Francis Bacon in Your Blood (22 page)

‘Why don't you try the lobster, Michael?' says Francis slightly sharply. ‘They get them sent straight up from Cornwall. Then you could have the roast beef from the trolley, which is particularly good. There's no point coming to these palaces if you don't have what you really want. How have things been in Paris?'

‘Not bad. The freelance writing is coming together, little by little,' I say.

‘Well, it must be marvellous to write like that. I mean, you can do it anywhere, you don't have to have a studio or anything to work in. But I'm sure it's difficult to make a living like that, and I was just thinking before I left the studio that you might well need some money, so I brought some with me.'

‘That's terribly kind of you, Francis,' I say, blushing. ‘But you've already been more than generous towards me, and I'm managing to get by quite reasonably.'

‘The thing is', says Francis, chuckling, ‘that I did have an extraordinary run of luck at roulette the other evening, so I've got masses of the stuff on me.'

‘I'm very grateful, Francis,' I say, feeling increasingly clumsy and ill at ease at the way the conversation has turned, unexpectedly focusing on me. ‘Really, I don't need money at the moment.'

‘Well, I have to say I've always needed money,' Francis goes on, unperturbed, ‘and I've always taken it whenever I've needed it, by any means I could. I can't say I was at all honest when I was young, I used to rent rooms and leave without paying and that kind of thing. What's called morality has grown on me with age, and it would be a sort of stupid luxury for me to steal now, but I did steal on occasion. There was this Greek who picked me up once in Dover Street and we went up to his place and afterwards when he was in the bathroom I started going through his pockets and he must have been watching me in the mirror
because he came out and said, “What are you doing, Francis?” and I said, “Well, you can see what I'm doing,” and he said, “You don't have to do that. You only have to ask.” And he took me down to his bank and drew out £100, which was a lot of money in those days, and gave it to me. I must say it was a marvellous way to behave, and I've never forgotten it.'

The lobster has come and gone. After much consultation the wine waiter has filled our glasses with a magnificent Château Latour. I feel its subtle fire slip into my blood and burn away any lingering shyness. All evening I've been wanting to ask Francis about his new paintings, not just for my essay but out of a real need to know for myself. There is something about having seen the paintings in the gallery that's not unlike having witnessed a bad accident or a crime. I feel personally involved. I was hoping he'd bring the paintings up himself since he knows I'm writing about them and this is why I'm here. But it seems to be the last thing on his mind as he scans the wine list to see what we should have opened in advance of the cheese that will provide an even more exquisite experience.

‘I thought the new paintings were incredibly powerful,' I say at what I hope is a suitable lull in the conversation.

‘Ah, I'm particularly pleased
you
like them,' he replies smoothly, as if my reactions were the decisive factor. ‘There are one or two I quite like too, but I never really know with my own things.'

‘I was wondering what one could really say they were about,' I mumble over my rare roast beef. ‘It occurred to me that on one level at least they were essentially about love or, um, sex.'

Francis pauses, his glass midway to his mouth. He looks almost startled. I can't see whether he thinks I'm merely stating the bleeding obvious or whether I've trivialized a far more metaphysical intent.

‘Well, I don't actually think they're about anything,' he says slowly, almost as if he were giving evidence. ‘I'm just trying to make my thoughts and sensations about life come back at me
with greater intensity. The paintings are about my life, and of course sex is part of that. I suppose I would like to make images that bring you closer to what being human is actually like. But you know painting's become so impossible now. One can just try and make things a bit more precise. What else is there to do with life but try and make oneself a bit more clear? Of course, after all these years, I don't know whether it's ever worked. Now and then I still get this marvellous feeling that I will be able to make it work for a moment. Perhaps I never shall. But I always hope for this great wave of instinct with which I might really be able to change and renew everything.'

I realize he's deftly sidestepped my question, but if I challenge him I know it will simply irritate him and he'll stop opening up.

‘There's no saying whether I've been able to change anything at all, obviously,' Francis continues. ‘Only time can tell about that sort of thing. But I've always been fascinated with the idea of making images. With the idea of finding something which will make my own visual experience come back to me more violently. You see, for me painting has always been a way in which I've tried to excite myself. Make my own sensations return with more poignancy. But with all the mechanical forms of recording, you see, it has become a much more close and difficult thing. Ah but it's also made it much more interesting, because if the image is going to be any good nowadays it has to go much deeper than simply recording appearance. Somehow you have to try to get the paint down in such a curious way that it comes back on to the nervous system more exactly and more profoundly. If this image is going to be worth making at all, you see, it has to unlock sensation at a deeper level, it has to go in at an instinctive level. Otherwise, a photograph can do the whole thing much better.'

‘My impression is that you're working way outside photography while actually absorbing a lot of its techniques,' I say, ‘a bit the way photography did when it first appeared and had to appropriate so much from painting.'

‘Well, I hadn't thought about that, Michael, but it's probably true,' Francis says. After his initial surprise, he's clearly enjoying the chance to talk more openly about his work. ‘At the same time, there is this very mysterious thing about the actual texture of paint. For some reason, we don't know why, it comes across on to the nervous system in a more immediate, more abrupt way than, well, the surface of a photo for instance. What's so strange, too, is that the medium of oil paint is so fluid that you can try to manipulate the chance marks it makes into suggesting how you might be able to develop the image in a way that lies outside illustration. Illustrational form tells you immediately what the form is about, whereas non-illustrational form works first on your sensibility, then gradually leaks back into fact. So that if you're very lucky, if this sort of accidental thing works for you, you see for a moment how you might be able to bring off this image outside illustration which makes it both a recording of appearance and something that unlocks sensation about life more deeply.

‘Of course what one would really love in a portrait is a kind of Sahara of the appearance. To make it so like the thing you're trying to record, yet seem at the same time to have the distances of the Sahara. As you know, I myself terribly want to avoid telling a story. I only want the sensation – that thing Valéry said, the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. What I long to do is to undercut all the anecdotes and story-telling yet make an image filled with implications. Make it more specific, yes, but at the same time more general. A kind of concentration that makes it more general. I've always believed that great art comes out of reinventing and concentrating what's called fact, what we know of our existence – a reconcentration that tears away the veils that fact, or truth if you like, acquires over time . . .

‘What would be marvellous, in the end, would be to have something like the whole sea at the end of a kind of box you could look into. Just like that. So small and yet to have the whole
sea in it. I expect that sounds ridiculous, Michael. It probably is ridiculous. But then life itself is so ridiculous one might as well try to be as brilliant and ridiculous as one can. Now, why don't we go to Muriel's and have just a leet-el bit more to drink.'

We do, copiously, and when I get back to Knightsbridge I tiptoe into David's flat like a caricature drunk with my shoes in my hand. I try to settle down on the unfamiliar couch, but snatches of what Francis kept saying go round my head so obsessively – ‘great wave of instinct', ‘more violently on to the nervous system', ‘brilliant and ridiculous' – that I think I'll be up all night and feel even more exhausted tomorrow. Then gradually the wine begins to burn down. I lie there watching the yellowish-orange light from the lamps outside make a gash on the ceiling over my head. So this is London, I remember saying to myself shortly before I fell asleep. This is London, and I travel from one illusion to another.

I'm going to have one last dinner with Francis before flying back to Paris. We're meeting at Sheekey's because that's where George likes to go. It's still early evening and I'm going to try to catch John Deakin at one of his haunts in Soho. I know I'm in something of a minority but I'm quite fond of John, perhaps because I like anyone who makes me laugh and also because I'm grateful to him for having introduced me to Francis so adroitly. If John isn't in the Caves de France, he'll probably be in the Coach and Horses or the French House. I haven't been to the French in ages so I go in and find John exactly as when I first met him, hunched in his sheepskin coat on a stool by the bar, cigarette and glass in hand like a saint with his symbols. I shake hands with Gaston behind the bar, like one Frenchman greeting another, and order two large white.

John is full of news and gossip but lets drop right away that he is now, at last, making sculpture.

‘What kind of sculpture?' I ask. I'm genuinely surprised because I thought photography was his whole life.

‘My dear, I see that only hard facts will satisfy your ardent mind,' John says, drawing out each syllable. ‘If you must know, I'm engaged on a cycle of figurines.'

‘Well, that's interesting,' I say, a bit too hesitantly. ‘What are they of?'

‘If you really must know,' says John, rolling his eyes to convey the suffering of the eternally misunderstood creator, ‘they consist of a suite of small sculptures of Apollo. Fashioned in terracotta.
Et voilà!
But of course as with all great art they nearly, literally, killed me.'

‘You're kidding, John?'

‘I sure am not kidding, kiddo,' John says, his voice rising indignantly. ‘In order to bring the figurines forth, first of all I completely stopped drinking.'

He pauses to let the enormity of the notion sink in.

‘Then one morning, it was such a fine morning and the work had been going so well, I thought surely one tiny glass of white wine could do no harm. So I went to that loathsome house on the corner and ordered just one small glass. And the great clodhopper behind the bar – I still don't know whether it was because he simply didn't understand what white wine was, or because he thought it funny – served me a glass of Parazone.

‘Yes, my dear, Parazone, I know, it simply staggers belief. It's like Jeyes Fluid. You can imagine. They shoot it down lavatories and things. And it's mighty strong, I can tell you. To make things worse, I happened to knock the filthy stuff back in one go. And then of course I just did not know what had hit me. I went out like a light, straight off my stool on to the floor. And the very next thing I knew, I was lying in bed in hospital.

‘The doctor, who was quite delightful, told me that had my stomach not been so thoroughly lined with alcohol I might well have died,' John concludes, his voice dropping to a scandalized whisper. ‘Suspended between life and death, my dear, and all because that
knucklehead could not, or would not, tell the difference between white wine and lavatory abrasive.'

By the time I get to Sheekey's, Francis and George are already sitting at their table. I sense Francis's irritation as I sit down because I'm a bit late. He himself is punctual to the minute, unless, very rarely, he's so drunk he's completely forgotten where he's meant to be. It's strange to feel so many contrary extremes in one person: genial and easy-going but also harsh and strict; generous with his time, help and money and mean in his opinions about people; sympathetic, even tender, and cruel. He can also show extraordinary, down-to-earth common sense one moment, then rely on chance or ‘instinct' the next.

I tell them about John and although they already know the story this makes them laugh for a moment. But there's a tension between them. Francis is curt and testy, while George is looking particularly pale and withdrawn.

‘The thing is,' Francis says, ‘poor George hasn't been feeling at all well, have you, George?'

‘No I 'aven't,' George nods, with an affirmative snort.

‘He's been on the drink for so long he can't actually eat.'

‘Can't keep anyfink dahn.'

‘So I thought we'd come here because they do a kind of eel broth that sort of just slips down.'

Francis confers for a moment with the waiters. Then a chef appears and they all stand round nodding.

George continues to gaze down at the table, pulling hard on his cigarette, his brows knitted in concentration, as if he were trying to work out an insoluble problem.

‘I'm going to have to leave you with George,' Francis suddenly says to me. ‘I hope you don't mind. There's somebody I have to see about something, and unfortunately they are not free at any other time. Just order anything you want.'

I'm surprised, not only because Francis usually seems to have all the time in the world, and also because, however open-handed he is in introducing his friends to each other, he doesn't like the idea of their getting together when he isn't present. I wonder if Francis's in some kind of trouble. A gambling debt to settle, perhaps, or some trouble with the gangsters he knows from Tangier. He's mentioned the Kray twins several times. They're like celebrities now, always in the news, even though it's tacitly accepted that they torture and kill people.