Francis Bacon in Your Blood (40 page)

Francis has done quite a few new paintings, and the combined effect of so many Bacons in a relatively reduced gallery space is, contrary to what I imagined, incredibly powerful. Whereas at the Maeght gallery you had room to step back and consider, here you are hemmed in by Bacons on every wall. There is no escape. If you recoil from your reflection in the glazed surface of one alarming image, you bump into and are incorporated into
another alluringly shiny horror scene. It reminds me of a house of mirrors I went into at a funfair once with my mother and wherever you looked you were so pulled out of shape you roared with laughter and became even more grotesque. Only here it's not funny because you slip into someone else's twisted world where the distortions are ominous and go deeper, deforming the body and then the mind. The punks have arrived and the crush in the gallery heightens the nightmarish effect, effortlessly blending business suits and spiky hairdos, dog collars and pearl ropes because the real, more insidious question is whether the mangled spectators are trying to get into the paintings or the mangled figures in the paintings trying to get out.

Francis, meanwhile, is surviving the crush, glad-handing supporters of whatever stripe and signing catalogues and posters by the score. Eventually he disengages himself and like a praetorian guard a number of us accompany him in cars to the Halles aux Blés, the beautiful, covered grain market beside the meat and vegetable Halles, where Claude has laid on a memorable party, having invited people from across the globe to celebrate the event. Like several of Claude's events, there is a hallucinatory aspect to it, since although we are no longer among waxworks here the very circularity of the neoclassical building where all the guests are wandering round with drinks entails coming across people from all kinds of places and periods in one's life eternally revolving in a continuum where time itself is altered, so that having greeted someone one hasn't seen for yonks leads to seeing him or her again repeatedly and ineluctably, changing any surprise or pleasure at the encounter into a wry ‘I haven't seen you in fifteen years and now I bump into you every five minutes.'

Another event that has the punks jumping is a reading by Bill Burroughs at the brand-new Beaubourg Museum, a kind of Halles
aux tableaux
officially known as the Centre Georges Pompidou. As with Bacon, there's a terrific turnout and the punks are visibly in the ascendant. Burroughs puts on his
glasses and begins to read, in a reedy voice, from a work in progress. He is dressed in a grey suit with a grey hat and looks halfway between a dodgy accountant and a frail gangster. The performance does not impress the punks, many of whom don't have a word of English between them and who in any case were expecting a livelier, more subversive event. Frustrated, several of them clamber up on to the stage where Burroughs continues in his grey monotone as they dance around him. At one point, one of them with a bright-yellow mohawk and chains waves his arms derisively behind Burroughs's head, then very slowly tips his hat over his eyes. Once occluded, Burroughs stops talking and the crowd goes wild with applause.

The day after Francis's opening, anyone wandering down the street where Serge Gainsbourg lives, a place of pilgrimage for his huge army of fans, cannot help but see a prophetic phrase scrawled on to the wall of his house: ‘
Seul Francis Bacon est plus merveilleux que toi
'.

‘Your serve!'

I pitch the little black ball high in the air and smash it on to the wall, winning the point outright.

For the following serve, I try an underhand lob that loops through the air and should die in the corner, but the ball comes out a bit and my opponent uses the opportunity to drive it hard down the side wall. We play several close strokes straight down the wall until I hook the ball out into a gentle crosscourt shot which, satisfyingly, wrong-foots my opponent, grazes the front wall just over the red line above the tin and rolls irretrievably along the sidewall nick, taking the game to 9–7 and winning the set.

In the changing room, my partner says, ‘I began to feel drunk on court myself with all those wine fumes coming off you!'

It's true I've come from an epic Bacon lunch and am frankly delighted not only to have managed to play squash in that condition but to have won, however amateurish the level of play.
After sweating out some of the booze and a shower, I feel on top of the world and ready to go back to the Coupole where I left Francis talking to a big, beefy young man called René whom he's picked up somewhere along the way and, I think, hopes to seduce. I doubt he'll have much luck since René, whom Francis calls ‘
une force de la nature
', looks as straight as a die, and he's much more comfortable talking to me, as just another bloke, than to Francis, which in turn I suppose irks Francis. I should probably just leave them to it, but I'm drawn back because the wine is still flowing and I find René good company because he laughs easily, slapping his thighs, and doesn't kowtow to Francis, who looks quite small and almost dainty sitting opposite him. I find them at the same table, but several bottles later and deep in conversation about Van Gogh, with Francis saying he prefers the
Potato Eaters
to all his other pictures. This strikes me as particularly reductive and I contend that the later works are greater and start talking about the Saint-Rémy period. I get a funny sideways look from Francis, who seems to have a bit of trouble breathing, but I'm high on my win and the new wine. Then a bit like a gramophone record Francis starts on all his usual slagging off of David Hockney, probably to impress René but also because he's irritated by the increasingly international success David's been having in Paris, where he has taken over a studio in the Cour de Rohan, an elegant courtyard behind Odéon well known in the Parisian art world because Balthus painted there from the 1930s on.

‘Well, I'm not surprised he's been so successful,' Francis says. He's wheezing noticeably now, and I wonder for a moment how much Francis's asthma affects his mood. ‘After all the paintings are like illustrations for
Marie Claire
, there's nothing to stand up to in them and that's why people like them. They may be pretty but when you look at them there's nothing really there.'

And I feel it's time to stop the rubbishing and start saying how original the early work was and how skilfully ironical the
California images can be and I don't notice that the atmosphere has changed until Francis thunders:

‘Well, with a taste as superficial as yours I'm not in the least surprised you like them. You're like all the critics who just go along with what everybody else says. And then of course you write it, just like all the others. And that's why we're stuck with all this dreary, anodyne art. Because of people like you.'

Francis's eyes are boring into me. His face has gone hard and pale.

René shifts uncomfortably.

I decide to leave them together and go out into the cold Montparnasse dusk, walking briskly to try to contain my confusion and hurt. ‘You didn't see it coming, did you?' I say to myself angrily as I go down into the Vavin Métro. Then out aloud, startling the other passengers waiting for the train beside me:

‘And what chance in hell does your book stand now?'

12

Primal Cries

I'm trying to come to terms with Francis's sudden bitchy outburst. It's wounding, as it was meant to be, since he knows exactly how to find your weak spot. But although I've seen him go frequently for other people, he's only done it to me twice, which given all the late nights and drink we've shared over the years means I've got off pretty lightly. I think Francis realizes that if he had a go regularly, as he does with Denis – but not, for instance, with Lucian, at least while the two of them were still talking – I wouldn't stick around. I think it's also fair to take into account that he is often under appalling pressure (usually of his own making) from work in progress, from gambling debts and occasional blackmail, from mammoth hangovers and exhaustion. There is also the pang, the stab, of jealousy, which Francis loves when he can watch it at work in others or reads Proust's masterly analysis of its insidious effects but from which he also occasionally suffers. I wouldn't have thought of the possibility had Alice not pointed it out when I described the scene at the Coupole to her, that Francis might have imagined René actually fancied me rather than him. This prompts a hollow laugh from me, but in fact having gone over the incident time and again has led to one positive outcome.

Although I've been scribbling away since adolescence, I've become increasingly aware that writing things down and getting
them into some kind of order or perspective really helps me deal with everyday misunderstandings and disappointments as well as my own contradictions. ‘One writes in order to have written,' says my great friend in Barcelona, Jaime Gil de Biedma, but one also writes to survive the ‘slings and arrows' and to give some sense to the persistent confusion in which we, or at least I, live. A great deal of what I write disappears into a series of black books which I keep as an intimate diary and where I can ramble on about whatever I happen to be thinking or feeling at a particular time without any forethought or framework, until even I am bored by what I'm saying and stop. Frequently of course I record what happens in my relationship with Francis, such as the Coupole incident, which has lost a little of its sting now that it's been written down. This in turn has prompted me to go back to the book I've been writing about him and his effect on me and try to give it a clearer shape.

At the moment it is still one long tract with no chapters or other subdivisions and little notion of a narrative moving forward. My head is too full of Joyce and Beckett, Borges, Kafka and Michaux, to think in such conventional terms. Rather I am looking for a form that will convey the strange circularity that characterizes all my encounters with Francis, who himself (quoting Gertrude Stein about Derain) frequently lambasts Balthus for trying to ‘do something new with an old technique', which he sees as an impossibility, adding that you have to ‘break the mould of accepted thought' in order to invent. So I suppose that's what I'm trying to do: find a new technique. Consequently there's little sense of time or any specific ‘development' in my account, which ends (as I sincerely hope it will before too long) with exactly the same words as it begins. This particular ‘in my end is my beginning' is exactly how it feels when you start off an evening with Francis, having champagne in a grand hotel, dinner in a plush restaurant, then a tour of the bars, all of them increasingly similar and sometimes even the same because the Colony Room might lead to the Maisonette, the Coronation, the Iron Lung,
but also back to the Colony and possibly even the grand hotel or restaurant for supper after a few hours' hard drinking, and it's not just the circularity of places and the deadening recurrence of bottle after bottle which in themselves gradually swallow up all notion of time but the circularity imposed by Francis himself as he repeats what he has just said, again and again like a mantra, until you feel imprisoned in a tightening circle of nihilism and finality.

That said, however much I experiment with form and buff up the impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness content, agonizing over a verb here, a dialogue there, I have to admit that at one hundred thousand words and counting ‘Myself I Must Remake' (the working title) is not exactly a breeze to read, let alone write, especially since the main theme is interwoven with an equally implacable account of my own inner turmoil and despair, including frequent vignettes of wasted mornings, blank pages and rampant literary impotence. On the bright side, however, the backbone of the book remains valid since I quote Francis a lot and it constitutes a kind of portrait of him in his own words. Given the keen interest in Bacon since the Grand Palais exhibition and Claude Bernard's mobbed show, word of my screed has travelled through the incestuous Paris art and literary worlds, coming eventually to the ears of Georges Lambrichs, editor of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, who gets in touch to ask if I would let him see some extracts to consider for eventual publication.

Even the luckiest man only glimpses heaven a few times in his life, and the prospect that something of mine might appear in the
NRF
, with its sublime red logo and hallowed list of authors (bar Proust, of course, whom Gide turned down for publication the first time round), appears to me like a permanent portal on to paradise, leading more or less inevitably to other distinguished publishers in London and New York soon falling over themselves to secure whatever now in this potential blaze of glory flows effortlessly from my pen. This is more alluring than
any pie-in-the-sky publication project for an art gallery and I waste no time in choosing and blending various extracts into a desirable whole while realizing that without the agreement of the book's hero the entire venture will founder. So having neatly typed out my offering on onion-skin paper, I call Francis to let him know, without any further indication, that I'll be in London next week and he immediately suggests dinner at Claridge's on the evening I arrive.