Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  I tell Jaime about Bacon, whose painting he knows and admires but whose studio, of which he has seen some photos, he says is too messy for him to imagine they could ever see eye to eye. I suppose there is some parallel between my friendships with Francis and with Jaime. Both are brilliant men, creative and excessive, effortlessly dominating the people around them by their drive and their wit. They are also, of course, both homosexual, and I am not unaware that if I gravitate so unerringly towards this kind of company it must say something about me. I brood over this for some time, and one night when we’ve done all the bars and Jaime has picked up some drifting boy and the three of us go back to his apartment and I sit with my gin, a drink I’ve taken up because Jaime likes it and has even referred to it in one of his poems addressing some pickup like the one who’s with us now and whose eyes he describes as ‘color de mala ginebra’ (the colour of bad gin), and I’m sipping this oily, melancholic alcohol and rocking slowly to and fro and the boy says to me, ‘Do you like boys or girls?’ and I shrug and say, ‘Let’s see,’ and he leans over me and starts kissing me, and there’s something like a grain of sand on his lips which in any case I find disgusting and I slip out of the embrace, out of the rocking chair and the apartment, and when I get back to my room I spend half the remaining night washing my mouth out obsessively with soap and water.

  I’m now part of a group that’s older, more sophisticated and demonstrably more gifted than I am, and I prize my membership hugely. One of our regular excursions at weekends is to Sitges, a picturesque little seaside town south of Barcelona that became fashionable in the late nineteenth century. Each time we go Jaime agonizes over whether he is going to be able to squeeze once more into the white trousers he likes to wear on these trips. Going round the bars in the evening I fall in with another English boy about my age who introduces me to his German girlfriend, Margaret, an older woman I find attractive. I start visiting Sitges regularly by train. Margaret has a small house not far from the beach where she lives with her mother and her two young children. We begin an affair. I move into her house where I enjoy telling her children stories and going on long walks over the cliffs above the sea with Brass, their German shepherd dog. I continue to go into Barcelona, where I take book reports in to Seix Barral and give English lessons. Otherwise my life is like an extended holiday. I write occasional poems and stories, swim a great deal and drink heavily. If ordered in sufficiently large quantities, wine, gin and brandy can be bought at wholesale prices. I also host large, inexpensive dinner parties that usually consist of artichokes and grilled sardines, which a friendly fish seller in the market guts and scales for me. Jaime, Luis and other friends come to visit regularly. Jaime comes alone on one occasion when he is depressed. After we’ve done the bars we go down to the beach where he undresses and throws himself naked into the shallow, phosphorescent waves, crying ‘I want to die!’ several times, although the water barely covers his ghostly white bottom. A hippy couple who spend their nights on the beach follow me round for several days convinced that I’m Michael Caine going incognito. Otherwise Margaret and I see a mixture of other expatriates, mainly bar owners, property agents and assorted drifters as well as a huge, flaxen-haired American wrestler called Chuck, also known as ‘El Vikingo de Oro’ (‘The Golden Viking’), who takes on all-comers in a converted cinema in Sitges after putting away several roast chickens for lunch. Everyone is endlessly available, night and day. It’s an idyllic existence in many ways but I can’t see it leading anywhere. Lazy and wayward as I know I am, I’m plagued by a sense of futility. Everything I write seems so minor, so fragmentary. What is the point, I wonder, of writing for ‘myself’ when even myself is not interested? I begin to panic at the idea of spending a whole winter here drinking in the increasingly empty bars, watching the sky and water turn grey and complaining about the natives with the other expats. I correspond regularly with an old Cambridge friend called Adrian Dicks, now a journalist, who has written to say he’ll be passing through Grenoble if I want a lift back to London. I look at the map and see Grenoble can’t be too difficult to get to. Driving slowly up the backbone of France would give me time to distil what Spain has meant to me and what might still be to come. On impulse I destroy the desultory texts and notebooks I have been dragging around with me from room to room. I also prepare my farewells. Whatever life-transforming experience I’d hoped for in Spain hasn’t happened, and now I am going back, empty-handed, with only lost illusions to show.

  The basement flat in Tregunter Road is darker and damper than I remember it but otherwise unchanged, and I’m relieved to have a place still to lay my head, once the clutter that has built up over the past year on my bed has been cleared away. The golden autumn days I had grown used to in Spain have been replaced by cold grey ones. People are already wearing overcoats, and nobody is lingering on café terraces or contemplating a swim in the Mediterranean as they hurry about their business. I’m pleased to be back, thankful to be back, but I feel I’ve been left behind. Both Magnus and Peter have jobs which they go out to early in the morning, while I sleep in and then moon disconsolately around the flat, half waiting for them to get back to hear how their day has gone. I meanwhile feel I have gone nowhere, particularly now that my tan has faded and my finances have reached an all-time low. I bestir myself to make a few phone calls in the hope of reviving past love affairs and am rewarded by the occasional nostalgic cuddle in front of the blue and yellow flames of the flat’s ancient gas fire. I’ve been meaning to call Francis, too, but I’m embarrassed by having been out of touch for so long. When I do eventually call, it’s as if I’d never been away. ‘It’s marvellous to hear you,’ he says. ‘And such a good idea you called now because Michel and Zette are over here and I terribly want him to see a picture I’ve just finished. And it would be marvellous if you felt like seeing it too. I don’t really know if it works, of course, but I am quite excited about it because it’s one of those things that just came about, I don’t know how, and I’m not even sure what it’s about, I’d been trying to do this image and didn’t know how to do it and suddenly the paint suggested something quite different. Anyway, we’ll be having dinner here afterwards because it’ll be much easier. And Zette and Sonia are coming too, of course. I know they’d love to see you, if by any chance you were free.’

  When I get to the studio, it really is like old times. Francis is standing at the top of the steep stairs, his arms held out in welcome. I pull myself up on the same old greasy rope, give a sideways glance into the studio as I get to the landing and promptly accept a frothing glass of Krug when we go into the living room. Leiris and Zette have both come down with a grippe, Francis explains, and Sonia has gone to their hotel to make sure they’re comfortable and have everything they need. He tells me this in an apologetic tone, as if seeing them had been the main reason for my coming round in the first place. I’m actually quite glad to be alone with Francis, since I haven’t seen him for so long, though I imagine he’s disappointed that he won’t be able to show Leiris the new painting. I also suspect he won’t take me into the studio, which I’ve only seen when the door is ajar, because as a rule he never lets anybody in there.

  ‘I hope Michel feels better tomorrow,’ Francis goes on, topping up my glass. ‘They can be very debilitating, those flus. And of course he’s not a young man any more. I did want him to see this picture because I think he may decide to write something. But I’d also love to know what you think of it, Michael.’

  Without more ado, Francis crosses the sitting room with his lithe, springy step and opens the battered, paint-splattered door wide on to the studio and with a dramatic gesture pulls a sheet off a large painting on an easel in the middle of the chaotic room. I’ve been wanting to get into the studio ever since I got a glimpse of the interior the first time I was here, and now I simply don’t know where to look first – at the threatening image looming over me or at the incredible mess under foot, washing from side to side right across the room, out of which the picture
seems to have grown like some huge evil flower. Francis is staring fixedly at it, rubbing his thumbnail across his lower lip.

  ‘When I stopped working on it the other day,’ he says, ‘I really did think it looked like George. But when I see it now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Oh you can certainly see George,’ I hasten to say, peering into the pulped mass of pigment atop the figure’s contorted body. And it’s true, within the confusion of pink, white and green brushstrokes, there’s the exact jut of George’s nose and the clear line of where his severely brushed-back hair meets his closely barbered face. It’s George badly beaten up, twisted and scalloped, but recognizably still just about George. I wonder what goes on between them, since Francis has already hinted that he was a willing victim of Peter Lacy’s sadism, to the point where he had been so badly thrashed by Peter he was left to wander round Tangier until the police picked him up and took him to the station, thinking he was the victim of a severe random assault. But why did Francis then smash and pummel the figures he painted until they teetered on the edge of extinction? Was it a kind of re-enactment of what he went through? Or the search for some irreducible visual identity, only arrived at through physical brutality? I knew it was the kind of question he avoided, but by now I’d had enough champagne to feel emboldened.

  ‘Is there a particular reason why you twist and deform the people you paint?’ I venture light-headedly.

  ‘I’m only trying to deform into truth,’ Francis says. ‘After all, photography has done so much, so how are you to make a portrait nowadays unless you can bring what’s called the facts of someone’s appearance more directly and more violently back on to the nervous system? You have to deform appearance into image. There it is. If I didn’t have to live, I wouldn’t let any of this out.’

  There’s an irritation in his voice, and I know better not to push the question any further. You have to be very careful with Francis. His charm and generosity seem boundless, but every now and then you touch on something that’s better left alone unless you want to get the very rough side of his tongue.

  Having absorbed the new portrait, I gaze quickly round the whole studio. I’ve never seen a place like it, even though I went to quite a few artists’ studios while I was doing the Cambridge Opinion issue. There is a chaos here which is so extreme it’s hilarious, a monstrous joke, a mess beyond mess, taken further than anyone could imagine. Yet it’s not a mess, it’s an extraordinary, visually riveting creation. Anywhere you look you could scoop up an armful of fascinating images, photos of wild animals, boxers, Nazi leaders, crowds in flight, George in profile, Lucian sitting on a bed, Henrietta naked and abandoned, old passports, paint-stiffened cashmere sweaters, brushes, paint cans, reproductions of Goya and Velázquez, Grünewald and Degas, Van Gogh and Michelangelo. You could scuffle to and fro throwing up new images, other strata, all the time because this carpet of heads and limbs and bodies, some killed, some with terrible wounds, is at least ankle deep. And I guess that’s exactly what Francis does as he walks up to his painting and back as he works, constantly kicking up new combinations, new visual suggestions, ‘triggers of ideas’, as he calls them. It’s like looking into some fascinating encyclopaedia of images, or into the head of someone who has spent a lifetime tracking down the most exciting visual phenomena that can be found. Just as you think you’ve memorised a list of contents, then come the photos of mediums at a séance, Rodin sculptures, a couple of champagne cartons, bits of a striped dressing gown, some letters and texts and books, copies of Paris Match, used tubes of paint – and paint itself, everywhere, covering all the crushed and scuffed items on the floor in a multi-coloured net, paint rising up the walls in trial marks, paint the real hero of the room over which it has established its dominion.

  ‘Well, there it is,’ Francis says, glancing at my astonished face. ‘I live in this kind of squalor. But it’s useful. This is my compost. It’s the compost out of which my paintings come. Fifty years from now, people will see how simple the distortions I make really are. Simple and natural. You see, I’ve worked on myself a great deal. I’ve deliberately simplified myself, if you like, so that now you might say I’m what Gertrude Stein called “simply complicated”. In the end, all those things come through in the paintings.

  ‘Anyway, Michael,’ he concludes, as if something more important has just occurred to him. ‘You must be absolutely ravenous. If it’s not too much of a bore, we could simply have dinner here. I’ve made something very ordinary. Just a roast chicken with bread sauce, which I know Michel and Zette like. Apparently bread sauce is the one thing you can’t find in Paris. A collector sent me a case of Bordeaux the other day. I think it’s probably rather good, it’s a 1961, but I’m such a fool about wine I can never remember if that’s a very good year or one of those they tell you to avoid. I’d be curious to know what you think of it.’

  While Francis busies himself in the tiny kitchen, I sit at the table, which has been cleared and considerably smartened up with gleaming cutlery and napkins, and reacquaint myself with his living room. The dark-green sofa I slept on and the inlaid commode are still there, along with the photos of Peter Lacy in the alcove, although they have now been joined by a photograph of an immaculately suited, anxious-looking George. The Moroccan bedcover and the naked overhead bulbs haven’t changed either, but I realize with a start that the big wall mirror where Francis always checks his hair before going out now has an enormous starry smash in it. If you look into it and move from side to side your face becomes progressively fragmented before it falls into a black hole at the centre of the smash. It’s not unlike what happens to a head in one of Francis’s small triptychs, though he can hardly have done it deliberately himself. I know that things are occasionally very tense between Francis and George and wonder whether this didn’t happen during one of their fights.

  ‘A friend of mine threw a heavy glass ashtray at my head,’ Francis is saying enigmatically. He’s come back into the room with a huge, half-carved chicken. ‘I managed to duck and it smashed into the mirror. I rather like the effect, there’s something very poignant about it, like a memory trace, so I think I’ll keep it that way.’

  ‘I think the new picture is terrifically powerful,’ I say as I help myself to the delicious bread sauce and attack my plate. ‘I’m sure Michel will be impressed when he sees it.’

  ‘Well, of course, one never knows about those things,’ Francis says. ‘But I’m particularly pleased that you like it, Michael . . . So what will you do now that you’re back in London?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I suppose I’ll keep trying to write, even though I find it very difficult, not only writing in itself but finding a subject that seems worth writing about.’

  ‘I think those things are very difficult. It’s just the same in painting. So much has already been done and then photography has cancelled out so many other possibilities. When I started painting I needed extreme subject matter. And then I found my subjects through my life and through the friends I came to have. I mean one’s work is really a kind of diary or an autobiography.’

  Francis reaches down into the wooden case beside the table and takes out a third bottle of the sumptuous wine we have been drinking. He seems to be in a communicative mood, and I’m pleased to be back in the undemanding role of interviewer. In a sense, I realize, interviewing him has become quite central to my life, and even though we’ve been out of touch for a while our conversations have continued to circle round my mind, to the extent that I can recall many of them verbatim. It’s a quest I want to continue, it’s become personally important to me, almost as if by finding out more about Francis’s life and his painting I will have a better chance of finding myself and what I want to do with my life.

  ‘So your paintings are really full of things about yourself?’

  ‘About myself, my thoughts and feelings and what are called the moeurs of my times. But then I think I go deeper than my times. That may be a profoundly vain thing to say, but I often feel in my work that I
’m close to the ancient world. I think you can convey all sorts of things about yourself, or about anything really, in painting. I think it’s more difficult in words, even though one never tires of talking about oneself, n’est-ce pas? It’s like confession. Or psychoanalysis. But of course it can be embarrassing. Or at least it’s embarrassing if it’s presented in certain ways. I wouldn’t mind, and I do think the only way of telling one’s life is to tell all of it – or everything you can remember. But there are still one or two people alive who would think it terribly cheap if I did. It probably is very cheap, but there you are.’

  ‘Do you remember things from way back, from your childhood?’

  ‘Some things, though of course one forgets a great deal. I remember being very excited when a cavalry detachment did some practice charges up and down the driveway to the house where we lived in Ireland. I had an older brother then who had this cycling cape I admired very much, and he let me wear it and I went marching up and down the avenue of trees outside, up and down, feeling very important. We used to hide behind those trees with other children we knew because we thought this bigger boy called Reggie we’d met at children’s parties was coming after us. So we just hid there. Reggie never came, naturally, and in a way we knew perfectly well he wouldn’t, but for some ridiculous reason we used to love hiding there and pretending he might find us. Of course, he was older and far too important to be interested in us.’

  ‘I think you told me you never got on with your parents. What were they like, Francis?’

  ‘I certainly never got on with my father, although he was a good-looking man and when I was growing up I was attracted to him. He wasn’t interested in me because I was asthmatic – I was what’s called the “weakling of the family”. Anyway, he’d married my mother because she had a bit of money and set himself up to train horses in Ireland because it was cheaper to do it there than England. Things were easier with my mother, but she was much more interested in her own pleasures than in her children. The person I was most close to in the family was her mother, my grandmother, who was rather extraordinary. She married five times and was terribly free in her way of life. I mean when you think of what Ireland was like then! And with this way of hers she did fascinate a great many men. She just loved having lots and lots of people around her, and she used to give these marvellous parties. They sometimes seemed terribly lavish. The Aga Khan came once, and of course that did strike local people as something rather exotic.