Francis Bacon in Your Blood (2 page)

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.

An hour later, with my idea of an interview already accepted as if it were a privilege for a famous artist to share his creative thoughts and process with a tiny student readership, Francis Bacon has swept me off, with Deakin and the others who are all apparently part of his inner circle, round the corner to lunch at Wheeler's. As soon as Bacon pushes the door back and leads in his band of now visibly merry men, heads turn and the temperature in the murky dining room shoots up. Waiters are all smiles and the manager hurries past the oyster bar to greet his famous guest and lead him to his favourite table by the restaurant's mullioned windows. More bottles appear, orders are taken, jovial remarks exchanged, then platters of oysters on ice and seaweed arrive in rapid succession as if time itself has accelerated. Buoyed by the
Chablis and flattered by the attentions of my host, who includes me in every turn of the conversation, I watch surreptitiously to see how the others negotiate their oysters and soon follow suit, too caught up in the cut and thrust of the talk to wonder whether I like either the briny taste or their slimy texture. Then various exotic-sounding soles are served,
sole meunière
,
sole bonne femme
,
sole Walewska
, and the conversation opens out.

‘For some reason oysters are supposed to be terribly good for you,' Bacon is saying between gales of laughter. ‘It sounds mad but my mother used to make a kind of mousse out of seaweed when we lived in Ireland. It was very delicious and apparently very nourishing. And I was in Nice the other day and they gave us these things, I've forgotten what they're called,
violets
I think, and they're like little leather pouches that are also full of iodine. You slit them open to eat them. A doctor down there told me they're terribly good for you because they filter out what's called all the impurities of the sea and they're given especially to anaemic children. Well . . .'

‘Francis, you're the least anaemic child I've ever known,' says one of his guests, pushing his purplish face forward.

‘Well, I'm afraid with all the drink the goodness is probably just washed through,' says Bacon with mock remorse.

‘You might not believe it now,' Purple ventures, ‘but I once knew someone who was so in love with me that he said he wanted to lick caviare off the back of my throat. I had a large pot of beluga . . .'

John Deakin, sitting demurely opposite him, rolls his eyes at me.

‘I can't think who you expect to impress with that kind of rubbish,' Bacon ripostes, suddenly looking cross. ‘The trouble with you, Denis, is that you're coarse. The very texture of your sensibility is coarse. And I'm afraid it's what shows in those ghastly little paintings you do.'

Denis seems to relish the rebuff, exult in it even. He is about to come back with a further witticism, but a pale, wiry man
called Lucian heads him off. Lucian's wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up tightly and the sort of thin, blue-and-white-chequered trousers that chefs use in hot kitchens. ‘Did you know that for all their Dover soles and French recipes the cooks here are actually Chinese to a man?' he says in a soft, lisping voice that sounds oddly foreign. ‘I met one of them just outside the other day and asked him how he was. Mustn't glumble, he said.'

‘Well, he's right,' says Bacon, emptying his glass emphatically. ‘There's no point. After all, life is all we've got, so we might as well enjoy it as much as we can. Nietzsche said that since the whole thing is such a charade we might as well be as brilliant as we can be. Even if it is only being brilliant about nothing. Because we come from nothing and go into nothing, and in between there's only the brilliance of life, even if it means nothing. We don't know much, but that at least I think we do know. Don't you think, Michael?'

I nod vigorously, old head on young shoulders, anxious to look as though I could be frequently brilliant about nothing. Just say the word.

‘I've been looking at Michael's ginger sideburns,' says Denis, his purple cheeks gleaming with suppressed innuendo, ‘and thinking they must be the exact colour of his pubic hair.'

‘Oh do shut up, Denis,' Bacon says irritably. ‘The more she drinks, the more rubbish she talks.' He takes a pink comb with half its teeth missing out of his jacket and puts it in his ear like a hearing aid. ‘What's the silly old cunt saying now? What she say? Same old rubbish? Well, there it is, we might as well be brilliant, even though we have to put up with Denis's stupidity, because there's simply nothing else to do, even to pass the time. After all, life itself is nothing but a series of sensations. We just drift from moment to moment. My whole life has been like that, you know, drifting from bar to bar, person to person, instant to instant. And I think particularly when you're very young and very shy, with all that talent welling up inside you, it's what you have to do.
You have to drift until you find yourself. Simply drift and see . . . There you are. I expect I've been talking too much. Now let's have some more wine.'

‘The thing about Nietzsche', Lucian says, softly enunciating each syllable with his faintly foreign accent, ‘is that he is terribly, terribly clear about our human predicament. He says that marvellous thing about all history being placed in the balance again when a genius is born with, what is it, “a thousand secrets of the past crawling out – into his sun”.'

‘Well, of course that is a marvellous way of putting it,' says Bacon, opening his hands widely towards the whole table. ‘But then I've always thought that Nietzsche said everything that your grandfather was to say, that all Freud is contained in Nietzsche, even though I admire Freud very much, but more as a writer than anything else. I think he was a marvellous writer, but Nietzsche was this kind of extraordinary precursor. Every now and then there's a writer or an artist who comes along and completely alters the course of things, breaks the accepted mould and reinvents the way thought and feeling are conveyed. Because you could also say that you get the whole of Cubism in Cézanne. That it was already there, like a distillation. And I know people say how marvellous Cubism was, but I see it almost as a kind of decoration on Cézanne.'

Bacon pauses, to see if there is any reaction among his guests. Then he goes on:

‘When I was young Cézanne was the god, but I myself have always preferred Van Gogh. I think he was the more extraordinary artist and a more extraordinary man. You get everything in his letters, for instance. I reread them all the time. People make him out to be some sort of inspired fool, a naïf, but he was immensely intelligent and sophisticated, with ideas about everything you can think of, even about cancer and things like that.'

There's a moment's silence as we all take a slow, reflective pull at our wine, evaluating and absorbing this compact statement. Halfway along the table there's a powerfully built man in a
formal suit and tightly knotted tie who's said nothing but who's been drinking steadily right through the meal. A large plate of pale smoked salmon with two wedges of lemon lies untouched in front of him. He looks like a retired wrestler or a nightclub bouncer. Alongside the white wine, he's been ordering gin and tonics regularly, but otherwise he seems elsewhere, closing his eyes from time to time and just feeling for his glass. Even with his eyes shut, he exudes a kind of threat, and I sense he is someone to be wary of. But I am too excited by the wine and the exalted talk – Nietzsche, futility, Cézanne, drifting – to take much notice. It's all much more than I could ever have expected. The interview seems already in the bag because Bacon clearly likes to talk and all I have to do is to make a mental note of what he's saying and get it down on paper once I'm back in Cambridge. It couldn't be easier, it seems, especially since Bacon often repeats the same phrase or comes back to something he's already said and expands on it. It's as simple as getting the gist of a lecture but without the complicated dates and developments, and much more exciting. Much more about life and about the way things are. Bacon also actually seems interested in what you have to say and responds to it, even defers to you, saying things like ‘I'm sure you know much more about this than I do', unlike all those dons who simply talk at you and expect you to note it down. More vital to be here at the centre of things, in the middle of Soho, drinking and talking freely with someone creating images now, than sitting in a lecture room looking at slides of things done centuries ago in churches in Bruges or Perugia or wherever. Much more fun: life on another plane, speeded up, more glamorous.