Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  As we make our way through the champagne, white Burgundy and fine Bordeaux, I keep hoping the conversation will free up but it continues to be arduous. I ask Francis a few circumspect questions, but he keeps his answers to a clipped minimum. No, he doesn’t agree with this, and no, he’s not interested in that at all; he actually loathes that. Given that I’m highly pleased with life at the moment and should like to share my enthusiasm with Francis, thus hopefully lifting him out of his doldrums, I decide to tell him about our first child being on the way. After all, he appears to have accepted my getting married easily enough, so why would he not be pleased at the natural outcome? I drop the news casually into the conversation and expect ironic politesse or at most a veiled barb. And so it proves, at first.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s a kind of immortality,’ Francis says. ‘A kind of immortality,’ he adds, clearly indicating that he considers it the lowest, most common form of immortality.

  I notice that he has gone pale, but I think he may perhaps be thinking of all the new responsibilities a child will mean for me, and possibly that I won’t be so available to meet and talk and go out on the town as before. But I feel sure it won’t change anything in his life and that he’ll probably not give it a second thought.

  I try to set the conversation on a new course, introducing a little Paris art-world gossip as well as recommending a good if rather austere Breton fish restaurant I’ve just found, although I’m not sure Francis would care for the trawling nets that have been draped over the walls or the bibs and mallets handed out for you to crack your own crab. But to my surprise Francis keeps coming back to the news of the forthcoming birth, as if suddenly he couldn’t think of anything else. As he mentions it, he becomes increasingly agitated, tugging the whole time at his shirt collar. I begin to panic, thinking that he might start suffocating. He’s talking as if this birth is an affront to him, a direct, deadly insult. I have never seen him this angry ever, and he just goes on and on, getting paler and more vitriolic by the minute. I am deeply alarmed, but I can’t think of anything to say or to do, so I just sit there under the onslaught as if it were no more than my just deserts.

  ‘And I hope,’ Francis repeats, his face going white with fury, ‘I just hope that if it’s a monster or something, or even if the thing doesn’t have all what’s called its five fingers and all its five toes you’ll just do it in and get rid of it. Do you see? Do you see what I mean? Just do it in and get rid of it altogether.’

  We get up and go down the Bibendum stairs in silence. I can hear Francis struggling for breath as he slowly takes one step at a time. I’m stunned by the ferocity of his attack as well as worried as to how he will manage the short walk back to the studio. Once we’re outside the restaurant, I ask Francis if I can drop him at Reece Mews.

  ‘I’d rather walk,’ he says curtly, turning on his heel.

  I watch him disappear into the summer night, the anger almost visible, like a halo around his taut, receding frame.

  Eventually I hail a taxi and I ask the driver to take me back via Pelham Crescent so that I can check if Francis is alright. Halfway along the curved street the cab’s headlights pick him up, white-faced and tense, leaning against a tree with his asthma reliever clamped to his mouth as if he were fighting for every last breath.

  Watching my daughter Clio being born and hearing her first cry transforms my entire life from one instant to the next. This tiny bundle separates everything that Jill and I have known, individually or together, into a before and after the momentous fact of her arrival. It’s unreal how much has changed already and how much more, that’s already obvious, her existence will continue to change and shape ours from now on. I am overjoyed, in a giddy, confused way, but more than that I’m overawed. Although I’m fond of children I haven’t thought much about them before, since neither the magazine nor marriage has really altered my deep-rooted bachelor attitudes. But it’s clearer by the day now, as light-headed celebration gives way to hands-on baby care and sleepless nights, that nothing will ever be the same again. Art International, meanwhile, has not gone away. And as I get back, dazed and elated, into the old publishing routine and go through the motions of being as involved as ever, I wonder how much longer Jill and I can afford to have both such a demanding profession and a family.

  Devastated though I was by Francis’s unexpected, venomous attack, it pales in the face of this new phenomenon called Clio, who chuckles and bawls by turns, keeping us parents in a permanent froth of pride and anxiety. I am too caught up by the demands of suddenly becoming a father – was the paediatrician’s appointment confirmed? did I buy the right-size nappies? – to think much about his ferocious reaction. At odd moments the memory of that white mask of fury returns, not least when Clio kicks her feet in the air or clutches my thumb with all her five tiny fingers. But however much I turn it over in my mind, I understand less and less why the news of Clio’s birth should have roused Francis to such embittered spite.

  Did he feel I had betrayed him by going over into a heterosexual zone where he couldn’t follow or exert control? Was he jealous of the fact that I could have a child and he could or would not? Had the very notion of new life as his own life is drawing to a close touched him to the quick? Or, weird as it seems, could he have simply felt he was losing me?

  I still go back to London regularly, mostly on magazine business. Francis and I still meet, as if nothing has happened. The incident is simply never mentioned again. I’m aware that Francis is too dandyishly steely to show any wound he can hide. He appears as welcoming and affable as ever.

  What strikes me most, though, is how contented and mellow Francis currently looks, about as far from the spitting rage I last saw him in as could be imagined, even though he is now into his eighties, a prospect he dreaded volubly. I have known him at every extreme of emotion from the highest high to the blackest low, but one word that would never have occurred to me when describing him is ‘happy’.

  Yet Francis is happy, almost ecstatic, and when we meet one evening for dinner – ironically enough at Bibendum, where a few months ago he tore into me so savagely – I think back to certain moments when he’s been exhilarated by success in love, work or gambling, but I can’t recall a time when his mercurial temperament and approaching drunkenness didn’t threaten to tip elation ineluctably over into despair.

  Now, on the other hand, as we make our way through the usual extravagant banquet, the mood is evenly and serenely joyous. Francis seems to be radiating some kind of inner luminosity – words, and a concept, that he would normally be the first to reject with withering scorn.

  Just like his recent paintings, he exudes a calm, almost mystical aura of acceptance, as if the conflicts that had kept his whole being stretched for so long have been resolved. The pink-cheeked older man sitting opposite me, exuding bonhomie, is so far removed from the white-faced prophet of hate I encountered here before that for a moment I wonder whether I didn’t dream the whole nightmare up.

  Bemused, I can only speculate that Francis’s new radiance comes from the deep harmony that falling in love brings. But I know better than to inquire, just as I know better, however much my cheeky nature eggs me on to do so, than to ask sarcastically, ‘You haven’t gone religious, have you, Francis?’ – as Francis put it to me when I was so obviously in the first flush of falling in love with Jill.

  After dinner, we walk down Pelham Crescent towards the studio, stopping almost exactly where I had seen Francis struggling for breath after our row. We look up and admire the sweep of immaculate, white townhouses silhouetted against the night sky.

  ‘Cecil Beaton used to live in one of those houses,’ Francis says to me casually. ‘He always took such enormous care of himself. But in the end it didn’t do much good. He was only in his mid-seventies when he died.’

  A couple of months later I am back in London briefly, but this time en route to New York. Usually I go to New York in order to drum up advertising, but now I have a more sombre plan in mind. Glob
al recession has struck, and almost overnight our revenue from gallery advertising has dropped by over half. At the same time, after some five years’ struggle, our whole staff is exhausted and generally disgruntled by working ever-longer hours for dwindling salaries.

  The writing is on the wall. Neither Mariella’s bounty nor our own meagre revenues will suffice. If we do not find a radical solution – such as getting ourselves absorbed into a bigger, more resilient publishing group – we will plunge headlong into debt, a spectre I have so far kept at bay. A couple of the big US magazine owners are notoriously passionate about art. Could I not interest one of them in clasping our impeccably high-class, if indelibly unprofitable, publication to their wealthy bosom?

  I can hardly pass through London without giving Francis a call. The last time we spoke I mentioned the difficulties Art International had been going through, and he was immediately sympathetic. ‘The trouble with those things is that they never make any money,’ he commented, then promised to see whether he could find a backer or a purchaser for us. He seems to know everyone in London and has suggested several people, including Terence Conran and Richard Branson, who might take an interest in it. Although I can’t see what any of them would do with an art magazine, I’m sufficiently desperate to encourage the idea.

  I haven’t heard from Francis in a while now, but when I think of him I still see the joyous, serenely inner-lit figure who sat opposite me in Bibendum. I’m delighted at the thought that he has found such obvious contentment at this late juncture of his life, and I assume it will carry him through the old age he so dreads.

  I call his number and hearing it ring for a long time I am about to hang up when Francis suddenly answers.

  ‘I can’t come out,’ he says, faintly. ‘I’ve been ill. Really ill.’

  I can hear him gasping for breath.

  ‘I’ve got no energy,’ Francis says. ‘I just have to stay in.’

  I joke weakly that he’s always had more energy than all of the rest of us put together, but I hear only a soft gasp, like a sigh, at the other end.

  I ask if I can come to see him and bring him something – some Krug and caviare, perhaps – but I already know he will refuse. Only the sound of choked breathing comes down the line. I feel confused and embarrassed as I hang up, almost as if I’d been talking to someone impersonating the quick, alert Francis Bacon I know.

  Once in New York, I’m caught up in a series of negotiations that always look as if they are going somewhere until they come to an abrupt, definitive end. ‘It’s a tough call,’ my New York friends tell me blankly when I ask them what they think my chances are of being bought up.

  Luckily I’m staying in comfort on Sutton Place with my old friend Marjorie Loggia, in whom I can confide everything, and when I return from yet another series of fruitless meetings she is never short of a play or a party where we can go and shake off the frustrations of the day.

  Even if I do not seem to be getting anywhere, not finding the generous patron who will relieve me of the burdens of publishing and allow me to go back to writing, the only thing I really want to do and in the end what I do best, the weather in New York is scintillating, with high blue skies and bright spring sunshine. And if I think of Francis, which I don’t often as I race from one high-perched office with its amazing, sparkling views over the city to another, I assume that with his extraordinary resilience he will have bounced back by now and become his old ebullient self.

  So I am not in the least prepared when I come down from Marjorie’s apartment one shining morning in late April 1992 and buy the New York Times and on the front page, between war reports and an update on riots, see the headline ‘Francis Bacon, 82, Artist of the Macabre, Dies’.

  It’s like a punch in the stomach, coming unexpectedly hard out of the blue, making me feel weak and nauseous. I take the paper into my local coffee shop and stare at the front page, trying to make sense of the bold print. I remember Francis told me he was ‘really ill’ when I called him in London, but although I knew he always talked dispassionately about his own health it hadn’t occurred to me for a moment that he could be in any way close to death. I was just waiting for him to recover, so we could resume that marvellous round of the best that friendship and conversation, drink and food could offer.

  I study the short obituary again, as if it might yield some hidden information. For a moment I feel stupidly pleased that Francis made it into the most important international news, right up there with all the other big events of the day. Then I go into the rest room, see my pale face in the mirror and dry-retch until my stomach won’t heave any more.

  Epilogue

  In the months and then the years that followed, I missed Francis deeply and sometimes even bitterly, especially during the big-money wrangles over his estate and the decision to uproot his studio from London to Dublin, where he happened to be born but never set foot thereafter.

  I always knew that Francis would be irreplaceable, not least because he was so unlike anybody else I had ever come across, and since his death that day I have tried repeatedly to work out what set him apart. The best definition I have found is that even while he was alive Francis already belonged to history. He often remarked that in his work he felt he was ‘following a long call from antiquity’. This never struck me as portentous, as it would have done in the mouths of many artists I know. It struck me as a statement of fact. Something in Francis himself reached back to the ancient mysteries, like the Sphinx or the Oracle of Delphi, reverberating across the centuries with their enigma intact.

  The mythical dimension that marked Francis apart in life has continued to grow. His work poses the most searching questions about existence, questions that are asked from one civilization to the next because no lasting answer is ever found. Why has man been created, alone among the animals on earth, in the acute consciousness of his mortality? Should we not assume our animality, display our passions and contradictions without shame – openly pant, roar and scream? What meaning, if there is a meaning at all, can we attribute to our brief span?

  Francis incorporated the tensions of being human into the very grain of his paint. Examined close up, the swirling impasto appears encoded with specific evidence, specific human traces that continue to rehearse and echo our fraught existence. That is perhaps the underlying reason why his figures, spun out of this infinitely suggestive stuff, come across as a concentrate of all the impulses and confusions of our flesh, unresolved and shockingly alive.

  I lost a father when Francis died. But I myself became a father. However belatedly, I also became my own man.

  With Francis dead and my independence fully established, I might have expected that he would fade from my life and be replaced by other interests, since I have always been imaginatively engaged in the whole of art history, from antiquity to the medieval, from the early Renaissance to our own times.

  Over the intervening years I also had the chance to change career radically. I was invited at various points to write film scripts in Hollywood, manage an Old Masters gallery in New York and join one of the international auction houses. I dithered, playing for time and hoping for a portent to show the way, until the opportunities disappeared.

  In truth I was savouring another kind of freedom at that time since, shortly after Francis went, Art International went too. No angel for the ailing magazine had been found, and rather than watch over its decline I suspended publication, parted with the staff and spent an awkward interval refunding subscribers and winding the company up. Having emerged from the magazine’s ruins, I felt shaken but liberated. Meanwhile, our son Alex was born: with a growing family to support I cobbled together a mélange of highbrow art journalism and lifestyle pieces for glossy American magazines to provide a basic subsistence. And I didn’t think or look much beyond that.

  But in death as in life, Francis did not go away. My reputation and career proved too closely entwined with his whole trajectory and aura as an artist. A variety of people – some convinced th
ey owned an unattributed ‘Bacon’, others with Bacon book, show or film projects – began beating a path to my door. I also published articles about Bacon in the press and got involved in curating museum exhibitions of Bacon’s paintings as well as writing catalogue prefaces for them. After a time, I came to put on shows of my own. For Valencia and Paris, I assembled a selection of works entitled ‘The Sacred and the Profane’. For a museum in England and two others subsequently in the US, I took the theme of ‘Francis Bacon in the 1950s’ to highlight paintings from that amazing decade when Bacon was still struggling with the terribilità of his subject matter and the technique required to convey it. Then, in Rome, I was fortunate enough to work on an exhibition that brought Caravaggio and Bacon face to face among the other masters, including Titian, that line the Galleria Borghese’s marble walls. When the exhibition opened to great fanfare and Roman-style rejoicing, my only regret was that Francis had not received an art-historical tribute of this significance during his lifetime.

  Eventually I was also asked to write Bacon’s biography, and although I felt as well placed as anyone to take this on, it became painfully evident once I got into it that, for all the areas of his life that Francis had talked to me about, there were many more he had never touched on and for which no reliable witnesses or documents remained. It had not occurred to me before that he had so deliberately restricted information about his life, with his biography in exhibition catalogues being limited to a single, curt phrase: ‘Lives and works in London’.