How marvellous he’s taking you everywhere and telling you everything,” John
Deakin, Soho wit and Francis Bacon’s favourite photographer, said to me in
1963. I had come to London some weeks before in the hope of interviewing
Bacon for a student magazine, and Deakin had introduced me to him with
muttered misgivings at the bar of the French House. Deakin was visibly
delighted we’d hit it off. “Now make sure you get it all down,
my dear,” he admonished in high camp tones. “It could be very
important one day!”
I did get it down, one way or the other. While weaving my way woozily back to
a friend’s sofa late at night, or to my digs in Cambridge, I copied
out all kinds of half-understood phrases — “shorthand of despair” and
“unlocking the valves of sensation” and “homosexual love is both more tragic
and more banal”. But I hardly needed to. Having been absorbed with vast
quantities of champagne, Bacon’s definitions continued to bubble up in my
mind, and I could reel them off, staggering round the room with exaggerated
imitations of the Bacon voice and the Bacon gestures. “Well, that’s all
there is,” I would repeat with a glistening smile to alarmed friends.
“We are born and we die, and in the interval we attempt to give life a
meaning through our drives.”
I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was not merely grappling with Bacon’s
pronouncements on art, love and death, I was attempting, above all, to get a
measure of the man. It’s rare to meet a genius at any point in one’s life.
But to meet one when you’re 20 and know nobody even remotely comparable — in
brilliance, compassion and devilry — marks you for ever. I’ve been lucky
enough to meet a few remarkable people since, but I am still coming to terms
with that initial resounding impact on my life, which began in the bars and
clubs of Soho, then continued to crescendo, in London, Tangiers and Paris,
for some 30 years until Bacon’s death.
What was Bacon really like — behind the myth that grows almost daily about
him? I’ve often tried to put it into a nutshell, only to realise that
whatever formula I come up with is at best half true. “Whenever he came into
a room, any room,” one of my quick answers runs, “you could feel the
temperature go up. Suddenly there’d be a new vitality, with people outdoing
themselves in talk and laughter and drink and general carrying on.” Bacon
put you, and anybody else drawn to him, on their mettle. When you were with
him, you were subtly but inexorably obliged to think more penetratingly and
express yourself more clearly. You became unusually self-aware, often
painfully and disturbingly so. “You’ve ruined my life by making me think
about myself!” Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy once shouted, suddenly
rounding on him and no doubt meting out the violent punishment Bacon craved.
In the end, Lacy could not take that heightened self-awareness, and he drank
himself deliberately to death — his end coinciding, as we now know so well,
with the opening of Bacon’s first retrospective at the Tate in 1962.
Similarly, poor George Dyer, more vulnerable by far and the other great love
of Bacon’s life, killed himself with drink and drugs on the eve of the
artist’s great triumph as the Grand Palais retrospective of his work opened
in Paris in 1971.
What Bacon was like really was a man strung perpetually between the extremes
of his temperament. He could, literally, be one thing and its opposite.
Thus, the painter of doom and gloom would regularly emerge from a drunken
gambling spree with thugs in Soho to take tea with upright and uptight
collectors, charming them into buying another of his terrifying (and already
terrifyingly expensive) pictures. Or he would demolish another painter’s
reputation with a few waspish asides, then worry that his guests hadn’t had
enough caviar and Louis Roederer Cristal, and hurriedly order more. Or,
again, he might abandon himself to the further reaches of a sadomasochistic
orgy before hurrying to the bedside of a sick friend with the most delicate
and thoughtful of gifts.
During our long, involved friendship, I was rarely the recipient of his
nastiness. Once, emboldened by a mindless quantity of fine bordeaux, I
challenged his interminable put-downs of David Hockney’s work, and he
rounded on me like an animal at bay, the hair bristling at the back of his
neck. On another occasion, during a dinner with some young artists at La
Coupole, in Paris, I dared to differ from one of his repetitive diktats on
Van Gogh and received the rough edge of his tongue for my pains. More
interestingly, and for me at least incomprehensibly (since he had accepted
my marriage without demur), Bacon grew white with fury when I told him,
during a dinner at Bibendum, in London, not long before his death, that my
first child was about to be born.
On the other hand, I was constantly the recipient of his attentiveness and
generosity. It was not merely a question of being invited to countless
banquets at the best restaurants and grandest hotels — or, on a few
memorable occasions, being backed (with sums I myself could not possibly
have afforded) to try my luck at roulette and, when I won, being commanded
sternly to keep the winnings. Bacon’s largesse permeated our relationship in
much more subtle and telling ways. When a close friend of mine had a bad
fall and broke her back, the first person to call, offering advice and
funds, was Bacon. Having taken on an art magazine that I was trying to
relaunch from Paris with little money and less business sense, I was
considerably helped by Bacon’s enthusiasm and practical support, which
included introducing me to potential backers for the project.
Bacon could also be a tower of strength when things went wrong in very
personal areas of one’s life. After my father died in the mid-1980s, my
whole existence in Paris fell apart. Bacon picked up instinctively on the
crisis I was going through and, when we next met, took me on a trip through London
that I will never forget. After dinner in the art-deco splendour of
Claridge’s, we went gambling and I — as happy in gaming as I’d
recently been unhappy in love — had a considerable win. We then swung round
to Annabel’s for more champagne and a midnight supper, accompanied by
sublime claret. At this point, buoyed up by Bacon’s wit and vitality, my
spirits began to revive. But Bacon, who had staged all this to pull me
through my despair (as he might have described it), did not stop there.
“There are all these girls — why don’t you ask them to dance?” he kept
saying to me, until I overcame my shyness and pranced about dementedly on
the spangled floor until dawn. No therapy could have worked better. The next
day, I woke up giggling (for the first time in months) at the extravagances
of the night.
However satanic Bacon might look, trussed up in his Nazi-style black leather
greatcoat, however venomous his drunken tirades waxed, this instinctive
compassion never left him. It was one of his many paradoxes, just as he
seemed at times the most feminine of men, intuitive and yielding, and at
others the toughest, most daring and dominantly masculine. Similarly, he
would interrupt a mammoth drinking bout taking him from pub to club across
London to consult his doctor, or top up on some bizarre health food (he took
garlic pills addictively) after having consumed the richest dishes on every
fancy menu in town.
The man who thundered against God and the universe would allow himself to be
taken meekly in hand by Valerie, his diminutive minder and nanny figure
(“Valerie at the gallery,” as Bacon called her), who told him which
appointments he needed to keep — from art-world bigwigs to the electrician.
The high roller who squandered fortunes on roulette could also be found
going home on the Tube.
These contradictions stretched Bacon’s sensibility and kept him in a state of
tension that was as palpable in the man as it is in his pictures, radiating
waves of intensity. But the greatest paradox he kept to the last. Whoever
could have imagined that Bacon — the virulent, lifelong atheist, the painter
of screaming popes and bestial couplings — would choose to be cared for
by an order of nuns when he became ill? He had gone on record in an
interview saying he could conceive of nothing worse than dying among nuns.
Yet on his last trip to Madrid, when he knew he was at death’s door, he
returned to the Servants of Mary, dying under a crucifix and being cremated
to the sounds of Gregorian chants. Of all the enigmas that hover over
Bacon’s tumultuous life, this is surely the most hauntingly mysterious.
A revised and updated version of Michael Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon: Anatomy
of an Enigma is published by Constable at £12.99
