we change for some brightly coloured chips. I don’t have time to protest because he’s already off among the green-baize tables, settling a little bunch of chips here, another there. I walk round to get the general hang and start playing as well, without any system, betting on a couple of random numbers and impairs without really thinking about it, because the whole thing seems arbitrary, not to say silly, when you’re using money that’s not yours and you never even expected to have.

  I start circling round the tables, among a few jovial punters finishing off an evening and a larger number of pale habitués, many of them slender, almost emaciated women who are gambling as if their lives depended on it. With beginner’s luck I’ve started winning a lot more than I’ve wagered. Francis comes back, saying he’s completely cleaned out, and I give him my winnings and simply take another turn round the room, savouring the champagne that’s being liberally served free of charge and watching the raptness of the other gamblers crouched over the baize.

  Eventually Francis comes back and tells me he’s lost it all so we should go and get some more money from the studio. I expect him to be downcast but he’s exuding pleasure and vitality. Out of thin air Crockford’s provides a chauffeured car and we set off towards South Kensington, and Francis starts up a bit of banter with the driver, who’s wearing a peaked chauffeur’s cap.