Francis Bacon in Your Blood (42 page)

I find out soon enough, however, because a telegram arrives stating in no uncertain terms that publication of the text should be stopped. I am appalled. The translation has already been sent to Gallimard, which publishes the
NRF
, and Lambrichs, the editor, says it's perfect; he has even decided to accelerate the schedule and include it in the October issue. I don't know which is worse: calling Francis for an explanation, or calling the
NRF
to say we can't go ahead. Or rather I do, it's calling Francis because there is a great deal more riding on that conversation.

‘I got your telegram, Francis.'

‘Oh good. I do hope you'll stop publication.'

‘Yes, obviously. But I don't understand why you've changed your mind.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘Well, when I gave you the original in English after our dinner at Claridge's, you sent it back with a couple of changes, which I made, but otherwise you were apparently fine with it. You even said the more indiscreet—'

‘I didn't know what I was doing. I went on to a few bars after our dinner and someone must have spiked my drink. I was drugged. I had no idea what I was looking at.'

The notion is so outrageous I can't think what to say, but Francis carries on.

‘In any case, what you've written is not at all accurate. You'd have to tell the whole story for it to be accurate. And also I don't want any of this to come out while I'm alive. You can do what you like when I'm dead, but there are one or two people still alive who would be very offended if they read what you've written. Now if you need money, you only have to let me know and I can get some wired to you.'

I hadn't seen that one coming at all. I bleat something to the effect that it has nothing to do with money and hang up, totally distraught. I wonder what can have changed. Was it seeing his own words translated? Did someone put the knife into the project? The gallery, thinking it wouldn't reflect well on their star artist? David Sylvester, who certainly wouldn't welcome anyone else on what he considers to be his exclusive turf,
his
Francis? Possibly one, possibly both, but I have to accept that in the end it is Francis's decision. It's a crushing blow to all my hopes, but I have always known that the friendship with Francis was more important to me than any ‘project'. The book, along with its various extracts, will have to go into a drawer and stay there, mouldering, perhaps for ever.

Bad as this news is, I have another, more serious problem brewing like a storm on the horizon. I have been with Alice for a good twelve years now: I was just under thirty when we met, and now I am forty-two. She has been a delightful, stimulating mistress, allowing me to continue my relatively carefree, bachelor existence and forgiving my occasional indiscretions. She has also had a maternal presence in my life, making up for the lacks and soothing the wounds left by the unfulfilling relationship I had with my mother. I have loved her more deeply and completely than anyone in my life, and I still love her loyally. We are joined by thousands of tiny threads of shared experience and affection. But there is a growing restlessness in me. I don't approve of it and I've been pretending it doesn't exist by making sure that my work includes as much foreign travel as possible, since trips in Europe and America to do articles or interviews help to put it out of my mind. I probably would have gone on denying it if I hadn't had a fling with a Polish painter that has resulted in her wanting the relationship to become more ‘serious' and insisting that the two of us be seen together at various art events and openings where Alice is likely to turn up too. This has already resulted in my trying to two-time more fully, going
away for the weekend with one, then with the other, attending this function with Alice, that cocktail with the Polonaise. Why I have got myself into a triangle again, apart from my ingrained waywardness, I don't really know, because nothing makes me so unhappy as being duplicitous in love. I fret by day and am tortured at night by the whole sleeping-with-one-to-think-of-the-other syndrome. From relative contentment I now find myself constantly on edge, convinced I'm about to be caught out through some slip of the tongue or a badly told lie.

So when the Polonaise announces she's pregnant, I panic. Normally this would be something I would confess to Alice, who might even give some practical advice. But since I am attempting, painfully enough, to distance myself from her counselling it is out of the question. There are scenes with the Polonaise, whose biological clock is ticking very audibly and who believes the situation can be resolved only by our getting married. Mournfully I contemplate the prospect of a shotgun wedding followed by a union as increasingly joyless as my parents', and the effect it would have both on us and on the child, all because of one small accident (despite all the precautions apparently taken). I try to communicate this to the Polonaise but she is deaf to what she dismisses as my pessimism. Tension grows as we both dig in our heels: I will not marry on this basis and she will not consider having a child out of wedlock. Eventually, feeling like an accomplice in crime, I accompany the Polonaise to a discreet clinic and try to be as supportive as I can. Afterwards, when I come to collect her, we sit in complete silence in the taxi taking her back to her apartment.

I've barely opened the door in my place when the phone rings and an orderly at the Hôtel-Dieu informs me that Alice has been admitted to hospital with a broken back. She apparently lost her footing at the top of the free-standing circular staircase leading up from her study to her bedroom and her back hit the hard, sharp edge of the steps as she fell. It's strange this should have happened now, because although the staircase was a potential
danger from its very inception by a fanciful architect she knew, there has never been the slightest mishap before. I go down to the hospital immediately, clutching flowers, but Alice has been given a strong sedative and she's out cold. I walk back bewildered through the old streets of the Marais, gazing blindly at the familiar sooty façades of the great townhouses as if they might provide some clue to why everything is going wrong. The blackened coronets and lions rampant on the crests indicate only the passage of time and the progress of decay, but a woman in dark glasses guided by a big, patiently plodding dog is coming along the pavement towards me through the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon. I remember the blind man in Marseille hitting me with his white cane, and the jinx, yes the jinx, and panicking I scuttle down a side street out of sight.

My flat on the rue des Archives is like a sanctuary these days. I have all my books neatly aligned in a large alcove beside my writing table and my best pictures hung where I can see them while I work. For years I have been a useful single man, making up numbers at dinner parties in Paris and country weekends, and I rarely declined an invitation, particularly when the food and company were good. But I have started going out less, seeing far fewer people, and the entries in my diary are growing longer and more introspective as I grapple with the reasons why my plans for writing things and getting them published have gone so completely awry, and what in all the confused emotion welling up in me I really feel about Alice, the Polonaise and the lost child, and how I can live my life in a less disorderly, damaging way.

The only bright spot I can find on the horizon is that
Connaissance des Arts
, a magazine that belonged to the same publishers as
Réalités
when I worked there, has asked me to review an exhibition called ‘Primitivism in 20th-Century Art' that will open at MoMA in New York in the autumn. I've seen some of the advance material and, visually, it's a knockout since it
includes some of the most powerful tribal carvings and of course an outstanding line-up of modernist masterpieces. It should be an extraordinary show, and I'm delighted to have the chance to get away from Paris for a while and spend a few days in a city which, although it intimidated me on my first few visits, now seems the most exciting and stimulating place in the world.

The idea is that my review should come out to coincide with the opening of the exhibition in several months' time, so when I come off the hot, noisy Manhattan streets into the chilled calm of the museum there are no works to see yet but only photographs of them in an advance proof of the catalogue. I've heard that William Rubin, the chief curator, is very powerful in the art world and correspondingly imperious. But he receives me cordially and lays lots of photos out on his large desk to illustrate some of the highlights the show will include. Then, in a more professorial tone, Rubin gives me an overview of the theme, stressing his convictions about its groundbreaking importance, and I listen enthusiastically, make appropriate notes and carry away the bulky catalogue proofs so that I can absorb the concepts underlying the exhibition and their various ramifications before I begin to write. For a couple of days the sun shines, New York is filled with its characteristic, jolting energy, and I come back to Paris revived and begin straight away to plan the outline of my review.

The trouble is that the more I read and, above all, the more I see the two totally different cultures juxtaposed – an African mask, say, paired off with a Picasso painting – the more sceptical I become about the exhibition's underlying thesis. Once boiled down and simplified for what the curators clearly hope will be a wide audience, the show basically suggests that whenever a European artist came across this (an African mask or tribal fetish) in the earlier part of the century, he hurried back to his studio and painted or sculpted that (a Cubist portrait, say). Here was an idea that not only the man in the street but a child could readily understand: Picasso saw an exaggeratedly frontal Nimba mask
from Guinea, then started doing female heads with big noses. Similarly, Giacometti may have wandered into the ethnographic collection in Bern and admired a slender, anthropomorphic Nyere walking stick in the 1920s (a pure supposition that the catalogue cannot confirm) and, hey presto, he begins to think in terms of long, thin people, eventually creating armies of them in what becomes his signature style. I am amazed that such a simplistic, fundamentally flawed idea can have become the crux of a weighty New York cultural event, buttressed by a two-volume catalogue brimming with scholarly disquisition and accompanied by the usual PR firm razzamatazz. It seems to me that it does a disservice all round: to the European artists who look like devious copycats; to the ‘primitive' artists whose works have been taken completely out of their primarily religious context and function; and to the public, most of whom surely know that artists' imaginations work in more unpredictable and subtle ways.

But I'm embarrassed to have found this whopper out all by myself and feel like a dissident pygmy, about to wave its fist in the face of a vast, renowned institution. Truth to tell, I have never been a particularly critical critic and I usually manage to review exhibitions or write about artists that convince, interest or please me, which is one of the few prerogatives of being freelance. Occasionally I have a sideswipe at something I find preposterous, like a show I saw recently that consisted uniquely of electric wires ripped out of a gallery's walls; and, no doubt partly under Francis's influence, I wrote a sceptical essay, also for
Connaissance des Arts
, about the legacy of Jackson Pollock, which I was surprised to find won me plaudits whereas most of what I write disappears for ever into a silent black hole. I still feel enthused by the quality of many of the works on show, however, so there is no reason for me to wax scathing and write the whole venture off, especially as I have taken a few knocks myself recently and am not eager to go around trailing my coat, looking for a fight. I will put all the positive aspects forward
while being duty-bound as a critic to speak my mind and say in as amiable prose as I can muster that the pairing of a big-nosed mask and a big-nosed Picasso, a slender African walking stick and a Giacometti
Walking Man
, is tendentious and misleading.

I send the review to
Connaissance
diffidently enough, half expecting them to protest at the least negative comment about such a prestigious-sounding event at MoMA, but they respond enthusiastically to my argument. The magazine, which has been bought and relaunched since I first knew it, now belongs to an American, and his son, Philip Jodidio, not long out of Harvard, has been appointed to run it. We'll put a tribal image on the September cover, Jodidio tells me, and it's good the review raises important questions since it will be the lead story. I'm delighted by this reception and forget what now seem like overscrupulous misgivings, especially since I have to look after Alice, who has moved into one of the smaller rooms on the rue des Archives side of my apartment to recuperate. She does not appear to have damaged her spine permanently but she needs to rest undisturbed and be looked after until the bone reknits. Several friends have offered help, and to give him his due Francis was the very first, calling to say that if I need money to settle medical bills he will wire whatever's necessary right away. I still feel raw about his bizarre behaviour, a sort of senseless double-cross, over the book, but I'm touched and pleased by his solicitude. Meanwhile, I assume a carer's routine, not displeased by the diversion it provides, but it's clear that I now inhabit a parallel universe, still very close to and fond of Alice but unable to share any of my deeper preoccupations with her. After a couple of weeks, fortunately, Alice is well enough to return home.

The summer goes all too quickly. I love the days that lead up to the longest day, then regret that the best is then over and that daylight is diminishing even as we enter the hottest months. I keep meaning to go away, to get back to the beaches in Brittany or Biarritz, but now I have no one to go with and, after a brief skirmish with the Club Med, I decide the only holiday I'll have this
year is with a friend from Kyoto who visits me every September. This is a curious liaison, begun several years ago after a casual meeting in a restaurant in the Marais, but I find it very soothing because, although we know each other well in certain ways, we have almost no conversation, Setsuko speaking little English and my Japanese being non-existent. She arrives as always with a strange present, a fan covered in ideograms, a table mat with a view of Mount Fuji or a pair of brown nylon socks which prove too small. I cook for her, and she is always very appreciative, except that anything she does not wish to eat, like fat or gristle, she slaps abruptly on to my plate. We never speak at meal times and only rarely at other moments, when our exchanges are brief and usually wreathed in smiles. Once, when I believed we had both just enjoyed an instant of bliss, Setsuko tugged my beard sharply and asked: ‘Mikkel, how you make your money?' On another occasion, after breakfast, she giggled suddenly and said: ‘You want to be my honey baby?' Then, more seriously: ‘What your policy regarding marriage?' I am cautious with my replies.