Francis Bacon in Your Blood (26 page)

‘Then, of course there've been others, like Peter, who I think I told you about. Then there was this other one called Robert Heber-Percy, who was rather pompous, that I met in the Ritz bar, and he said to me, “I'm just off to South Africa,” so I said, “How lucky you are,” and he said, “Well, why don't you come with me?” and I thought, well, why not.
¿Por qué no?
So I did, and everything went wrong, naturally. We travelled out together with him in first class and me in steerage, which I must say was a great deal more fun. But nothing worked. We ended up by having this enormous row and by what's called parting on the banks of the Limpopo . . .'

The barman has been discreetly straightening chairs around us. Francis looks as if he's said most of what he's been wanting to say. I walk him back to the hotel where he's staying near by on the rue des Saints-Pères. We say goodbye quite formally, as though no confidences have been exchanged, and I take one of my favourite ways home, down the small streets to the Seine, then snaking alongside the tall, dark buildings on the Ile de la
Cité, wondering why I have so much information from a man about whom, his violently clashing images apart, next to nothing is known.

The posters are up, all the way down the Champs-Elysées and then at points right through Paris. Francis's amazing bullfight image is literally everywhere, and for me it's as though the whole city's tempo has quickened. There's no point sitting around in my little room wondering about the meaning of life now, I realize. The show has come to town and there's a new vitality in the bright autumn air.

Everybody's over. Sonia, John Deakin, Dickie and Denis, Isabel Rawsthorne, and loads of Soho cronies. Francis has brought George over, too. ‘He's in so many of the pictures,' he said to me, ‘I couldn't really tell him not to come. He's been on a cure to get himself off the drink. I mean, it sounds ridiculous coming from an old drunk like me, but George becomes absolutely impossible in drink.'

It's pretty obvious that Francis wants George out of his life. He thought he was getting a muscular East End tough who would thrash him to within an inch of his life and instead George turned out to be confused and gentle and clinging, which Francis hates. There was a drugs scandal in London, when George planted some cannabis in the studio and the police were tipped off and came round with a sniffer Alsatian and of course found the weed. The police charged Francis and he protested that he didn't smoke anything since he was asthmatic. Francis contacted his solicitor, the influential Lord Goodman, thinking that, as Harold Wilson's ‘fixer', he might be able to make the whole thing go away. But the police pressed charges, and the case went to court. ‘I knew I'd get off when I recognized a few old lags in the jury,' Francis told me afterwards nonchalantly. But he was certainly upset by the publicity the whole fiasco attracted – it made the front page of the
Evening Standard
 – and that has soured his relations with
George further still. But George is here, fresh out of his cure, and with the opening only a few days away the three of us are having a celebratory lunch at the Grand Véfour.

Francis is already there when I arrive, eager to be admitted once more into the restaurant's luxurious ambiance. I pause for a moment as I cross the room, looking up at the late eighteenth-century ceiling, where rosy-cheeked girls with baskets of flowers laugh as they listen to the court paid to them by slim, straight-backed soldiers. But I'm shocked when I see George looking so pale and strained.

‘Been onnis cure, see,' he says to me, pushing the glass of champagne he's been served to the very edge of the table. ‘Been at one evvem 'omes.'

A black-coated waiter has materialized at our side.

‘Messieurs,' he says, ‘today we 'ave salmon with celery and black truffle or delicious duckling from—'

‘I'll 'ave that,' George says with an unimpressed snort.

‘What will you have, Sir George?' says Francis, chuckling.

‘Nat fing wiv salmon. First one 'e said,' George says. His eyes have roamed the room, noting the tables where the jewels glint. On an ample bosom at the table next to us, there is a diamond necklace almost within his grasp.

‘The real trouble about not drinking is the boredom,' Francis says, following George's glance at the necklace with detached amusement. ‘I went to one of those ridiculous health farms once to lose weight – I only have to look at food, you know, to blow up like an enormous balloon. Anyway, they give you absolutely nothing, just three glasses of water a day, and the boredom is indescribable, and you also begin to smell very bad. I used to take the train up and down to London, up and down, simply to pass the time.'

George nods, sucking his cigarette so hard it crackles.

Francis outlines the plans for the opening. I'd expected him to be a bit overwhelmed or nervous, but he seems very much in control and almost apologetic, as though we had much better
things to do than to come to the exhibition and the banquet afterwards.

‘Of course most of the pictures are of George,' Francis says genially, trying to draw George out.

‘Yeh,' says George. ‘Mostovems of me.' He's pushed his salmon to one side and is busy flicking specks of ash off his dark suit.

Another carafe of champagne is set bubbling on the table between us, but even Francis has accepted that the lunch won't take off.

White-faced and sober, George is waiting to disappear back to the hotel. He's lost Francis, and now he's lost the oblivion he found in drink.

I walk with them down the Palais-Royal arcade towards the river. Then, impulsively, I turn back through the gardens and take a lingering look into the Véfour's windows, half expecting to see the three of us still sitting round the table, but laughing now, like old times, our faces flushed with pleasure.

It's a perfect late-autumn day, and the sun is sparkling on the silver helmets and swords of the Garde Républicaine standing to attention on either side of the red-carpeted steps that lead up to the Grand Palais. President Pompidou has decided to open the exhibition in person, and as he mounts the steps surrounded by a group of dark-suited officials, Francis is waiting at the top to greet them and take them round.

I feel a surge of pride as their backs disappear into the museum's shadowy entrance. Francis could hardly have more luck or higher honours. Even the weather has held for him, and the French state has just acquired a particularly tough new triptych that shows George seated on a creamy white lavatory. The advance press has focused on the extraordinary power of the paintings, saying they're like ‘a punch in the face' and wondering out aloud why France has taken this long to recognize an artist of such overwhelming importance.

The plane trees along the Champs-Elysées have lost some of their leaves, but the high blue sky overhead gives no indication that we'll soon be plunged into winter. A long line of birds in perfect formation moves southwards over the Place de la Concorde towards the Seine. They look like letters in a sentence being written and unwritten, an indecipherable message etched for a moment on the void. Then they pass out of view.

I'm excited to see the show, because it will fill in all sorts of gaps in my knowledge of Francis's painting and above all give me a better idea of what he did in the earlier part of his career. Somehow I've come to feel personally involved as if, having studied the recent work, I now have an urgent need to know what came before.

Getting here early means I'm in the first batch of VIPs and journalists waving engraved invitations to be let in. Francis has probably moved on with the official group. As we pour into the first gallery I don't know quite what I've been expecting. The first few works are smaller and darker than I'd imagined. They don't have the exuberant assurance of the canvases Francis has done over the past few years. They're rougher and more tentative, as if the artist were still working in the shadows, unsure of what he was looking for or achieving. Blurred figures are isolated in dark enclosed spaces, dark moving on dark. Francis's voice speaks out of each image. As I walk past it follows me, clearly, insistently.

‘Life is nothing more than that, I'm afraid. Simply this moment between birth and death. We're like grass. We grow and we're cut down. And then we go on to the great compost heap of the world. We don't know much, but that I think we do know.'

The writhing Popes. The great blood-red-and-black Crucifixions.

‘When I was young I needed extreme subject matter. Then later the subjects came out of my life and the people I knew.'

A white face, its features half washed away, is screaming from one gilded frame to another.

‘Peter was hysterical, almost mad really, the whole time. We had these four years of hell together. I'd never been really in love before and I was utterly physically obsessed by him. In the end he just left me. He rang up one day and said, “Consider me dead.” And when that exhibition of mine opened at the Tate, among the telegrams, I got this one saying he had just died.'

Screaming in pain, screaming in pleasure. White bodies humped on creamy sheets, abandoned in the grass sprouting through the canvas weave.

‘That side of life has always been disastrous for me. So many of my friends have been drunks or suicides. They're all dead now.'

Posthumous portraits rising mysteriously out of the fleshy metaphor of paint. Bring him back.

‘It seems mad to paint people once they're dead. You know if they haven't been incinerated their flesh has rotted.'

In another room the first self-portraits appear. Francis twisted by Francis.

‘I've had a disastrous life, but in a way it has been more curious than my paintings. It's gone deeper than what are called the
moeurs
of my times. I think I'm unique. Everyone's unique, of course, it's just that I have been able to work a bit on my uniqueness. I've tried to make myself profoundly artificial.'

Then a burst of small heads of women, pulled every which way, anger-red in their deformity. Muriel, Isabel and Henrietta, as ancient and as regal as Nefertiti, attacked down to the bone.

‘There's nothing you can do about death. Death exists only for the living. It's working on you all the time. You can't prepare for it, as they say. All you can do is to go on living.'

More self-portraits. Himself attacked most furiously, a cheek excised, a cranium axed, an eye elided.

‘When I want to know what someone looks like I'd never ask a woman. I'd always ask a queer. They're very accurate. After all, they spend most of their time pulling other people's appearance to pieces . . .'

Portraits of Lucian, caught close up, pinned on a sofa, coiled on a stool like a snake about to strike. Full figures or portable heads, done from photos, from memory, in the seething silence of the studio.

‘If they were sitting in front of me, they would inhibit me and I couldn't practise on them the injury I inflict in my work. I like to be alone with the way I remember them. And then I hope to bring them back more poignantly and violently.'

Then comes George. George caught in a black mirror, welded to a bicycle, corkscrewed to a chair.

‘George was down the other end of the bar and I was with John Deakin and all those others, and he came over and said: “You all seem to be having a good time, can I buy you a drink?” And that's how I met him, I might never have noticed him otherwise.'

The lover in the lover's eye, cut in half, head split, sheared to a topknot, ringed by fag ends, capped with a cheese-cutter. Poor George, so bashed around his own mother wouldn't recognize him.

‘'Ees done masses of 'ese pic-yeres of me. I fink they're reely 'orrible. All 'ese uvver people fink they're terrific. I still fink they're orful.'

George dominating the last part of the exhibition, bobbing up bewildered beneath the battering.

‘He asked whether he could come with me and since he's in so many of the pictures I could hardly say no. Even though there's been nothing between us for ages now, I couldn't say no.'

So many cries and blasphemies echoing through the lugubrious galleries, so much outrage against the human form has taken the elegant Parisian public by surprise. They came in expecting some Hogarthian whimsy and leave having witnessed scenes of savagery so intense and yet so subtle they have no idea how to react. Far from the self-satisfied nonchalance with which most museum
vernissages
end, a shocked silence reigns throughout this
vast theatre of cruelty. At the very end of the exhibition, Salvador Dalí in full fig, with a big blond transvestite in red hotpants on his arm, lies in wait, clearly intent on stealing the limelight. ‘
C'est très, très rrraisonnable
,' he announces dismissively at regular intervals, rolling his ‘r's loudly and waving his silver-topped cane at a couple of the most disturbing images in the whole show. Prized though Dalí's clowning usually is in Paris, the well-bred visitors are so shocked by what they have seen that they barely glance at him, much to the Great Masturbator's annoyance, before they make hastily for the exit.