Francis Bacon in Your Blood (6 page)

‘
Plus ou moins ce que je veux, selon les circonstances
,' I answer blushing but promptly. Speaking French is perhaps the one area I can have some confidence in.

‘Well, I suppose you can come if you think you'll fit in,' says Sonia, clearly reluctantly, ‘but I should warn you you'll be out of your depth intellectually, and probably socially. Michel Leiris is reckoned after all to be the greatest French writer alive, and he's just finished the latest volume of
La Règle du jeu
which as I hope you know has become a fundamental text. Everyone in Paris is raving about it. We'll also have the new French cultural attaché who's the author of
Marx est mort
, which I have to say is
tout ce qu'il y a de plus controversé en ce moment
, and André Masson's son, Diego, the conductor. I won't say
le tout-Paris des arts et des lettres
will be there but not so very damned far off. Then we'll probably have the publisher Nikos Stangos who's delightful and a very talented American writer called David Plante. Do you think you can hold your own in a soirée like that?'

‘Yeah,' says George with a derisive snort. ‘You reckon you can 'old your own with all of 'em?' He's perked up and is following the scene with obvious amusement.

‘Well, I'll try,' I say lamely, feeling exposed and regretting the anonymity my role as interviewer has so far conferred on me.

‘I don't think you need worry, Sonia,' Francis says. ‘I've noticed Michael's at ease in any company. He might seem shy to you, but he understands everything. After all, we're all shy when we're young, what with all that talent welling up inside us, even though with time we realize there's simply no point in being shy.
C'est pas la peine
, as your friends in Paris would say. So why
don't we have just a leet-el more of this Château La Lagune, then go on to Muriel's for some champagne?'

We tumble in and out of a taxi up a dank stairway and into a low-lit, green room heavy with cigarette smoke and seething with people where someone is playing an invisible piano and crooning, ‘And that's why darling it's incredible – that someone who's unforgettable', and there's a severe-looking woman dressed in black with her shiny black hair pulled into a tight bun who looks like a retired ballerina sitting straight-backed on a stool by the bar who turns and says: ‘There you are, my daughter, no not you, you cunt, I'm talking to Francis.'

With the three of us in tow, Francis kisses her and orders champagne all round. As the corks pop and everyone's glass is filled to the brim, he raises his own, with the golden liquid slopping over his wrist, and like a challenge calls out: ‘Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends,' and amid the laughter, some frank, some furtive, he knocks the drink back and orders more and introduces me to the severe lady who turns out to be Muriel. She seems kindly disposed towards me as another round of champagne breaks like a wave over the room and says that as ‘daughter' has said such nice things about me she'll make me a member of the Colony Room and Ian behind the bar will give me the card I need. As I down my champagne with the best of them I notice her whisk the bubbles out of her own glass with a little silver cocktail stick and I'm taken aback when she says politely, ‘That's my clitoris, dear, always keep it moving's my motto, I've never liked the bubbles, just the effect.' The piano starts up again and it's ‘Non, je ne regrette rien', and I notice Sonia, red-faced and almost tearful, joining in while George stands to one side silently keeping himself to himself with cigarette and glass, now one going up to his mouth, now the other. Muriel controls the unruly swell around her by regularly issuing orders to punters who seem to be called alternatively ‘Sod', ‘Granny' or ‘Lottie' – ‘Come on, Lottie,' she says, ‘open up your bead bag and pay for
last night's round' – or sending other customers packing with one of her choice farewells: ‘Back to your filthy urinal, Granny, back to your cottaging, and don't show that cock-sucking face of yours here again or I'll give you a fourpenny one,' while pausing elegantly, with perfect erect composure, to receive a compliment from a more favoured member kissing her hand whom I dimly recognize from photos in the papers as someone famous. And Francis, who told me he first came here with the queer Oxford aesthete Brian Howard twenty years ago, is again at my side making sure my glass is full but, unaccountably, we're now somewhere smaller and underground where there's a jukebox playing Johnnie Ray's ‘Just Walking in the Rain' and a couple of large amiable men with big red forearms are dealing out drinks from behind the bar and talking to each other in snatches of Polari. ‘There's a palone putting on her slap in the carsey,' says one, with an exaggerated moue. I start getting interested, always up for a new lingo, but minutes later, I don't know why, we're outside again, just Francis, George and me now, and we go up more stairs and across landings with Francis saying, ‘I just know it's here somewhere, you can always get a drink before dawn, for some reason I think it's called the Pink Elephant,' and then oddly we are back in Muriel's, which Francis says is a place to go to lose your inhibitions, except there are not many people now, not many inhibitions either, and we are all standing around the bar and there's banter between Muriel and Francis. ‘That's all the facts when you come down to it,' Francis is saying. ‘When did you last have all the fucks, de-ah?' Muriel is saying. But everything's slowed up, slowed down, and we have been here for ever, haven't moved for as far back as I can remember from these same four walls with the same music in this same unchanging world, and I don't remember anything more until I wake up and hear George asking Francis plaintively in his blocked nasal tones, ‘What d'you 'ave to givim ten pahn for? All 'e ad to do was open the fuckin' door,' and Francis saying, ‘Try to get some sleep, George, we've got to leave early in the morning you know,' and everything's still
turning in the dark and I work out I'm on the green velvet sofa and the dark goes round and round and George starts talking again in fits and starts nasal-thick as he sleeps. I want to throw up but I know I can't, I mustn't be sick, and I drift back into sleep for a few moments before Francis, all dressed and fresh and rosy, is handing me a cup of steaming tea and saying he and George, who's standing behind looking like a successful boxer in neatly pressed singlet and trousers with red braces hanging down by his sides, are going over to Paris via Newhaven and Dieppe, then taking a
wagon-lit
in the night train down to the Côte d'Azur which sounds so glamorous and shimmeringly alluring, and never more so than when we're standing outside in the damp grey morning on the cobblestone court, with George lighting his first cigarette of the day.

I bid them goodbye, transformed like Cinderella back into student boy, the threadbare scholar in his grey polo-neck sweater, ill at ease, with all the time in the world to drift and be unhappy and have no destination in sight beyond the provincial cloisters where his friends won't believe all he's done and seen even if, he reasons confusedly as the train rumbles up towards Cambridge, he could be bothered to let them in on this his big new secret.

3

Bacon's Boswell

I always come back to Cambridge in a strange state. I'm really pleased to be going around with Bacon like this and talking to him, often alone and late into the night. I really like going to all these restaurants, bars and clubs I never knew about and couldn't in any case afford, meeting all kinds of people I'd never come across as a student going between college and lecture room. I love the delicious, expensive food and all the fine wine too, even if it sometimes takes me a day or two to come round from the hangovers. There's no doubt it's already brought a whole new dimension to my life, changing the way I see myself and my future.

And that in itself is part of the problem. Since I'd spent two years after school studying languages, first in Göttingen, then in Perugia, I already felt older and more experienced than my contemporaries when I first came up, and now that I'm going regularly to London and starting to be part of another, more sophisticated world, the disaffection has grown apace. It reminds me of when I was ‘held down' for a year at school because I was the youngest in my class and had started momentarily falling behind; so that afterwards everyone who had been a year beneath me became, to my lasting shame, my contemporaries. Something similar has occurred now that I'm at university, although I do have a small circle of close friends I'm really fond of. I've noticed, however, that whenever
I mention my Soho exploits to them, it soon sounds suspiciously like bragging, and I'm particularly irritated that no one has remarked on the dark-blue, fly-fronted John Michael shirt that Francis bought me on Old Compton Street – I've been looking and I haven't noticed anyone else with one in Cambridge, where tweed jackets and pipes still dominate as if Carnaby Street fashion and the King's Road simply don't exist. Regardless, I wear my new shirt as frequently and defiantly as I can.

So I've come to accept that I'm now leading a kind of double life: gowned student by day, huddled with other youths round gas fires in damp cloistered quads, endlessly soul-searching and trading shallow banter as we wonder who we are and what we might become; Bacon's chosen companion by night, invested with special powers, riding a crest of champagne as all doors from the Ritz to the last seedy outpost at dawn open before me. I get used to the duality, but it does nothing to bind me more closely to my undergraduate status. And regular contact with artists like Frank Auerbach, Kitaj and David Hockney – the new Sunday colour magazines have just photographed him like a film star, in a gold lamé jacket – has only served to convince me further that it's time to leave Renaissance art behind and look for something new. As my final subject of study, I choose what I have always loved most and might have read from the beginning: English Literature. But before I can even begin to cram into one year what would normally take three, I am still struggling to complete my issue on ‘Modern Art in Britain', which has taken me off any kind of even desultory study for the past few months.

To be fair, I've been incredibly lucky with the contents so far. Hockney, Kitaj, Paolozzi and others have all written texts specially for the issue, and I've done an exchange of letters with Auerbach. I've also bagged some big essays from critics as important as Lawrence Alloway, Norbert Lynton and Jasia Reichardt. I'd hoped to include David Sylvester, who first asked me to come down to London to talk about the possibility, then explained to me, walking me up and down the station platform
when I arrived, that he could not write, like the others, without proper compensation. We are a student magazine and there was never any question of paying anybody; the return fare for this fruitless visit has already taken a good few bob out of my meagre budget; I just hope we get enough in from the advertisements to go some way towards settling the printer's bill. My Bacon interview has been pieced together from scraps of conversation. I've tried to touch on various aspects of his beliefs – or lack of beliefs – about life and art. It's a bit disjointed, and still with a lot of suspension points between unrelated phrases; but it's the best I've been able to do so far, and I have to say his conversation is a bit like that – like a series of brief definitions, things like ‘art is a shorthand of sensation' or ‘we only give life meaning by our drives', which often have more impact after a couple of bottles of Chablis than they do in cold sober print.

The only artist I haven't been able to pin down is Lucian Freud. He's often there at the lunches and dinners, but not so much once we start on the round of bars and clubs because he doesn't want to drink. Actually, he doesn't eat much either, just nibbles things from his plate and puts them back, half chewed, if he doesn't like them. We've been talking about his doing a kind of ‘statement' about art for some time, but it never materializes. He doesn't want an interview and I can't do more than politely remind him. It would be important to have him in the issue, though, if only because of all the artists I've met over recent months he is certainly the one closest to Bacon. They have an odd relationship. When I've been with them both, they never mention painting, only people they both know. Lucian makes a point of relaying the latest gossip about their mutual friends, and Francis clearly relishes this, interjecting comments they both seem to agree on, like ‘I've always known he was a rat. He'd rat on you just like that if he thought he could get something out of it' or ‘I hear that now John Russell has left Vera, that stammer of his has got so much better.'

Lucian also clowns around, specially for Francis. One of his favourite turns is to pick up the restaurant bill when it comes,
give it a cursory look and then pretend to faint, falling sideways on the banquette like Charlie Chaplin, while Francis chuckles and writes out a cheque. Sometimes he comes with a waif-like girlfriend in a faded frock, but mostly he comes alone. He is quite funny in an ironic way, with his lightly inflected patter doing quick pirouettes around the people he describes, but I think he is in awe of Francis, or even in love with him. But then I suppose most of us are, whether it's Lucian or George or me, Sonia Orwell or models like Henrietta Moraes, or Miss Beston, who looks after everything to do with Francis at the Marlborough gallery, from his exhibitions (where she always gives the glass on his pictures a last go-over with a shammy leather she keeps in her handbag) to his laundry bills or medical prescriptions. He is the point, whether we know it or not, around which we all turn. Because of this, I mention to Francis that the issue is pretty much complete except for Lucian's long-awaited statement, and the next thing I know I get a message from Lucian – the first ever – suggesting we meet.