Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  I go and pick Francis up at the Saints-Pères around tea time and find him a little pale but in jovial mood, drinking whisky with one hand and grasping his coat in the other. He orders a whisky for me, almost unthinkingly, then another round, as if he can’t wait to get a certain degree of alcohol into his system. I try to go easy, knowing that we have a long evening ahead, and I’m still on the first glass as two others stand waiting to be drunk on the table. Francis is talking volubly and doesn’t seem to notice, then he leans over suddenly and says: ‘You don’t have to finish those drinks if you don’t want to. I always drink everything, I don’t know why. To pass the time, I suppose. After all, you have to do something. It’s very silly, I know, to go on drinking like that. The odd thing is, when I’m alone at home I rarely take any drink. But I’ve spent so much of my life drifting round these bars, because when you live alone you just seem to go out more to those kinds of places. And drink does make things easier, or at least it has for me. Once or twice it has helped me to work. It helps to loosen you, I think. I also love the sensation you get with drink. There’s something so marvellous about that feeling, although I sometimes get so drunk it doesn’t make much difference.

  ‘But I do know it makes me less nervous,’ he goes on rapidly. ‘I keep saying to myself, ye’re too old to feel nervous. But there you are. I always am nervous. And then those dreadful hangovers make me even more nervous. Yet they also make me much more concentrated. It’s a curious thing but when I have a hangover, nothing exists outside the thing I happen to be thinking about. Sometimes it makes me particularly clear about what I want to say. It sounds mad, but with a really bad hangover my mind crackles with electricity.

  ‘That doesn’t mean I don’t hate those mornings after. They make you feel really uncomfortable. But in spite of everything I always go back to the same old dreary places and start all over again. Like all those other fools.’

  This seems to give the signal for us to move on to other drinks, since Francis has been invited by a Russian painter he knew in Tangier a long time ago to come for cocktails in his apartment not far away on the rue de Saint-Simon. It’s dark now and there’s a slight drizzle. We both put on our raincoats, me an old Burberry, Francis a brand-new leather coat with epaulettes which he belts up so tightly he looks half strangled.

  ‘The thing is this Russian lived in Tangier because he only liked very young boys,’ Francis tells me as we make our way towards the crossroads at the rue du Bac. ‘And as you know, at least at that time, people in Tangier were very easy about that kind of thing, because it often meant that if a foreigner showed an interest in him their son could simply look forward to a better kind of life. But then things changed, and I think he had to get out very quickly to escape being charged and imprisoned. Anyway, he got in touch and left me his address. Apparently he calls himself Prince Viktor now. He certainly wasn’t a “prince” when I knew him. I let him take over a room I had there to paint in, and I left a whole lot of canvases that hadn’t worked and I hadn’t thrown out because I thought he could use the primed side to paint on. But he didn’t, of course, and he must simply have kept the lot because now some of them are coming on to the market, which is a real bore because I terribly didn’t want to let any of them out.’

  Just at this moment, a thin, elegantly dressed young man comes up to Francis and says:

  ‘Are you Monsieur Bacon?’

  ‘Well, I can hardly say no, can I?’ Francis says with a smile.

  ‘I was sitting in the café and recognized you as you walked by,’ the young man says in an intense, self-preoccupied way. ‘May I ask you a very important question, Monsieur Bacon?’

  ‘Pourquoi pas?’ Francis says ironically. ‘¿Por qué no?’

  ‘I have this problem which I think you can understand,’ the young man goes on. ‘I started taking cocaine about a year ago and now I take it more and more. I have become totally dependent on it, even though it makes me ill and gives me bad anxiety attacks. My friends are worried, so are my parents. So I wanted to ask you, Monsieur Bacon, whether I should try to get off it somehow, with one of those cures.’

  Francis has been looking at him very curiously, as though weighing something up.

  ‘Why shouldn’t you take cocaine?’ he says after a moment. ‘I’ve always taken anything I can get my hands on. It’s a way of stretching the sensibility. No, I think cocaine’s a very good idea,’ Francis adds warmly, as if recommending sea air or an apple a day. ‘I’d go on taking it if I were you.’

  The young man disappears swiftly into the gloom.

  ‘The thing is, he was quite sure I was going to tell him to stop,’ Francis says. We walk on in silence. The incident is forgotten.

  ‘I’ve no idea how Viktor manages to afford living here,’ Francis remarks as we turn into the rue de Saint-Simon and try to find the right number. ‘It all looks very chic. I suppose he must have been selling those dreadful old paintings of mine. But there’s no point in asking him. He’ll simply deny it.’

  We key in the door code and take the lift up to the second floor. A lean, muscular man with close-cropped hair opens the door and greets Francis, who introduces me as ‘a great friend from London who’s now living here’. The apartment is totally white, with white rugs on a pale concrete floor and minimal white furniture. Everything seems to have been accorded its precise place in the room, from the pleated white curtains to the white tulips in the glass vase on the white plastic table. Viktor asks if we’d like a gin and tonic, clearly the only acceptable drink in this blanched space, then he and Francis talk about the people they knew in Tangier – Paul and Jane Bowles, Ahmed Yacoubi, Burroughs and Ginsberg, and some other names I don’t recognize. But the two men are clearly wary of each other and the conversation never warms up. After a while Francis starts congratulating Viktor extravagantly on the ‘beautiful interior’ and contrasting it to the ‘dump’ in South Kensington where he lives. I take this as a signal that we are about to leave, and within minutes we’re out again on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, with Francis struggling to breathe, then expostulating:

  ‘That ghastly flat looks like an operating theatre,’ he says, ‘but what really struck me was the ridiculous toupee that Viktor was wearing!’

  I have to admit that I hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Well I certainly did,’ says Francis. ‘It was sitting like a patch of grass on top of his head, and I kept wanting to pull it. In the end I just had to get out . . . Now where do you think they might give us something to eat?’

  ‘We could try Brasserie Lipp, if you like, Francis,’ I suggest. ‘The food isn’t so great, but it’s close enough to walk.’

  ‘Well, why don’t we do that then.’

  There’s an inconsequential feel to the evening, as if it’s made up of loosely floating fragments that won’t cohere. We’re drifting, I think, simply drifting through space and time, along the Boulevard Saint-Germain with the rain and the leaves falling, drifting from moment to moment, which Francis says is the only way you ever find yourself. He seems to have warmed up on all the whisky and gin we’ve drunk, and I’m happy simply to drift along and watch and listen.

  ‘I can’t think what Viktor can do with himself now,’ Francis says. ‘I didn’t see any signs of painting, thank God, because he was a ghastly painter from what I saw of his work in Tangier. And now I suppose he has to be very careful with those tastes of his. The thing is, he can only fall in love with boys of about twelve years old or less. It’s tragic, really, but then homosexuality is tragic. It’s both more tragic and more banal than what’s called “normal” love. There it is. I mean, it’s tragic to get to my kind of age and to still desire. I was in the tube the other day in London and there was this very young, very good-looking man who was staring at me – can you imagine, at my age? – and I looked back at him and when the train stopped at the next station he got off and motioned to me that I should follow him. Then just as I decided to get off and see what would happen, the doors closed and he was l
eft there, standing on the platform, as the train pulled out. That in itself was tragic in a way, and I’ve been thinking ever since of using those closing doors in a picture.

  ‘There you are. I think there are a great many men who don’t really know what they are sexually. Often of course they’re neither one thing nor the other. And then some of them who are really homosexual simply can’t accept it. They probably think it’s not manly or something. At the same time I have to say I find that homosexuals are often better, more enlivening company than most people. They have that marvellous kind of wit. I mean, a long time ago, I was once in one of the homosexual bars and I started talking to this friend of someone I knew and we were getting on rather well, perhaps too well, because of course then the other one, who was getting annoyed as he watched us, had to come over and say to his friend: “When I knew her” – meaning me – “she was more famous for the paint she put on her face than for the paint she put on canvas.” It was a marvellous thing to have come up with, just like that, and I’ve never forgotten it.’

  I’m delighted that Francis is talking so easily and openly, and all the more dismayed when we get to Brasserie Lipp to find it already thronged with early diners and bustling waiters. The drizzle has turned into a soft, steady rain so we stand inside, wondering where else to go. I sense Francis’s mood changing, but luckily the manager, who’s reputed to know every famous face, recognizes Francis and whisks us off to a corner table that’s just being relaid. To my relief, Francis brightens again, as if he’s realized that his luck is still in. He must also be aware that if he’s accorded this treatment, it’s because he’s become an established star in the Paris art world. Gilles Deleuze, the well-known French philosopher, is devoting a book to Francis’s work, and this in itself is enough to make him a legend in the incestuous, intellectual village of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

  ‘I love the atmosphere of this place,’ Francis says, pleased at the speed with which a bottle of Chablis has been placed on the table. ‘I don’t know why I don’t come here more often. For some reason, I don’t go anywhere new. I just go back to the same old, dreary places. I don’t travel any more, even though there are lots of places I’d like to go to.’

  ‘Well, you liked New York, didn’t you, when you went there for your show at the Metropolitan?’

  ‘I did, and I’d love to go back and spend more time there. New York has a real fascination to it. I found it beautiful and exciting, and I terribly liked the Americans. They have a marvellous kind of, well, I suppose good manners, of the kind you used to be able to find in England. A kind of real courtesy. I met De Kooning and Rauschenberg and even though I don’t actually care for their work, as you know, I thought there was something terribly sympathetic about both of them. I also went to the Factory while I was in New York. I must say it’s rather extraordinary, and Andy Warhol is very charming. He was doing the portraits of all the well-known drag queens of New York while I was there. Well, there was certainly something rather curious about that! I’ve always been a great admirer of his films. I’m not so sure about the painting, but I thought Flesh was an extraordinary film. The technique is so fascinating . . . If I weren’t obsessed with painting there are all sorts of places I’d like to go to. I’ve always longed to go to Lebanon because I think I would have adored the atmosphere of Beirut. But with the situation there that’s become completely impossible now.’

  A Baltic herring has been put in front of me, but I’m more interested in keeping the conversation going.

  ‘You’ve never even been back to Ireland after all these years, have you?’ I venture.

  ‘It’s true,’ Francis says, ‘though I should love to. When you think about it, English literature in our century has been made either by the Irish or the Americans. Of course the Irish have always had this way with words. They talk marvellously, talking is really a way of life with them. They seem to exist to talk . . . Somebody in London the other day sent me all the novels he’s written. I believe he’s quite well known but I can’t even remember his name. But the thing is, I can’t read novels. I find them so boring. I really prefer either documentary things or great art, great poetry. I don’t think there’s anything between the two nowadays. I love poetry that’s a kind of shorthand about life. When you have everything there, in a most marvellous brief form.’

  The plain grilled sole seems to have found favour with Francis, and he accepts the waiter’s suggestion that, if we want to go on to red wine, we drink a Bourgueil with it. Almost predictably, Francis finds it ‘trop léger’ and we drink it quickly so that he can order a full-bodied Bordeaux. I’m pleasantly drunk by now and as pleased as a photographer with a scoop to have got so much varied new material from Francis, even though I’ve heard bits of it before. I know he’ll start repeating himself, again and again with a slightly differing emphasis each time, as he gets progressively drunker. The phrases will be hammered home into my head by the time we’re finished, and I wonder sometimes if that’s the reason Francis does it, endlessly repeating himself so that I can reproduce whole passages of his table talk verbatim, like an actor who has learnt his lines perfectly by heart.

  ‘I’ve never been back to Ireland,’ he’s saying, and we’ve moved up a notch from a well-balanced Montagne Saint-Emilion to a powerful Pomerol. ‘I don’t know why. But nowadays when I see them killing themselves, I’m afraid I can’t get really worked up about it. I just think, oh well, there’s ten or twenty less of them. I would like to see new places, of course, but then I think I can find everything I want between London and Paris. I’ve always wanted to live between the two, and it’s so marvellous, once you’re bored with one to move to the other. I like the people here so much. They seem so much more intelligent and better informed than their counterparts in England. Waiters in cafés and people like that. Of course it’s true that when you live in Paris for a while you do see that other side to them, as you say. I noticed going to the market and so on that they’re not very, well, amiable. I’d always found them absolutely charming, but I do see that other side now.’

  Francis pays the bill, which seems to have quadrupled with the wine we’ve drunk, but I know he’s pleased because he leaves an even larger tip than usual. The waiters, who have gravitated more and more attentively round us in the course of the meal, look pleased too, and the manager comes over with the cloaks lady to add his thanks and as we are helped into our coats and escorted deferentially towards the door I realize that Francis’s magic still works, not only on me but on the whole staff of the restaurant where we arrived like wet dogs and are now leaving like top celebrities. I’d like to go back home, while we’re still on a high, but I know that’s not going to happen because, with Francis, we always have to go too far to go anywhere, and although I’d dearly love a normal night’s sleep when I think of all the magazine problems I’ll have to face the next day, if I’m truthful the idea of pushing the boundaries excites me too, perversely enough, although I’ve come to dread the sudden volte-face in Francis that takes him from genial to abusive and wounding in the space of a single glass.

  We’re silent in the taxi that takes us over the dark river to the Halles, and when we arrive Francis is put out because we’re told at the Pied de Cochon that if we only want drinks we should go to a café, so we settle on a dingy, neon-lit bar round the corner where we’re offered a sticky-looking bottle of Calvados that looks even more dubious as it’s trickled out into cloudy balloon glasses. Francis begins to repeat what he’s said earlier, adding odd bitter phrases, ‘Well, that’s been cancelled out now, just like the night train between London and Paris. The few things that give people just the slightest bit of comfort have been done away with. That’s why I don’t travel anywhere any more . . .’ He’s clearly drunk now, as well as wheezing audibly, and I begin looking for a way out of what I know will be an ever-decreasing spiral of words, and to bolster my resolve I think about Jill coming to join me soon and say:

  ‘It’s been a fantastic evening, Francis, but I
have to get back to check the proofs for the next issue before morning.’

  Francis looks taken by surprise. He’s about to say something, but checks himself. Then he gives me his sharpest abrupt stare, so that even in the café’s gloom I feel I’ve been suddenly X-rayed down to the bone.

  ‘You’ve changed in some way, Michael,’ Francis says eventually. ‘I’ve noticed it all evening. As if you’d gone religious. You haven’t gone religious or something, have you?’

  Out in the street I make my way against the rain towards the rue Rambuteau, past the late-night scavengers going through the dustbins and the last tired whore standing in a doorway in her blood-red dress and white plastic thigh-boots. I start laughing to myself in little, hysterical bursts. Religious! Francis could have been much more upset by my having fallen so deeply in love and becoming to that extent less under his dominion. Religious! Given how aggressive that realization might have made him, I think as I come out of the rain into the arcades around the Place des Vosges, I’ve got off very lightly, very lightly indeed – this time at least.

  Between financial forecasts and deadlines I’ve been thinking about Minotaure and Cahiers d’Art, the great French art magazines of the 1930s, and wondering how they managed to stay afloat. They would of course have attracted the occasional benefactor, as we – to my lasting wonderment – have been lucky enough to find Mariella. But they would also have counted on the support of the artists they championed, from Picasso and Braque, Miró and Giacometti onwards, receiving the odd work from them for sale. Both the publishers and some of the foremost writers, like André Breton and Paul Eluard, bolstered their and the magazines’ slender fortunes by doing some picture-dealing on the side (‘with their left hand’, as the French say). Things have changed radically since, however. The art world has grown out of recognition, and the relationship between artists, publishers and writers is far less cosy. There are also much clearer indications as to what constitutes a ‘conflict of interest’. It would be deemed unacceptable if I devoted an issue of the magazine to Dubuffet or Tàpies and financed it by selling a piece of their work. I have avoided any involvement in any aspect of the art market until now, but I realize that the very fact of owning and running an art magazine makes me part of that market – and that, if the whole ship is to avoid capsizing, I’d better rethink my aloof attitude to commerce. For some reason, while I’d feel ill at ease trying to pry paintings out of the more important artists I know in order to boost the magazine’s finances, I have no such scruples if it’s a question of doing a limited edition of prints with them, possibly because it would be a joint venture with the proceeds shared.