Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  Francis still looms very large at all sorts of unexpected moments, even so. The other day, for instance, I felt absurdly proud when Cartier-Bresson, who’s become a good friend both of mine and of the magazine’s, told me that of all the people he has known in his long life the most exceptional are Giacometti and Bacon. And my continuing dependence on Francis is driven closer home when I realize that I’ve been carefully plotting the best way to introduce him to Jill (who, meanwhile, has been rather dreading the encounter). I decide on a dinner at the RAC where both she and I are at ease, and I suggest that Francis bring his new Spanish boyfriend José in the hope that will create a certain symmetry. I’m anxious that Francis might be a little snobbish about coming to such a large, unexclusive club but when he arrives he immediately responds to its confident Edwardian opulence and repeats several times: ‘I’d love to have a place like this to come to but they’d never want someone like me.’ José arrives with him, and as we drink some champagne in the bar I notice they are dressed in almost identical dark suits with exactly the same shiny black ankle boots, which they show off to each other with a smile as if they are sharing a private joke. We go into the Great Gallery and I’m disappointed that, on one of the rare occasions when I’ve been able to host a dinner for him, Francis says he hasn’t been feeling well recently and orders only onion soup and a plate of Parma ham. It’s true that he’s looking paler and frailer than I’ve known him before. Similarly, although I’ve carefully picked the wine, only a couple of bottles are consumed. The first one seems to me distinctly corked. When I remark on it Francis is sceptical, but I know the wine well since Jill and I drank it at our wedding breakfast here. I send it back and am relieved to find the new bottle has a totally different, fresher taste. Once he’s sipped it critically, Francis acknowledges this with an approving nod towards me, which, emancipated from his influence as I feel I have become, still gives me a rush of pleasure.

  Whether Francis will approve of Jill is, however, another matter. So far he doesn’t seem to have really acknowledged her, limiting what he says to the occasional memorable phrase like ‘I’ve always been convinced that we came out of the sea,’ or others, such as ‘There’s a kind of blueprint of the nervous system that’s made at the very moment of conception,’ that I already know so well I could quote them in his stead. I’m worried because Francis looks strained and distant, and he gets muddled up when he starts talking about the currency markets, presumably in an attempt to draw José, who’s in the financial world, more into the conversation. ‘I saw the dollar was up and the Swiss franc down against sterling,’ he announces, then pauses with a blank look: ‘Or was it the dollar was down and the Swiss franc up?’, which sets Jill off giggling nervously and earns her a sharp look of rebuke. Eventually Francis does address her directly.

  ‘And what do you like in modern art?’ he asks her out of the blue, looking at her intently across the table.

  ‘Well, I’ve specialized mainly in German Expressionism,’ Jill says.

  ‘Well, I simply detest German Expressionism,’ Francis says sweetly. ‘I can’t think of anything I loathe more than German Expressionism.’

  Jill looks as though she would like to fall through the Great Gallery floor, but she recovers sufficiently to ask Francis how he started out as a painter, and I can see this warms him to her a little.

  ‘Well, I’ve spent so much of my life just drifting, you see, Jill,’ he says, slipping into one of his favourite setpieces. ‘From bar to bar, person to person. I often regret that I didn’t have more discipline and concentrate myself when I was young. I mean, when you think of how many French artists – and probably your German Expressionists as well – have been so concentrated from the start. I didn’t really begin to paint at all seriously until the war. I did a little before, but it was no good. When the war came, I was turned down because of this asthma of mine. So I had all that time just to drift in and do nothing. It’s true I’d been doing odd jobs to make my way – I worked in an office for a bit, then I tried to design some furniture. I even became someone’s valet. But I had been thinking a great deal about painting. About how I might perhaps begin to make this thing work a little.

  ‘The thing is, I’ve been very lucky to be able to earn my living by doing something that really obsesses me. I never expected to. I don’t suppose it will last. Not with the way everything else is going. People will simply stop buying painting but I don’t care. It’ll change nothing for me if all of a sudden I have no more money. I shall just exist by scrubbing floors or by going back to being somebody’s manservant. I’ve always managed somehow to get by.’

  Jill nods vigorously, sensing that she has been taken at least temporarily into the fold, and the conversation moves on, with Francis turning waspish again when he mentions that an old friend of his recently accepted a knighthood.

  ‘I’ve never wanted those things,’ he adds. ‘They’re ridiculous, and besides they’re so ageing. I want nothing really, except not to grow old. But then I never really feel old. I always think “old” is ten years away from whatever age I am.’

  When we part shortly afterwards, each with a new lover, I feel disappointed that the dinner hasn’t exactly gone with a swing. So I’m relieved and elated when Francis calls me next morning to suggest dinner at Claridge’s. Since he makes no mention of José, I assume he is not including Jill, who I know, having not quite recovered from the attack on German Expressionism, would be happier catching up with her own old friends. I’d like her to see Francis when he is on really good form, and I’m beginning to wonder whether that will happen again now that – for all his expostulations to the contrary – he is growing visibly older. That is hardly surprising since he’ll turn eighty soon. Francis complains bitterly about ageing, as though of all mortals he has been unfairly singled out to grow old. When people ask him how he is, he often replies, ‘Well, I’m alive, but I can’t say much more than that,’ or goes back to an old refrain: ‘Getting old is like having some ghastly disease. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.’ Perhaps his health is beginning to fail, although I doubt that he would ever mention it. He looks very pale sometimes, as he did at dinner last night, and I wonder whether his chronic asthma and the constant drink haven’t worn down even his extraordinary constitution. ‘I’ve had virtually every illness that exists,’ he said to me once, and I know he continues to consult his doctor very regularly and takes all kinds of pills. When Francis was in Paris recently I gave a buffet supper for him and a few people he likes at the rue des Archives. I know he was looking forward to it, but he didn’t even turn up, I think because he had a blackout from drink. Then he sent me a letter apologizing, simply saying (for some reason in French) ‘on ne peut plus lutter’, as if he had accepted that life was getting the better of him. I’ve also noticed that where Francis used to make light of things his outlook has become noticeably bleaker. He gets darkly pessimistic about the world situation, for instance, particularly when he has a bad hangover, and sometimes when we’ve had a skinful the evening before, he’ll call urgently and say something along the lines of ‘I can just feel there’s war coming. I can hear the boots marching. You’ve only got to look in the shop windows to see there’s nothing left any more. It’s like Munich. You can feel a disaster’s coming just by looking in the shop windows.’

  But when I meet him in the suave atmosphere of Claridge’s he doesn’t appear to have changed since I first met him. He’s rosy-faced again and jumps up exuberantly the moment I come into the bar, smiling and laughing and thanking me warmly for last night. I’d like to ask him what has happened since then but I know I’ll only find out if he chooses to tell me. As we go through the champagne ritual, I assume things must be going well with José, and when I tell Francis how charming and good-looking I found him, he almost whinnies with pride. ‘The marvellous thing,’ he says, ‘is that I usually only find brutes and with José, who speaks every known language, I can talk about all sorts of things. Of course, he’s also terribly well hu
ng, almost too well hung,’ he adds with feigned regret. We go into the dining room and an attentive waiter notices that Francis is still carrying his black leather trench coat, but when he attempts to take it from him, Francis rears back, clutching it closer to his chest and saying in mock alarm: ‘Can’t you just leave it with me? I know it’s just a bit of old skin but can’t you just leave it with me? When you get to my age you have to have something to hold on to!’ We all burst out laughing, as do the people sitting near by, as the waiter settles us at our table.

  To me, it feels exactly like old times, as if nothing of any real significance has intervened in the quarter-century since Francis first brought me here. When I’m with him, time is siphoned off into a kind of strange circularity, as if there is no before and no after, simply a continuous present; and that, I reflect, sipping the excellent white Burgundy, happens even before I’ve had a lot to drink. I can’t work out why this should be, unless it’s Francis himself who exists in circular time, drawing me into it by the power of his presence. We’ve been here before, and no doubt we’ll be back here again, but in this particular moment all the tenses have been laid out side by side. The sensation is all encompassing, as though one had stepped momentarily into a parallel universe, and for a long time it made me intensely anxious, as if I were under the influence of an unknown drug; now I relax into it, enjoy it even, knowing that the sense of circularity will increase as we follow the same route towards drunkenness and listen to the same stories that, like children, we want to hear again precisely because we already know them by heart.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Francis is saying, peering round at all the other, mostly elderly diners chatting away animatedly in the room’s pinkish haze, ‘I think I’ll move into a hotel like this just so that I have a place to die in. I love the atmosphere of these luxury hotels, though I suppose with the way the economy is going and everything else, they won’t exist for much longer.’

  ‘I’m trying to work out the feeling of circularity I have when we meet, Francis,’ I say, buoyed by the Burgundy but aware that Francis gets impatient with this kind of talk, which he tends to condemn as ‘mystical’. ‘I don’t know if it’s just a strong feeling of continuity, but it’s almost as if nothing much has happened since I first came here with you in the early sixties.’

  ‘Well, perhaps nothing has happened. Nothing changes much,’ Francis says, quite loudly, in one of those silences that happen in crowded rooms. ‘I still masturbate, you know, even at my age. And I still prefer the arsehole to the cunt. I don’t think those kinds of things ever really change. After all, if you think about it, life is just a series of moments. It’s no more than that. But you can’t even really talk about it, because you’re part of the whole thing and you’ve got nothing you can compare it with. It’s just an extended moment between birth and death. And then we go out on to the great compost heap of the world. We don’t know much but I think we do know that. Now, what do you think we should drink with the partridge?’

  Chastened by this forthright declaration, I scurry back to my Boswellian role and steer the conversation round to his new paintings, several of which I’ve seen in the colour transparencies that have been sent to the magazine. I’m wondering whether Francis’s old spirit of self-criticism is still as sharp and whether he shares at all my suspicion that, in his attempt to condense and refine, the imagery has become overly ethereal. But as we talk I sense that like most painters he is convinced that his very latest paintings are his best, and it occurs to me that perhaps, with the physical effort that his large canvases require, he has reached an age when destroying a large part of his output is no longer viable.

  ‘The thing is, Michael,’ he says, ‘that images just drop into me like slides. One image breeds others in me. When I say that, I’m certainly not saying I’m what’s called inspired. I just think I’m receptive to these kinds of things. I usually know what I want to do the moment I start working, but it’s how to do it, how can I achieve this thing technically, that is the problem. And of course one’s always hoping that this one marvellous image that’s both absolutely factual and deeply mysterious will come up, just rising like that out of one’s unconscious with all its freshness locked like a foam around it, that will cancel all the previous images out. That’s why one goes on, of course, hoping for the one image that sums everything up. But in the end it’s just an impossibility to do.’

  ‘Are you aware at all when you’re painting of a link between your own experience, your own life, and the image you’re trying to bring about?’ I ask, a bit self-conscious about having fallen back so naturally into interviewer mode.

  ‘I’m not conscious of anything really if the work is going well. As you know, I’m only painting for myself, painting to surprise and excite myself. And I’m always surprised when anyone else is interested in what I do or actually wants to have a picture of mine. I’m sure my painting comes out of my life. In a sense I have actually painted my life, but only in a sense because painting, art itself, is a very artificial thing. I’m not sure many people see that because very few people actually have an eye for painting. One day, in fifty or a hundred years’ time, people will see just how simple my distortions are. And sometimes, when I hear other artists and critics and so on talking, I think I come from an ancient simplicity.’

  ‘You’ve talked to me quite a lot about your life, but there are still huge periods and whole aspects to it that I know nothing about.’

  ‘Well, this is the problem,’ Francis says. ‘I probably could tell someone what’s called the whole story if they could be bothered to listen. But that’s not it. The thing is you would have to know how to present these things. They mean nothing, naturally, unless they’re presented in a particular way. You see, it sounds terribly vain but even though the times I’ve lived through have been extraordinary, I think I myself run deeper. Deeper than the moeurs I’ve lived through. But I think it would take a Proust to be able really to record all that. It would take a real work of art . . . Now, why don’t you finish your glass and have some more?’

  Jill and I have found a flat overlooking the second, inner courtyard of a building in the Marais that dates back to the fifteenth century, when it was an inn called L’Auberge du Lion and catered mainly to pilgrims setting off on the route to Compostela. There is an ancient canopied well going back even further, and all around the uneven cobblestone yard, between the fig tree and the rhododendrons, there are dismounting posts for people arriving on horseback. Despite the increasing pressure of getting Art International out without compromising too much on our original ideals of quality and independence, as well as ensuring we don’t run up insurmountable debts, we are very happy. Jill has always made it clear that she wants children (her mother confides with a laugh that Jill has a ‘five-year plan’ for me in mind), and since I haven’t the faintest idea what that involves, or certainly how it involves me, I’ve never had any particular issue with it. When Jill announces she is pregnant, I am thrilled and delighted, although I do wonder whether the magazine, which has already survived most other tests, could cope with the arrival of children.

  I continue to go to London, often on magazine business. We have a new number coming out on modern art museums, and I’m interviewing several prominent directors, including one in London who has never given me the time of day before but who is suddenly all over me as we talk for publication and who, I predict, will cut me again once I am no longer of obvious use. For the issue we are preparing specially on him, I also interview Francis, who always talks well on these occasions, although he suddenly waxes very bitchy about what he calls Matisse’s ‘squalid little forms’; since this remark has nothing to do with the main interview I edit it out in the published version. Francis invites me to lunch at Wiltons for the following day and, knowing how punctual he is, I get there early and grow increasingly concerned when he doesn’t turn up at the appointed hour; I sit fiddling with my starched napkin, watching equal numbers of vaguely familiar, shifty-looking TV person
alities and less familiar but ebullient politicians arrive. Francis says Wiltons is a restaurant for dukes and picture dealers, but the only person I really recognize, because of his signature head of hair, is Michael Heseltine, who is giving lunch to an overawed-looking man with no hair. I feel a bit overawed myself, because I can’t afford to eat here on my own dollar and I’m wondering how I can make the least embarrassing exit. Then a few minutes later José comes in, with Francis following shortly in his wake. Francis seems surprised to see me, although we have made a firm date over the phone, and I realize he must have forgotten and thought he was having lunch with José alone. Francis’s memory is getting less and less reliable, which is hardly surprising, especially if he was out drinking to all hours. Feeling distinctly de trop I try to extricate myself from this tryst, but neither man will accept my bowing out, although that does not stop them from becoming totally absorbed in a lengthy, delicate billing and cooing. I sit through the meal, which seems to take for ever, like a maiden aunt there to ensure that the young couple do not get up to anything untoward.

  I get a message from Francis that evening suggesting dinner at Bibendum for the morrow. I reflect on how much of Francis’s life takes place, like his pictures, within four walls, from the studio to the restaurant and club, then into a taxi’s solid interior and back again; I’ve almost never spent time with him outside, even in a street, let alone a garden, a park or the open fields. I like the idea of Bibendum because it’s off the usual West End beat and housed in an architecturally unclassifiable Edwardian building that used to be the headquarters of the Michelin Tyre Company. When I arrive, I notice Francis no longer has the rapturous expression he was wearing yesterday, so I imagine a tiff of some sort may have occurred between him and José. He also seems to be very short of breath, and his hair has a very odd, bright orange tinge which presumably means he got things wrong while dyeing it. Over the years I have seen Francis drunk and sober, in and out of love, warm and cold, so I don’t really think much about the veiled sullenness he is giving off in waves. I notice he has a rim of dried red wine, like a lipstick, round his mouth, so I suppose he’s been doing some heavy drinking. Whatever his mood, he remains the attentive host as always, and we agree on a simple but perfect menu of dressed crab and turbot.