Francis Bacon in Your Blood (4 page)

Francis's face goes in and out of focus. As I start to sway, all the drink of the day seems to freeze in my body. Everything freezes, the talking mouths, the heavily made-up pale faces, the bottle on the way to the glass, all is in stasis. Panic rises up in
me again and I know this time I must leave. Guinea-a-lash is looking at me fixedly, meaningfully, from the bar. Francis seems to be talking still, but the words flatten back against his face, distorting it. Everything static and distorted. Must get out now. Butt in and blurt out thanks, how wonderful it's been but have to get back now and perhaps get together again to take interview further.

‘We can take it further whenever you like, Michael,' says Bacon, suddenly focused and sober and completely present. ‘After all, what is more fascinating than what's called talking about oneself? It's a long story, and of course it all depends how you tell it. I should think one could go on talking for ever – at least until the other person couldn't bear it any longer and simply did you in! Call me any time you like, Knightsbridge 2925, the earlier in the morning the better.'

I stumble out into the night and eventually find my way from the Isle of Dogs to the more familiar solitude of King's Cross Station, relieved to be alone with my thoughts but also with Francis's telephone number etched into my mind, and exhilarated by all the new possibilities opened up by one chance meeting . . .

2

Under the Spell

After that first memorable encounter with Bacon, I had at least the wit to get hold of the catalogue to his retrospective, which had taken place exactly a year before at the Tate, primarily because I needed a more developed notion of what his work was like before interviewing him about it. Leafing through that historic little document without any preconception of what I was going to see, I was taken aback and deeply disturbed by the brutal ugliness of the imagery. Although the reproductions were small, the shock waves coming off them were palpable, and I was almost relieved not to have had to confront them head on during their relatively brief showing. They reminded me of a sort of horror show, exposed to the public for a moment, then hurried like a collection of freaks out of view. Where paintings like that ended up I had no idea, because the thought of having to live with them was unbearable – a deliberate, constant reminder of things better left unseen and unsaid.

There was nothing in my admittedly limited visual vocabulary to begin to compare these pictures to – none of the simpering Madonnas with heavenward gazes that I was familiar with, certainly, nor any crucifixions or martyrdoms that I could bring to mind, even in the work of the quirkier artists of the quattro- or cinquecento. Compared to Bacon's onslaught, all the Christs on the Cross and arrow-studded St Sebastians I'd seen conveyed
a degree of serenity, since their suffering was contained within a vast redemptive scheme. Bacon's writhing figures, on the other hand, clearly had no future and no exit; their suffering took place in anonymous rooms that were vacuums unto themselves, signifying nothing and leading nowhere. Even from the reproductions, one could see how the paint itself revealed pain, as if the skin of the swirling red, green and black oils had been pulled back, the grain cut open, to show the confusion beneath.

Part of my shock on encountering these brightly blurred images, even in reproduction, was that they seemed so alien to the exuberant bonhomie, the Bacchic joie de vivre, that characterized Bacon when I met him. For sure, his utterances – ‘We come from nowhere and we go nowhere' – were bleak enough, but they were delivered like a toast, with a glass aloft and a gleaming smile. How could these two extremes be reconciled, the generous well-wisher who offered you everything you wanted and the scourge who stripped life of all meaning and faith? And how did he laugh and drink and enjoy good company while staring into the abyss?

I was shocked and nauseated by what came over as the systematically wilful distortion of every form – figures corkscrewed, sofas buckled, perspectives skewed; the only straight lines were those that immured these mutant elements in their airless space. I found the screaming popes particularly intimidating, as if I had been made brutally aware of a shameful truth kept hidden for centuries. Was the Pope himself, the head of the Catholic church and spiritual leader of millions, just another victim of bestial emotion and despair? Behind the pomp and dogma of religion, did he dissolve like Bacon's naked lovers into spasms of lust and rage?

Seeing so much flesh racked by anxiety and guilt also recalled and strangely validated an intimate, barely avowed anguish in myself, something I tried to keep at bay and not think about. Here, in Bacon's mise-en-scène, it was translated to a grander, more dramatic plane, framed in gold and exhibited with defiant
panache at one of the country's foremost museums. If I thought I had been held back by having my art studies cut off at the Renaissance, the imagery now before me so outstripped my understanding that instead of constraint I felt in complete free fall.

For all my initial reluctance and alarm, deep down I nevertheless had an instinctive inkling of what Francis Bacon's twisted world was about. I was particularly struck, not only by the brutally pagan, blood-red Crucifixion triptych Bacon had completed especially for the show, but by the way beast changed into man and man into beast, as if the two were in a constant, unpredictable flux. This was something that I had been aware of, in myself and others, in my family and in the youths all thrown together at boarding school. Looking at the Tate catalogue more carefully, trying to take in one alarming image after another, my fascination with Francis accelerated. He seemed to have created a vision in paint that took the pictorial grandeur of the past – the one I had been studying – and reinterpreted it, or rather twisted it, so as to absorb and convey our own specific, post-war anxiety. Once I'd overcome my initial revulsion, which I gradually realized consisted more of shock than disgust, I was aware of a spontaneous kinship with what, a little research revealed, had been dismissed as ‘gratuitous horror' in many critical reviews. At the same time, underneath the nascent sympathy I felt, there ran a powerful dark foreboding, a sense of having got involved in something that went altogether beyond my control.

Entranced by the prospect of more wine and talk and flattery, new restaurants and increasingly bizarre little clubs, I was soon going to Soho regularly, almost as though these trips had become part of my syllabus, a new course in general awareness, a broadening out where, as well as being out on the town and having fun, I could test the merits of Borges or existentialism or Antonioni or Ray Charles – or any of my other enthusiasms of the moment – against my new circle of friends' more mature judgements and
experienced tastes. The world was more alive and up to date here, and everything in the news, like the thunderbolt of Kennedy's assassination, more immediate and meaningful.

Dimly, intuitively, I sensed the importance of my discovery of these unknown shores, and the threat of the quicksands that lurked beneath them, ready to suck the unsuspecting in; the lost souls of Soho that I saw, passed out in the sawdust on the pub floor or jabbering to themselves in the afternoon drinking clubs, were a constant reminder. But being Francis's protégé seemed to me to confer a certain inviolability, even though other people around him came to grief. I quickly grew adept at parrying unwelcome attention in the late-night bars and, like a girl who knows her way around, at brushing off the hand that strayed above the knee.

Francis constantly smoothed my path through this uncertain, treacherous, looking-glass world. He also knew instinctively how to put me at my ease, readily deferring to my halting views about this and that, fussing in restaurants to make sure I was given the best of everything and making me feel very sophisticated by appearing to share his innermost thoughts with me. At every meeting I became more deeply flattered and more involved. How could I not? Among his many talents, Francis was an arch seducer, as lavish with his praise as with his wounding criticism, knowing unerringly in both cases where to aim. One evening, on the crest of several bottles of champagne, my open-handed host turned to me under the bar's dimmed lights and said, ‘Listen, Michael. You've got looks, you've got charm and you've got intelligence. Your life's only just beginning, you've got everything before you. You can go anywhere and have anyone you want.' Now that really did hit the spot for an obscure young man filled with self-doubt and painfully adrift in the universe . . .

For days I've been mooching around Cambridge with Francis's telephone number – KNI 2925 – carefully inscribed in my
diary (although I know it now by heart), trying to screw up the courage to give him yet another call. I am very conscious that while I am regularly at a loose end, dodging lectures and not really knowing what to do with myself, he is almost certainly in the studio, squaring up to a new blank canvas or battling some terrifying new image into existence. It's obvious even to me that my trips to London have become a kind of necessity, giving my whole existence a point that it otherwise wouldn't have, but I am also aware that Francis has more pressing things to do than take students endlessly out on the town. Sometimes I think of myself wryly as a footnote in art history: the young man who prevented Bacon from painting more masterpieces: a sort of perpetual ‘person from Porlock'. Eventually I do go into a phone box, on impulse, and once more nothing could have seemed simpler or more obvious. It's as if Francis has been almost waiting to hear from me, and this time we've decided to meet in the studio so that I can get some order into the interview we are meant to be doing – which tends to start off well then get lost as drinks go into dinner and dinner into a round of the bars. So far I've just managed to get some scraps of conversation together – short, individual statements that don't really link up or create a coherent whole, even if I resort to putting lots of suspension points between them. On the other hand Bacon does tend to talk like that, in one-sentence definitions and clearly rehearsed phrases that sound like maxims (he's a great admirer of La Rochefoucauld). He's always repeating things, trying to make them more vivid and concise – ‘I like phrases that cut me,' he says at one point – and I want to catch as much of the tone of his talk as possible, which is not easy and doesn't sound the same or have the same impact once it's been lifted out of the drink-drenched moment of its delivery.

Before calling, I'd thought Francis would suggest we meet in a pub like the French or somewhere where there were other people around, as we have before. I certainly didn't expect to be going to his studio in Reece Mews, which I imagine as a very
private, even secret place, like an alchemist's or sorcerer's cell. This intimidates me even more, so I carefully memorize a map of the area before setting off as if I might have to negotiate a complex labyrinth, but it turns out it's only a short walk from the South Kensington tube and quite easy to find. You go up the Old Brompton Road, then right into a cobblestone mews, where the houses basically consist of big garages with living quarters perched on top. One of my Cambridge friends whose mother is an actress tells me that Lionel Bart – his musicals are always in the news – lives in one of them too. I suspect every house here belongs to someone famous and that I'll recognize anyone who happens to walk past. At number 7 the battered old grey-blue door has been left open and the moment I go in Francis is standing at the top of a very steep flight of stairs, his arms opened out in welcome. It's like going up a ship's ladder, with a thick, greasy rope screwed to the wall to help you pull yourself up. As I get to the top I have a quick look into the studio itself because the paint-splattered door on the right hand of the landing is ajar. There's a great big strew of photos and magazines and cloths and paintbrushes and pots right across the floor, with huge multi-coloured explosions of paint on the walls. There's something frightening, even sinister, about it, but it also feels liberating, as if someone has managed to let loose all the chaos inside himself and live surrounded by it – recognizing it for what it is and channelling it into a specific purpose. I'm amazed and intrigued, as I sense my own confusion welling up in me and seeking a way out. It's a very tantalizing sight, a glimpse of a kind of mad, secret, visual treasure chamber.

But instead of going in, which I was hoping we would, we go to the little kitchen area, which has photos of recent paintings pinned up over the sink, and oddly the gas on the cooking range is on, perhaps to get the heating up, I've done that myself in various digs, though Bacon is wearing a thick, sky-blue cashmere sweater and a black leather blouson so he could hardly be cold, and then we go into the living room – an anonymous rectangular
space where there's a deal table cluttered with books and letters, a dark-green velvet sofa, a big-bellied commode and at the far end a bed. The exotic-looking bedspread is about the only splash of colour in this very ordinary space with its rough grey floorboards made even greyer by the dull, wettish afternoon light filtering through the small windows. Francis turns on the lights – a couple of bright naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling – but the room looks quite as austere. He seems intent on talking to me about painting, especially about his own way of what he calls ‘trapping the image at its most living point'. Perhaps he's been thinking about our interview, though I'd be surprised if he's gone to any trouble and I'm beginning to think I've got enough for what the magazine needs. Yet he talks quickly and deliberately, as if he had prepared things he wanted to say. I put aside notebook and pencil because I want to engage more fully in the conversation and just hope, since he often repeats and emphasizes things, I'll be able to recall and note down exactly what he says later.