Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  Francis has just written – a much longer, scrawled letter than usual – to thank me for the ‘very generous and flattering article’ I’ve written on his work for Connoisseur magazine in New York. A friend of mine, Hans Namuth, has taken a series of portraits of Francis to accompany it, and I can’t think that Francis was unaware when they met in London that Hans is best known for the famous photographs he took of his bête noire, Jackson Pollock, at work. It doesn’t seem to have got in the way, however, despite Francis’s much aired antipathy to Pollock. In any case, I’m very pleased he likes my text, because although it could hardly be construed as anything less than positive and admiring you never quite know whether Francis isn’t going to take issue with some statement or allusion he finds inaccurate or ambiguous, particularly since he believes that most, if not all, art critics are stupid and they have to be told what to say, rather as he has done, in his maniacally controlling way, in his interviews with Sylvester. He corrects me, rightly enough, on a mistake I made in quoting his favourite line from Aeschylus, ‘The reek of human blood smiles out at me,’ then goes on to say, ‘I particularly liked your emphasis on enigma, which as you know is difficult to achieve. I wonder if at Delphi the Sibyl still gives it out.’ Francis himself is about to be the Sibyl now, since his big new retrospective will soon be opening at the Tate, which is why my article, along with scores of others, has been commissioned, in order to apprise the wider world of what is about to hit them.

  I’ve been invited to the VIP reception at the Tate and the dinner afterwards, not just as a friend of the artist’s but also as a lender, since they have requested my triptych, which I am all the gladder to lend since it will be properly insured for once, not only in London but in the subsequent venues in Stuttgart and Berlin. Unexpectedly, when I go over to London for the opening, I don’t get the same intense rush of excitement – that peculiar mixture of dread and pleasure – which seeing a number of Bacons together has always given me so far. There is a degree of familiarity that makes the dread less dreadful, although going through the first half of the exhibition is as emotional an experience as ever. These dark, often almost clumsy images were painted by another Bacon, before I knew him, a young artist who was struggling with the burden of the terrible truth he had to express, if he were to survive, but didn’t yet know how to express. There is a sense of an elemental struggle here, of the forces of life and death being confronted head on, that you never get except in the greatest paintings. Here Bacon joins the masters, the artists who continue to enthral us through the generations. Perhaps later on, and certainly in some of the most recent paintings, he has become almost too adept, too technically cunning and practised, at evoking the central enigmas of existence.

  I know Francis has been particularly insistent that there’s no lack of champagne for the party afterwards, and since a large contingent of Soho friends and hangers-on has turned up the evening looks like it might be lively to the point of getting out of hand. There’s many a face I vaguely recognize from years of trawling all the pubs and clubs with Francis, and he hasn’t left out any of the old-timers, like Gaston Berlemont, with his buffalo-horn moustache, from the French pub, and the one they call ‘Maltese Mary’, the former policeman now presiding over a particularly unruly Soho nightspot. If I were a Proust, I guess I would be having a Proustian ‘moment’, with all kinds of memories and smells and phrases flooding back, but my main reaction is relief at having got away from this frayed, inward-looking little world, fond of it though I still am. As I listen in, the boozy talk goes suddenly from booming to sotto voce as odds are taken on the most likely victim to be claimed this evening. First it was Peter Lacy, then it was George Dyer, whose turn is it now? goes the refrain. Eyes turn to where John Edwards is chatting and laughing, but he looks far too poised and cheerful to be considering any drastic action. In any case, as I leave the Soho brigade and scan the seething, guffawing mass of people to see where else I might mingle, I am struck by how death has already plucked too great a number from our midst: Sonia Orwell is no longer here, nor is Muriel Belcher, and John Deakin died a good while ago.

  Francis is standing in the middle of the swell, moving from one ring of fervent admirers to another and beaming with pleasure. He is particularly good in these circumstances. Once all attention is totally and unambiguously focused on him, he makes nothing of it and becomes unusually attentive to all those around, kissing and greeting and making charmingly self-deprecatory remarks. I go over to congratulate him, and he greets me warmly, but I don’t see much of him for the rest of the evening because the lionizing never stops. We’ve arranged to meet at Wheeler’s, just like old times, later in the week once the hubbub has died down. I wonder whether Francis will have recovered from all the exposure and compliments by then, since most people would probably prefer a week on a health farm to such relentless carousing. But then, of course, Francis is not ‘most people’, and I’m sure his appetite for praise is as boundless and voracious as it is for food, drink and sex.

  One thing I feel fairly certain of when I get to Wheeler’s and tuck into the mouth-puckering combination of briny oysters and acidic white wine is that, if ever Francis is going to be relaxed and generous about other artists, this moment of barely contested triumph will be it (though I was amused to see a Punch cartoon showing a crowd of people going into the show hale and hearty only to come out of the exit bent over and vomiting). I want to do a new interview with him, and I’d like to get him to discuss his contemporaries in a measured, if not even slightly positive, way. The inevitable sole hasn’t even been served up before I discover my mistake.

  ‘I still think Pound was right. You have to “make it new”,’ Francis says the moment I mention Freud’s big, newish picture, Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau). ‘There’s something so infinitely boring, so academic, so depressing really about that way of painting.’

  The moment Freud’s name comes up I sense him go aggressively tense, as if the hair at the back of his neck was suddenly bristling like a dog’s – just as it did, I remembered, years ago when a hapless hostess in Paris introduced him to Jasper Johns. I’d been talking about the picture to Ron Kitaj the day before, and he’d praised it to the skies. ‘It’s the greatest painting to have been done in years,’ Kitaj enthused. ‘At least, the greatest in what I call “straightforward” painting, where there’s no modernist intervention. In my work, in Francis’s, there’s intervention, Surrealist, Expressionist or whatever. Freud paints without that, directly.’

  ‘I think he’s managed to achieve something very difficult,’ I say. ‘To record a certain reality faithfully, without distortion, yet forcefully, memorably.’

  ‘I don’t agree with you at all,’ Francis says. ‘The difficulty has got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘But it is difficult nowadays to stay that close to visual fact . . .’

  ‘But nowadays you have to reinvent the way you communicate those facts.’

  ‘Well, I think there’s a whole generation of artists who feel they have to come back closer to direct representation of reality, who feel that invention and distortion have been taken so far there’s not much more to be achieved in that direction. I mean, after Picasso—’

  ‘Oh but there’s a lot more, a very great deal more. There are all sorts of ways still of bringing fact back in a more violent way. But you have to have the talent to find them.’

  ‘Well, after Picasso and you, Francis, the field has been pretty well covered, surely?’

  ‘Well, of course, one doesn’t know about oneself . . .’

  During this short exchange Francis has topped my glass to the brim twice. I’ve seen the warning signs and know that I should head the conversation elsewhere. But I’m annoyed at coming up constantly against this blank wall, so I give it one last try.

  ‘There must be some contemporaries whose work you like, Francis.’

  ‘I’m not sure there are, really,’ Francis says, after a pause. ‘The trouble is when you have no really gr
eat art, you don’t even get good minor artists. Nowadays, since no one has been able to reinvent that whole mythical side that the Greeks were able to draw on, you almost have to make an art out of your critical faculties.’

  ‘Well, what about Frank Auerbach?’ I persist. ‘I know you admired some of his paintings.’

  ‘I used to think Frank Auerbach’s work had quality for a moment,’ Francis concedes. ‘But only for a moment, though.’ Then, turning more waspish, he adds: ‘I’ve certainly never liked those ghastly sculptures your friend Raymond Mason does. They look like the brains you see laid out on slabs in French butchers’ shops. They’re coarse, terribly coarse. Just like him.’

  I play my trump card, knowing I will probably pay dearly for it.

  ‘Well, I suppose you would say that, now that you’ve been acknowledged right across the world as the “greatest living painter”.’

  I half duck, expecting a broadside.

  ‘Well,’ says Francis, brightly, with an ironic smile. ‘There’s not much competition, is there?’

  Back in Paris, just before waking up this morning in the office (barely in time to get my clothes on before our secretary arrives), I had an odd, disturbing dream. Francis had died, quite suddenly, while he was here, in a room I vaguely recognized. I was notified almost immediately, and shortly afterwards a group of Parisians, mostly museum directors and officials at the Ministry of Culture, contacted me to let me know that they had decided to erect a bronze statue of him, either in the Tuileries gardens or beside the Deux Magots at the big crossroads in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I told them I thought Saint-Germain would be the more suitable location, and I also took issue with the fact that they wanted simply to have Francis’s initials, ‘F.B.’, carved into the stone plinth. The name, I insisted, should be carved in full. During these discussions I was obliged to go into the room where he had died. His body had been removed, but that vaguely familiar space was alive with his recent presence even though it smelt like a hospital of surgical disinfectant. The room started to take on a nightmarish aspect, as if it were the room where I also had to die, and I struggled against having to go back there. I also became anxious that, once cast in bronze, Francis would look rather ridiculous, particularly if the sculpture accentuated his paunch and made him look dumpy. I began to worry whether or not the sculptor would put him in a double-breasted jacket, like the ones he has taken to wearing recently, and so give him a better figure. Then I realized I had lost an important part of my past and that I would keenly regret Francis’s not being there any more. It made me feel lonely. But I also felt freer and lighter, as though a new perspective had opened up in my life.

  14

  An Ancient Simplicity

  You start off thinking how interesting, challenging and even fun it might be to have your own magazine and, after fantasizing about it for a moment, you wake up to find it’s consumed your whole life. You are no longer a person, you are Art International, not just to the people working with you but to all the artists, writers, dealers and hangers-on who want something from the publication. Art International has taken off, it’s in mid-air now, and the recurrent nightmare I have of being plucked out of my passenger seat to actually pilot the plane while it bucks and plunges randomly across the sky with the instrument panel going crazy is very close to present reality. I’ve always needed to feel in control of what’s going on in my life, but now I am up to my neck in the chaotic and unforeseen, lurching from one new crisis to another.

  Wherever I look, trouble is brewing. Our secretary becomes pregnant and I find that under French law I have to continue to pay her while taking on another in her place who in turn insists that she must have her own part-time assistant. We now also employ an office manager and a publicity director, both of whom have brought in various smiling accomplices paid on a complex system of retainers and commissions. Our costs are going through the roof, and although Mariella supports us loyally, it is never clear when she will make out another cheque or in what amount; she has an uncanny knack of knowing just how much will keep us from going under before the next issue comes out. I pace round my former flat, once a haven of romantic assignation and youthful revel, to keep a sharp eye on the proliferating staff as they commune with typewriter and screen, fax and telephone. But the amiable old terracotta tiles shift uneasily under my feet, as if at any moment they might open and swallow me into a bottomless pit of debt.

  It’s not just the acceleration of outgoings that worries me, but the regular shortfalls in eagerly anticipated revenue. Some advertisers simply default on their payment. Others default while making a fuss about it. How could we, they protest, have got the colour or the design in their artwork so wrong? Others claim they have not been displayed advantageously enough, with one refusing to settle the bill because their ad appears opposite a gallery with whom – didn’t we know? – they have fallen out with a vengeance. Staff and advertisers are only part of the problem. A museum director in Australia feels slighted because we haven’t reviewed a show he has curated, telephoning long-distance to insult and threaten me personally; an influential German artist insinuates that his dealers will cease advertising unless a painting of his appears on the next issue’s cover, while an ageing American painter who considers we have overlooked his achievement follows me all the way down the rue de Seine loudly chanting ‘Fuck you and fuck Art International’ – to say nothing of the renowned Marxist art critic who vociferously demands four times what our other timid, bourgeois writers are paid. While visiting more art fairs and exhibition openings than ever, I mingle less freely, frequently looking over my shoulder. Meanwhile, since Eli and his fellow Filipinos have no papers and our whole little operation falls woefully short of France’s complex labour and fiscal laws, a definite paranoia has set in, so that, while refining a sumptuous choice of paintings by Crivelli or a collage of Surrealist poetry, we live in daily dread of the surprise knock on the door and being busted by the sinister-sounding brigade financière.

  Whenever I feel severely oppressed, I take refuge in the company of a close painter friend called Zoran Mušič, an exact contemporary of Francis’s and a survivor of Dachau. Over the past decade Zoran has produced a series of poignant paintings of the dead and the dying as he saw and lived with them in the death camp. I have interviewed him and written about his work, and in the relationship that has developed between us he has become a parallel father figure, albeit a less flamboyant and demanding one than Francis. Zoran’s high-ceilinged, silent studio on the rue des Vignes is a haven of peace. He knows the stresses I am under and often we sit there together for an hour or two without talking. In the extraordinary calm Zoran radiates I attempt desperately to get my situation into perspective and find the best way of muddling through before I return to my self-inflicted responsibilities as owner and publisher of an art magazine.

  One very bright spot on this otherwise darkening horizon is that, after a period of celibacy and a couple of passing affairs, I have fallen in love with Art International’s new correspondent in London. She is called Jill Lloyd, and although fourteen years my junior she is already a recognized authority on German Expressionism and a valued lecturer at University College London. We met briefly at the opening of a ‘School of London’ show in a Düsseldorf museum, whose sympathetic director was her long-standing fiancé and where, with a little help from my artist friends, I managed to stage a powerful display of works by Bacon, Freud, Michael Andrews, Kossoff, Auerbach and Kitaj. At first sight each of us found the other distant and arrogant; then we met again for a drink at the RAC to discuss how Jill might cover the art scene in London for the magazine, but we began laughing so much that all business was forgotten and we spent an extraordinary, exhilarating evening together, ending up in Soho in search of small drinking clubs I’d known with Francis. We have seen each other at every available moment since, in London and Paris, New York and Venice. We are so swept off our feet that neither of us doubts for a second that our future lies in living together. Jill pla
ns to cut all her ties in London and Düsseldorf in order to move to Paris and work with me on the magazine. Meanwhile I hope to get Francis’s approval to take over the studio definitively for a period so that Jill and I have somewhere to begin our new life.

  Falling in love has given a huge boost to my vitality and self-confidence, enabling me to confront pressing, professional problems that I have been dodging. I clamp down on associates and assistants, sacking an advertising rep whose expenses regularly dwarf whatever revenue he brings in. The atmosphere in the office seems to improve, though I do wonder whether this is not mainly because I am seeing everything through powerfully rose-tinted spectacles. I try to tone my new-found optimism down, since I’m aware it might well annoy those unfortunate enough not to be bathed in the same radiant light. Even so, I catch myself exuding a conviction that carries all before it, descrying sense and harmony in what seemed an inescapably haphazard and cruel universe before.

  Francis is back in Paris, and I’ve told him a little about what has happened with Jill. He’s always been perfectly at ease and charming with my girlfriends, particularly with Alice, whose lively company he seemed to enjoy. But I’m wary of Francis’s reaction because his opinion still counts enormously for me and I want him, almost like a parent, to approve of Jill. I also have to be careful that he isn’t made too aware of the influence he wields in case that triggers the sadistic, treacherous streak in him. For the moment, however, he couldn’t be more generous and encouraging. Knowing that the studio is so useful to me, he has booked himself into the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, and when I protest about this (I’ve got the studio completely ready for him, right down to milk in the fridge and a single yellow rose on the marble-topped bistro table), he claims in his best, unanswerable way that he’s far more comfortable there, not least because he’s been unwell and the hotel has a doctor always on call.