Francis Bacon in Your Blood (55 page)

It's like a punch in the stomach, coming unexpectedly hard out of the blue, making me feel weak and nauseous. I take the paper into my local coffee shop and stare at the front page, trying to make sense of the bold print. I remember Francis told me he was ‘really ill' when I called him in London, but although I knew he always talked dispassionately about his own health it hadn't occurred to me for a moment that he could be in any way close to death. I was just waiting for him to recover, so we could resume that marvellous round of the best that friendship and conversation, drink and food could offer.

I study the short obituary again, as if it might yield some hidden information. For a moment I feel stupidly pleased that Francis made it into the most important international news, right up there with all the other big events of the day. Then I go into the rest room, see my pale face in the mirror and dry-retch until my stomach won't heave any more.

Epilogue

In the months and then the years that followed, I missed Francis deeply and sometimes even bitterly, especially during the big-money wrangles over his estate and the decision to uproot his studio from London to Dublin, where he happened to be born but never set foot thereafter.

I always knew that Francis would be irreplaceable, not least because he was so unlike anybody else I had ever come across, and since his death that day I have tried repeatedly to work out what set him apart. The best definition I have found is that even while he was alive Francis already belonged to history. He often remarked that in his work he felt he was ‘following a long call from antiquity'. This never struck me as portentous, as it would have done in the mouths of many artists I know. It struck me as a statement of fact. Something in Francis himself reached back to the ancient mysteries, like the Sphinx or the Oracle of Delphi, reverberating across the centuries with their enigma intact.

The mythical dimension that marked Francis apart in life has continued to grow. His work poses the most searching questions about existence, questions that are asked from one civilization to the next because no lasting answer is ever found. Why has man been created, alone among the animals on earth, in the acute consciousness of his mortality? Should we not assume our animality, display our passions and contradictions without
shame – openly pant, roar and scream? What meaning, if there is a meaning at all, can we attribute to our brief span?

Francis incorporated the tensions of being human into the very grain of his paint. Examined close up, the swirling impasto appears encoded with specific evidence, specific human traces that continue to rehearse and echo our fraught existence. That is perhaps the underlying reason why his figures, spun out of this infinitely suggestive stuff, come across as a concentrate of all the impulses and confusions of our flesh, unresolved and shockingly alive.

I lost a father when Francis died. But I myself became a father. However belatedly, I also became my own man.

With Francis dead and my independence fully established, I might have expected that he would fade from my life and be replaced by other interests, since I have always been imaginatively engaged in the whole of art history, from antiquity to the medieval, from the early Renaissance to our own times.

Over the intervening years I also had the chance to change career radically. I was invited at various points to write film scripts in Hollywood, manage an Old Masters gallery in New York and join one of the international auction houses. I dithered, playing for time and hoping for a portent to show the way, until the opportunities disappeared.

In truth I was savouring another kind of freedom at that time since, shortly after Francis went,
Art International
went too. No angel for the ailing magazine had been found, and rather than watch over its decline I suspended publication, parted with the staff and spent an awkward interval refunding subscribers and winding the company up. Having emerged from the magazine's ruins, I felt shaken but liberated. Meanwhile, our son Alex was born: with a growing family to support I cobbled together a mélange of highbrow art journalism and lifestyle pieces for glossy American magazines to provide a basic subsistence. And I didn't think or look much beyond that.

But in death as in life, Francis did not go away. My reputation and career proved too closely entwined with his whole trajectory and aura as an artist. A variety of people – some convinced they owned an unattributed ‘Bacon', others with Bacon book, show or film projects – began beating a path to my door. I also published articles about Bacon in the press and got involved in curating museum exhibitions of Bacon's paintings as well as writing catalogue prefaces for them. After a time, I came to put on shows of my own. For Valencia and Paris, I assembled a selection of works entitled ‘The Sacred and the Profane'. For a museum in England and two others subsequently in the US, I took the theme of ‘Francis Bacon in the 1950s' to highlight paintings from that amazing decade when Bacon was still struggling with the
terribilità
of his subject matter and the technique required to convey it. Then, in Rome, I was fortunate enough to work on an exhibition that brought Caravaggio and Bacon face to face among the other masters, including Titian, that line the Galleria Borghese's marble walls. When the exhibition opened to great fanfare and Roman-style rejoicing, my only regret was that Francis had not received an art-historical tribute of this significance during his lifetime.

Eventually I was also asked to write Bacon's biography, and although I felt as well placed as anyone to take this on, it became painfully evident once I got into it that, for all the areas of his life that Francis had talked to me about, there were many more he had never touched on and for which no reliable witnesses or documents remained. It had not occurred to me before that he had so deliberately restricted information about his life, with his biography in exhibition catalogues being limited to a single, curt phrase: ‘Lives and works in London'.

I began my research, trying to piece together the fragmentary evidence, and discovered that for many years even Francis's date of birth could not be confirmed or the details of his parentage, let alone anything substantial about his upbringing and education. It was as if, having chosen enigma as the source of his art, Francis
had cloaked his life in it as well. Gradually I put together an archive of related background material illuminated by a handful of indisputable facts, photographs, letters and eventually early exhibition notices and reviews. Francis had said that it would take a Proust to tell his life, but I found that before any tale could be told at all it took dull, dogged fact-finding.

At times while I was writing the biography of a man who would have remained near-invisible were it not for the traces left in his oracular imagery, I wondered to what extent Francis had foreseen that I would devote a large part of my life to preserving and enhancing his memory. There is no doubt that he had gone repeatedly out of his way to impress his whole personality on me, with all the thoughts, memories and interpretations that he wanted to record. But there would have been dozens of other impressionable young people who had wandered into his orbit and who would have been equally receptive. Why had the task fallen to me? I wondered repeatedly, as I grappled with the difficulties of writing a life of someone who had so constantly covered his tracks. Francis had barely ever mentioned his schooldays, for instance, so I located his few surviving schoolmates and, from their ancient reminiscences, tried to dredge up a portrait of him as a young man. But the portrait came to life only once these pale memories had been blended with Bacon's own vivid account of his father's throwing him out of the family house shortly thereafter and packing him off to Weimar Berlin.

Francis affected dandyishly not to care whether his paintings stood the test of time or whether his life story would ever be told, with or without the Proustian insight he believed it required. ‘When I die,' he told me, more than once, ‘I just hope everything about me just blows up, just blows up and disappears.' But of course it didn't. Curiously, the very fact that Francis pretended indifference to what happened after his death has fanned worldwide interest in both the man and the work to an astonishing degree. In one sense, of course, Francis's whole existence was devoted to drawing attention to himself, and far
from disappearing he has seen off all his rivals in twentieth-century art except for his one-time master Picasso. And perhaps Bacon may come to be seen as even more significant in the history of art than the protean genius of Málaga. No artist since Van Gogh, it is already evident, has grown so powerfully in mythical stature from beyond the grave as Francis Bacon.

One late-autumn afternoon, many years later, I am back in Francis's old studio on the rue de Birague. All the furniture, including the brass-bound sea chest, the big easel and the trestle table with its paraphernalia of paint tubes, brushes and rags, has long disappeared. The walls and the heavily beamed ceiling have been repainted in the exact matt white that Francis originally chose. The room stands totally empty but nothing else has changed: the same, even northern light coming through the tall, elegant windows, the same carved wooden shutters, the same Versailles parquet on the floor. The nostalgia I feel looking round this immaculate, vacant room turns to melancholy as I reflect on how brimming with life this space once was and how neutral and banal it is now, emptied of all traces of Francis's presence and creativity. I can still see him here, laughing, full of vitality, eager to get back into the pleasures of Paris. I start thinking too of the various canvases painted here, from the intimate evocations of George, whose suicide still weighed on him, to the astonishingly vivid portraits of Michel Leiris and the starkly concentrated, translucent images of his last years.

I turn to leave, hoping to get away from the powerful feelings of loss and sadness that are enveloping me, but just before I go I pull open the built-in wardrobe where Francis always left a few clothes. It is completely bare inside now but the haunting, pungent smell of his asthma inhaler, which always pervaded the places where he lived, wafts up. The moment I breathe it in it sets off a series of images sliding through my brain that I cannot stop. Francis's face close up laughing, the spin of a roulette
wheel,
Nada
,
Nada
, a glass of wine spilling like blood over a tablecloth. I push the wardrobe doors to right away but the inhaler's corrosive smell is already settling in my lungs, releasing a chaotic flow of memories.

Outside it is already dusk and a fine rain has begun to fall. The ancient lamps cast a faint glow over the large, empty courtyard. Once it would have been filled with horses and carriages, with people going intently about their lives. They have gone, and coming after them others immortalized in early photographs taken here with their confident expressions and stiff clothes have gone. Generations have gone, and the courtyard is silent now. Emotional and confused, I think of people I have been close to and who are now dead. I think of you, Danielle, and you, Zoran, and I think fleetingly, awkwardly, of my own dead father. As I make my way over the courtyard towards the street I picture each of the glistening, yellowish cobblestones as marking a grave, uneven little memorials to the dead whom I knew and who are now beyond recall and whom we will rejoin, whatever and wherever they may be. And standing under the lamplight, although I know it is no more than a rush of fantasy, I find a headstone for you, Sonia, and for you, George and John Deakin, for Michel Leiris and Isabel Rawsthorne and all the others I have known through those hundreds of hours in clubs and restaurants, with the champagne pouring and the conversation rising as if neither would ever end. I think back to that mass of time bright with the hopes and illusions I once had, the unbearable excitement entwined with the blackest despair, now all gone, all past, all lost. I think of the horror of life and the beauty of life, standing there in this graveyard of my own imagining, its fleeting grandeur and its certain decay. And I can no longer hold back the tears. Emotions that have been held in check for years well up, and I cry as I haven't cried since I was a child sobbing myself to sleep, but I also cry as an adult in the awareness and acceptance of death. I cry for myself and I cry for all the dead and I cry for Francis, through whom I came to
know them and who, like a light gone out, is himself dead. And slowly it comes home that this powerful surge of feelings that he has left in me can be unleashed at any moment, out of the blue, when I come across a torn photo, glimpse a familiar face or hear a half-forgotten song. Once Francis Bacon is in your blood, he will be there for ever.

Gradually the tears subside, leaving a huge void of relief behind. The light coat I'm wearing is wet from the rain. I shake myself like a dog, then I move on, crossing the formal gardens of the Place des Vosges and into the old, dark streets beyond.

 

Acknowledgements