The only remedy I can think of, as I lie inertly on David’s sofa, would be to sweat out some of the alcohol in a Turkish bath. I know of a hotel that has one where you can sit in various hot rooms for as long as you like for a few quid, so I force myself up and get myself over there. I’m aware that this establishment is known not only for its health benefits but as a relatively respectable pickup place for homosexuals; however, I tell myself that if I’ve managed to come through so many queer bars and clubs unscathed there shouldn’t a problem of that order. Once I’ve paid my entry fee I’m provided with a towel and a red-and-white-chequered loincloth. In the gents changing room, several middle-aged men are sitting around discussing a deal where, one of them says, ‘everyone will clean up’. I notice they are all completely naked so, ever mindful of etiquette, I decide to take my loincloth with me, like a large hanky, and put it on only if others do. Among the suits, there are several military uniforms hanging round the changing room, including a Guardsman’s scarlet tunic with its accompanying bearskin rearing up on a brass hook. I make my way gingerly through a couple of tiled rooms with stone slabs to sit on and a few deckchairs. In one of them a red-faced man is fast asleep with his loincloth on his head and his mouth open. I creep past him towards the steam room, thinking almost sensuously of all the poisons that are about to gush out of my pores. The steam presses up so tightly against the glass door of the Turkish bath itself that it’s impossible to see inside. Knowing there must be numerous other naked men already in there somewhere, I sidle uneasily into the room’s hot vaporous embrace. The steam is so thick, swirling up into my face, that I can’t make out the size of the space or any shapes or forms at all. I move cautiously forward feeling for the stone slab that I suppose must be there to sit on somewhere and gingerly settle down on what feels like a tiled bench. Then to my horror I become aware that something hard is poking into my buttock. I freeze with embarrassment despite the heat, then edge discreetly away, sweating as I try to control a panic attack. Not a sound can be heard from within the hot white cottonwool that envelops us all, whoever and wherever we might turn out to be. Then the door opens again and the steam parts for an instant to reveal a large, pink, prosthetic limb stretched out next to me. The hangover I came in with evaporates as I clutch my loincloth and dash for the ice-cold plunge.
8
A Death Foreshadowed
Francis has been coming more often to Paris over the past few months. I know it’s to do with a big exhibition here, and they’ve offered him a choice between the Musée National d’Art Moderne and the Grand Palais. He says that the Grand Palais’s big, high galleries would suit his work best, but of course it’s also considerably more prestigious. Picasso had a huge retrospective at the Grand Palais a couple of years ago, and Francis is very aware that he will be the only other living artist to have been invited to exhibit there. Paris is still very much the absolute centre of the art world for him, and he’s said to me several times that he considers a success here to be the greatest accolade he could ever receive. I’m proud and excited, as several of his other close friends are. Sonia keeps popping up here, too, and I think she’s played a role in the whole thing because of her friendship with Leiris and other Paris bigwigs.
I’ve been to three lunches with museum directors and curators while Francis has been over. They’ve been a welcome break from an otherwise pretty lacklustre round of writing for art magazines and newspapers, though I’m pleased that the New York Times has recently shown interest in some ideas for articles I’ve submitted. I’ve also managed to get Le Monde to take a short preview of Francis’s show, which has been timed to coincide with his sixty-second birthday. Stupidly I go out of my way to show Sonia a cutting of the article, thinking she’ll be impressed because it’s in Le Monde and I’ve written it directly in French. ‘Not very big, is it?’ she says with a sniff. Even so, I feel I must be making some headway because I was introduced to the feared, famously vituperative art historian Douglas Cooper at an exhibition opening here the other day. He was standing there, with an alarmingly choleric complexion and dressed in a loud tweed suit, surrounded by what I took to be acolytes. I know that he and Francis knew each other well and fell out spectacularly at some point. Cooper was pleasant enough while we chatted but the moment I moved on I heard him calling me the ‘impertinent Peppiatt’ because of an essay I had written about Nicolas de Staël. So even if Sonia still dismisses everything I do, some people do actually read my art criticism, if only to disparage it. I feel sure that Cooper would think that anyone who dared write about art apart from himself was impertinent.
During the lunches we’ve had recently I’ve helped Francis find a few phrases in French and done some interpreting for the culture vultures who will be curating the show, but otherwise I can’t think of any particular reason why I’m invited. I’d been expecting the conversation to be about choice of works and the catalogue, but it seems to be purely social with Francis ordering bottle after bottle of wine and of course always paying. To ensure he’ll be footing the bill, he sometimes makes an arrangement with the restaurant owner or management in advance. It must cost a fortune each time, but I suppose always being the host gives him a certain subtle power over people. The museum officials certainly lap it up, as I do, and everybody seems very enthusiastic about the great event, though whether they ever get any work done after all that wine is questionable.
I certainly can’t go back to writing, so I’m pleased as we stumble out into the afternoon sunlight after a long lunch at Lucas Carton that Francis suggests going to look at Monet’s Waterlilies in the Orangerie. We do a bit of window-shopping as we weave down from the Madeleine towards Concorde and I notice a pale-green V-neck sweater in an Italian shop and before I know it Francis has gone in and bought it for me. I’m delighted, though it dawns on me as we cross the Tuileries that there’s not much difference between the sweater and the money he offered me in London, apart from the fact that if I’d taken the money I could probably have bought a complete new wardrobe.
‘I think Monet went very far indeed with the Waterlilies,’ Francis says. The basement gallery is cool and the muted light ideal for looking at these extraordinary frescos of flowers and water and mirrored sky merging together. ‘I think he became really extraordinary towards the end of his life. He’s given the whole thing here an extraordinary tension by taking it as far as he can into abstraction without losing the specific image. There are only a few great works like this where technique and subject are so closely interlocked that you can’t separate one from the other, the technique is the subject and vice versa. I often come down here just to look at the technique of them.’
We’ve moved round the whole oval of the room and are standing in front of the last composition, which at times looks like an expanse of pure colour until a recognizable detail brings the lily-pads and the shimmering surface of the pond back into focus.
‘There are very few great things, you know,’ Francis continues, ‘because I actually think there are very few artists when it comes down to it. All the fuss of big shows and reviews and so on means nothing. No one ever knows in his own lifetime whether his work has any real quality. Just think of all the fuss that’s been made in our century, and who is there of real importance? Not the abstract painters with all their free fancy about nothing, you can at least be sure of that. I mean, who has really invented anything in our time? Picasso and Duchamp. And to some extent Matisse. Who else has made a profound innovation? No one.’
I’d like to suggest we sit down for a moment. If I’m tired, surely Francis who is twice my age and has been going since dawn, must be exhausted. But I know better by now than to interrupt on one of the rare occasions that he’s ready to talk so freely about art.
‘You see, I don’t know how you’d say it about literature, Michael, but I know that I’ve been deeply influenced by a handful of images. I have a profound admiration for Michelangelo, but I think what I admire most, curiously enough, are his drawings. I love tha
t real male voluptuousness they have. I think he says everything in the drawings. Just as in Degas, it’s the pastels I love because the technique is so perfect. I think Degas’s pastels are among the greatest things ever made. I think they’re far greater than his oil paintings. Some of the paintings are nothing in comparison, it’s very curious. You know, for me, Van Gogh got very close to the real thing about art when he said something like, I can’t remember the exact words: “What I do may be a lie, but it conveys reality more accurately.” That’s a very complex thing. After all, it’s not so-called “realist” painters who manage to convey reality best. I mean, I saw an extraordinary picture by Monet in an art exhibition in London the other day. I’d never seen it before, even in reproduction. It was one of his views of the Thames, but you couldn’t make anything out in the first instance because everything was covered with seagulls. It’s the most extraordinarily inventive thing, and yet very real – a kind of fog of seagull wings over the Thames.
‘What I really like are very grand images that look as though they’ve come about by chance – although great art is always deeply ordered however much has been given by chance. Like the late Rembrandt self-portraits, or that extraordinary picture by Goya in Castres, I think it’s called La Junta, is that how it’s pronounced? You’d know with all your languages. Have you seen it? Well, it is the most extraordinary thing because you have all these figures sitting in a kind of parliament, I suppose, a whole crowd of them which in itself is a very difficult thing to paint. But somehow Goya’s given this space such grandeur you can actually feel the light moving or weaving round all these figures and sort of creating them. They’ve become facts as it were, but they’re facts twisted through artifice to make them more intensely factual.
‘Now I don’t know about you but I was wondering whether we shouldn’t just go over to the Crillon and have a little champagne. What d’you think – un peu de champagne pour nous remonter?’
If I’d been by myself I’d probably have had a cup of tea and tried to close my eyes for ten minutes to put the lunchtime drink behind me. But I’m fascinated by the manic energy radiating almost literally from Francis at the moment. I’ve seen it before when he’s had a good win at the tables or, I imagine (although I don’t care to think about it much), been successful on some late-night prowl. If he’s in such extraordinary form, it’s probably because the Grand Palais show is coming together just as he wants it, and now, with his gambler’s instinct, he’s pushing the stakes higher and higher, pushing himself harder and harder (one of his refrains, I remember, is ‘one is never hard enough on oneself’). So now he’s going to drink for the rest of the day and most of the night, and he’ll probably end up with some bad-news tough who’ll beat him up and rob him. But he’s also ready to talk more and more, and since finding out more and more about him has become a kind of obsession for me – though I couldn’t really explain why – there’s no way I won’t stay the course, not least since I’m as excited as he is at the idea that the limits of normal life can be pushed back, further and further.
So now we’re back in luxury-land, a flute of champagne in hand, and breathing in the slightly perfumed, rarefied atmosphere of the grand hotel.
‘I don’t know what we can drink to,’ Francis says genially, ‘so why don’t we drink to us? I sometimes come to these places when I’m alone just to watch the way everybody carries on. They can be very fascinating, these hotels, because some of the rich clients staying there make a play for the staff, whatever their tastes are, so there are often all kinds of intrigues and affairs going on. After all, what’s more fascinating than watching other people carrying on, particularly if you can watch them in a mirror. That’s one reason I love those old-fashioned Paris brasseries and cafés where you have mirrors going all the way round the room. I hope I’m not talking too much, Michael? I tend to get very garrulous in drink.’
‘Not at all, Francis,’ I say. ‘I think I tend to get a bit sleepy in drink. Don’t you get terrible hangovers when you’ve been drinking day after day like this?’
‘Well I do,’ says Francis cheerfully, ‘and it’s true those really bad hangovers can make you feel uncomfortable. But generally I don’t think about them because I often find that the worse the hangover the more my mind seems to crackle with energy.’
‘So you actually work well when you’ve got a serious hangover?’
‘I think I do. I mean, if a picture is going to work for me at all, it can come at any time, whether I’m drunk or sober or hung over. It’s a bit like a win at roulette, you never know which way your luck is going to turn. I’ve been trying to do some new pictures for the Grand Palais show, and I’ve done a new version of that thing of mine, the one called Painting 1946, they’ve got in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I didn’t really want to do it but when those nice people we had lunch with asked to include it in the show here, they were told it was too fragile to travel. So I said to them, well, I’ll just do another one and we’ll put that in instead. I myself quite like it, because it has something really artificial about it, and I think all art that’s worth looking at is deeply artificial.’
‘Why’s that?’ I say. I’m feeling a bit light-headed.
‘Well, art itself is artifice. It’s an illusion, and if an image is going to work it has to be reinvented artificially. I mean, think of Van Gogh. You’ve never actually seen a boot or a starry sky like that, have you? Or Velázquez’s portrait of Philip IV in the National Gallery. You don’t think he really looked like that? Well, yes, at least one hopes not. But reality has to be reinvented to convey the intensity of the real.’
We are served more chilled wine. It’s like drinking a starry sky, I think, and I’m about to make a remark to that effect but sense, half-seas over as I am, that I’d do better simply to listen. Francis is on a roll:
‘For some reason one still does think at times that one’s going to do something really strange and extraordinary. One probably never will, of course – in any case, those are things one can never tell about oneself. But it’s one of those obsessions which make life more interesting. I mean when you look around you in the street or in the bars, even places like this, and you see all those other poor things, drooping like daffodils, you wonder what can they be doing with their lives? What can they be living for? Life doesn’t mean anything, I know. But when you look at people like that, their lives seem particularly meaningless. I suppose that only for creative people does life have any point at all. Well, in the sense that, very exceptionally, somebody does actually come along and thicken the texture of life. But unless you can do that, what point can there possibly be? People talk a great deal at the moment about how important it is to get more freedom. But why, really? The trouble with freedom is that once people get it, very few of them know what to do with it. Unless you have this obsession with doing something – I don’t mean just painting or creative things, but anything you really want to do, that you happen to be obsessed with – what’s the good of freedom? What are you going to do with it once you’ve got it? Of course you can just shake your arms in the air or something, but what is it going to change for you?
‘I have known an extraordinary kind of freedom in my lifetime. Of course I don’t think it will last much longer; things are getting more and more impossible now. That’s why I’m always extremely surprised by intelligent people who say that they believe in Mao. Because of course under Mao they’d never have been able to do what they have done in life. It seems quite mad to me. I don’t see at all that they’d be better off, with all their marvellous intelligence and gifts and things that they’ve developed, if they were put to work in the fields or in factories.
‘I know you joined in the May 1968 thing here but what struck me as odd while I was following it from London was all those students with the marvellous freedom and chances they had demonstrating in favour of a system which would only take them away from them. Things are bad enough, with the dreadful mediocre people who govern us now, but surely
they’d just get much worse. I know Sonia thinks I’m on the right, or a Fascist, but I think of myself as what used to be called a liberal. I also think I’m terribly lucky to have been able to lead my kind of life, this curious kind of gilded gutter life I’ve led, in real freedom. It’s also been a rotten life, a disastrous life, I’m afraid. But there it is.’
I want to know more, in fact I want to know everything, and occasionally I wonder why Francis is telling me all this beyond the fact that he likes to talk about himself and I enjoy listening. Each time we meet and he’s in the mood to open up, I feel I’m filling in a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, the enigma that he and his paintings represent for me. I suppose it might all be of use for some future article I might write for this or that publication. But there seems more at stake. I begin to think I might write about his life as well as his work, pretentious as this sounds since I only have an interview, one essay and a short announcement about his forthcoming show to my credit.
‘I know you say that your whole life goes into your painting, but could you ever put it into words?’ I ask.
‘Well, I could what’s called tell all,’ Francis concludes, ‘if anyone could be bothered to listen. After all, whoever tires of talking about himself? Although when you hear others droning on about their lives you think how dreary you must sound yourself. Anyone’s life sounds dreary, I suppose, unless it’s presented in a certain way. At times I feel there are a great many things I’d like to talk about. Growing up in Ireland. And about Berlin, when it was very, very curious. Or about why I think painting is in the situation it is in now. Those kinds of things, but I don’t suppose anybody would be at all interested.’
Francis has a posh dinner to go to with Frank Lloyd, his dealer from London, and they’ll probably be discussing some strategy or other for the Grand Palais event. Apparently Sonia’s coming over too. I’m heading back to my new studio flat in the Marais, which I’m very proud of and still in the process of buying, where I will note these exchanges down without worrying whether they will ever be used for anything. They don’t need to be. They are being used right now. Hearing about him helps me form or clarify my own attitudes to life and sort out my contradictions. It helps me to live.
Francis Bacon in Your Blood Page 18