Francis Bacon in Your Blood (48 page)

My household arrangements are necessarily changing apace. The dining room, where not long ago I entertained Francis and Denis, has been taken over by the American, who has assumed the sonorous title of ‘Editor-in-Chief', which sounds more desirable to me than my own onerous position as ‘Publisher'. The big loft-like room, where I used to work and sleep, has also taken on a predominantly professional air in which the bed covered by a vivid green-and-pink Indian quilt looks increasingly incongruous. The small, gilt-framed triptych, the latest painting Francis has given me, still hangs above the fireplace at the end of the room. It acts like a magnet, drawing everybody's attention the moment they come in. It's made up of three studies of the photographer Peter Beard, whom I've met several times with Francis. Peter is strikingly handsome and has sent Francis
sheaves of photographs of himself that I've seen lying around the studio here. Francis talks in a detached, clinical way about liking the ‘bone structure' of Peter's face, although I assume he is also very attracted to him. Each ‘head' is beautifully, intricately contrived, and I know I should insure the picture, since it's easy to break into the apartment and in any case so many people are now coming through all they'd need is a minute alone to pop the three studies into a bag and slip off. I did get a quote from Lloyd's but the cost plus the security measures they insisted on were way beyond anything I could afford, either this year or next. So I just leave it there, like a major statement, a symbol of our involvement in art, and hope for the best.

An English secretary has joined us, and sometimes she arrives in the morning before, still stuck in my nonchalant bachelor habits, I have even woken up. Since our little triumvirate works at all hours day and night, I'm finding the lack of privacy frustrating, and although I set out not to request any favours I have now asked Francis whether I might have the use of the studio from time to time. Francis has not only agreed, but he's actually encouraging me to take it, claiming that he has to focus on new work over the next few months for the retrospective that the Tate is organizing in his honour. So I flit between the two spaces, wondering where I feel less uncomfortable, the rue des Archives with all its office furniture and electronic equipment or the paint-daubed chaos of the rue de Birague.

Even before we have cobbled the first issue of the new
Art International
together, our team is growing exponentially as we move towards publication date. Not only have we got designer, printer, foreign correspondents and advertising reps in place, but Eli, my long-standing Filipino cleaner and odd-job man, has graduated into a full-time role by undertaking everything from expediting mail drives and running errands to preparing lunch and being on standby to package the actual magazines when they eventually arrive and hump them over to the post office for international delivery. I am too preoccupied by the
whole constantly accelerating process to ask myself whether I am enjoying this radical change in my circumstances. I'm aware of how much I dislike schmoozing with gallery owners in order to win advertising and how impatient I become when sitting with bankers and accountants going over profit forecasts and other equally abstract concepts. I am also regularly peeved by having to commission writers to do the kinds of more interesting articles I myself used to spend my time writing – a now distant, idyllic state to which I sometimes crave to return. I am also growing more and more anxious about whether the whole venture will survive financially and what my future would look like if it doesn't and I'm simply left with crippling debts. Whatever cheques I've managed to garner for prepaid advertising space have already been gobbled up by mounting costs, even though everybody on the team has agreed to work for minimal wages. And since we have splashed out on colour in this first issue and gone way over budget, I am already living in dread of receiving the printer's bill, which I suspect will leave us penniless.

Then, just as we seem doomed to go under before we've barely even begun – the most ephemeral of ephemeral art magazines – the miracle occurs. An Italian painter friend who has positioned himself strategically among the wealthy tells me that one of his collectors has heard we are relaunching a prestigious art magazine and wonders whether she might be of help. Apparently this lady, Mariella, a well-known cinema actress before the war who married an extremely rich lawyer, now lives between her several properties while frequently battling manic depression in discreet Swiss clinics. If she could play a role in the magazine's success, my friend tells me, it would help her enormously to deal with her condition. One other thing that she has to contend with, he adds slyly, is her guilt at discovering that she is fundamentally lesbian, which she thought I might understand better than most because of my privileged relationship with Bacon. Depression, homosexual guilt, gifts of money, I thought: these are all stars
that in one way and another have lit my way. I agree immediately to a meeting.

The date has been set and I make my way to a plump white villa sitting in an immaculate garden in Neuilly. The maid takes my coat and ushers me into an overheated room filled with orchids. It is tea time, and the tea things have been daintily set out with two large dishes of livid-green and shocking-pink macaroons. The moment Mariella enters the room, I fall in love with her. Even though clearly of a certain age, she is still strikingly beautiful, with delicate blonde hair and amazing, oddly wounded blue eyes. Rich and attractive, living in the lap of luxury, she seems vulnerable and she regularly mocks herself. We laugh a great deal, and I munch alternately on the little green and pink confections. Then after a while, tea having been cleared away and a welcome glass of champagne in hand, we talk about the magazine's prospects and the focus of our first issue (she worships Bacon from afar, and we make plans for a meeting next time he is in Paris). And when I think our meeting is over and I should make myself scarce, Mariella says:

‘You have been doing a lot of writing. Now it is my turn to do some writing.'

At which point she produces a chequebook out of her handbag, carefully writes out a cheque and hands it to me.

I am embarrassed but delighted, and the delight gets the upper hand. I kiss her goodbye. We agree to set up another meeting soon.

The moment I am out on the street, I stop under a lamp, take the cheque out of my inside jacket pocket and gasp. The sum is sufficient to cover the current issue and the following one.
Art International
has been saved. Life can go on.

Life does go on, and the tempo at the magazine is considerably quickened. Mariella will now appear on our masthead as ‘Director of Public Relations', and we have had some smart business cards with the red-and-black
Art International
logo printed for her. True to her new calling, Mariella has suggested that a good way
to attract advertisers to the magazine would be to organize a launch party for our first issue at the George V or some other grand Paris hotel. I endorse this wholeheartedly, realizing that, although I should actually prefer to have the cost of the party in cash against future issues, a reception on this scale would convince the galleries that
Art International
was an ideal, solidly funded publication for them to announce their forthcoming shows. And no sooner have the invitation cards, proper stiffies edged in gold, gone out than our advertising revenue for the second issue doubles. I am both relieved and deeply pleased, but no one is more delighted than our languid English secretary who has come into her own in deciding who should and should not be invited and dealing with the avalanche of RSVPs. When the evening comes round, attendees at the reception are deeply impressed not only by the flowing champagne but by the abundant caviare Mariella has ordered. Dealers who normally didn't acknowledge my presence before now come over to pay their respects, champagne in one hand, blini in the other.

I like to be inclusive and I've invited all our tiny staff including Eli, our factotum. He has brought his attractive Filipina girlfriend, and the two of them, chattering away together in Tagalog, are so slim and elegantly dressed they stand out even in this well-heeled art gathering. At a pinch, I suppose, Eli in his dark-blue suit, white shirt and conservative tie could be taken for a Japanese collector, and since the Japanese have been investing spectacular sums in Western art, I imagine he can only lend a positive note to the evening. I forget about them both and circulate, making sure that prospective advertisers meet Mariella, who is looking ineffably chic and reassuringly wealthy in a silver couture sheath with diamonds discreetly blazing round her neck. The evening is going with a swing. Mariella has invited some of her rich friends, and the dealers have picked up on the wealth in the room like a scent. Mariella was absolutely right. A show of money is the surest way of attracting money, and several galleries have already confirmed their intention to advertise in our pages.

Towards the end of the reception, I have a moment of rare delight. With their Far Eastern allure Eli and his fiancée have become a centre of attention. I go over to see what's happening. Several prominent art dealers from Paris and New York are circling round them, almost literally rubbing their hands as the couple agree, nodding their heads eagerly and politely, to the picture deals that they have been offered. It seems that, having expressed interest in a Renoir, Eli has indicated that they are also in the market for more contemporary masterpieces, thereby keeping all the dealers in a froth of expectation. When pressed for his contact details, Eli nevertheless refrains with true oriental inscrutability, advising the dealers he can only be contacted through me.

A few days later the bulk of the new issue arrives at our office. Eli has commandeered a few migrant fellow Filipinos to come in under cover of night and slap the magazines into individual cardboard cases that will protect them on their journey to the four corners of the earth. The magazine's old subscriber list has come alive, and we realize that we have readers in the most outlandish places in the world. New subscribers have since joined. The wind is squarely in our sails. We are on our way.

Francis has just written – a much longer, scrawled letter than usual – to thank me for the ‘very generous and flattering article' I've written on his work for
Connoisseur
magazine in New York. A friend of mine, Hans Namuth, has taken a series of portraits of Francis to accompany it, and I can't think that Francis was unaware when they met in London that Hans is best known for the famous photographs he took of his bête noire, Jackson Pollock, at work. It doesn't seem to have got in the way, however, despite Francis's much aired antipathy to Pollock. In any case, I'm very pleased he likes my text, because although it could hardly be construed as anything less than positive and admiring you never quite know whether Francis isn't going to take issue with some statement or allusion he finds inaccurate
or ambiguous, particularly since he believes that most, if not all, art critics are stupid and they have to be told what to say, rather as he has done, in his maniacally controlling way, in his interviews with Sylvester. He corrects me, rightly enough, on a mistake I made in quoting his favourite line from Aeschylus, ‘The reek of human blood smiles out at me,' then goes on to say, ‘I particularly liked your emphasis on enigma, which as you know is difficult to achieve. I wonder if at Delphi the Sibyl still gives it out.' Francis himself is about to be the Sibyl now, since his big new retrospective will soon be opening at the Tate, which is why my article, along with scores of others, has been commissioned, in order to apprise the wider world of what is about to hit them.

I've been invited to the VIP reception at the Tate and the dinner afterwards, not just as a friend of the artist's but also as a lender, since they have requested my triptych, which I am all the gladder to lend since it will be properly insured for once, not only in London but in the subsequent venues in Stuttgart and Berlin. Unexpectedly, when I go over to London for the opening, I don't get the same intense rush of excitement – that peculiar mixture of dread and pleasure – which seeing a number of Bacons together has always given me so far. There is a degree of familiarity that makes the dread less dreadful, although going through the first half of the exhibition is as emotional an experience as ever. These dark, often almost clumsy images were painted by another Bacon, before I knew him, a young artist who was struggling with the burden of the terrible truth he
had
to express, if he were to survive, but didn't yet know how to express. There is a sense of an elemental struggle here, of the forces of life and death being confronted head on, that you never get except in the greatest paintings. Here Bacon joins the masters, the artists who continue to enthral us through the generations. Perhaps later on, and certainly in some of the most recent paintings, he has become almost too adept, too technically cunning and practised, at evoking the central enigmas of existence.

I know Francis has been particularly insistent that there's no lack of champagne for the party afterwards, and since a large contingent of Soho friends and hangers-on has turned up the evening looks like it might be lively to the point of getting out of hand. There's many a face I vaguely recognize from years of trawling all the pubs and clubs with Francis, and he hasn't left out any of the old-timers, like Gaston Berlemont, with his buffalo-horn moustache, from the French pub, and the one they call ‘Maltese Mary', the former policeman now presiding over a particularly unruly Soho nightspot. If I were a Proust, I guess I would be having a Proustian ‘moment', with all kinds of memories and smells and phrases flooding back, but my main reaction is relief at having got away from this frayed, inward-looking little world, fond of it though I still am. As I listen in, the boozy talk goes suddenly from booming to
sotto voce
as odds are taken on the most likely victim to be claimed this evening. First it was Peter Lacy, then it was George Dyer, whose turn is it now? goes the refrain. Eyes turn to where John Edwards is chatting and laughing, but he looks far too poised and cheerful to be considering any drastic action. In any case, as I leave the Soho brigade and scan the seething, guffawing mass of people to see where else I might mingle, I am struck by how death has already plucked too great a number from our midst: Sonia Orwell is no longer here, nor is Muriel Belcher, and John Deakin died a good while ago.