Francis Bacon in Your Blood (47 page)

I've heard of Charlie Chester's but I've never been there, and as soon as we arrive it's clear we're not there for the atmosphere
since the place certainly has none of the panache of Crockford's, where I went gambling with Francis before. There are various games with evocative names, like crap and blackjack, and numerous silver fruit machines stuck round the walls. Some punters appear to be playing on a couple of tables at once, taking a passing crack every now and then at the one-armed bandits. Francis, pink-faced and chuckling, soon gets into his stride, dropping off little piles of coloured chips. It's clear that he's following some system of his own, placing the chips very deliberately. I feel I wouldn't know where to start, so I just look on, reluctant to risk the money I have set aside to pay for my stay at the Athenaeum. Much like last time, Francis is quickly cleaned out and the three of us go back to the studio to hunt for a wad of cash he's hidden – again in a dried-out tin of paint – and return, rearmed, to the tables. I'm tempted this time to try my luck with part of my money, and I'm annoyed to find that I lose it almost immediately, with all my chips raked in and nothing to show for it. Fortunately, a bottle of champagne has materialized, no doubt provided by the watchful ‘house', and I join Francis at a small table where he's keeping an eye on John's progress.

‘I really don't know why I keep coming back to these places,' he says, clearly delighted by a significant new win. ‘I always think that for a moment my luck might change. It's mad. What's terribly nice, though, is that I've already managed to win back everything I'd lost earlier and just a bit more. You always lose in the end, naturally, but now and then, if you're really lucky, you get that marvellous feeling that luck can only work your way. It never lasts for more than an instant, but for that instant it makes life really exciting. If one didn't lose, of course, these ridiculous places wouldn't exist. They live off all those fools like me who for some reason think they're actually going to twist luck in their favour.'

I consider telling Francis that I've just lost but think better of it in case he insists on topping me up so that I can play and lose some more. It occurs to me that if I won last time it was
partly because I simply didn't care. Now I care very much and I don't want to get into money problems, like running up an overdraft or having to borrow some cash. I also wonder whether the fact that I was so down on my luck in every other area of my life didn't help me win then. Over the last few weeks I've been hatching a plan to relaunch the Lugano-based art magazine called
Art International
from my apartment in Paris. The prospect is hugely exciting; it's a bit as if I'd fallen in love again and that almost certainly will not favour my luck at the tables. I decide to hang on to my remaining loot and just enjoy Francis's new-found loquacity.

‘And did you ever manage to twist the way luck went?'

‘It's happened terribly rarely over the years. Not very long ago, when I was on my way back from the south-west of France with Dickie and Denis, we drove through that what's it called, that place where you can walk under all those marvellous arcades and never get wet when it's raining, yes Dinard, and I did for some reason have a bit of luck there and manage to get out with enough to pay for the whole holiday.

‘I don't think you can know the tremendous draw gambling has unless you've been in that kind of position where you terribly need money and you manage to get it by gambling. When you need it and win. It can get a hold of you then. Of course you spend the rest of the time losing it again and God knows how much more. But at those moments there's this feeling you get of being able to control the way your life goes.

‘I had a marvellous win, years and years ago now, it must have been about 1950, when I was in Monte Carlo. I was playing on three different tables and I kept thinking I could hear the numbers called before they came up, as if the croupiers were actually calling them out. I had very little money and I was playing for small stakes. But by the time I'd finished I'd got sixteen hundred pounds, which was a very great deal for me at that time. So I went out and took a villa and stocked it with food and drink and invited a lot of people to come and live there. At the end
of it all, I didn't have anything left, naturally, hardly enough to buy a train ticket back to London, but it was marvellous while it lasted, and I had lots of friends.'

‘Do you still go back there?'

‘You know, I don't much, but I adore the atmosphere of those places. They have a kind of grandeur, even if it's a grandeur of futility. There's something so beautiful about the view you get from the casino in Monte Carlo, when you look out on to the bay and the curve of the hills behind. I love that kind of landscape. That and just desert. I love the feeling of all that space with absolutely nothing in it . . . It sounds ridiculous, liking a landscape from behind a window, but I actually can't stand the countryside itself. After a day or two, I long for streets and people, just to be able to walk and see them.

‘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 corridor to watch in wonder as sheets of typescript spew effortlessly out on to the red-tiled floor.