Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  ‘The thing is, Michael,’ Francis remarks diffidently, ‘one can’t really talk about painting, only around it. After all if you could explain it why would you bother to do it?’ He’s brought us both a very strong cup of tea and we sit perched at either end of the soft, squidgy green sofa. ‘Those things are very strange. I’ve no idea how you could present them in a factual way in your interview and yet make them a little bit interesting. That’s what I feel so often in painting. I mean I know exactly what I want to do, but I can’t find the way in which this thing can be made. I want a deeply ordered image, you see, but I want it to come about by chance. You always hope that the paint will do more for you, but mostly it’s like painting a wall when the very first brushstroke you do gives a sudden shock of reality that is cancelled out as you paint the whole surface.

  ‘What one wants in art nowadays is a shorthand where the sensation comes across right away. You have to give things right away, otherwise people can’t be bothered. All you can ever do, obviously, is to work as close to your instinct as possible. What I always hope for – this sounds terribly pretentious, perhaps one always sounds pretentious when one’s talking about oneself – is this one absolutely perfect image which will cancel all the others out. Make this thing like an idol which would blink out all kinds of other beautiful images. When I’m away from the studio, abroad for instance, I keep thinking how I might do this thing. I was walking round those formal gardens at Versailles not very long ago and all these images kept simply dropping in to my mind, just like that, one after another, like slides. Well, it’s marvellous when that happens, of course, and I couldn’t wait to get back to London and work.

  ‘What one longs to do above all, I think, is to reinvent appearance, make it stranger, and more exciting. That’s what’s so extraordinary about Velázquez: he reinvented the very outline of appearance. You only have to look at the way things are in his paintings. He managed to come back to appearance by way of something that lay quite outside the kind of illustration that was expected of him at the time. But it’s a hair’s-breadth thing, particularly nowadays. If you go too far, you just fall into abstraction.

  ‘You would love somehow to make this marvellous, poignant image and at the same time elevate it on to a kind of stage. So that without using any kind of narrative, you managed to fill it with all sorts of implications. I myself am always looking as I go to and fro every morning in my cage here for ways in which I might make sensation come across with as much immediacy as possible. But this is only something you can do for yourself. I can only paint for myself, to excite myself, you see, and I’m always surprised when other people are interested in it. All painting, well all art, is about sensation. Or at least it should be. After all, life itself is about sensation.’

  Francis produces this last phrase like a rabbit out of a hat which makes me laugh, which in turn seems to please him. He goes padding off in his silent desert boots and comes back with a frosted bottle of Krug and two glasses.

  ‘Now where shall we have dinner?’ he asks, as if that is a far more important issue than talking about art and life. He seems almost embarrassed to have talked at length, as if he had been boring me.

  ‘Everything you’ve just said would be really good for my interview,’ I suggest enthusiastically. ‘As long as I can remember it by the time I get back to Cambridge. I’m not sure people have ever thought about art, or even about life, like that up there. It just seems to make so much more sense.’

  ‘Well, it might be just your charm saying that, because one never really manages to say things directly enough,’ Francis says, fingering the thin watch on his wrist with unexpectedly long, thick white fingers. The fingers of a butcher, I find myself thinking. Or even a murderer. ‘Now listen,’ he goes on, ‘the restaurants round here are all rather dreary – there’s something called the Ordinary and I tried it the other day and I have to say it was very ordinary. There’s the Hungry Horse of course but the people who run it now have started drowning everything in these terrible sauces, so shall we find a taxi and see if we can get a table at Sheekey’s? They at least can give you a piece of plain grilled fish. I think I’ve told you about this new friend I have called George, and he happens to terribly like eating there. Would that be a bore for you? I’ve also invited Sonia Orwell, who I think you might quite like.’

  We make our way gingerly down the ship’s ladder and out into the early London evening. It must have rained while we were talking because the cobblestones outside the mews glisten under the street lamps and there is an odd metallic tang to the air. We clamber into a cab which heads nimbly off towards the West End. Francis has gone silent, holding on to the handle above his seat with both meaty hands, apparently lost in thought. I’ve just noticed how smartly dressed he is, in a grey flannel suit with a blue button-down shirt and a black knitted tie, although the desert boots he’s got on make the whole thing look less formal. I’m wearing the best I can muster: a grey polo-neck, a sports jacket I’ve recently dyed dark blue, charcoal trousers and my rather cracked, Italian winkle-pickers. I watch Francis’s profile against the evening light: not exactly handsome, but strong, well carved, like the figurehead on a ship’s prow or a gargoyle sticking out against the elements.

  Francis keeps checking his watch, a clearly expensive wafer-thin model on a gold strap, but we arrive early at the restaurant. He is known here and warmly welcomed like a regular, which perhaps he is since he clearly dines as well as lunches out every day. At all events he seems to be treated as a regular wherever we go, I think with admiration and an odd sense of pride. A table is no trouble, of course, and another bottle of Krug arrives in a silver ice bucket. I sense that Francis has not said as much as he would have liked to in our earlier talk, so I try my luck, asking him if he could tell me more. After all, I’ve got a key article for my magazine riding on this.

  ‘Well, I suppose I could what’s called tell all, if anyone could be bothered to listen. Whoever tires of talking about themselves? Although when you hear others droning on you think how dreary you must sound yourself. Anyone’s life sounds dreary, I suppose, unless it’s presented in a certain way. That’s the thing. At times I do feel there are a great many things I’d like to talk about. Growing up in Ireland. And about Berlin, which was very, very curious at the time I happened to be there. Or about why I think painting is in the situation it is in now. Those kinds of things.

  ‘But then, at other times, I wish I’d never let anything about myself out. When I feel that, I only wish that when I die, just before, I’ll be able to see everything to do with me simply blow up. Just like that. Blow up so there’d be nothing left.’

  ‘Could one say that your painting is in some way autobiographical?’ I venture, rather primly.

  ‘Autobiographical? Well yes, inevitably, it’s about my life, at some level. It’s filled with my thoughts about things. And yet when I’m in the middle of it, I forget about everything, about myself and about friends and things that have happened. That might sound as if I’m talking about inspiration, but it’s not that. I mean, most of the time I simply don’t know what I’m doing. I just get the bits of paint down and hope they suggest a way I can make something that looks as if it’s come directly off the nervous system. And if it comes at all, it usually comes very quickly and by a kind of accident. I might be working and thinking “Oh my God, this is awful” and put the brush right through the image I’ve been trying to make and, every now and then, just by chance, with the fluidity of oil paint, that gesture will suggest the image I’ve been looking for all along.

  ‘But there’s no complete explanation as to how these images come up. Otherwise I suppose one wouldn’t bother to try and do them. In my case, I spend a great deal of time looking at things that have no direct relevance to what I want to do or anything and then one of them might crop up, just like that. I think one makes this kind of huge well inside oneself and images keep rising out of it the whole time. But you can’t analyse how, because it’s not really co
nscious. That’s why I say, half the time I don’t know what my painting’s about. I was doing a picture once and looking at a photograph of birds diving into the sea, and for some reason this curious double image came up. I couldn’t really tell you what it is, I mean I think of it as two people moving and it reminds me of certain Greek things too. But I couldn’t explain it.

  ‘D’you know I think one thing about artists – there are very few real artists, of course – is that they remain much more constant to their childhood sensations. Other people often change completely, but artists tend to stay much the way they’ve always been. In my case, I’ve always been obsessed by images. Well, all sorts of things. When I was very young, for instance, I had this obsession with filters, I don’t know why, industrial filters and things. And I couldn’t stop looking at them. I’ve never found out why, it was really rather mad. Though I suppose if you really think about it the body itself is a kind of filter, filtering everything through the whole time.

  ‘Of course I never expected to make a living by painting images, they were simply something that haunted me and that I knew I wanted to do. In that sense, I’ve been very fortunate. It probably won’t last, the way everything’s going. My things probably won’t sell any more. But then if I’m absolutely poor tomorrow, what difference will it make? If I have nothing, well, there it is, I have nothing. It won’t change my life. I’ll go back to being a manservant – because I was someone’s manservant once when I was very young. That’s another story, though – a very funny story, as it happens. But I should still go on painting. I should like to go on just as long as I can move my arm. Because there’s so much I still want to do. Sometimes I get all these ideas for new things, and I think if only I could get them all down in a single image: like slapping a sole on the wall, I’d like to slap this thing down, with all the facts and intuitions in it, and it would be there, with all its bones and things – complete and absolutely perfect.

  ‘I never stop thinking about images, you know, I can’t just sit around and relax. The other night I had this dream, usually I don’t remember them, I was going down a street and my shadow was going along the wall with me and I reached out and tore the shadow off and immediately I thought, ah this might help me with my painting. Of course I probably won’t be able to do anything at all with it – oh good I can see George and Sonia coming in. You’ve been drinking nothing, Michael, have a little more champagne.’

  I look round and see a buxom blonde lady sailing across the room with a pale, athletic-looking younger man in her wake. She’s wearing a cream-coloured shirt buttoned up to the neck and a pleated, grey skirt. Francis makes the introductions, then busies himself filling their glasses from the bottle beside the table and orders some important-sounding Bordeaux as well.

  ‘Almost impossible to find a taxi in this ghastly drizzle,’ Sonia says breathlessly. She takes a lipstick and compact out of her large handbag and quickly refreshes her crimson lips. ‘We thought we were never going to get here, didn’t we, George?’

  ‘Yeh, wasn’t ’alf difficult,’ George agrees shyly, half swallowing his words. He seems to have a speech impediment or even a cleft palate, which makes his thick Cockney accent even more impenetrable. ‘It was orful. Fing is, we nearly didn’t get ’ere.’ Sonia has been seated opposite Francis and next to me. I don’t think she’s even taken in my existence yet, although I’m certainly aware of hers, not only as the wife of the man who wrote Down and Out in Paris and London but as having worked with Cyril Connolly, whom I revere both as an essayist and as the editor of Horizon. I feel overawed to be sitting next to someone who has been at the absolute centre of contemporary literature for so long.

  George, meanwhile, has placed his cigarettes and a chunky silver lighter neatly in front of him, like weapons. He’s chain-smoking in a controlled, studious fashion. I take out a cigarette to keep him company, and he immediately clicks his Ronson lighter into action beneath my nose. I notice the deep little pleat of concentration between George’s eyebrows and the tightly knotted dark-blue tie he’s wearing with a white shirt and dark-blue suit. If I hadn’t heard a bit about him already, I would have thought George was a successful East End entrepreneur in his early thirties. As it is, from the banter in the Soho bars, I’ve made out that he’s actually an unsuccessful thief and burglar of that age. There’s a story going about that Francis actually caught him breaking in to Reece Mews from the skylight above the studio. But Francis says that’s nonsense and they just met in the French pub. ‘I was having a drink with John Deakin and all those others,’ he’s told me, ‘and George was standing on the other side of the bar. And he came over and said, “You all seem to be having a good time. Can I buy you all a drink?” So he just joined us, and there it was.’

  ‘Now, I just had a call from Michel Leiris as I was coming out,’ Sonia is saying rapidly, ‘and he and Zette are coming over from Paris next week so I thought I’d do a dinner on the Tuesday, if you and George are free, and possibly ask Lucian and David Sylvester or has David written something recently about Lucian that Lucian doesn’t like and they’re not actually talking?’

  ‘I think they’re still talking – or you could invite Michael?’ Francis suggests. ‘I believe his French is very good.’

  ‘Alors on va voir ça tout de suite,’ Sonia says, rounding on me suspiciously. ‘Qu’est-ce que vous pensez pouvoir dire en français, mon pauvre jeune homme?’

  ‘Plus ou moins ce que je veux, selon les circonstances,’ I answer blushing but promptly. Speaking French is perhaps the one area I can have some confidence in.

  ‘Well, I suppose you can come if you think you’ll fit in,’ says Sonia, clearly reluctantly, ‘but I should warn you you’ll be out of your depth intellectually, and probably socially. Michel Leiris is reckoned after all to be the greatest French writer alive, and he’s just finished the latest volume of La Règle du jeu which as I hope you know has become a fundamental text. Everyone in Paris is raving about it. We’ll also have the new French cultural attaché who’s the author of Marx est mort, which I have to say is tout ce qu’il y a de plus controversé en ce moment, and André Masson’s son, Diego, the conductor. I won’t say le tout-Paris des arts et des lettres will be there but not so very damned far off. Then we’ll probably have the publisher Nikos Stangos who’s delightful and a very talented American writer called David Plante. Do you think you can hold your own in a soirée like that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says George with a derisive snort. ‘You reckon you can ’old your own with all of ’em?’ He’s perked up and is following the scene with obvious amusement.

  ‘Well, I’ll try,’ I say lamely, feeling exposed and regretting the anonymity my role as interviewer has so far conferred on me.

  ‘I don’t think you need worry, Sonia,’ Francis says. ‘I’ve noticed Michael’s at ease in any company. He might seem shy to you, but he understands everything. After all, we’re all shy when we’re young, what with all that talent welling up inside us, even though with time we realize there’s simply no point in being shy. C’est pas la peine, as your friends in Paris would say. So why don’t we have just a leet-el more of this Château La Lagune, then go on to Muriel’s for some champagne?’

  We tumble in and out of a taxi up a dank stairway and into a low-lit, green room heavy with cigarette smoke and seething with people where someone is playing an invisible piano and crooning, ‘And that’s why darling it’s incredible – that someone who’s unforgettable’, and there’s a severe-looking woman dressed in black with her shiny black hair pulled into a tight bun who looks like a retired ballerina sitting straight-backed on a stool by the bar who turns and says: ‘There you are, my daughter, no not you, you cunt, I’m talking to Francis.’

  With the three of us in tow, Francis kisses her and orders champagne all round. As the corks pop and everyone’s glass is filled to the brim, he raises his own, with the golden liquid slopping over his wrist, and like a challenge calls out: ‘Champagne for my real friends, real pain for m
y sham friends,’ and amid the laughter, some frank, some furtive, he knocks the drink back and orders more and introduces me to the severe lady who turns out to be Muriel. She seems kindly disposed towards me as another round of champagne breaks like a wave over the room and says that as ‘daughter’ has said such nice things about me she’ll make me a member of the Colony Room and Ian behind the bar will give me the card I need. As I down my champagne with the best of them I notice her whisk the bubbles out of her own glass with a little silver cocktail stick and I’m taken aback when she says politely, ‘That’s my clitoris, dear, always keep it moving’s my motto, I’ve never liked the bubbles, just the effect.’ The piano starts up again and it’s ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, and I notice Sonia, red-faced and almost tearful, joining in while George stands to one side silently keeping himself to himself with cigarette and glass, now one going up to his mouth, now the other. Muriel controls the unruly swell around her by regularly issuing orders to punters who seem to be called alternatively ‘Sod’, ‘Granny’ or ‘Lottie’ – ‘Come on, Lottie,’ she says, ‘open up your bead bag and pay for last night’s round’ – or sending other customers packing with one of her choice farewells: ‘Back to your filthy urinal, Granny, back to your cottaging, and don’t show that cock-sucking face of yours here again or I’ll give you a fourpenny one,’ while pausing elegantly, with perfect erect composure, to receive a compliment from a more favoured member kissing her hand whom I dimly recognize from photos in the papers as someone famous. And Francis, who told me he first came here with the queer Oxford aesthete Brian Howard twenty years ago, is again at my side making sure my glass is full but, unaccountably, we’re now somewhere smaller and underground where there’s a jukebox playing Johnnie Ray’s ‘Just Walking in the Rain’ and a couple of large amiable men with big red forearms are dealing out drinks from behind the bar and talking to each other in snatches of Polari. ‘There’s a palone putting on her slap in the carsey,’ says one, with an exaggerated moue. I start getting interested, always up for a new lingo, but minutes later, I don’t know why, we’re outside again, just Francis, George and me now, and we go up more stairs and across landings with Francis saying, ‘I just know it’s here somewhere, you can always get a drink before dawn, for some reason I think it’s called the Pink Elephant,’ and then oddly we are back in Muriel’s, which Francis says is a place to go to lose your inhibitions, except there are not many people now, not many inhibitions either, and we are all standing around the bar and there’s banter between Muriel and Francis. ‘That’s all the facts when you come down to it,’ Francis is saying. ‘When did you last have all the fucks, de-ah?’ Muriel is saying. But everything’s slowed up, slowed down, and we have been here for ever, haven’t moved for as far back as I can remember from these same four walls with the same music in this same unchanging world, and I don’t remember anything more until I wake up and hear George asking Francis plaintively in his blocked nasal tones, ‘What d’you ’ave to givim ten pahn for? All ’e ad to do was open the fuckin’ door,’ and Francis saying, ‘Try to get some sleep, George, we’ve got to leave early in the morning you know,’ and everything’s still turning in the dark and I work out I’m on the green velvet sofa and the dark goes round and round and George starts talking again in fits and starts nasal-thick as he sleeps. I want to throw up but I know I can’t, I mustn’t be sick, and I drift back into sleep for a few moments before Francis, all dressed and fresh and rosy, is handing me a cup of steaming tea and saying he and George, who’s standing behind looking like a successful boxer in neatly pressed singlet and trousers with red braces hanging down by his sides, are going over to Paris via Newhaven and Dieppe, then taking a wagon-lit in the night train down to the Côte d’Azur which sounds so glamorous and shimmeringly alluring, and never more so than when we’re standing outside in the damp grey morning on the cobblestone court, with George lighting his first cigarette of the day.