Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  The chaos in the Paris studio is nothing like Reece Mews but it’s growing. There’s a big trestle table beside the easel that’s already like an archive of the way he works. It’s covered in dried brushes, half-used Winsor & Newton paint tubes, Sennelier pastel sticks, acrylic sprays, old colour-caked socks and sweaters along with several green-and-gold-edged dinner plates from Heal’s and even a brand-new frying pan that have been used to mix colours. The latter always stands out, because where you might expect to find a couple of fried eggs, you get a rich, pounded swirl of bright oils that, like a signature, could only be Francis’s. Similar patches of paint reappear all over the table, as well, oddly, as several scattered oyster knives. There are also photos and books, loose change and restaurant bills, notes, Métro tickets and letters flowing on to the floor, which in itself remains comparatively pristine, perhaps because the parquet was made specially, and expensively, for the space and so imposes a certain respect. What has been less respected, I’m shocked to discover, is one of the volumes of the Degas catalogue raisonné by Lemoisne that I gave Francis as a present, having gone to considerable trouble to track down the complete, original edition through an antiquarian bookseller on the Place Saint-Sulpice. It’s lying open under the table now, with paint all over it and several pages clearly ripped out.

  Beside it there’s also a copy of the original draft of The Waste Land with Ezra Pound’s annotations that Francis gave me once in London and that I’ve brought back to the studio here because I know the whole idea of one great poet being edited by another fascinates him. We’ve talked about it several times and Francis says how lucky Eliot was to have Pound’s editing since he thinks the poem became so much better as a result. ‘I long to have someone telling me “Do this. Don’t do that,” but of course I’ve never found anybody.’ Every time I try to imagine the kind of person Francis would take instruction from I come up with a total blank.

  By the windows Francis has put a large, brass-bound sea chest. I’ve no idea what’s in it because it’s always kept locked, but I imagine he has other, no doubt more personal or secret photos and painting paraphernalia in it. Along with the brightly coloured frying pan, he also keeps an old wooden T-square and a large plastic dustbin lid to hand, and every now and then I’m amused to see how he has used them to get angles or circles in the paintings. There are also quite a few books that Francis has been given by friends and admirers on the bookshelves. He’s become quite a star in Paris since the Grand Palais show, and I’ve seen people come up to him in restaurants and cafés and ask for signatures or press some publication of their own on him. We were going down the rue de Seine the other day when a woman suddenly threw her arms round him and kissed him. I imagined they were good friends until he told me he hadn’t the faintest idea who she was.

  I suppose this kind of fame has come to Francis not only from all the exhibitions of his work and the books and countless articles about him in the press that have appeared over the years, but also from less obvious sources like the cinema. Last Tango in Paris, for instance, which has been hugely controversial and widely successful, was influenced in all kinds of ways by Francis’s paintings, it seems, and it featured reproductions of two of them in the opening credits. Apparently the film’s director, Bernardo Bertolucci, visited the Grand Palais show several times and wanted to incorporate some of Francis’s colours, notably his very distinctive orange, into Last Tango. I particularly like the fact that Bertolucci took Marlon Brando into the exhibition and suggested that Paul, his character in the film, should absorb as much as possible from Bacon’s figures and especially from their faces, that were ‘eaten’, Bertolucci suggested, ‘by something coming from the inside’.

  I know Francis has been working on several pictures commemorating George’s death, and I sometimes wonder whether the real reason why he wants a place in Paris (whether he himself is conscious of it or not) is to be close to that loss and that pain. One of the things that make Francis stand out, I think, is what you might call an ‘appetite’ for suffering, which is perhaps as strong in him as his appetite for pleasure. He’s said to me that he thinks that ‘an artist’s sensibility should always be kept stretched’, and sometimes one can actually sense the tension this must set up coming off him in waves. So I suppose that by living in Paris he now feels closer to the source of pain and that, artistically, he can feed off it.

  Like everything in life, death can come in by the strangest door. Francis’s sister, Ianthe, has been visiting him with her whole family. They have a vast citrus farm in Rhodesia (his other sister, Winnie, is an invalid living in the capital, Salisbury) and they’re in Europe mainly, I think, to see her famous brother. The two of them get on well and share the same kind of frankness. I was amused the other day, over lunch, when Francis said their parents always had wine with their dinner and Ianthe said, ‘Did they?’ in a surprised tone, clearly implying that that wasn’t her memory at all, and I began wondering to what extent Francis’s version of his early years, to say nothing of the rest of his life, hasn’t been recast and closely edited according to his own needs and fantasies. Mythologizing his life is at the very centre of his existence and his painting, and of course to some degree we all mythologize ourselves, the main difference being that most of us don’t do it skilfully and powerfully enough for it to be of any importance or relevance to anyone else.

  Francis also likes Ianthe’s husband, Ben, probably because he’s jovial and very masculine, since they don’t exactly have much in common. We’ve had several congenial meals together, with Francis playing the perfect host in grand Paris restaurants like Taillevent, and I’ve got on well with Ben too, so I’m shocked when Francis calls me and says that Ben has had a massive heart attack and died in the hotel room. I immediately send a letter of condolence to Ianthe, conscious of how little one can say and how little it will mean, and I know Francis has been very much on hand to help her with the unwelcome formalities and procedures surrounding a death, which he knows well. I have dinner with Francis in a local bistro shortly after Ianthe and her children have gone back to Africa, and he’s clearly shaken by the sudden death, even though it opens a vein of black humour in him that is never far from the surface.

  ‘Ben’s death came as a terrible shock of course to all of us,’ Francis says. ‘But when you start thinking of it dispassionately there is something horribly comic about the whole thing because he came over here as this great big man and now he’s being flown back as nothing more than a little box of ashes.’

  PART THREE

  1976–1992

  11

  ‘Only Francis Bacon is More Wonderful than You’

  ‘Sales Anglais! Sales Anglais! ’

  A blind man is striking me over the head and shoulders as hard as he can with his white stick. Luckily for me the stick is hollow and although I’m rigid with shock the blows hardly hurt.

  The attack has come completely out of the blue. I’m in Marseille for Francis’s show at the Musée Cantini, which is due to open tomorrow evening. It’s a perfect summer afternoon, I’ve just had a delicious bouillabaisse with Francis on the Vieux-Port and we’ve decided to take a stroll through the city. Without realizing it we’ve wandered into a fairly run-down, rough area. It’s quite exotic, because the cooking smells are more spicy and there’s loud Arab music pouring out of the bars. The men are North African workers and the only women to be seen on the street are clearly prostitutes, brightly dressed and some of them with big Alsatian dogs on a leash, no doubt for protection. I sense that the men are looking at us oddly, with hard, dark eyes, and just as I mention this to Francis the blind man who has been tapping the pavement in front of us turns round and starts yelling at us and raining blows on me. It’s easy enough to dodge out of range but somehow we’ve lost our appetite to explore further. We walk back to the main road and I expect Francis to comment on this curious outburst, which seems to have been triggered off simply by the fact that we were talking in English. I wonder whether being struck by a
blind man has any particular significance. It hardly seems a good omen just before a big, official opening – and, I reflect, it may well have put a jinx on me. I can see from Francis’s face that, like me, he’s been struck by the odd symbolism of the incident. But since he doesn’t mention it, neither do I, and we walk back to the hotel in silence.

  Most of the artists I know get pretty jumpy before an exhibition, but Francis seems calm and collected, even though he’s had to meet numerous local worthies and give endless interviews and will no doubt have to go through many more hoops in the run-up to the opening. He’s intrigued by Marseille’s reputation as an ungovernable city, riven by organized crime and racial tensions, and he’s looking forward to the dinner we’re having this evening with Gaston Defferre, the ‘strong man’ mayor reputed to have links with the Mob and to be the only politician capable of controlling the place.

  Defferre, who has the extra distinction, I learn from a newspaper article, of being the last man in France to have fought a duel, has taken a private room in a well-known local Provençal restaurant. Francis, Nadine Haïm and I arrive promptly on time and Defferre introduces us to his wife, the writer Edmonde Charles-Roux, whose novel Oublier Palerme has been a runaway best-seller. Defferre looks satisfyingly like the ‘strong man’ he is reputed to be: broad-shouldered, powerfully built and with a deep tan. He tells us he’s been out on his boat sailing all day. I’m still a little shaken from my beating by the blind man, but I realize that it’s hardly a story worth telling this evening since it reflects badly both on Marseille and on me. Francis is doing what he can to keep the conversation flowing, which he always finds more difficult when he is not playing the flamboyant host, but since the mayor clearly doesn’t know much about Francis’s work and we know next to nothing about Marseille politics or Edmonde Charles-Roux’s novels, the conversation is in danger of drying up. Luckily, when baskets of bread are brought with frozen olive oil as a substitute for butter, a topic is suddenly found that tides us over for a while, with Francis exclaiming he has never seen or spread frozen olive oil before, and me taking up the refrain in a minor mode with Madame Defferre, seated next to me, and all of us extol its taste and nutrient properties as we attempt to mash the slippery, resilient substance into our crusty pain de campagne. I notice Francis scrutinizing Defferre’s face keenly as if he’d been commissioned to do a portrait of him and had only this occasion to find how he might make it work. The ‘strong man’ of Marseille, who has spent an entire career being photographed, is oblivious to this more subtle kind of examination. Since little common ground seems forthcoming, we all somehow fall back on what has become the common denominator of olive oil.

  ‘Monsieur,’ asks Edmonde Charles-Roux, my statuesque, celebrated hostess, as if our future that evening depended on the right answer. ‘Aimez-vous l’huile d’olive?’

  This, I realize, is a leading question. Should I reply, ‘Madame, I cannot see how one could not like, love, even adore l’huile d’olive,’ or would it sound better to remain Olympian and say, ‘Everything depends, naturellement, on the terroir, the pressing and the year’?

  ‘Yes, of course, Madame,’ I reply meekly, forking the remnants of the frozen variety into my mouth. ‘There are few things I like better.’

  ‘Monsieur,’ Edmonde says, though I can hardly think of her as ‘Edmonde’ since it sounds more formal even than ‘Madame’. ‘I will send you a case of the best olive oil that Provence can produce.’

  I pause for a few seconds to convey how much this honour means to me, even though I suspect somehow it will never happen, and answer:

  ‘Madame, I should be honoured and delighted but please do not give yourself the bother of even thinking about it.’

  This appears to inflame Madame Edmonde’s desire to fulfil her promise.

  ‘Monsieur,’ she countermands. ‘Be so amiable as to provide me with your address in Paris and I shall give the necessary instructions.’

  The wine has flowed as steadily as the oil and when we rise at the end of the evening we all appear to have become the most inseparable of friends, linked by a shared passion for the produce of Provence.

  Once back at the hotel, I am unable to get to sleep. I slip out and retrace our steps of the afternoon. The blind man is nowhere in sight but the prostitutes are, looking more alluring now that night has fallen. I engage in preliminary banter with one of them but the big dog accompanying her sniffs and noses my crotch intimately, then growls deep in its throat so threateningly that I beat a retreat, my tail very much between my legs.

  However tough the mayor and the city he rules, I suspect that Francis’s new images may come across as provocatively morbid. The show opens with a beautiful Bullfight, a locking of man and beast with the background panel as if mirroring a Nuremberg Rally, a sea of heads beneath a Nazi banner, in the distance. This memorable picture seems to me to illustrate perfectly Francis’s particular genius for bringing two quite distinct, separate images convincingly together, whether a pope and Eisenstein’s screaming nanny, or a corrida and the Third Reich, so setting off in the imagination entire runs of other images and associations. There’s often no knowing what his original sources are, but I experience a rush of pleasure when I notice that one of the strangest new pictures, simply entitled May–June 1974, shows two horse riders on the beach. That is an obvious homage to Degas’s riders, and the reason why Francis ripped the corresponding reproductions out of the catalogue raisonné I gave him in order to have them in view as he painted.

  Soon, however, for anyone who knows the basic facts about the artist, the exhibition turns into a poignant requiem to George, who has been brought back and held between life and death in several majestic, gilt-framed triptychs. In one of them he is shown on the left-hand panel against a black exit with half his body already excised and the rest of his vitality seemingly seeping into a shadow on the floor, while Francis appears on the right similarly diminished. In the centre panel both their bodies are joined in a blurred coupling. After several premonitory pictures comes the death itself, reading from right to left in three acts: George alone in the hotel room, trying to vomit up the drink and drugs into the washbasin; passing into the strange bat-like shadow of death; dying seated on the lavatory, his face half averted and as delicately splintered as a cracked eggshell.

  Since getting back to Paris I’ve been haunted by the various posthumous images of George, and it is clear to me now that Francis did want to return to Paris above all to feel his guilt and pain and loss as keenly as he could in order to reconceive the few sad events with maximum intensity. I’ve had a recurring dream the past few nights where I’ve been running down a street of toppling buildings, great blocks of cement and masonry just missing me, then hands reaching out of the air to pull at me and slow me down so that the chances of being hit get ever closer until I wake up in a sweat. I can only think the dream is re-enacting my own fear of death, and I wonder whether the frequent attacks of anxiety I suffer from (and which alcohol momentarily soothes) aren’t rooted in my refusal to accept death as an inevitable fact of life – as Francis’s paintings do so vividly. Francis himself keeps death squarely in view, and perhaps he derives his extraordinary appetite for life from being aware of death lying constantly in wait for him, as for all of us, just around the corner.

  The two big self-portraits in the exhibition are also very moving. One shows Francis alone in a circular room in which the sheerly foreshortened perspective of the floorboards presses his corkscrewed figure tight up against the picture glass, as if all the air had been siphoned out of the space – a sensation which I often think must have been prompted, consciously or not, by Francis’s continuous struggle as a chronic asthmatic to breathe. The other has him leaning despondently on a washbasin, no different from the one where George had attempted to vomit except that, in a brilliant conceit, the basin has been painted as if in a void, unattached to any wall, so that Bacon himself is portrayed as floating in a kind of limbo. I try to reconcile these images of
loneliness and desolation with the ebullient companion I have spent so much time with over the past few months and wonder if two such extreme states can coexist – or whether the cheerfulness is merely a veil, a disguise put on to hide the despair. ‘I’m optimistic about nothing,’ Francis frequently says. ‘Even though I don’t believe in anything I’m rarely depressed simply because my nervous system is filled with optimism.’

  Certainly despair hasn’t kept him from celebrating life in Paris, and to my delight we have been hitting the high spots in the city in a very regular, determined fashion, from tea and dainty cucumber sandwiches at the Ritz to champagne (‘juste une coupe pour nous remonter’) at the Crillon, from gorgeous dinners at Lucas Carton and the Tour d’Argent to new, fashionable nightclubs like Le Sept on the rue Sainte-Anne, a predominantly homosexual disco where Francis is greeted as a hero, even on crowded evenings when other celebrities like Nureyev and Yves Saint-Laurent, to say nothing of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, are having supper there. When Francis and I go in there together I’m impressed that the owner, Fabrice Emaer, who’s nicknamed the Prince of the Night, always cuts a swathe through the jostling, partying crowd to greet Francis, whom I think of as the magician of the night; certainly, between the two of them, the night comes fully alive. No doubt because he has such an iconic presence at the Sept (here comes that number again), Francis makes it a nightly port of call whenever he’s out on the town, and although I’ve never seen him pick up anyone or disappear into the dark, throbbing dance floor downstairs, I know he particularly enjoys sitting by the bar watching the ebb and flow of people in the huge wall mirrors that slightly distort all the goings-on from every angle round the room, much as he must have liked watching and recording it in his mind’s eye years ago in the mirrors of the Gargoyle.