Francis Bacon in Your Blood Read online

  FRANCIS BACON IN YOUR BLOOD

  FRANCIS BACON IN YOUR BLOOD

  A Memoir

  MICHAEL PEPPIATT

  To Jill, Clio and Alex

  Contents

  Preface

  PART ONE: 1963–1966

  1Absolute Beginner

  2Under the Spell

  3Bacon’s Boswell

  4Mischief in Morocco

  5Conversations at Night

  PART TWO: 1966–1976

  6Exile and Revolution

  7‘Poor George’

  8A Death Foreshadowed

  9Consumed by Guilt

  10The Inspiration of Pain

  PART THREE: 1976–1992

  11‘Only Francis Bacon is More Wonderful than You’

  12Primal Cries

  13Whose Turn is it Now?

  14An Ancient Simplicity

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Preface

  ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’ as he was, Francis Bacon became a father figure for me and the central influence on my life. I was twenty-one when I first met him in Soho in 1963, and Bacon was fifty-three, still youthful, energetic and keenly enjoying the attention that his first retrospective exhibition at the Tate had brought him. What began as a brief interview for a student magazine turned into a close friendship that lasted nearly thirty years.

  I have already published a biography of Francis Bacon, bringing together all the available information about his life and setting it against the background of his achievement as one of the most inventive, influential and subversive artists of the twentieth century – and, arguably, of art history as a whole.

  The book I have written here is a very different animal. Far from the objective account of a life, this is the subjective story of two lives, focusing on the complex, volatile relationship that bound Bacon and me together over those three decades. Drawn from diaries and records I kept at the time, it presents an intimate, revealing portrait of the artist as friend and mentor. Bacon comes across here in ways that no formal biography could convey: close up and unguarded, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the legend that has grown up around him.

  The story also recounts what it was like for me, an impressionable young man, to be drawn deeply into the orbit of an immensely vitalizing, manipulative genius. Fascinated by his magnetism and sheer devilry, I followed Bacon for years into a maze of louche bars and clubs night after night until dawn, discovering the worlds he moved in, recording what he said, who we fell in with and how he behaved. I was entranced by the freedom and gusto with which Bacon drove his life and his luck forward, recklessly. As we cut a swathe through Soho I came across all kinds of extraordinary people and strange places, eventually joining Bacon’s inner circle and spending memorable evenings with George Dyer, Sonia Orwell, Lucian Freud, John Deakin and Michel Leiris.

  Long after my original interview was published, I kept going back to Soho, where Bacon would always greet me with champagne and marvellous meals in the best restaurants in town. Desperate to find my own direction in life, I was drawn to Bacon not just because I had enormous fun going around with him but because he exuded such self-confidence and purpose. In my eyes, he was first and foremost an artist whose vision had been forged by extreme inner conflict. From Bacon I learnt that my own contradictions could only be resolved by letting myself drift as freely as possible. Drifting with Bacon, from the Ritz to the last seedy outpost of the night, grew more important to me than any career or university degree. I wanted to go further and know more, and as new horizons opened, so did the hidden temptations and pitfalls. But I had Bacon at my side. He always knew how to avert danger at the last possible instant. Perceptive and adroit, he also knew exactly how to respond to a confused young man and, as he put it, ‘to pull him through his despair’.

  From time to time, when he had finished a new picture he particularly liked, Bacon would invite me to come and look at it in his studio, where few people were ever admitted. I talked to him in depth about his paintings, and as he took me into his confidence about the sources, aims and techniques of his art, I began to write about his work. Soon I was as fixated by the intense, twisted vision of Bacon’s paintings as by the power of his iron-willed personality.

  Having left Cambridge without finding a job I wanted in London, I set off for Paris in 1966 to work on a French magazine. Once there, I imagined my friendship with Bacon would fall away. But Paris, the city of Picasso and Giacometti, was the place where Bacon most craved recognition as an artist. My living there acted as a catalyst for him to cross the Channel more frequently, and in time he asked me to find him a studio where he could work whenever he wanted. Paris turned out to be the theatre of Bacon’s greatest triumph and his worst disaster. Just as his Grand Palais exhibition opened to universal acclaim, Bacon’s ill-starred lover and muse George Dyer committed suicide in their hotel room.

  In the aftermath of that tragedy Bacon spent longer and longer periods in Paris, feeding his guilt and completing a series of profoundly moving paintings dedicated to the memory of his dead companion. During those two remaining decades of Bacon’s life, our friendship deepened and I shared his innermost thoughts about life and death, love and art and, as he saw it, the ultimate futility of human existence. We embarked on endless conversations and epic drinking bouts, blurring night into day, day into night, that continued until shortly before Bacon’s death.

  Having lived to tell the tale, I recount it here as indiscreetly as Bacon once recommended I should, sketching in the parallel events of my own life as the story unfolds. In this respect, Francis Bacon in Your Blood can be seen as a double portrait, a diptych of the kind Bacon sometimes painted, showing two profiles, two personalities, two lives closely intertwined.

  A feature article came out a while ago in the Observer in which the author, Peter Conrad, interviewed three men who had been close to Francis Bacon in their youth. He described each of them as having been ‘burnt’ for life by their contact with the painter. The implication was that you did not survive the influence of a genius as dark and powerful as Bacon. The three men were the photographer Peter Beard, the artist Michael Clark, and myself.

  Since reading the article I’ve thought on and off about that provocative view. Yes, of course, there are risks involved when, at the age of twenty-one, you get caught up in a whirl of drink, drugs and gambling, predatory homosexuals, seedy clubs and East End thugs. But, if you do survive, what a revealingly accelerated introduction to life it is – and what an unusual story it leaves you to tell.

  And although to some extent Conrad was right, because the intensity that Bacon radiated did transform my life, I am convinced I should have been a much duller person if I had not passed through his fire. I think it was the making of me, and certainly proof of Nietzsche’s dictum that what does not destroy us makes us stronger. So I have decided to tell that story in full, with its seamier sides set in the perspective of my own self-discovery, its harshness and despair leavened by profound admiration, gratitude and love.

  It’s a story I have been wanting to write for years, telling it as it really was, before the world I shared with Bacon vanishes and is retold by those who were never there.

  Michael Peppiatt

  Paris, May 2015

  PART ONE

  1963–1966

  1

  Absolute Beginner

  It is June 1963. The streets of Soho have just been hosed down and look almost fresh in the midday sun. Inside the French House it is darker and danker, and the scrubbed floorboards give off a sour odour of detergent mi
xed with beer. A few scattered drinkers are at the bar, communing quietly with the glass before them or exchanging the odd word with the burly manager with a walrus moustache standing behind the beer pumps. They are all regulars and all much older than me. I feel out of place, out of my element and uncomfortably conspicuous, even though no one has bothered to so much as look my way.

  Then the lunchtime crowd comes in, rapidly filling the room with loud banter and laughter. The warmer smell of wine and cigarettes takes over. A faint, brownish sunlight brightens the room for a moment, illuminating the clouds of smoke. Everyone is growing increasingly relaxed and jovial, talking across the bar in booming voices and laughing at their own and one another’s jokes. It would be dead easy to talk to them, but I can’t. I can’t even pretend to be part of all this. I have been standing here since opening time, nursing a half-pint, ill at ease and nervous, rehearsing what I have to say. And if I don’t manage to say it soon I will have failed and I’ll have to go all the way back to college empty-handed. Somewhere among the drinkers in this growing fug I have to find a photographer called John Deakin. I need to track him down and ask him for a favour . . .

  This was the first time I had been in the French House, which took me a while to find that morning since, confusingly, it was still known to most locals by its pre-war name, the York Minster. Although I had turned twenty-one and knew London well enough, I wasn’t that familiar with Soho beyond its reputation as a louche area where sex and exotic foreign food were on offer. As a teenager I’d gone on a rite of passage to the 2i’s café to listen to skiffle groups, sipping frothy coffee out of transparent cups and hanging around in the hope of spotting Tommy Steele. I went back occasionally because the markets, clubs and prostitutes made the area more alluring and colourful than most of drab, post-war London.

  Both my parents were London-born but my father later insisted we had to live ‘right in’ (he himself had been brought up on Clarges Street, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly) or ‘right out’ of the capital. Since he did not have enough money to buy a house in the centre of town, we moved ‘right out’ to a village in Hertfordshire called Stocking Pelham, where I spent long, bored holidays, frustratingly out of touch with the friends with whom I boarded at Brentwood, the minor public school my father had chosen to send me to. I travelled to London occasionally, often on my way to France or Germany, to improve the two languages I had specialized in at school. After changing from Modern Languages to Moral Sciences very briefly after my first year at Cambridge University, I settled on the History of Art, although I was soon chafing at the assumption underlying the whole syllabus that nothing of lasting quality or interest had been achieved in art since Raphael, or at most Rubens – to both of whom I developed a distinct allergy that lasted for years. But this was the early sixties, and although we students had been corralled into the Renaissance and told to consider it the unsurpassable peak of human achievement we were aware that, minor as it seemed beside the thriving music scene, a modern art world existed out there beyond the faculty walls. Progressively disenchanted with my professor, himself the world expert on Rubens, I was determined to get to know more about what was happening in contemporary art – ‘living art’, as I thought of it – driven more by an impulse to challenge entrenched attitudes, it has to be said, than to explore the new . . .

  At the same time, having failed to get a short story published in the literary review Granta – where I so feared rejection that I sent my text in anonymously – I found some solace in another student magazine called Cambridge Opinion. What set this august-looking publication apart was that, although produced by undergraduates, it devoted each issue to a particular theme, usually of a scientific or political nature, and invited the acknowledged specialists in that field to contribute their expert views. This editorial method worked well enough for a number of years, but the magazine had recently fallen on hard times and run up debts with the printers, who decided they no longer wanted to be part of such a risky venture. With the confidence of youth and total inexperience, I persuaded the printers that only by continuing publication could they hope to recoup even part of the outstanding sum. Then, to bolster the impression that the magazine might become financially viable, I grandly recruited a staff of other students, appointing two of them to bring in whatever paid advertising they could find. As for the theme of my first issue, there had never been any doubt. Cambridge Opinion had barely touched on the arts in any shape or form, at least not in the handful of past issues that had come my way. This only convinced me further that I was on the right track, preferring to see my choice as a way of extending the magazine’s scope rather than cocking a snook at the hidebound art history course I was about to quit. The revived magazine would of course focus on the then rarely discussed, indeed virtually unheard-of, theme of ‘Modern Art in Britain’.

  It was only once I had proudly announced my new role as editor to everyone I knew and basked for a moment in the unspecified importance it appeared to confer that I realized with a jolt I had no idea how or where to start on my first issue. Although I had gone to the odd exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum and had even seen the modest twentieth-century collection at Jim Ede’s ‘open house’ in Kettle’s Yard, my understanding of what constituted the ‘Modern’, whether in Britain or anywhere else, stopped at a few billowing forms with holes in them – the stuff of newspaper cartoons, which usually mocked the foolish pretentiousness of it all. Brought up in a house that had no pictures of interest on the wall, my first-hand experience of contemporary image-making was limited to the watercolours that my father produced during holidays on the beach in Suffolk; although I would never have admitted it later, as a small boy I was entranced by the ease with which he would pencil in random V’s to evoke gulls hovering over a still aptly wet sea; and the more adventurous of these seascapes were eventually framed and displayed at home, until one day there must have been an abrupt change of mood since they were taken down to a cupboard where my father kept relics of other abandoned pursuits, including a forlorn bag bristling with golf clubs.

  Then David Blow, a friend at Trinity Hall who came from a more sophisticated background than mine and had some contacts in the London art world, suggested that if I wanted my first issue to be taken seriously I had to include a painter called Francis Bacon. Although the name for me evoked only an Elizabethan philosopher whose essays I had never read, David told me that this living Bacon had just had a successful, if highly controversial, exhibition at the Tate. Since the war, David said, the British art scene had grown accustomed to a mild-mannered imagery that avoided disturbing the viewer at all costs; our parents had after all been through enough nightmares. For sure there had been occasional eruptions from the continent in the form of painters like Picasso and Dalí, David went on, but foreigners didn’t in the end affect us so much. Bacon, on the other hand, the scion of a long-established English family, was seen as having painted deliberately provocative and manifestly godless pictures. Nevertheless, a core of strong supporters in the more avant-garde circles thought of him as the most important living painter in the country. David easily convinced me that if I could get an interview with Bacon this whole new venture of mine would gain credibility. By meeting the well-known Soho photographer John Deakin, who had taken numerous photos of Bacon’s models, David added, I might get just the introduction to Bacon that I needed. Deakin had also photographed David’s own glamorous mother, so that already provided some kind of link. All I had to do was to get myself down to the French House in Soho and hang around . . .

  A small man is sitting just behind me on a stool by the bar, talking in an exaggeratedly posh, camp voice and waving his cigarette holder about. He is oddly dressed, in stained sweater and ancient trousers, with his head nestling in the upturned collar of a grubby shearling jacket. I don’t remember seeing him come in, but now he looks as if he has always been there, as if he were the pub’s mascot, addressing his running commentary to the whole room rather than to anyone in particular.
I recognize him right away, even though his face is much puffier and more lined than in the self-portrait photos I’d seen of him. I edge closer, draining my glass with what I hope is nonchalance, and blurt out my request for an introduction to Bacon.

  ‘First of all, my dear,’ the little man enunciates in pompously drawn-out tones, ‘you should know that you have the privilege, the rare honour, to be addressing the celebrated photographer and artist John Deakin, also frequently known, sometimes with nostalgia, always with respect, as the “Mona Lisa of Paddington”.’ Here he rolls his big spaniel eyes up as if in prayer to the pub’s mottled ceiling. ‘Then, my dear, you should consider that the maestro you mention has of late become so famous’, Deakin’s voice rises here, nettlingly, emphasizing each syllable over the din of lunchtime booze, ‘that she no longer talks to the flot-sam and jet-sam, the Tom, Dick or Harry, the je ne sais qui and the je ne sais quoi of the hoi polloi. Now that she has had an exhibition at the Tate Gallery of London Town and become so fa-mous, so fa-mous, I fear she wouldn’t even consider meeting a mere stu-dent like you!’

  There is a commotion at the bar, and a man about four backs down turns round. He has a wide face with piercing pale eyes.

  ‘Don’t listen to that old fool,’ he says. ‘I simply adore students. Come and join us. Now what are you having to drink?’

  After such a long tense wait I am a bit startled to have got what I wanted so soon. However young, inept and poorly dressed I feel, I am suddenly the centre of attention, transformed into a novelty, with bystanders moving in to greet me with genial interest. Francis Bacon has thrust a glass of white wine into my hand and is looking at me intently. ‘Here’s to everything you want,’ he says to me, anointing our newly formed group with a radiant smile. ‘I can’t wish you more than that, can I?’ ‘To everything you want,’ the others repeat in unison, as if we have engaged in a secret rite. The glasses go back, the toast is drunk, the glasses are refilled.