Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  ‘Those places like Monte Carlo fascinate me too because of all the odd people who seem to be able to exist there and nowhere else. Well, the curious kinds of doctors who I suppose can only practise in those sorts of places. And those incredible old women who queue up for the casino to open in the morning. Anyway, the evening I had that marvellous run of luck in Monte Carlo, a very handsome man was standing opposite me at one of the tables, just watching everything that was going on. Well, he came and stayed with me at the villa I took. And we were standing outside one night looking down at the sea and he said, he had some foreign accent, “That eez my yacht over zere,” and of course I knew he hadn’t got a yacht and I said, “That’s not your yacht,” and he said, “Ah perhaps it eezn’t zat one, it must be over zere somevere . . .” Anyway, later I said to him, “Why don’t you go into the films with those marvellous looks of yours?” And he looked very serious for a moment, and then he said, “Vell, I might go into ze films. Yes I might, I vill tink about it.” Anyway, the next morning he disappeared. And a couple of hours later the whole of the Monte Carlo police was in the villa wanting to know about him. It turned out he’d worked his way all round the Riviera, from casino to casino, as a confidence trickster, making people pay dearly for their fun, and probably everything else besides.

  ‘I’ve lived the life of all those fools. In many ways I regret it now. I wish I’d begun to paint seriously much earlier. I didn’t really begin until I was thirty or so. For so long I simply enjoyed myself, without knowing what I wanted to do with my life. At the time I was with this friend who had money, and we drifted together round the Mediterranean, going to all those kinds of places, staying in grand hotels and eating and drinking too much. The barmen there were fascinating, they were like nursemaids. People would come in and sit at the bar and pour their life stories out. And the barmen would keep filling their glasses and telling them what they should do. It was absolutely mad, but for some reason we spent all our time there. There was such boredom in the place you simply sat there and couldn’t believe it. One woman got so bored she just went up to her room and threw her dog out of the window. Well, it landed on that thing, the awning, below, and someone had to be sent to rescue it. Of course everyone loved that. It gave them something new to talk about. Relieved the unbelievable boredom of it all for a moment. Just for a moment.’

  I realize that if I hadn’t had such a complete breakdown I should never have left my impecunious but stylish, agreeable life as an art writer to get into the rough and tumble of trying to launch a specialist magazine. It was a bit like a drowning man grasping at a spar. Just as I began to resurface, Jim Fitzsimmons, who founded Art International in Switzerland in 1956, died. He was still relatively young, and alongside excessive drinking and smoking the main cause of his death was the unrelieved stress of running a high-quality, poorly funded magazine. Ever since I wrote my first article on Bacon for him, Jim and I had become good friends, and while I was suffering from my run-in with Rubin, he gave me all the moral support he could. On his death he also left me his whole, extensive library of first editions of modernist poets, from Pound and Eliot onwards. Like my fellow contributors, I was aghast at the idea of life without Art International, which I considered head and shoulders above other art magazines and for which I had been not only Paris correspondent for a good decade but also a senior editor (when Jim had no money to pay even his key writers, he would bestow prestigious titles on them). For a while there was discussion among the most faithful contributors about who might walk the plank, none of us having illusions as to how perilous and thankless the responsibilities of producing a niche art magazine would be. Like a sleepwalker, I stepped forward. Then in the dead of winter I made the trip to Lugano, handed over a symbolic Swiss franc to a lawyer in return for the rights to the magazine’s title and, from a lugubrious storage site covered in muddy snow, I collected the remains of this internationally respected magazine: a few hundred copies, some shoe boxes filled with subscribers’ addresses, and numerous letters, including a long, lively correspondence with Jean Dubuffet.

  Now that I’ve got these fragmentary archives back in my apartment, I’m wondering quite what the next step is. It reminds me a bit of when I manoeuvred myself into the driving seat of Cambridge Opinion all those years ago, then realized I didn’t know how to drive. Here the problems are more daunting because I am no longer a feckless student but a man in his early middle years, nel mezzo del cammin, who is about to have the entire moral, financial and fiscal responsibilities of an international publication suddenly visited on him. There are a few glimmerings of light in this dark tunnel. Several friends have pledged support of one kind or another, not so much in the form of cash, unfortunately, as advice and introductions. I’ve also been absorbing the correspondence with Dubuffet which reads almost like a manual on how to launch an art magazine. Fitzsimmons himself clearly had to learn as he went along, and Dubuffet is constantly guiding him, insisting above all on which art dealers he must cultivate to ensure they take, and pay for, advertising space – the only revenue a magazine of such inevitably limited circulation can aspire to. I wonder who my Dubuffet might be. Although I plan to do my first issue on the ‘School of London’ artists (again not so different, although hopefully more professional, than my Cambridge Opinion venture), Francis is the only one with the influence and the generosity to help. But I particularly don’t want to ask him for anything because in this new undertaking I want to stand very much on my own two feet. For the moment at least, I realize, I will have to be my own Dubuffet.

  Meanwhile, news of my editorial acquisition has gone the rounds of the Paris art world in no time. One variegated group, which might be loosely characterized as my artist friends (who range from the middling successful to the irretrievably obscure), are celebrating the fact that, if I have not extolled their achievements in print earlier – because, I pleaded, my philistine editors always refused – now the way ahead is clear: as owner and publisher, I will be able to open my pages to them unconditionally, reproducing their works full page, and preferably slap bang on the cover. Some of them have taken to dropping in at my flat, already becoming better known as the Art International offices, to gently or quite crudely press their claim. I can barely give them the time of day, however, since I am overwhelmed by the need to set up a financially limited company, study methods of boosting circulation so as to stimulate advertising, while staying within the peculiarly constrictive French laws on commercial undertakings. I have started visiting bankers and accountants as if I can’t live without them. I also need constant legal advice, and luckily an old friend from Cambridge, Charles Campbell, who has set up a flourishing law firm in Paris, generously gives me both counsel and the comforting impression that I no longer stand totally alone, naked and unprotected, before the law. One thing everyone seems agreed on, however, is the doubt as to whether my undertaking can be conceived of in any sense as ‘commercial’, since all the signs are that art magazines devour money, hope and goodwill, chalk up losses, then die.

  If money is scarce, enthusiasm for the new project is becoming almost embarrassingly abundant. Offers to write, to solicit advertising or to mastermind subscription drives and promotional campaigns pour in, as if a deep swathe of the Paris art world cannot resist the seductions of working on the relaunch of the high-minded, beautifully produced magazine that Art International has always been. Among this number I discover one who appears able to do everything, from knocking out a useful text to organizing subscriptions and chivvying potential financial backers. Above all this clever, hugely keen American academic proves to be a dab hand at computers, whose use and very existence has escaped me until now. The American and I tacitly agree to join forces, and my elegant bachelor pad is slowly transformed into a functional space, with cheap, severe-looking desks and several boxy Apple computers. In what used to be my storage space at the back of the apartment, we also install a gleaming fax machine, and every time it rings, the American and I run down the corrido
r to watch in wonder as sheets of typescript spew effortlessly out on to the red-tiled floor.

  My household arrangements are necessarily changing apace. The dining room, where not long ago I entertained Francis and Denis, has been taken over by the American, who has assumed the sonorous title of ‘Editor-in-Chief’, which sounds more desirable to me than my own onerous position as ‘Publisher’. The big loft-like room, where I used to work and sleep, has also taken on a predominantly professional air in which the bed covered by a vivid green-and-pink Indian quilt looks increasingly incongruous. The small, gilt-framed triptych, the latest painting Francis has given me, still hangs above the fireplace at the end of the room. It acts like a magnet, drawing everybody’s attention the moment they come in. It’s made up of three studies of the photographer Peter Beard, whom I’ve met several times with Francis. Peter is strikingly handsome and has sent Francis sheaves of photographs of himself that I’ve seen lying around the studio here. Francis talks in a detached, clinical way about liking the ‘bone structure’ of Peter’s face, although I assume he is also very attracted to him. Each ‘head’ is beautifully, intricately contrived, and I know I should insure the picture, since it’s easy to break into the apartment and in any case so many people are now coming through all they’d need is a minute alone to pop the three studies into a bag and slip off. I did get a quote from Lloyd’s but the cost plus the security measures they insisted on were way beyond anything I could afford, either this year or next. So I just leave it there, like a major statement, a symbol of our involvement in art, and hope for the best.

  An English secretary has joined us, and sometimes she arrives in the morning before, still stuck in my nonchalant bachelor habits, I have even woken up. Since our little triumvirate works at all hours day and night, I’m finding the lack of privacy frustrating, and although I set out not to request any favours I have now asked Francis whether I might have the use of the studio from time to time. Francis has not only agreed, but he’s actually encouraging me to take it, claiming that he has to focus on new work over the next few months for the retrospective that the Tate is organizing in his honour. So I flit between the two spaces, wondering where I feel less uncomfortable, the rue des Archives with all its office furniture and electronic equipment or the paint-daubed chaos of the rue de Birague.

  Even before we have cobbled the first issue of the new Art International together, our team is growing exponentially as we move towards publication date. Not only have we got designer, printer, foreign correspondents and advertising reps in place, but Eli, my long-standing Filipino cleaner and odd-job man, has graduated into a full-time role by undertaking everything from expediting mail drives and running errands to preparing lunch and being on standby to package the actual magazines when they eventually arrive and hump them over to the post office for international delivery. I am too preoccupied by the whole constantly accelerating process to ask myself whether I am enjoying this radical change in my circumstances. I’m aware of how much I dislike schmoozing with gallery owners in order to win advertising and how impatient I become when sitting with bankers and accountants going over profit forecasts and other equally abstract concepts. I am also regularly peeved by having to commission writers to do the kinds of more interesting articles I myself used to spend my time writing – a now distant, idyllic state to which I sometimes crave to return. I am also growing more and more anxious about whether the whole venture will survive financially and what my future would look like if it doesn’t and I’m simply left with crippling debts. Whatever cheques I’ve managed to garner for prepaid advertising space have already been gobbled up by mounting costs, even though everybody on the team has agreed to work for minimal wages. And since we have splashed out on colour in this first issue and gone way over budget, I am already living in dread of receiving the printer’s bill, which I suspect will leave us penniless.

  Then, just as we seem doomed to go under before we’ve barely even begun – the most ephemeral of ephemeral art magazines – the miracle occurs. An Italian painter friend who has positioned himself strategically among the wealthy tells me that one of his collectors has heard we are relaunching a prestigious art magazine and wonders whether she might be of help. Apparently this lady, Mariella, a well-known cinema actress before the war who married an extremely rich lawyer, now lives between her several properties while frequently battling manic depression in discreet Swiss clinics. If she could play a role in the magazine’s success, my friend tells me, it would help her enormously to deal with her condition. One other thing that she has to contend with, he adds slyly, is her guilt at discovering that she is fundamentally lesbian, which she thought I might understand better than most because of my privileged relationship with Bacon. Depression, homosexual guilt, gifts of money, I thought: these are all stars that in one way and another have lit my way. I agree immediately to a meeting.

  The date has been set and I make my way to a plump white villa sitting in an immaculate garden in Neuilly. The maid takes my coat and ushers me into an overheated room filled with orchids. It is tea time, and the tea things have been daintily set out with two large dishes of livid-green and shocking-pink macaroons. The moment Mariella enters the room, I fall in love with her. Even though clearly of a certain age, she is still strikingly beautiful, with delicate blonde hair and amazing, oddly wounded blue eyes. Rich and attractive, living in the lap of luxury, she seems vulnerable and she regularly mocks herself. We laugh a great deal, and I munch alternately on the little green and pink confections. Then after a while, tea having been cleared away and a welcome glass of champagne in hand, we talk about the magazine’s prospects and the focus of our first issue (she worships Bacon from afar, and we make plans for a meeting next time he is in Paris). And when I think our meeting is over and I should make myself scarce, Mariella says:

  ‘You have been doing a lot of writing. Now it is my turn to do some writing.’

  At which point she produces a chequebook out of her handbag, carefully writes out a cheque and hands it to me.

  I am embarrassed but delighted, and the delight gets the upper hand. I kiss her goodbye. We agree to set up another meeting soon.

  The moment I am out on the street, I stop under a lamp, take the cheque out of my inside jacket pocket and gasp. The sum is sufficient to cover the current issue and the following one. Art International has been saved. Life can go on.

  Life does go on, and the tempo at the magazine is considerably quickened. Mariella will now appear on our masthead as ‘Director of Public Relations’, and we have had some smart business cards with the red-and-black Art International logo printed for her. True to her new calling, Mariella has suggested that a good way to attract advertisers to the magazine would be to organize a launch party for our first issue at the George V or some other grand Paris hotel. I endorse this wholeheartedly, realizing that, although I should actually prefer to have the cost of the party in cash against future issues, a reception on this scale would convince the galleries that Art International was an ideal, solidly funded publication for them to announce their forthcoming shows. And no sooner have the invitation cards, proper stiffies edged in gold, gone out than our advertising revenue for the second issue doubles. I am both relieved and deeply pleased, but no one is more delighted than our languid English secretary who has come into her own in deciding who should and should not be invited and dealing with the avalanche of RSVPs. When the evening comes round, attendees at the reception are deeply impressed not only by the flowing champagne but by the abundant caviare Mariella has ordered. Dealers who normally didn’t acknowledge my presence before now come over to pay their respects, champagne in one hand, blini in the other.

  I like to be inclusive and I’ve invited all our tiny staff including Eli, our factotum. He has brought his attractive Filipina girlfriend, and the two of them, chattering away together in Tagalog, are so slim and elegantly dressed they stand out even in this well-heeled art gathering. At a pinch, I suppose, Eli in his dark-blue su
it, white shirt and conservative tie could be taken for a Japanese collector, and since the Japanese have been investing spectacular sums in Western art, I imagine he can only lend a positive note to the evening. I forget about them both and circulate, making sure that prospective advertisers meet Mariella, who is looking ineffably chic and reassuringly wealthy in a silver couture sheath with diamonds discreetly blazing round her neck. The evening is going with a swing. Mariella has invited some of her rich friends, and the dealers have picked up on the wealth in the room like a scent. Mariella was absolutely right. A show of money is the surest way of attracting money, and several galleries have already confirmed their intention to advertise in our pages.

  Towards the end of the reception, I have a moment of rare delight. With their Far Eastern allure Eli and his fiancée have become a centre of attention. I go over to see what’s happening. Several prominent art dealers from Paris and New York are circling round them, almost literally rubbing their hands as the couple agree, nodding their heads eagerly and politely, to the picture deals that they have been offered. It seems that, having expressed interest in a Renoir, Eli has indicated that they are also in the market for more contemporary masterpieces, thereby keeping all the dealers in a froth of expectation. When pressed for his contact details, Eli nevertheless refrains with true oriental inscrutability, advising the dealers he can only be contacted through me.

  A few days later the bulk of the new issue arrives at our office. Eli has commandeered a few migrant fellow Filipinos to come in under cover of night and slap the magazines into individual cardboard cases that will protect them on their journey to the four corners of the earth. The magazine’s old subscriber list has come alive, and we realize that we have readers in the most outlandish places in the world. New subscribers have since joined. The wind is squarely in our sails. We are on our way.