Francis Bacon in Your Blood (7 page)

I've never been alone with Lucian. I've never felt particularly at ease with him. He has none of Bacon's warmth and geniality; on the contrary, although he is clearly an unusual and rather exotic person, he seems to me coldly self-centred and calculating. So I'm not particularly looking forward to this encounter near Paddington Station, but when I find Delamere Terrace and see Freud waiting by a large stylish car I have no time to think because as soon as I get in, the Bentley takes off with a squeal and we hurtle through a few streets, squeal round corners, bounce up on to pavements and ricochet off the wrong way into one-way streets at a speed I've never travelled through any city before. I'm terrified at first, thinking we're going to smash into other cars or a wall, but it soon becomes clear this is what ‘driving' means to Lucian, full pelt, hell for leather, as if this is a getaway he'll only get one crack at, and that he's very skilled at it, so the fear subsides a bit and I begin to enjoy the sense of complete anarchy and the breaking of every rule they teach you when you
first take to the road. This breathtaking journey turns London into the most compact of cities and within minutes we come to a squealing halt outside a grand townhouse in an elegant crescent in Knightsbridge.

Lucian produces a key from his jacket, and for the first time I notice he's wearing a well-cut double-breasted grey suit but with no shirt or apparently anything else beneath. Without explanation, though I suppose he must know the grandee who lives here, Lucian opens the front door and ushers me up the stately staircase, past sitting rooms filled with impressive paintings, some Old Masters in carved frames but mainly modern, to a sparsely furnished, low-ceilinged room at the top. There are only two chairs, prepared as if for an interview. The late-autumn light is fading, but Lucian begins a soft, lisping monologue that has vaguely threatening undertones, as if he might at any moment say ‘We have ways of making you talk,' but of course he says nothing of the kind but rambles on about the ‘situation' we or painters or somebody is in now and there's little we can do about it but attempt to return to a certain truth that only stumbling on through the dark can tell, and truth to tell it has become dark now in the room and I can't note down anything of what Lucian's saying and he's got up and he's moving through the darkness talking, it's unnerving, he's become just a disembodied voice, distant, and I'm trying to make out the soft lisping sounds, it all sounds rather abstract and about ‘the way things are', then suddenly he comes closer, standing right by me, and I'm wondering what might happen next, until all the lights suddenly go on in a blaze like the end of a film and I'm invited to take the stairs down and leave and make whatever I can of these utterances with their quotes from Nietzsche and turn them into something that will pass muster in my magazine, as I find myself back on the street, breathing in the night air, blinking in the lamplight, relieved and suddenly free again.

Knowing I'd be in London I'd called Francis and we've arranged to meet for dinner. There's already something comforting about the whole ritual of a night out as we sit in the snug bar at Wheeler's and as usual I am starving and make my way through several bowls of peanuts with the first few glasses of wine and Francis chats to the barman who tells us about his girlfriend getting her ‘knickers in a twist', a silly phrase which somehow helps soothe the unrequited sexual pangs that torment me day and night and keep the great enigma of love at bay. Perhaps Francis has sensed this. He seems to accept the fact that I only like women, even if I find the company of homosexual men in many ways more interesting, and frequently more flattering, and if he has made a pass at me it must have been so subtle that I haven't noticed it. So I was intrigued the other day when I went to see him that he suggested I meet one of his models, Henrietta Moraes, whom I've heard is very ‘free'. And he took one of the copies of
Paris Match
he had lying around and over a double page of photographs of war atrocities in Vietnam he wrote me a sort of letter of introduction to her, but while I was waiting for what I thought might be the right moment to make contact with her, John Deakin showed me a sheaf of photographs he had taken of Henrietta naked on the bed, originally commissioned by Francis so that he could do portraits of her. Several of them focused on Henrietta with her legs splayed, and they were so graphic, not to say hirsute, that whatever lust impelled me quailed; so my need for female company continues to be spotlit and exacerbated, much as in Cambridge, by being in entirely male company virtually all the time.

Francis is in good form, he says the work is going well ‘even if you never really know about those things', and he is very affable with everyone, leaving the barman a noticeably large tip, and I wonder whether that isn't in itself a form of seduction, certainly all the staff seem more interested in serving us than anybody else in the crowded restaurant and every time a new bottle of wine is brought he has a note at the ready to crush
into the waiter's hand. Of course, he did say at one point, ‘I've bought my way through life,' and I wondered what he meant, but perhaps this is it. What is also very attractive is the feel of boundless energy coming off him, radiating through his gestures and the relentless way he keeps returning to a subject until he feels it can't be analysed and defined further, even if he's only had a couple of hours' sleep and has been doing the bars all afternoon. That must be the reason that even when he's saying ultimately very negative things like ‘We go from nothing to nothing' or ‘Life's a complete charade' they sound almost positive and cheerful, or at least liberating, as if he's proposing a toast. We're well into the ritual now, oysters, sole and Stilton dispatched, and pleasantly drunk, and if it were anyone else they might be saying it's been a long day I think I might get an early night, but Francis is saying: ‘I don't know if you're at all free after dinner but I have to go to Muriel's because one of those ridiculous Sunday papers wants to do an article and Snowdon's going to do the photographs.'

So of course I'm free, nobody is freer than me as more doors open and another strange evening beckons. ‘I'm greedy for life,' Francis has said to me at one point, ‘I'm greedy for food and drink, for friends, for things happening,' and I relate immediately to that. I'm greedy for experience, I realize, following him up the evil-smelling little staircase to the Colony and into an atmosphere which is quite different from anything that, as a proud, new, card-carrying member, I've known before. It's quite crowded, with a mixture of regulars and their guests, and the word is clearly out that Lord Snowdon is coming, but although the members are flattered they've decided with instinctive club spirit they won't show it. ‘Christ almighty,' a character behind me is saying, with a great show of being put upon, ‘can't we fucking come in here for a quiet drink without having some little pansy photographing us?' ‘Well,' says his friend, more philosophically, ‘you can't get away from the press these days, my old mate, can you?' Muriel is clearly unimpressed. ‘We've never had royalty in
before,' she says, ‘but I hear she's a nice little lady so we'll make her welcome. Well come isn't in it is it, dear,' she continues in a lofty patter. ‘I expect she's had more cocks than you've had hot dinners,' she remarks to the amorphous group of drinking heads around her, ‘so back to your filthy urinals now darlings before your very presence before the highest in the land brings my lovely little club into disrepute.'

Francis has been assiduously doing the rounds, tipping one bottle of champagne after another into everyone's glass, as if to excuse himself in advance for all the attention that he is about to receive. ‘Why he wants to photograph my old pudding face', he says, slopping more wine into the out-held glasses, ‘I can't imagine. Never mind. Let's simply amuse ourselves while we can. Cheers. Cheerio. Here's to you.' And he weaves his way round, half swaggering, half staggering, until the mood of the room changes imperceptibly, alerting all Colony members that Snowdon has been sighted at the entrance. And so he comes among us, slight and smiling in a safari jacket, his camera at the ready as if he is about to snap wildlife in the veld, and after declining a glass from Francis he also begins to weave round the room. There are the two of them now, eager hunter Tony, lithe and intent, and willing prey Francis, his wide head thrown back in laughter, as if in a life filled with charades this is the silliest role he's ever had to play. But he's playing it so well, our Francis, the big beast in the jungle, hidden in the club's recesses then breaking cover in a clearing between two stands of solid boozers, and with the champagne working its beneficent magic the members decide as a man to take the lovely little lord to their bosom and begin to act up for the camera, a couple of them putting their arms round Francis for a group photo, Muriel's Boys November 1963, their mottled, wattled faces split into grins full of native wit. And a cheer goes up from the bar as more toasts are made and a man with a huge scar down his cheek begins to intone in a fine tenor voice ‘Oh wouldn't it be loverly', and other voices take up the chorus while Snowdon, sensing a
coup, closes in clicking, Soho at song, and Francis makes up to the camera like a star, mumbling to me as he passes, ‘I can't think what he's going to do with all those ghastly photos,' and from having felt generally put upon the Colony might have outdone itself in bohemian bonhomie had one very large regular known as Tiny not been rocking to and fro on his stool at the bar and suddenly catapulted himself back into the throng, scattering drinkers and breaking glass and landing out cold on the floor behind, unrecorded but unquestionably the scoop of the day, bringing the party to an abrupt end – to be later enshrined in Colony myth and fondly recalled by Muriel in later years as ‘that fucking orgy in space, dear'.

One of the things I'm coming to appreciate more and more about going around with Bacon is that we talk so freely, even if the conversation tends to be mostly about him, his life and painting – which is of course why I originally sought him out. But he talks quite as willingly about the latest news or politics or medical research; at one point, apparently, he read every issue of the
Lancet
he could lay his hands on. It didn't occur to me, though, that he took a deep interest in literature until he started passing on to me this or that odd book he had lying around in the studio. Of course, it's true, and I picked up on that right away, that he has all kinds of writers and literary people among his friends or at least within his orbit, and not just art critics like David Sylvester, John Russell and Lawrence Gowing. Stephen Spender he sees quite a lot of (and I've met him with Francis, and to my embarrassment, and even more I imagine to his, I keep confusing his poetry with Auden's, which I know much better; Auden, I soon found out, is someone Francis can't stand because of what he calls his ‘Christian hypocrisy'). Cyril Connolly he met through Sonia, as well as the much loved Peter Watson, now dead, who put up the money for the review
Horizon
. Then he knows Burroughs, of course, and ‘Cal' Lowell, who he says sometimes thinks he's Hitler or Napoleon. And a lot of writers
send him their books – I've noticed Elizabeth Smart, Paddy Leigh Fermor and Caroline Blackwood, and from Paris Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Gaëtan Picon and Jacques Dupin – and I get a glimpse of the latest ones whenever we go into the living room because they're scattered all over the big table by the window.

Out of the blue Francis has just handed me Djuna Barnes's
Nightwood
, saying ‘You might try this book, which I suppose you could say is about despair. Djuna Barnes must have been a very remarkable woman, living that lesbian life of American women in Paris in the 1920s. She's very old now. Someone told me nobody's been able to talk to her for years because she lives in this flat in New York behind a great wall of gin bottles.' I've been finding it difficult to get into but since Francis has recommended the book I've persevered and now I'm fascinated by its rich perversity and realize it's quite different from anything I've ever read. His tastes in literature are as definitive, not to say peremptory, as they are in art. Just as he goes in one bound from the Egyptians to Michelangelo, so there seems to be nothing in his literary pantheon between Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. He's told me that some plays or poems have influenced him even more than painting by the power of their imagery. ‘Even in poetry I've always been obsessed by images,' he said to me the other afternoon in the studio, as we were trying once again to conclude our interview. ‘When I was very young I found this marvellous translation of Aeschylus. It was really more of a free rendering I expect than a translation. But it had these images in it I thought so beautiful they've been with me ever since. There was something so extraordinarily vivid about them. “The reek of human blood smiles out at me” was one. Then there was this other one I can't quite remember about Clytemnestra sitting over her sorrow like a hen. They are superbly visual. I feel myself very close to the world of Greek tragedy . . . often, in my painting, I have this sensation of following a long call from antiquity.'