Francis Bacon in Your Blood (14 page)

While Francis busies himself in the tiny kitchen, I sit at the table, which has been cleared and considerably smartened up with gleaming cutlery and napkins, and reacquaint myself with his living room. The dark-green sofa I slept on and the inlaid commode are still there, along with the photos of Peter Lacy in the alcove, although they have now been joined by a photograph of an immaculately suited, anxious-looking George. The Moroccan bedcover and the naked overhead bulbs haven't changed either, but I realize with a start that the big wall mirror where Francis always checks his hair before going out now has an enormous starry smash in it. If you look into it and move from side to side your face becomes progressively fragmented before it falls into a black hole at the centre of the smash. It's not unlike what happens to a head in one of Francis's small triptychs, though he can hardly have done it deliberately himself. I know that things are occasionally very tense between Francis and George and wonder whether this didn't happen during one of their fights.

‘A friend of mine threw a heavy glass ashtray at my head,' Francis is saying enigmatically. He's come back into the room with a huge, half-carved chicken. ‘I managed to duck and it smashed into the mirror. I rather like the effect, there's something very poignant about it, like a memory trace, so I think I'll keep it that way.'

‘I think the new picture is terrifically powerful,' I say as I help myself to the delicious bread sauce and attack my plate. ‘I'm sure Michel will be impressed when he sees it.'

‘Well, of course, one never knows about those things,' Francis says. ‘But I'm particularly pleased that you like it, Michael . . . So what will you do now that you're back in London?'

‘I'm not sure. I suppose I'll keep trying to write, even though I find it very difficult, not only writing in itself but finding a subject that seems worth writing about.'

‘I think those things are very difficult. It's just the same in painting. So much has already been done and then photography has cancelled out so many other possibilities. When I started painting I needed extreme subject matter. And then I found my subjects through my life and through the friends I came to have. I mean one's work is really a kind of diary or an autobiography.'

Francis reaches down into the wooden case beside the table and takes out a third bottle of the sumptuous wine we have been drinking. He seems to be in a communicative mood, and I'm pleased to be back in the undemanding role of interviewer. In a sense, I realize, interviewing him has become quite central to my life, and even though we've been out of touch for a while our conversations have continued to circle round my mind, to the extent that I can recall many of them verbatim. It's a quest I want to continue, it's become personally important to me, almost as if by finding out more about Francis's life and his painting I will have a better chance of finding myself and what I want to do with my life.

‘So your paintings are really full of things about yourself?'

‘About myself, my thoughts and feelings and what are called the
moeurs
of my times. But then I think I go deeper than my times. That may be a profoundly vain thing to say, but I often feel in my work that I'm close to the ancient world. I think you can convey all sorts of things about yourself, or about anything really, in painting. I think it's more difficult in words, even though one never tires of talking about oneself,
n'est-ce pas?
It's like confession. Or psychoanalysis. But of course it can be embarrassing. Or at least it's embarrassing if it's presented in certain ways. I wouldn't mind, and I do think the only way of telling one's life is to tell all of it – or everything you can remember. But there are still one or two people alive who would think it terribly cheap if I did. It probably is very cheap, but there you are.'

‘Do you remember things from way back, from your childhood?'

‘Some things, though of course one forgets a great deal. I remember being very excited when a cavalry detachment did some practice charges up and down the driveway to the house where we lived in Ireland. I had an older brother then who had this cycling cape I admired very much, and he let me wear it and I went marching up and down the avenue of trees outside, up and down, feeling very important. We used to hide behind those trees with other children we knew because we thought this bigger boy called Reggie we'd met at children's parties was coming after us. So we just hid there. Reggie never came, naturally, and in a way we knew perfectly well he wouldn't, but for some ridiculous reason we used to love hiding there and pretending he might find us. Of course, he was older and far too important to be interested in us.'

‘I think you told me you never got on with your parents. What were they like, Francis?'

‘I certainly never got on with my father, although he was a good-looking man and when I was growing up I was attracted to him. He wasn't interested in me because I was asthmatic – I was what's called the “weakling of the family”. Anyway, he'd married my mother because she had a bit of money and set himself up to train horses in Ireland because it was cheaper to do it there than England. Things were easier with my mother, but she was much more interested in her own pleasures than in her children. The person I was most close to in the family was her mother, my grandmother, who was rather extraordinary. She married five times and was terribly free in her way of life. I mean when you think of what Ireland was like then! And with this way of hers she did fascinate a great many men. She just loved having lots and lots of people around her, and she used to give these marvellous parties. They sometimes seemed terribly lavish. The Aga Khan came once, and of course that did strike local people as something rather exotic.

‘She and I used to tell each other everything. I suppose I was a kind of confidant for her – I used to take her to hunt balls and all those ridiculous things when I was sixteen. Of course I hadn't the faintest notion what to do with myself when we got there. Just stood around and looked silly I expect. Because I was really gauche, and of course having been brought up in Ireland I knew nothing about anything. But she was a remarkable woman, with this most marvellous ease and vitality. My own mother was less remarkable, but she had that same kind of easiness with people. And she adored entertaining too – though while my father was there she didn't get much chance. What was rather extraordinary about her was that way she managed to start a really new life after he died. I used to visit her after she moved to South Africa, and we got on much better then.'

‘But your relationship never got better with your father?'

‘It certainly didn't. The thing is, Michael, from as far back as I can remember, I used to trail about after the grooms he had working for him on this horse-breeding farm. I just liked being near them. In that sense, I suppose, I'm what you might call completely homosexual. I don't think there was actually any question of choice. It was there, right from the start. So when I was an adolescent I started dressing up in my mother's clothes and her underwear and that kind of thing. And my father caught me at it. Of course he was absolutely disgusted to see a son of his going to the bad and so he decided to send me to this very manly friend of his, you see, to straighten me out. But I'm afraid it didn't change anything, because a bit later we were in bed together. There it is. He was terribly odd, in his way, this man. A brute. Really tough – you know what I mean? Of course he used to fuck absolutely anything. The curious thing is I really don't think he cared one way or the other who he went with.

‘He was going on a trip to Berlin and for some reason he decided to take me with him. At that time, in, well it would have been in 1927 I think, Berlin was absolutely extraordinary. It was
so somehow open. I don't know how to put it, but you had this feeling that you could get anything you wanted. Anything. Having never been outside Ireland before, you can imagine how exciting that was for me. I felt all of a sudden well now I can just drift and follow my instincts. Just drift and see. I always remember they had these streets of clubs, where people used to stand outside them and sort of mime the perversions going on indoors. After Ireland, I must say, the whole thing was absolutely fascinating! We stayed in this hotel, the, it's ridiculous I can never remember the names of things nowadays, well it was the Adlon that's it. I don't suppose it's there any more, or at least not in that way, because it had a kind of luxury that could hardly exist anywhere today. I mean I remember, it sounds so absurd now, but stretching my hand through the hangings of this four-poster bed and pulling the breakfast trolley, it was an extraordinary thing with a silver swan's neck at each corner, well just grasping one of these swan's necks and drawing the whole silver thing to the bed. And of course everything came in silver dishes with the toast wrapped in linen and that kind of thing. And all the time you knew that just outside this hotel there was the most appalling poverty all around.'

‘And then you managed to go to Paris?'

‘Yes, I did. After a while my father's friend went off and simply left me, so I hung on for a bit in Berlin and then, since I'd managed to keep a bit of money, I decided I'd go to Paris. I remember being so ridiculously gauche and shy in Paris I didn't dare talk to people or even to go into a shop and ask for something. Of course looking the way I do, with everything gone wrong, didn't help. But there it was. I stayed in that little hotel in the rue Delambre in Montparnasse. Of course it's been done up now and become rather smart. But it wasn't a bit like that then. I didn't keep myself to myself all that long – thank Gawd! Berlin had at least shown me how to follow out my instincts, and after a bit I started going round with this male prostitute. Well, round the bars, behind the Lido, and places like the Sélect,
which was the homosexual café at that time. And for a while I drifted round with him, living that kind of life.

‘My mother used to send me an allowance of three pounds a week. That sounds ridiculous now, but in those days it did help a little. But most of the time I went about with people I picked up. By the time I got back to London, I still had no idea what I really wanted to do. I'd started to think about painting, and of course I'd been to see the Picasso show in Paris, but that was about all. So I just went on drifting. Well, in that same kind of way basically. I started putting advertisements in the personal columns of
The Times
, offering myself as a companion. The curious thing is that the replies simply poured in.

‘I had my old nanny staying with me at that time. She came and lived with me almost everywhere I went, from place to place, for over ten years. She understood everything. She'd come from Cornwall, and I was far closer to her than to my family. Anyway, when the replies came in, we used to go through them together, and she used to pick out what she thought were the interesting ones. I have to say she was always right.

‘I went back to Paris shortly afterwards, with a dreadful old thing who took this very expensive flat on the Avenue Pierre, what's it called, Pierre-Ier-de-Serbie, yes. Well of course, I didn't stay with
him
for very long. There you are. I used everybody I could. I was quite impossible then. I mean, with my sort of looks, everything gone wrong, and with that awful gaucheness from having been brought up in Ireland, things did seem terribly difficult. I've worked on myself a great deal since. Tried what's called to present myself as well as possible. I always remember this very interesting man in Paris, saying to me the important thing is how you present yourself. Of course I didn't know what he was talking about then, but now I do think it's very true. The French are terribly conscious of that presentation – of making the best of themselves. There was a woman I met once in Paris who looked much younger than she was. And I said to her, how do you manage to look so young? And she said, “
Ecoutez, Francis.
Je me fais jeune. Voilà tout.
”' She was quite right. You have to remake yourself. I've tried in different ways to remake myself over the years. Of course it hasn't really worked. But there it is. Nothing has ever really worked for me.'

I sense Francis's mood has changed. His face has hardened and his mouth is set in a bitter pout. I hadn't seen the change coming, although I know it can happen between one glass and the next, and we have worked our way through five or six bottles of the Bordeaux. He sits there, eyes downcast, as if turned to stone. To break the silence I suggest, without much conviction, that we go on to Soho for a last drink, and I am relieved when he tells me he wants to stay put and get up early to ‘try to paint'. When he says nothing has worked for him, it's almost certainly the relationship with Peter Lacy he has in mind. He feels responsible for his death, however indirectly, and needs to scourge himself, to alleviate the sense of guilt, I suppose, or is it to intensify it? The paintings brim with violence and suffering. Do they feed off this guilt, and does Francis nurture it because he knows the deeper the guilt the more potent the images will be? What the fuck, I know I'm drunk too and that I should leave before Francis begins a monologue of ever terser, more acid phrases. ‘In some ways I've had the most ghastly life.' ‘There it is – there's nothing you can do about those things.' ‘Everyone I've ever been really fond of has always been a drunk or a suicide.' I gather up fragments of our earlier talk in my mind like a spy memorizing secrets, then take my leave of Francis, picking my way gingerly down the steep stairs. Nightclouds scud overhead as I walk back through the dark empty streets to the basement on Tregunter.