Francis Bacon in Your Blood (52 page)

Even Francis is drinking more than usual, which means that after the champagne and the white wine, we have a couple of bottles of Saint-Estèphe before settling down to some port. As we leave Le Duc and wander unsteadily up to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, it becomes clear this is going to be a bender. We stop at La Rotonde and have some more port, which Francis pronounces ‘filthy' but nevertheless drinks, then we weave our way along to the Sélect, which I know is where Francis used to hang out with the homosexual crowd when he first lived in Paris in the late 1920s.

He certainly seems very at home here, as if he'd been in the night before, which I suppose he might have been, and he orders two more double ports and begins to clown about, suddenly producing a small pink plastic mirror from his leather overcoat and combing two tendrils of hair carefully across his brow, saying to me:

‘Do I really look that young still? Well, there it is. I'm simply a brilliant fool, brilliant and idiotic, and there it is. I don't believe in anything and I don't care about anything. There's just my brilliance and the brilliance of life. And when you're old you are never really less than your age and that's an abominable thing but every now and then someone does actually come along and thinks you are younger than you really are and when you tell them your age they're really shocked. It's tragic still to desire at my age, even though in a sense I've never been young, I was born without innocence, I always knew how things were from the start.'

Francis has now leant his head on the back of the customer standing next to us, who's too embarrassed to move as Francis
starts looking at himself in his hand mirror again, a pink, chubby, chuckling Silenus. ‘You see, I've always known. And even though I've always been a fool I think I've just painted the best picture I've ever done. I wanted to do a wave, and it turned into a jet of water, it's nothing but this jet of water, simply a bit of water smeared over the canvas, but there's something very mysterious about it.
Encore un porto
,' Francis says to the barman. ‘
Non, un double!
' and when he tastes it he throws it into the sink on the other side of the bar, saying ‘
Il est très mauvais, votre porto
,' and there's an expectant ripple among the other customers that things are going to turn nasty, and I'm wondering reluctantly if I'm going to have to step in to protect him, but the barman has produced a better port and Francis is laughing even harder, drinking the wine and holding his glass out for more, swaying and half falling over the other customers, who are clearly uncertain how to act and decide simply to put up with him. And it takes another good hour before I can get him out of the Sélect, and we weave out into the boulevard to get a taxi, swaying through the fast-moving cars. Alice and an American art-dealer friend who happen to be sitting opposite on the covered terrace of the Coupole see us marooned in the traffic and stand up in alarm, waving their arms at us and clearly bidding me to be careful, which, drunk as I am and with Francis nearly keeling over, makes me even more terrified. At last I flag a taxi down, but the driver takes one look at Francis and says, ‘Your friend is ill,' before locking all doors and roaring off. Eventually we half dodge, half tumble in and out of the traffic to the other side. I ask Francis, who's standing stock still on the pavement now, what he wants to do and he says, ‘
Nada
,' he doesn't want to stay there and he doesn't want to go anywhere. ‘
Nada
,' he repeats several times and then he starts turning abusive, saying he certainly doesn't want me taking him back to his hotel, he's alright by himself, and all I can think of doing is getting him on to a bus going roughly in the right direction and I watch him standing inside, beside the driver, swaying again, trying to get his ticket into the ticket
machine, missing and trying again, until the bus is swallowed by the dark.

Francis calls me next morning and says he can remember our lunch at Le Duc but nothing thereafter. ‘I think my mind's going,' he says. ‘Was I alright or did I talk the most dreadful nonsense? I really must stop that kind of drinking at my age because when I wake up the next morning I have this complete blank and I'm filled with guilt.' He says that he has this conviction the world will blow up at any moment. Then we chat for a while, and he suggests that I come to the hotel before he leaves so that he can give me a colour transparency of the
Jet of Water
he's just painted.

I go over and look at it. A great gush of water rises from a hole or pipe to the right of the middle of the canvas against a background that is half blue sky, half black night. It is a desolate picture, the water pulsing up and spilling pointlessly into a void where there might once have been human life.

Francis has clearly developed a ‘late style'. I'm pleased that the eerie translucence of his most recent, full-length portraits of John Edwards reflects a new serenity, as if the contradictions that have warred so dramatically in him for a good half-century are now to a large degree resolved. These new paintings put me in mind of
The Tempest
because the serenity has been achieved at a high cost in loss of illusion and the suffering that entails. They transmit an otherworldly aura, tinged with deep sadness. Our revels now indeed are ended and they have been replaced by a melancholy acceptance of age and fate.

At the same time, I also worry whether Francis's imagery, once so rooted in his own inner conflict, hasn't forfeited some of its vitality, as if the blood has been drained out of it. Bloodless Bacon, and it shows in the commissioned portraits he has been accepting of late of personalities like Gianni Agnelli, the ‘King of Italy', and Mick Jagger. He has also agreed to do a portrait of an
international financier he knows well. ‘I couldn't really say no,' Francis tells me, ‘because he's got all my money, and I have to say he seems to have done brilliantly with it. So I asked him to get some photographs taken of himself, and I've been looking at them, but the trouble is, when you look at his face, there's absolutely nothing there. So I don't know how I'm going to do a portrait of him.' I'm sure he'll come up with an acceptable solution, not least because getting one's portrait painted by Bacon is now no longer seen as an assault but as daringly chic and desirable, and collectors all over the world, from Farah Diba, the former Empress of Iran, and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines to Greek shipowners and Agnelli himself, fall over each other to get their hands on his paintings. Meanwhile the press whips itself into a frenzy about the huge prices Francis's paintings are now making, without of course realizing that a disproportionate chunk of these goes first to his dealers, then to the tax man, and much of the remainder is spent buying champagne for everyone in sight. For all the sybaritic lifestyle the newspapers like to attribute to him, Francis still lives like a monk in his bare studio-cell.

I could never mention my doubts about the recent work to Francis without getting my head seriously bitten off. It's not really my place to make comments of this kind in any case, although I don't know who else would ever tell him. I have more pressing concerns as a publisher, and I'm beginning to forge another sense of my own identity, both as an employer and as a man who is about to get married. I'm gratified now that I'm running a magazine of my own that I am no longer quite the ‘obscure young man' as Sonia, with no doubt unintentionally cruel accuracy, once dubbed me. I was pleased, too, when I came to London the other day to discuss some parallel projects I've been working on with the film director Peter Bogdanovich, to find Francis dining at a table near ours at the Ritz, mainly, I have to admit, because it showed that my life had taken off in other directions, quite independently from him. Of course the fact that during this visit Jill and I slipped into the Chelsea Register
Office to get married would have been another, more striking indication.

Francis still looms very large at all sorts of unexpected moments, even so. The other day, for instance, I felt absurdly proud when Cartier-Bresson, who's become a good friend both of mine and of the magazine's, told me that of all the people he has known in his long life the most exceptional are Giacometti and Bacon. And my continuing dependence on Francis is driven closer home when I realize that I've been carefully plotting the best way to introduce him to Jill (who, meanwhile, has been rather dreading the encounter). I decide on a dinner at the RAC where both she and I are at ease, and I suggest that Francis bring his new Spanish boyfriend José in the hope that will create a certain symmetry. I'm anxious that Francis might be a little snobbish about coming to such a large, unexclusive club but when he arrives he immediately responds to its confident Edwardian opulence and repeats several times: ‘I'd love to have a place like this to come to but they'd never want someone like me.' José arrives with him, and as we drink some champagne in the bar I notice they are dressed in almost identical dark suits with exactly the same shiny black ankle boots, which they show off to each other with a smile as if they are sharing a private joke. We go into the Great Gallery and I'm disappointed that, on one of the rare occasions when I've been able to host a dinner for him, Francis says he hasn't been feeling well recently and orders only onion soup and a plate of Parma ham. It's true that he's looking paler and frailer than I've known him before. Similarly, although I've carefully picked the wine, only a couple of bottles are consumed. The first one seems to me distinctly corked. When I remark on it Francis is sceptical, but I know the wine well since Jill and I drank it at our wedding breakfast here. I send it back and am relieved to find the new bottle has a totally different, fresher taste. Once he's sipped it critically, Francis acknowledges this with an approving nod towards me, which, emancipated from his influence as I feel I have become, still gives me a rush of pleasure.

Whether Francis will approve of Jill is, however, another matter. So far he doesn't seem to have really acknowledged her, limiting what he says to the occasional memorable phrase like ‘I've always been convinced that we came out of the sea,' or others, such as ‘There's a kind of blueprint of the nervous system that's made at the very moment of conception,' that I already know so well I could quote them in his stead. I'm worried because Francis looks strained and distant, and he gets muddled up when he starts talking about the currency markets, presumably in an attempt to draw José, who's in the financial world, more into the conversation. ‘I saw the dollar was up and the Swiss franc down against sterling,' he announces, then pauses with a blank look: ‘Or was it the dollar was down and the Swiss franc up?', which sets Jill off giggling nervously and earns her a sharp look of rebuke. Eventually Francis does address her directly.

‘And what do you like in modern art?' he asks her out of the blue, looking at her intently across the table.

‘Well, I've specialized mainly in German Expressionism,' Jill says.

‘Well, I simply
detest
German Expressionism,' Francis says sweetly. ‘I can't think of anything I
loathe
more than German Expressionism.'

Jill looks as though she would like to fall through the Great Gallery floor, but she recovers sufficiently to ask Francis how he started out as a painter, and I can see this warms him to her a little.

‘Well, I've spent so much of my life just drifting, you see, Jill,' he says, slipping into one of his favourite setpieces. ‘From bar to bar, person to person. I often regret that I didn't have more discipline and concentrate myself when I was young. I mean, when you think of how many French artists – and probably your German Expressionists as well – have been so concentrated from the start. I didn't really begin to paint at all seriously until the war. I did a little before, but it was no good. When the war came, I was turned down because of this asthma of mine. So I had all
that time just to drift in and do nothing. It's true I'd been doing odd jobs to make my way – I worked in an office for a bit, then I tried to design some furniture. I even became someone's valet. But I had been thinking a great deal about painting. About how I might perhaps begin to make this thing work a little.

‘The thing is, I've been very lucky to be able to earn my living by doing something that really obsesses me. I never expected to. I don't suppose it will last. Not with the way everything else is going. People will simply stop buying painting but I don't care. It'll change nothing for me if all of a sudden I have no more money. I shall just exist by scrubbing floors or by going back to being somebody's manservant. I've always managed somehow to get by.'

Jill nods vigorously, sensing that she has been taken at least temporarily into the fold, and the conversation moves on, with Francis turning waspish again when he mentions that an old friend of his recently accepted a knighthood.