Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  I bid them goodbye, transformed like Cinderella back into student boy, the threadbare scholar in his grey polo-neck sweater, ill at ease, with all the time in the world to drift and be unhappy and have no destination in sight beyond the provincial cloisters where his friends won’t believe all he’s done and seen even if, he reasons confusedly as the train rumbles up towards Cambridge, he could be bothered to let them in on this his big new secret.

  3

  Bacon’s Boswell

  I always come back to Cambridge in a strange state. I’m really pleased to be going around with Bacon like this and talking to him, often alone and late into the night. I really like going to all these restaurants, bars and clubs I never knew about and couldn’t in any case afford, meeting all kinds of people I’d never come across as a student going between college and lecture room. I love the delicious, expensive food and all the fine wine too, even if it sometimes takes me a day or two to come round from the hangovers. There’s no doubt it’s already brought a whole new dimension to my life, changing the way I see myself and my future.

  And that in itself is part of the problem. Since I’d spent two years after school studying languages, first in Göttingen, then in Perugia, I already felt older and more experienced than my contemporaries when I first came up, and now that I’m going regularly to London and starting to be part of another, more sophisticated world, the disaffection has grown apace. It reminds me of when I was ‘held down’ for a year at school because I was the youngest in my class and had started momentarily falling behind; so that afterwards everyone who had been a year beneath me became, to my lasting shame, my contemporaries. Something similar has occurred now that I’m at university, although I do have a small circle of close friends I’m really fond of. I’ve noticed, however, that whenever I mention my Soho exploits to them, it soon sounds suspiciously like bragging, and I’m particularly irritated that no one has remarked on the dark-blue, fly-fronted John Michael shirt that Francis bought me on Old Compton Street – I’ve been looking and I haven’t noticed anyone else with one in Cambridge, where tweed jackets and pipes still dominate as if Carnaby Street fashion and the King’s Road simply don’t exist. Regardless, I wear my new shirt as frequently and defiantly as I can.

  So I’ve come to accept that I’m now leading a kind of double life: gowned student by day, huddled with other youths round gas fires in damp cloistered quads, endlessly soul-searching and trading shallow banter as we wonder who we are and what we might become; Bacon’s chosen companion by night, invested with special powers, riding a crest of champagne as all doors from the Ritz to the last seedy outpost at dawn open before me. I get used to the duality, but it does nothing to bind me more closely to my undergraduate status. And regular contact with artists like Frank Auerbach, Kitaj and David Hockney – the new Sunday colour magazines have just photographed him like a film star, in a gold lamé jacket – has only served to convince me further that it’s time to leave Renaissance art behind and look for something new. As my final subject of study, I choose what I have always loved most and might have read from the beginning: English Literature. But before I can even begin to cram into one year what would normally take three, I am still struggling to complete my issue on ‘Modern Art in Britain’, which has taken me off any kind of even desultory study for the past few months.

  To be fair, I’ve been incredibly lucky with the contents so far. Hockney, Kitaj, Paolozzi and others have all written texts specially for the issue, and I’ve done an exchange of letters with Auerbach. I’ve also bagged some big essays from critics as important as Lawrence Alloway, Norbert Lynton and Jasia Reichardt. I’d hoped to include David Sylvester, who first asked me to come down to London to talk about the possibility, then explained to me, walking me up and down the station platform when I arrived, that he could not write, like the others, without proper compensation. We are a student magazine and there was never any question of paying anybody; the return fare for this fruitless visit has already taken a good few bob out of my meagre budget; I just hope we get enough in from the advertisements to go some way towards settling the printer’s bill. My Bacon interview has been pieced together from scraps of conversation. I’ve tried to touch on various aspects of his beliefs – or lack of beliefs – about life and art. It’s a bit disjointed, and still with a lot of suspension points between unrelated phrases; but it’s the best I’ve been able to do so far, and I have to say his conversation is a bit like that – like a series of brief definitions, things like ‘art is a shorthand of sensation’ or ‘we only give life meaning by our drives’, which often have more impact after a couple of bottles of Chablis than they do in cold sober print.

  The only artist I haven’t been able to pin down is Lucian Freud. He’s often there at the lunches and dinners, but not so much once we start on the round of bars and clubs because he doesn’t want to drink. Actually, he doesn’t eat much either, just nibbles things from his plate and puts them back, half chewed, if he doesn’t like them. We’ve been talking about his doing a kind of ‘statement’ about art for some time, but it never materializes. He doesn’t want an interview and I can’t do more than politely remind him. It would be important to have him in the issue, though, if only because of all the artists I’ve met over recent months he is certainly the one closest to Bacon. They have an odd relationship. When I’ve been with them both, they never mention painting, only people they both know. Lucian makes a point of relaying the latest gossip about their mutual friends, and Francis clearly relishes this, interjecting comments they both seem to agree on, like ‘I’ve always known he was a rat. He’d rat on you just like that if he thought he could get something out of it’ or ‘I hear that now John Russell has left Vera, that stammer of his has got so much better.’

  Lucian also clowns around, specially for Francis. One of his favourite turns is to pick up the restaurant bill when it comes, give it a cursory look and then pretend to faint, falling sideways on the banquette like Charlie Chaplin, while Francis chuckles and writes out a cheque. Sometimes he comes with a waif-like girlfriend in a faded frock, but mostly he comes alone. He is quite funny in an ironic way, with his lightly inflected patter doing quick pirouettes around the people he describes, but I think he is in awe of Francis, or even in love with him. But then I suppose most of us are, whether it’s Lucian or George or me, Sonia Orwell or models like Henrietta Moraes, or Miss Beston, who looks after everything to do with Francis at the Marlborough gallery, from his exhibitions (where she always gives the glass on his pictures a last go-over with a shammy leather she keeps in her handbag) to his laundry bills or medical prescriptions. He is the point, whether we know it or not, around which we all turn. Because of this, I mention to Francis that the issue is pretty much complete except for Lucian’s long-awaited statement, and the next thing I know I get a message from Lucian – the first ever – suggesting we meet.

  I’ve never been alone with Lucian. I’ve never felt particularly at ease with him. He has none of Bacon’s warmth and geniality; on the contrary, although he is clearly an unusual and rather exotic person, he seems to me coldly self-centred and calculating. So I’m not particularly looking forward to this encounter near Paddington Station, but when I find Delamere Terrace and see Freud waiting by a large stylish car I have no time to think because as soon as I get in, the Bentley takes off with a squeal and we hurtle through a few streets, squeal round corners, bounce up on to pavements and ricochet off the wrong way into one-way streets at a speed I’ve never travelled through any city before. I’m terrified at first, thinking we’re going to smash into other cars or a wall, but it soon becomes clear this is what ‘driving’ means to Lucian, full pelt, hell for leather, as if this is a getaway he’ll only get one crack at, and that he’s very skilled at it, so the fear subsides a bit and I begin to enjoy the sense of complete anarchy and the breaking of every rule they teach you when you first take to the road. This breathtaking journey turns London into the most compact of cities and within minutes we come
to a squealing halt outside a grand townhouse in an elegant crescent in Knightsbridge.

  Lucian produces a key from his jacket, and for the first time I notice he’s wearing a well-cut double-breasted grey suit but with no shirt or apparently anything else beneath. Without explanation, though I suppose he must know the grandee who lives here, Lucian opens the front door and ushers me up the stately staircase, past sitting rooms filled with impressive paintings, some Old Masters in carved frames but mainly modern, to a sparsely furnished, low-ceilinged room at the top. There are only two chairs, prepared as if for an interview. The late-autumn light is fading, but Lucian begins a soft, lisping monologue that has vaguely threatening undertones, as if he might at any moment say ‘We have ways of making you talk,’ but of course he says nothing of the kind but rambles on about the ‘situation’ we or painters or somebody is in now and there’s little we can do about it but attempt to return to a certain truth that only stumbling on through the dark can tell, and truth to tell it has become dark now in the room and I can’t note down anything of what Lucian’s saying and he’s got up and he’s moving through the darkness talking, it’s unnerving, he’s become just a disembodied voice, distant, and I’m trying to make out the soft lisping sounds, it all sounds rather abstract and about ‘the way things are’, then suddenly he comes closer, standing right by me, and I’m wondering what might happen next, until all the lights suddenly go on in a blaze like the end of a film and I’m invited to take the stairs down and leave and make whatever I can of these utterances with their quotes from Nietzsche and turn them into something that will pass muster in my magazine, as I find myself back on the street, breathing in the night air, blinking in the lamplight, relieved and suddenly free again.

  Knowing I’d be in London I’d called Francis and we’ve arranged to meet for dinner. There’s already something comforting about the whole ritual of a night out as we sit in the snug bar at Wheeler’s and as usual I am starving and make my way through several bowls of peanuts with the first few glasses of wine and Francis chats to the barman who tells us about his girlfriend getting her ‘knickers in a twist’, a silly phrase which somehow helps soothe the unrequited sexual pangs that torment me day and night and keep the great enigma of love at bay. Perhaps Francis has sensed this. He seems to accept the fact that I only like women, even if I find the company of homosexual men in many ways more interesting, and frequently more flattering, and if he has made a pass at me it must have been so subtle that I haven’t noticed it. So I was intrigued the other day when I went to see him that he suggested I meet one of his models, Henrietta Moraes, whom I’ve heard is very ‘free’. And he took one of the copies of Paris Match he had lying around and over a double page of photographs of war atrocities in Vietnam he wrote me a sort of letter of introduction to her, but while I was waiting for what I thought might be the right moment to make contact with her, John Deakin showed me a sheaf of photographs he had taken of Henrietta naked on the bed, originally commissioned by Francis so that he could do portraits of her. Several of them focused on Henrietta with her legs splayed, and they were so graphic, not to say hirsute, that whatever lust impelled me quailed; so my need for female company continues to be spotlit and exacerbated, much as in Cambridge, by being in entirely male company virtually all the time.

  Francis is in good form, he says the work is going well ‘even if you never really know about those things’, and he is very affable with everyone, leaving the barman a noticeably large tip, and I wonder whether that isn’t in itself a form of seduction, certainly all the staff seem more interested in serving us than anybody else in the crowded restaurant and every time a new bottle of wine is brought he has a note at the ready to crush into the waiter’s hand. Of course, he did say at one point, ‘I’ve bought my way through life,’ and I wondered what he meant, but perhaps this is it. What is also very attractive is the feel of boundless energy coming off him, radiating through his gestures and the relentless way he keeps returning to a subject until he feels it can’t be analysed and defined further, even if he’s only had a couple of hours’ sleep and has been doing the bars all afternoon. That must be the reason that even when he’s saying ultimately very negative things like ‘We go from nothing to nothing’ or ‘Life’s a complete charade’ they sound almost positive and cheerful, or at least liberating, as if he’s proposing a toast. We’re well into the ritual now, oysters, sole and Stilton dispatched, and pleasantly drunk, and if it were anyone else they might be saying it’s been a long day I think I might get an early night, but Francis is saying: ‘I don’t know if you’re at all free after dinner but I have to go to Muriel’s because one of those ridiculous Sunday papers wants to do an article and Snowdon’s going to do the photographs.’

  So of course I’m free, nobody is freer than me as more doors open and another strange evening beckons. ‘I’m greedy for life,’ Francis has said to me at one point, ‘I’m greedy for food and drink, for friends, for things happening,’ and I relate immediately to that. I’m greedy for experience, I realize, following him up the evil-smelling little staircase to the Colony and into an atmosphere which is quite different from anything that, as a proud, new, card-carrying member, I’ve known before. It’s quite crowded, with a mixture of regulars and their guests, and the word is clearly out that Lord Snowdon is coming, but although the members are flattered they’ve decided with instinctive club spirit they won’t show it. ‘Christ almighty,’ a character behind me is saying, with a great show of being put upon, ‘can’t we fucking come in here for a quiet drink without having some little pansy photographing us?’ ‘Well,’ says his friend, more philosophically, ‘you can’t get away from the press these days, my old mate, can you?’ Muriel is clearly unimpressed. ‘We’ve never had royalty in before,’ she says, ‘but I hear she’s a nice little lady so we’ll make her welcome. Well come isn’t in it is it, dear,’ she continues in a lofty patter. ‘I expect she’s had more cocks than you’ve had hot dinners,’ she remarks to the amorphous group of drinking heads around her, ‘so back to your filthy urinals now darlings before your very presence before the highest in the land brings my lovely little club into disrepute.’

  Francis has been assiduously doing the rounds, tipping one bottle of champagne after another into everyone’s glass, as if to excuse himself in advance for all the attention that he is about to receive. ‘Why he wants to photograph my old pudding face’, he says, slopping more wine into the out-held glasses, ‘I can’t imagine. Never mind. Let’s simply amuse ourselves while we can. Cheers. Cheerio. Here’s to you.’ And he weaves his way round, half swaggering, half staggering, until the mood of the room changes imperceptibly, alerting all Colony members that Snowdon has been sighted at the entrance. And so he comes among us, slight and smiling in a safari jacket, his camera at the ready as if he is about to snap wildlife in the veld, and after declining a glass from Francis he also begins to weave round the room. There are the two of them now, eager hunter Tony, lithe and intent, and willing prey Francis, his wide head thrown back in laughter, as if in a life filled with charades this is the silliest role he’s ever had to play. But he’s playing it so well, our Francis, the big beast in the jungle, hidden in the club’s recesses then breaking cover in a clearing between two stands of solid boozers, and with the champagne working its beneficent magic the members decide as a man to take the lovely little lord to their bosom and begin to act up for the camera, a couple of them putting their arms round Francis for a group photo, Muriel’s Boys November 1963, their mottled, wattled faces split into grins full of native wit. And a cheer goes up from the bar as more toasts are made and a man with a huge scar down his cheek begins to intone in a fine tenor voice ‘Oh wouldn’t it be loverly’, and other voices take up the chorus while Snowdon, sensing a coup, closes in clicking, Soho at song, and Francis makes up to the camera like a star, mumbling to me as he passes, ‘I can’t think what he’s going to do with all those ghastly photos,’ and from having felt generally put upon the Colony might
have outdone itself in bohemian bonhomie had one very large regular known as Tiny not been rocking to and fro on his stool at the bar and suddenly catapulted himself back into the throng, scattering drinkers and breaking glass and landing out cold on the floor behind, unrecorded but unquestionably the scoop of the day, bringing the party to an abrupt end – to be later enshrined in Colony myth and fondly recalled by Muriel in later years as ‘that fucking orgy in space, dear’.