The Death of Francis Bacon

by Max Porter

  Great thumping load of brass and timpani falling off the wall crashing onto a major chord:

  He knew what had to be done.

  He gripped the hilt of his sword and turned the point against his stomach.

  Sí. Okay.

  Intenta descansar.

  Four

  Oil on canvas, 14 x 12 in.

  Take a seat why don’t you?

  Are we rolling?

  Will you take out any really daft bits?

  It’s an attempt to get at the sense of what is looming up behind the person being hurt.

  It’s an attempt to keep the breast meat of the bird moist while the skin is crispy.

  It’s an attempt to express my feelings about a painter I have had a long unfashionable fixation with.

  It’s an attempt to get art history out of the way and let the paintings speak.

  It’s an attempt to hold catastrophe still so you can get a proper sniff at it.

  (The artist rolls his hand as if curtseying in the old fashion.)

  I see it as a fact or thing, surrounded by other facts or things, from the world of facts or things and I refuse to say any more until …

  (The artist twists on the sofa. Fidgets. Pats his pockets. Gets up. Finds packet.)

  … Until I’ve found my blasted ciggies!

  (Canned laughter)

  Mussolini or Bacon?

  Go, go, we’re up and running now, let’s talk until lunch. Bacon! Let’s have it.

  He is fundamentally a colourist, in the childish sense. He draws his simple pictures and he colours them in. At his most sophisticated he has been granted stickers:

  Red arrows,

  Bulbs,

  Wounds, cricket pads, little bits of lonely nonsense architecture.

  He has fun sticking these flat gimmicks on his fake figures, or behind them.

  Sometimes he sets aside his juvenile addictions long enough to look hard at a face or ponder patiently a colour field, and these are cheap trick successes, related to Heal’s, Habitat, Home Interiors Magazine more than to the great painters he slavishly imitates.

  Sister, you’re giving me a terrible desire to punch something.

  He treats his heroes as he treats a scientific magazine or a porno, or a student’s guide to Western Art, just a glance, a cut, a rip, a borrow, then binned, denied, questioned with no ear for reply, and it is tiring, year after year, Bacon’s baby struggles with his own limitations, it is exhausting to behold such huge quantities of paint being wasted.

  Enough!

  Sister Hurting?

  Francis Almost. Go on. A little more.

  His distortions are not snobbery, or innovation, they are lies. He is a flamboyant and brilliant liar who got lucky and found his medium.

  At first he worried me with fear

  I was timid, scared and young

  My shoulders were too rounded

  To bear his cat-rough tongue

  The purple, the orange, the shocking pink, the great lilac mistake, the poor man got so used to seeing his huge paintings in huge galleries, pumped up with huge space, huge palettes, huge cheques, he egged himself on to absolute banality, temper tantrums that he can’t actually make a figure move, and then his best pictures looked familiar, and fetched a pretty penny, because they were copies of his earlier worst, his sturdier work, his curdling burst of fifties kitsch, his own podgy face trademarked, pretending it confronted death when all it did was illustrate again and again a lazy fear of it.

  And then he promised me sleep

  I was brazen, fat and old

  My hand was shaking all day long

  His salty seed was cold.

  Here is a bespoke interview style, three bottles, three courses, tempt me down the garden path, gossip about my friends, slander the Americans, bravo hard heart, you treat, you card.

  In the end he is the great skiver, oil paint his lame accomplice, the marketplace his grim enabler.

  Baby fear of it?

  Baby fear of it.

  Do I seem babyish? Frightened?

  Sylvester was always very good at making me feel that what I was saying was interesting. You might indulge me in that regard. You might let me smoke a while, and steer me back to mouths or openings, popes or noticing. No?

  Enfermera.

  Arrow in the thigh, ‘kitsch’; arrow in the belly, ‘banal’; one right through the neck, gasping for breath, gargling blood, ‘slavishly imitating’; argh, my dear, can’t you see I’m dying here, thwump, straight to the heart, ‘illustration’; there’s no recovery, the vital organ, the martyr Francis tilts his rubber jaw to heaven and dies, spurts the viewer with cum and vermilion.

  Hermana?

  Sister?

  Sí. There is nothing here of any value. We try again. As you teach me.

  Intenta descansar.

  Five

  Oil on canvas, 78 x 58 in.

  Take a seat why don’t you?

  Perhaps lean back into the swan, à la contorted boy into falling drapery. Now, because I like you, this will be difficult.

  I’m going to tip you forward out of the frame and whip your buttock with lead white to give a sense of fight.

  You’re going to be a person spilling out of a trap, and I’m going to be a person who is fatherly, fuckable, and this is going to upset you, exhilarate me and interest scholars.

  I’m this person, pinned to the wall.

  Saskia. Hitching up her undergarments. A fag butt on the shit sheen of the Serpentine.

  You – telling everyone again and again how spontaneous you are, as if the whole golden edifice crumbles if they find out you’ve done some drawings.

  You – saying ‘Friends are thieves of time’ again and again until you have none.

  Yes, bresaola, radish, parmigiana, the little Italian place, eating whatever I wanted, ordering for myself, not trying to charm anyone, me, impervious to charm, myself, but seeing him in the reflection and being utterly delighted to discover I am smiling.

  I am smile. Venus and Cupid.

  Anyone but Bacon who sold himself to bankers like all good painters before him, but found himself alone, unable to breathe, in Madrid.

  A stained bump of damp plaster on the ceiling becomes a face, becomes a chubby putto, becomes the oversized child I fancifully yearned to care for, becomes hands and feet sucked free, pinkly modelled in the room and dribble dripping onto my waxy almost death mask and down, down, lands on me softly, pulls down the sheet, so hungry, hurry yanking, questing, opening my pyjamas and searching for the nipple, upside-down angle Veronese staged or trompe l’oeil, the baby on strings is the baby on a different plane, language, the dying painter is scarcely an image, never the two shall meet except to feed, latched on, glugging, sucking, me flat and mathematical like Mantegna’s Dead Christ, the feeding child rampant on the diagonal then gone.

  Just an ochre blob on the ceiling of room 417, Clínica Ruber.

  Is he gone? Blanco?

  Sí.

  It’s done, then. I gave them an awful lot of money. Would have liked to ride on my bicycle with my big brother Harley.

  The painter Francis Bacon or the corpse Mussolini? (Do you think you are the loneliest man in the world?)

  Can’t you say, instead, Your father or horses? And I would reply quick as a flash, Oh horses, I never spare my father a thought, but I think of horses often. I invented things to make the interviews interesting, and sometimes, as I said them, I realised they were true, intoxicating ways to think oneself into shape, very much like painting.

  Anyway, anything but Bacon, por favor. Torment. I am ever so sick of myself.

  Close your eyes, we will now paint, together, this expensive scandalous canvas and you can prepare your lies (I didn’t think I just made, it was unforeseen, painting is being handed things, I don’t know where ideas come from, compelled by inner storms to dollop a swastika on), poor muse-stuck bubble-dweller, budge over, six foot square, herringbone, tight and ready, room for the two of us, the two of
them.

  Subject.

  You can’t stop thinking about that photo, you’ve thought about it for years, Mussolini and Petacci, posed embrace, broken faces, her little row of teeth, his great rubberised lake of violence, the human face punished to formless.

  I think we have them smack bang in the middle on the circular bed (which is your pout).

  I think we have a receding diagonal frame, with the upside-down corpses, put there for their own compositional protection.

  Green metre squared. Thick, weirdly stubborn colour. Obstreperous. A 7 p.m. colour. A two-men-talking-in-the-study colour. Easy drinkable claret and someone senior gripping my wrist colour. Hate to admit it, English colour.

  Green against cream.

  Racing green, dated green, belatedly I worked out how to dilute the paste and fill the cut-circle space with it: green.

  Green baize, and a cross, and a rose. They litter the foreground and gather pace with the sense everyone ought to bugger off while I’m making a good/bad picture, this one is becoming extremely good/bad, won’t eat for a while, smoke two packs of ciggies and get this right, little bits of could be bone, little folds of could be mouth, little curl of could be tenderness, sleepwalking into this.

  Crowd versus body, these two dead animals, we will need a very clean world to set these two copulating heaps of flesh upon. Hooks perhaps, or beige.

  Show me nature.

  I can’t. I’m the least green painter in the history of marks.

  (cheat)

  Show me how this mess steps aside and lets you make a perfect surface of unbroken colour.

  It’s not for watching.

  (lie)

  I’m asleep. Find me a painter alive today who can do what I can do in the time I can do it, no help. Alone.

  Sí. Intenta descansar.

  Six

  Oil on canvas, 37 x 29 in.

  Take a seat wh

  y don’t you?rattdpissed as a afrt

  Siddow

  nstand upBackto me. Great long

  gdrooping fagash, fooping drag ashnever

  know what hethinking. Whatsehithiking. Perfect

  arse run bead a

  spiton run bead glob

  into hn and one fingerup knuckle deep and

  slappingthumb f

  uckinghim holding his

  cheek corner of my eyeon

  Eye on the picture,

  passis

  pass his cig back aroundandstarts

  wankinghishimself

  mightbesick start wallp

  wallopsd fingfuckerng him

  punch hard

  gruning

  hmmff

  sitback on me armunder and

  grbahis balls grb his

  balls take a seat whydonbtyou

  take a seat whyd ohntyou

  Francis Bacon or Caravaggio?

  Wait. Same set of images, sparkling sober, fresh out of the shower, ready to work.

  His back to me, George, playing at being angry, clutching his cigarette, I know what he’s thinking, undo belt, pull down trousers, reach around and out springs his hardon, briskly sets to wanking, he reaches back around and holds the filter and I take a long sucking drag on his fag, reaching for it like a feeding animal, and he puts one foot forward slightly, lifts his arse and I spit on my fingers and work one in, George grunts, palm up-as-a-cup middle finger fucking him to the knuckle as hard as I can and he drops the cigarette butt, reaches round and grabs my hair, too rough, I pull my finger out with a wet clack and slap his hand away, shove him, stupid oaf, dropping a lit cigarette in the studio, fucking imbecile, and he moans and empties two tablespoons of himself into his hand.

  Francis Bacon or Caravaggio?

  Wait. Same set of images, ten years later, three six-foot canvases, you are a

  strong

  Sister Tacky

  Francis Elastic

  man

  got me held here, like this, je suis un pédéraste, less, turn around a bit, tu es un souvenir, wrestler on the sprung boards, can’t really work out whether to put a nice navy blue behind, him out there, me in here, scared of each other, him in front, playing to the gallery, and me biting down on my shirt collar, pain like a stabbing in my kidneys, nothing elegiac or profound just I would’ve given you a key you daft sod, I would’ve given you a key you silly bugger, I’m crying all over my supper, I would have tilted you forward out of the middle panel and out into the lap of the beholder, you could have used a key, you silly daft soft toy …

  … meet you in the gift shop, tray English, canvas tote, Freud on a napkin, Bacon cashmere throttle the nanny, Spanish Annie.

  Sister Tacky

  Francis Plastic

  Caravaggio or Bacon?

  Caravaggio please, but three, and hung high, and walking left to right, keeping the middle still.

  Barge any old farts out of the way, I’m a fucking artist and I’m trying to tell a story.

  One: How to represent a leaden headache that has plagued him from Napoli up to Porto Ercole, easy peasy, lift his cranium off, fold pink brain outwards and smear it on the greasy hair, one eye socket hacked open with a sharp object – germy – the other inert, fallow-deer-dead, hiding from the sun, which offends him, suggest bone where nose was, suggest smirking guilty grimace of poisoned pain that would kill him, leave actual paint on his cause of death, actual paint in his actual bloodstream.

  Two: Wounds. Typical of me, all the gore, special effects, now I am the empty-head celebrity meat master of macabre, lead in his wounds, champagne, doomed. Sticky, smells like turpfish, curdled cheese burps, trying to hold this still, just ill red holes in the dark, weeping, but there’s a sense of still-living in the pink, despite the static sarsen weight of it, sunburnt Roman waiting to die in the Tuscan night, why not fleck the lip of the …

  (Is the patient with you? Keep still please, while we’re in the middle image. Can you hold the phone to his ear, Caravaggio, tick, definitely him he has distinctive death rattle, abdominal pain, cramps and vomiting, tick, discoloration of the urine and faeces, tick.)

  … foul-smelling injury to make it shine, make-up, still wet when the chatty boys from the Marlborough came to pick up. Take me while I’m wet, prendimi signore, sell me quick, I am merely the middle. Expensive cologne to cover it up. Hate myself.

  Three: Rolling over into the sheer textual left to right the line between his work and mine, several centuries of light on human flesh, real people in oil, roiling with the worst moods and most painful injuries and hyperbolic self-pitying praise-hungry mania to ever afflict a genius with a brush and a fight-me flush. I’m not happy. Paying actors. Posing. Less and less surprised by light.

  I want him leaving. I want the eye to trundle off past him. I’m inside the bloody thing watching you regard it, late sixties, hearing you say it’s the best work I’ve done.

  Back around to the left, glancing off the face of the person in pain, as if the mouth is the habit the eye has to kick. I’m inside the bloody thing watching you regard it, early eighties, hearing you say it’s the worst work I’ve done.

  No, not this time. I want you lost, lover and critic kicked off the gum jetty at the end of the triptych licked or on your knees, back to me saying Please, I did it to hurt you, to spoil Paris, and me saying CAN’T HEAR YOU, I did it because it was easy, your profile, cut out, ready, and everyone else was dying and I had a horrid stabbing realistic knack of surviving. Endless errors, no confusion, gag me, stop me speaking thinking about you, stop me working.

  One two three. Nothing but pain.

  Sí.

  I’m die-ready.

  Sí. Soon, piggy.

  Intenta descansar.

  Seven

  Oil on canvas, 77 x 52 in.