Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  As a result, after much soul-searching, I’ve decided to publish a numbered edition of engravings with Tàpies while devoting part of an issue to his work, in which the prints will be put on sale at a special, advantageous price for our subscribers. This, I hope, will supplement our other income and help the magazine survive. We have several other major artists on our hit list, with of course Francis in the number-one slot. I’m not sure how he would react to a request of this kind, although I suspect that, unlike Tàpies and most artists, he would waive any financial benefit for himself because of our friendship. I dither for several months, uncomfortable with the idea of asking a favour from someone who has shown me so much generosity. But when the magazine’s finances dip alarmingly into debt and the bank starts raking in a hefty commission on it, I allow desperation plus a couple of bottles of expensive wine to take the lead and put it to him bluntly over dinner.

  ‘Of course I will,’ Francis says unhesitatingly. ‘You should have asked before. But why bother to do just one image? Why don’t we do a complete triptych? It would make a more interesting lithograph and you should be able to get a better price for it.’

  I make up for lost time and go from magazine publisher to fine-art publisher overnight. Printed on Arches paper, trial sheets of each of the Three Studies of the Male Back have been seen and corrected by Francis, and now the full edition, with separate épreuve d’artiste and hors commerce suites, has been delivered in large portfolios to the office. They sit there, numbered but unsigned, awaiting the alchemist’s touch to transmute them into gold. A large table has been cleared, numerous graphite pencils sharpened and several bottles of Cristal stowed away in our ancient, wheezing fridge. When Francis arrives, he has several hundred sheets to sign. Consummately professional, he gets down to work, refusing a drink until later. His hand races over sheet after outsize sheet, and he pauses only once to say, in a distracted voice, ‘I can hardly remember what my name is,’ before the whole edition has been signed. Our staff gathers round, cheered by the prospect of a celebration, and the champagne corks are popped. They confidently expect him to say ‘Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends,’ but instead he toasts them all individually by name, thereby winning their vote for ever. The large salmon that Eli has poached is brought to the table and consumed amid merriment with a cucumber-and-yoghurt salad and a big, sunny Rhône wine.

  The next day Francis and I have a lunch appointment with Michel Leiris. I am always delighted to attend, whether the occasion takes place at a very grand restaurant like Taillevent or the Tour d’Argent or somewhere more modest, and more easy-going, like L’Escargot in the Halles or Le Petit Zinc. Yet often I wonder why Francis bothers to take me along since, although he’ll ask me for the odd word or phrase, he speaks French too well to really need my interpreting skills. Francis has actually become very much himself in French, moulding certain expressions to his own needs and bolstering his opinions with a few choice idioms. He says ‘au fond ’ the whole time, as if unearthing new depths of meaning in the phrase that follows, and he likes to make what he thinks of as self-evident truths about life even more self-evident with a very emphatic, sibilant ‘bien sûr’. So apart from being younger and enthusiastic, I don’t feel I’m contributing much to the proceedings. We go to the Petit Zinc where Francis expatiates so fulsomely on the silvery zinc bar that I wonder whether he isn’t thinking of incorporating it into a picture as he has already done with a similar structure he admired in the casino at Monte Carlo. Michel, resplendent in a recently broken-in Savile Row suit, is as punctual as we are. The conversation is fairly stilted until the first few bottles have been drunk, but then Michel opens up with almost alarming cordiality, laughing immoderately, attentive to every allusion and double-entendre, his face wrinkling and unwrinkling like a piece of pastry kneaded and smoothed. Suddenly Francis cuts across the conversation to say something that has been on his mind for a good while now:

  ‘C’est horrible la vieillesse, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘Oui,’ says Leiris. ‘C’est horrible et c’est sans remède.’

  ‘Voilà,’ Francis repeats triumphantly, as if old age had at last been nailed down into a definition. ‘C’est horrible et sans remède. Ghastly and irremediable.’

  They then get down to trying to sum up what ‘realism’ means in as few, concise words as possible. This concept has preoccupied them for some time now, because Francis maintains that he is not an Expressionist (‘After all,’ he repeats disarmingly, ‘I’ve got nothing to express’) but a realist, in the sense that he attempts in his painting to convey as intensely as possible the ‘reality’ – or, as he puts it, the ‘facts’ – of life. This is very important for him because he feels that, despite other people’s claim to the contrary, he has in no way exaggerated the ‘violence’ of life in his work (‘You only have to open a newspaper to see the horror that goes on in the world every day’). Michel agrees with him on this point and has resolved to write an essay that will attempt to pin down the slippery concept of ‘realism’ as he has experienced it while studying Francis’s paintings. The discussion takes a more problematic turn when Michel suggests that it is almost impossible to define ‘realism’ until one has defined the larger, more amorphous notion of ‘reality’. A further bottle is called for and definitions are batted to and fro, with the ‘realism’ of Van Gogh invoked, as well as the stark realism of Shakespearean tragedy. ‘What could be more poignantly realistic than those marvellous lines in Macbeth,’ Francis remarks, ‘where Shakespeare says that life is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”?’

  Much of the lunch is also spent in exchanging volleys of praise about Michel’s writings and Francis’s pictures. It seems at times like a diplomatic occasion where two powerful countries are exchanging tributes before getting down to the substance of their negotiations. But there is not much substance left. Michel has given his support by writing several prefaces to Francis’s exhibitions, from the key Grand Palais event of 1971 to Claude Bernard’s show. Francis realizes that his success in France was in part due to Michel’s prestigious endorsement, although he no longer needs it. For his part Michel, having been the close writer friend of both Picasso and Giacometti, is conscious that Bacon seems to be the most worthy successor, not least because he himself is a lifelong Anglophile and adores letting himself go in the tolerant pastures of Muriel’s Colony Room (to me he has recounted his surprise when one Colony member took him in his arms late at night and asked him longingly: ‘Are you alone?’). But more than anything now, they enjoy exchanging phrases and pithy definitions. ‘One is never disciplined enough,’ Francis says. ‘You have to be disciplined even in frivolity, perhaps above all in frivolity.’ And both he and Michel agree that ‘art is a métier for the old’.

  I don’t agree but since the idea clearly appeals to them both I don’t say anything. Once Michel has left the restaurant to be taken back home by his chauffeur, Francis says to me: ‘I kept looking at the way those veins stick out on Michel’s temples and wondered what would happen if I pricked them with my fork. I suppose they’d just burst.’

  This annoys me, a bit drunk as I am on lunchtime wine, because it seems unnecessarily cruel and disloyal.

  ‘Well, why don’t you give it a go, Francis?’ I ask.

  ‘Are you mad?’ he says in an aggrieved tone. ‘I was just wondering out aloud.’

  I sense a row brewing so I pretext a meeting at the office about the special issue we’re planning to do on him. Francis looks at me rather sourly but says he’ll call so that we can meet again for lunch before he goes back to London.

  People often ask me what Francis is like. I could say he’s strung between extremes – very generous with his time and money, for instance, but very critical and unforgiving in his opinions of other people and above all their art; very supportive but also very destructive; very vain and arrogant yet surprisingly realistic and modest. But then I have to go on qualifying all these char
acteristics, and I need a single phrase, so I say: whenever you’re with him, the temperature goes up. And that’s just what has happened today. When the two of us meet at Le Duc, it looks like any prosperous, lunchtime gathering in Paris: a mixture of businessmen, staid bourgeois couples and the odd couple of not-so-young and presumably adulterous lovers. Although the fish here is excellent, the restaurant’s atmosphere is distinctly formal and dull. The moment Francis arrives, greeting the staff affably and ordering champagne, things change. The manager comes over to say hallo, the waiters move more alertly and the clients begin, very slowly at first, to shake off the conventional torpor that they seem to think is called for in these staid circumstances. The temperature goes up. Francis engages the wine waiter, dark-haired and good-looking, in a spot of banter, then orders a very expensive Bordeaux. The wine waiter compliments him on his choice, at which, once the wine has been decanted, Francis invites him to have a glass of it with us. He would adore to, the wine waiter says, but it would be against house rules, so Francis pours him a large glass which he takes away with him through the service door. The door then opens several times during our meal, as in a French farce, to reveal the grinning wine waiter toasting us discreetly but enthusiastically from across the room. Somehow this charade and Francis’s manic good humour seem to generate a wave of jollity: people begin to laugh, more wine is ordered and what would otherwise have been a good but average lunch eventually turns into a feast.

  Even Francis is drinking more than usual, which means that after the champagne and the white wine, we have a couple of bottles of Saint-Estèphe before settling down to some port. As we leave Le Duc and wander unsteadily up to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, it becomes clear this is going to be a bender. We stop at La Rotonde and have some more port, which Francis pronounces ‘filthy’ but nevertheless drinks, then we weave our way along to the Sélect, which I know is where Francis used to hang out with the homosexual crowd when he first lived in Paris in the late 1920s.

  He certainly seems very at home here, as if he’d been in the night before, which I suppose he might have been, and he orders two more double ports and begins to clown about, suddenly producing a small pink plastic mirror from his leather overcoat and combing two tendrils of hair carefully across his brow, saying to me:

  ‘Do I really look that young still? Well, there it is. I’m simply a brilliant fool, brilliant and idiotic, and there it is. I don’t believe in anything and I don’t care about anything. There’s just my brilliance and the brilliance of life. And when you’re old you are never really less than your age and that’s an abominable thing but every now and then someone does actually come along and thinks you are younger than you really are and when you tell them your age they’re really shocked. It’s tragic still to desire at my age, even though in a sense I’ve never been young, I was born without innocence, I always knew how things were from the start.’

  Francis has now leant his head on the back of the customer standing next to us, who’s too embarrassed to move as Francis starts looking at himself in his hand mirror again, a pink, chubby, chuckling Silenus. ‘You see, I’ve always known. And even though I’ve always been a fool I think I’ve just painted the best picture I’ve ever done. I wanted to do a wave, and it turned into a jet of water, it’s nothing but this jet of water, simply a bit of water smeared over the canvas, but there’s something very mysterious about it. Encore un porto,’ Francis says to the barman. ‘Non, un double!’ and when he tastes it he throws it into the sink on the other side of the bar, saying ‘Il est très mauvais, votre porto,’ and there’s an expectant ripple among the other customers that things are going to turn nasty, and I’m wondering reluctantly if I’m going to have to step in to protect him, but the barman has produced a better port and Francis is laughing even harder, drinking the wine and holding his glass out for more, swaying and half falling over the other customers, who are clearly uncertain how to act and decide simply to put up with him. And it takes another good hour before I can get him out of the Sélect, and we weave out into the boulevard to get a taxi, swaying through the fast-moving cars. Alice and an American art-dealer friend who happen to be sitting opposite on the covered terrace of the Coupole see us marooned in the traffic and stand up in alarm, waving their arms at us and clearly bidding me to be careful, which, drunk as I am and with Francis nearly keeling over, makes me even more terrified. At last I flag a taxi down, but the driver takes one look at Francis and says, ‘Your friend is ill,’ before locking all doors and roaring off. Eventually we half dodge, half tumble in and out of the traffic to the other side. I ask Francis, who’s standing stock still on the pavement now, what he wants to do and he says, ‘Nada,’ he doesn’t want to stay there and he doesn’t want to go anywhere. ‘Nada,’ he repeats several times and then he starts turning abusive, saying he certainly doesn’t want me taking him back to his hotel, he’s alright by himself, and all I can think of doing is getting him on to a bus going roughly in the right direction and I watch him standing inside, beside the driver, swaying again, trying to get his ticket into the ticket machine, missing and trying again, until the bus is swallowed by the dark.

  Francis calls me next morning and says he can remember our lunch at Le Duc but nothing thereafter. ‘I think my mind’s going,’ he says. ‘Was I alright or did I talk the most dreadful nonsense? I really must stop that kind of drinking at my age because when I wake up the next morning I have this complete blank and I’m filled with guilt.’ He says that he has this conviction the world will blow up at any moment. Then we chat for a while, and he suggests that I come to the hotel before he leaves so that he can give me a colour transparency of the Jet of Water he’s just painted.

  I go over and look at it. A great gush of water rises from a hole or pipe to the right of the middle of the canvas against a background that is half blue sky, half black night. It is a desolate picture, the water pulsing up and spilling pointlessly into a void where there might once have been human life.

  Francis has clearly developed a ‘late style’. I’m pleased that the eerie translucence of his most recent, full-length portraits of John Edwards reflects a new serenity, as if the contradictions that have warred so dramatically in him for a good half-century are now to a large degree resolved. These new paintings put me in mind of The Tempest because the serenity has been achieved at a high cost in loss of illusion and the suffering that entails. They transmit an otherworldly aura, tinged with deep sadness. Our revels now indeed are ended and they have been replaced by a melancholy acceptance of age and fate.

  At the same time, I also worry whether Francis’s imagery, once so rooted in his own inner conflict, hasn’t forfeited some of its vitality, as if the blood has been drained out of it. Bloodless Bacon, and it shows in the commissioned portraits he has been accepting of late of personalities like Gianni Agnelli, the ‘King of Italy’, and Mick Jagger. He has also agreed to do a portrait of an international financier he knows well. ‘I couldn’t really say no,’ Francis tells me, ‘because he’s got all my money, and I have to say he seems to have done brilliantly with it. So I asked him to get some photographs taken of himself, and I’ve been looking at them, but the trouble is, when you look at his face, there’s absolutely nothing there. So I don’t know how I’m going to do a portrait of him.’ I’m sure he’ll come up with an acceptable solution, not least because getting one’s portrait painted by Bacon is now no longer seen as an assault but as daringly chic and desirable, and collectors all over the world, from Farah Diba, the former Empress of Iran, and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines to Greek shipowners and Agnelli himself, fall over each other to get their hands on his paintings. Meanwhile the press whips itself into a frenzy about the huge prices Francis’s paintings are now making, without of course realizing that a disproportionate chunk of these goes first to his dealers, then to the tax man, and much of the remainder is spent buying champagne for everyone in sight. For all the sybaritic lifestyle the newspapers like to attribute to him, Francis still live
s like a monk in his bare studio-cell.

  I could never mention my doubts about the recent work to Francis without getting my head seriously bitten off. It’s not really my place to make comments of this kind in any case, although I don’t know who else would ever tell him. I have more pressing concerns as a publisher, and I’m beginning to forge another sense of my own identity, both as an employer and as a man who is about to get married. I’m gratified now that I’m running a magazine of my own that I am no longer quite the ‘obscure young man’ as Sonia, with no doubt unintentionally cruel accuracy, once dubbed me. I was pleased, too, when I came to London the other day to discuss some parallel projects I’ve been working on with the film director Peter Bogdanovich, to find Francis dining at a table near ours at the Ritz, mainly, I have to admit, because it showed that my life had taken off in other directions, quite independently from him. Of course the fact that during this visit Jill and I slipped into the Chelsea Register Office to get married would have been another, more striking indication.