Francis Bacon in Your Blood (10 page)

The experience nevertheless left a significant question mark lurking behind until Bacon's incessant tirades against the futility of life, the nothingness of existence, drew it back to the fore. Part of my chronic confusion stemmed I thought from the lack of any firm belief, and even though I was both repelled and unconvinced by the bleak finality of Bacon's views, I was
impressed by the vehemence with which he appeared to adhere to them, as if believing in nothing had in itself become a faith so strongly anchored in him that he felt bound to proclaim it wherever he went and make whatever converts he could. In his eyes it was bad enough, as I had witnessed several times, to prefer a Beaujolais to a Bordeaux, or Rubens to Rembrandt, but when he discovered some unfortunate with a hope of salvation and an afterlife he could not contain his scorn and anger and berated the believer as savagely as he could. If he had seen the light of nothingness, why should others stumble on in their benighted darkness? It was as if he had a sacred duty to open their eyes to the stark limits of the brief futility that made up their existence as it did his.

I got a glimpse of just how closely Bacon kept to his faith, terrifying and comfortless as it was, when I was last with him in London on a bender that took us through to dawn. We'd had an excellent dinner with abundant champagne and red wine, but I noticed that George was particularly withdrawn and that Francis didn't make any fuss of him. In a good mood, he'd usually call him ‘Sir George', but there was none of that, and in the taxi from the studio to the Etoile on Charlotte Street he'd suddenly snapped at George, studiously smoking as ever: ‘Keep that filthy cigarette of yours to yourself.' We'd gone to a few clubs after that, and as I hadn't drunk much over the past week or so, I was pleased to be surrounded by so much excess. Then I noticed Francis's mood darkening, almost from one glass to the next, and by the time we'd reached the end of the night in some dark basement club whose name I never even glimpsed he seemed barely conscious, not wanting to stay but unable to leave, and since the champagne was not to his liking we switched to whisky, and Francis was swaying in his seat, rimmed by a strange blue light, with his eyes closed, his face closed to anything outside the darkness in his mind, repeating like a chant, a mantra, over and over again, ‘There's nothing, see. Nothing.
Nada
. Just
nada
,
nada
,' until George and I got him up the steps and into a cab
back to Reece Mews. But in that darkness I could see how he clung, as tightly as he clung to the black leather coat in his lap, to the core belief of his religion. And I wondered whether he had chosen it not only for the freedom it conferred but also because, in its unconditional harshness, it was the one that gave him the least hope and the greatest pain.

If I can be persuaded to ‘do the Bacon' a bit more freely at the moment it's because, after a couple of years sunk in existential gloom and doubt, I can make out at least the semblance of light at the end of the tunnel.
Cambridge Opinion
has just come out. It's taken an age to get all the texts and photographs together and see the whole thing through the press, but I'm over the moon now it's actually there, and I keep turning over the pages as though it's not yet quite real and might disappear if I stop looking at it. Both Kitaj and Hockney came up trumps, providing very articulate commentary on their own work, with Kitaj producing a painting specially for the cover. There's a lively exchange of letters between Auerbach and me, an interview with Anthony Caro by Lawrence Alloway and a rather wild text called the ‘History of Nothing' by Paolozzi. We've also got Freud's terse declaration (I had to call him repeatedly in London, then at some glamorous-sounding castle in Scotland, to get his final agreement to it just as we were going to print) and a distillation of my various conversations with Bacon opposite a striking portrait of him by John Deakin (whom I've thanked in the issue, but I expect I'll have to buy him a few drinks at the French or the Coach and Horses as compensation). Then there are all the critical essays to counterbalance the various artists' statements. Even the advertising, which my colleagues have rustled up from all over the place – including a whole back page from
Paris Match –
looks good.

If this weren't enough to make me feel I'm riding high, I get a flattering review of the ‘Modern Art in Britain' issue from John Russell in the
Sunday Times
. It had never occurred to me
that our little magazine would reach Fleet Street, let alone get a notice by a well-known art critic in a leading newspaper. Perhaps good things, like bad ones, come in threes, because shortly after that comes an invitation from Nigel Gosling, the art critic on the
Observer
, to drop in to see him next time I'm in London. I'm down there within the week, slightly suspicious he might just be angling for an introduction to one of the artists I've met, but he's very affable and takes me to a packed pub near by. He clearly relishes a liquid lunch, and when he asks me whether I would like to choose a few of the most interesting shows on in London each week and write short reviews on them – a ‘gallery roundup', he calls it – I wonder whether he hasn't had a gin too many. I try to look as if I'm weighing pros and contras up for a few seconds, then jump at the offer. Even though I'm not sure I want a career in arts journalism (wasn't my ideal supposed to be writing ‘for myself', whatever that was, in some exotic location overlooking the sea?), I could hardly turn down such an alluring prospect before Finals are even on the horizon; after all, this could lead, my new journalist and drinking friend says, to a permanent position on the
Observer
. I'm also mindful that coming to London every week to snoop round the galleries means I will see more of Bacon and the people in his orbit as we all continue to revolve on his unique whirligig of posh restaurants, louche bars and kinky clubs.

‘Do be an angel and open that whole case of wine,' Sonia is saying to me. ‘I so hate it when there's a good conversation going and I'm endlessly having to jump up and fiddle around with a corkscrew. By the way, do you know how to change a light bulb? Do you really? Oh, that's absolutely marvellous. All the men I know are totally impractical. They may be wonderful looking or absolutely brilliant but none of them can change a bloody light bulb. Can you imagine asking Francis or Michel Leiris to change a light bulb? Thank goodness you're here. Even if you've achieved nothing in life so far and can hardly be expected to
make any worthwhile contribution to what people will be saying this evening, you can at least change a light bulb. Why would you want to write when there are so many people who have already written such important and wonderful things? You'd be of much greater use to mankind if you became a plumber or an electrician. Oh, the light that needs changing is over there, by the dining table.'

This is the second time I've been to Sonia's house on Gloucester Road. Rather pointedly, she had not invited me earlier to the soirée I knew she was organizing for Michel Leiris but to a small dinner party where, as she put it, ‘there would be no really important people'. But the Leirises are back in London and they are coming this evening as well as Francis and Lucian and David Sylvester. I am already feeling a bit overawed, I realize as I make myself useful, and it's not much help when Sonia keeps reminding me what a privilege it is for me to be there. I suspect Francis must have said he wanted me to meet to Leiris, because Sonia, who has already introduced me loudly as ‘an obscure young man' to her lesser friends, clearly doesn't think I'm going to be much good at the elevated intellectual talk she expects around her dinner table. All the same I'm pleased she's asked me early to give a hand because she's one of the few women to appear regularly on Francis's nightly round and although I'm amused and flattered to be part of it I sometimes find the homosexual atmosphere suffocating and I crave female company.

I've found out quite a bit about Sonia from Francis, who often talks about her when she's not there. He seems to be drawn to her mainly by her unhappiness. ‘She's always been unhappy,' he says. ‘I don't really know why. Cyril Connolly once said to me, “The very idea of Sonia being happy is obscene.” She had two disastrous marriages. She married Orwell on his death bed when he had only weeks to live, and then she married Michael Pitt-Rivers, who had been charged with buggery during that whole Montagu affair. Sonia knew he was queer of course but decided she could change him or some nonsense, and of course that didn't
work. She was very beautiful and a lot of men have been in love with her. She had an affair with the philosopher Merleau-Ponty in Paris that lasted for a while, basically because he treated her just as a sort of English blonde. There've been all kinds of other people, but it's never really worked. Most of her real friends are women, and I've often wondered whether she wasn't
au fond
lesbian. She's always wanted to be with artists and writers, you know she worked with Connolly on
Horizon
, and I think she wanted to write herself but it's never worked either and so I suppose that's also been a frustration. But she has found a kind of role by giving all these dinner parties where she brings English and French people together. That's the rather marvellous, generous side to her. She's created a kind of salon where people can meet and talk, and that is of course a very rare thing nowadays and a very valuable one.'

There's plenty of talk this evening. Sonia has been drinking all through the evening, and even when she was making her
boeuf bourguignon
she was pouring one glass into the stew and another for herself regularly, so now she's a bit red-faced and bleary-eyed and argumentative. She keeps repeating things like ‘
Mais c'est fondamental!
 ' or ‘
Il n'a rien compris
' or ‘
C'est un faux problème
' very emphatically, although it's less and less clear what she's referring to. Leiris is very courteous to her and that seems to calm her down a bit. Lucian is polite, too, but he looks abstracted and a little bored and he has already announced that he has to leave straight after dinner. Sylvester I find rather ponderous, but he's made some good remarks, first about
Macbeth
, which is one of Francis's favourite plays, then about the rue des Saints-Pères which is apparently where Francis stays when he goes to Paris. ‘I often wonder', he booms, as Sonia ladles another helping of the
boeuf
on to his plate, ‘why there isn't a rue des Impairs!' I wish I'd been able to say that, but I reason it would sound more odd than witty coming from a student. I also wonder whether Sylvester hadn't prepared the remark or heard it elsewhere, and I focus more on following the conversation rather than trying to join
in, even though I mentally prepare what I hope are a few fluent phrases in French. Whenever I do say something, however brief, Sonia rounds on me with a ‘
Soyez pas idiot!
 ', so I decide simply to keep mum. I'm fascinated by Leiris's face, which is inhabited by numerous tics, but I'm also fascinated by how formal he is, tightly buttoned up in his suit and speaking in long sentences full of subordinate clauses and a regular use of the present and even the past subjunctive. Somehow I had imagined a kind of Left Bank intellectual in black clothes and possibly even dark glasses, involved to the hilt in the latest intellectual movements and snortingly dismissive of anybody who wasn't, rather than this elaborately mannered, deferential older man dressed more like a Swiss banker than a bohemian.

The real point of the evening, I'm beginning to realize, is for Leiris and Bacon to get to know one another better, and most of the conversation, which I'd thought would be so full of complex, subtle twists and turns I would barely be able to follow, is an exchange of what to any outsider would sound like outrageous compliments. ‘
Votre dernier livre est tellement merveilleux
,' Bacon has told him several times, opening up his arms to demonstrate how wide the book's appeal was, and Leiris, his face agitated by depth of feeling, has concluded his appreciation of Bacon's paintings with a perfectly honed ‘
Elles sont d'une puissance non seulement magistrale mais totalement réaliste
,' which makes Francis glisten with pride. He knows that Leiris has been closely involved with Picasso and Giacometti, and that praise from Leiris to some extent elevates him to their company. Sensing that the dinner has been a success, Sonia has fallen into a melancholy silence, her drinking and smoking still defiantly confirming her presence even though her essential role has now been played. Sylvester meanwhile, who has known both Bacon and Leiris for many years, has been following the mounting crescendo of compliments and fanning the flames of flattery, his corpulent frame heaving with the enthusiasm of an artistic matchmaker and the witness of a unique moment in
cultural history as writer and painter see eye to eye on everything from realism to Surrealism (except for one brief moment when they touch on Beckett, whom Bacon dismisses, saying, ‘I loathe all those ghastly dustbins on stage,' and Leiris defends mildly, saying, ‘There's enormous charm in the work').

I stay behind to help Sonia clear up the mountain of plates, glasses and bottles, and while moving dutifully between table and sink I make a drunken, desperate and wholly inappropriate lunge at my hostess which I expect to be appropriately brushed aside. But, to my surprise, it is reciprocated, without a moment's hesitation, as though it's accepted that that's what men do at this time of night, and all thought of clearing the dishes is suddenly, miraculously, suspended. I am further taken aback, however, when Sonia breaks out of my clumsy fumbling to say, ‘Everybody's doing it like this in Paris,' and proceeds with grim efficiency to move on to something I've heard of but more as a kind of dirty joke and certainly never done. I try to adapt to this turn of events with enthusiasm as well as a dash of what I hope comes across as Gallic nonchalance, but we both become aware of an urgent pacing up and down just outside the kitchen, and Sonia breaks off to say, ‘I told Cyril to go to bed,' before we resume, and Cyril, about whom I have heard enough to identify instantly as the great man of letters and Sonia's former boss at
Horizon
, continues to pad more and more noisily in the corridor outside. Standing with my back to the kitchen door, I feel increasingly detached, imagining myself no longer as a footloose student but as an aspirant against all odds firmly sandwiched now between two great names in literature, Orwell and Connolly, and thus elevated, almost like Francis so recently risen between Picasso and Giacometti, to undreamt-of realms of achievement but in my case with no justification, particularly as the farcical side of the situation begins to overwhelm all else, undoing alas what was so well begun, and crestfallen but oddly relieved I realize that to all my other failures in Sonia's eyes both intellectual and social I now have to add failure at this. Meanwhile, I repeat to myself,
hastily dressing in case an irate man of letters bursts in, although we bit off more than we could chew we might get another crack at the whip, however mixed my metaphors are and however real my shame, although even now I'm rearranging the whole thing as a story in my head, as Sonia says despondently, gazing at the unwashed dishes and apparently unaware I am still there: ‘To think that Cyril's still after me, after all these years.'