Francis Bacon in Your Blood (20 page)

I look at him in disbelief. From his manic smile, there is no doubt that he sincerely believes in what he has just said.

I leave the meeting abruptly, resolved to shun political action, direct or indirect, from this point on.

7

‘Poor George'

The silver lights of Paris have disappeared and we fly through a dark-blue void above the Channel before the gold lights of London come slowly into view. I haven't been on many flights, and this is the first time I've taken the plane rather than the boat-train to London. The city stretches beneath us like a vast black map crisscrossed with bright tracer lines. I can make out the Thames snaking between the glowing sodium lamps and then the shapes of landmark buildings. As we come in to land, the rooftops and streets glisten with wet and I can almost smell the misty, metallic odour of the rain.

I am pleased to be strung between two cities. I am at home in both now but I don't belong to either. That is the advantage of places over the women in one's life: you can go from one to the other and enjoy each without guilt. Of course I came unstuck in my two-timing with Danielle, as I always knew I would. After weeks of fear, lies and secretive meetings, I was going out for the evening with one when I came face to face on a Métro platform with the other. I broke out into a panic sweat as if I had been caught with a dead body and a bleeding dagger in my hand. Why did I allow myself to drift into all this, I've wondered ever since the initial thrill, when I knew I could no more handle it than I could being a double agent, constantly pretending and covering my tracks, constantly fearing exposure? There was no
pleasure lying in
hôtels de passe
rented by the hour, making anguished love to one while worrying about the other. And cheating on both eventually came down to cheating on myself, since I could no longer be sure who I really was as I shuffled between my dual roles. So when I broke with one, at dusk on a bridge over the Seine, I had to break with the other. There was a logic to this that could not be denied. From having had too much to handle I woke up one morning alone in my own room with nothing at all.

The logic continued implacably. Breaking bonds is contagious. Having left my loves, I left my job.
Réalités
had sent me across Europe to write more or less what I pleased and allowed me to work as it suited me, drunk or sober, at home or in the office. Now, for no apparent professional reason, I also turned this down for the more demanding and totally unreliable métier of writing freelance for whoever would hire me. This doesn't seem to have begun too badly, I'm glad to say, creating the one bright spot on an otherwise gloomy landscape as I try to adapt to celibacy.
Art International
, an impressively serious, well-produced art magazine published in Switzerland, has been in contact with me because Miss Beston, who looks after Francis at Marlborough Fine Art, has suggested I write an essay about the new paintings Francis will be showing soon in their New York gallery. I am delighted by the idea. It's the sort of thing that would never have come my way if I'd stayed at
Réalités
where art was regarded as part of lifestyle and Francis's work would have seemed too tough and provocative to sit comfortably between the châteaux of the Loire and ‘profiles' of up-and-coming actors or designers. It will give me the chance to write some real art criticism and to get more to grips intellectually and imaginatively with Francis's paintings, some of which must have already been included in the Maeght show I saw. I'll also be able to draw on the conversations I've had with Francis about his work over the past few years. At all events this is why, I repeat to myself triumphantly as the plane drops
bumpily down, I am on a BEA flight to Gatwick paid for by a Swiss magazine.

I feel considerably less triumphant when I push open the door to the Marlborough gallery on Bond Street. The atmosphere is very hushed, the lights are dimmed and the carpeting soft and deep. The main exhibition room is lined with nineteenth-century French painting in ornately carved frames which gives it the air of a private museum. There are no other visitors, only an aloof-looking secretary typing at her desk. I've been here a couple of times before with Francis, when the atmosphere was noticeably more welcoming. I pad silently round and notice there are some German Expressionist paintings mixed in with the Corots, Signacs and Monets. I also notice that my wet shoes have left clear damp imprints on the deep pile behind me. The secretary appears to have seen this, too.

‘Can I help you?' she asks, putting on a pair of spectacles to examine me more closely.

With my old, wet raincoat in one hand and a notebook in the other, I clearly do not look like a potential client.

‘Miss Beston said I'd be able to look at the new Francis Bacon paintings,' I say.

‘Ah yes,' she concedes. ‘We've been expecting you. Now, if you'd like to follow me.'

We go through a back door and down more carpeted steps into a harshly lit basement floor where several large canvases have been propped against the walls. A stool has been placed opposite them.

‘Both Miss Beston and Mr Reichardt are out at the moment, but they asked Terry and his helper to put these pictures out for you to see,' the secretary explains. ‘Let me know once you've had enough time to look at them and I'll ask Terry to bring the other works that are going to New York from the storeroom.'

I've seen quite a lot of Bacons reproduced in catalogues and had the chance quite recently to study a whole roomful of them at
Galerie Maeght. But being left alone in a silent space underground completely surrounded by them is another experience altogether. The bright lights play on the glazed gold frames so that at first you have no idea what's going on. Then twisted bodies rise to the surface of the glass like corpses in water, disfigured, discoloured, and stay there. Once you have seen them, there is no getting away, no exit. Each of the figures is held at some extremity – of pain, of guilt, of fear, of lust, or of all combined, it's never clear. There are screams issuing from wide-open mouths, but they are muffled, even soundless, because there is no space for screams to be heard and the bodies are pushed up, almost flattened, against the glass, and left there to gasp. There is no air for fear to scream or lust to pant, like a new degree of torment invented by a subtle medieval divine. Contours deliquesce, limbs buckle, and the head is reduced to a mere stump of misery. Trying to counter the great waves of threat I feel breaking over me I get up from my stool and go up to look at them close to, following the great swirls of pigment as if they might lead me to the source of so much pain. But the infinitely pliant, grainy paint only reveals further sadomasochistic refinement and humiliation. No facial feature has resisted the onslaught. Eyes are put out and noses splayed as a matter of course. Whole faces are flayed to a pulp around chattering teeth, while black and green spots bloom on the pink skin like a terminal disease.

I settle back on my stool and try to make some notes while I have the pictures in front of me, but I feel too overwhelmed to get much beyond inanities like ‘v. violent clashes of colour' or ‘skilful, wilful distortion'. If I'd seen Francis's painting up close like this before I met him, I probably would never have pursued him for an interview. How could I have imagined him as anything other than a kind of depraved monster, dedicated solely to the pain and horror of life, a kind of Dr Caligari of art? When I did meet him, I did of course become gradually aware that beneath the debonair charm, the elegance and the seductive generosity there was a deeper, darker streak that surfaced from
time to time, like a cobra about to strike, in a poisonously wounding remark (‘She's got legs like bolsters and she's rotten to the core') or an excessively disparaging comment, often about other painters (‘Jackson Pollock? Oh are you talking about the old lace-maker?'). There are lightning flashes of cruelty, and I have sometimes wondered whether George doesn't pay very dearly for his new, luxury, drink-sodden existence up west.

Most of the time, though, Francis is the perfect boulevardier, making his way through life with apparently not a care in the world beyond whether to order champagne or vodka with the caviare. The savagery of the painting, the attack on mankind, was confined to the studio. Once he'd washed and got into fresh clothes, he turned the key on all the nightmares and sauntered forth. More than the portrait of Dorian Gray, it was Jekyll and Hyde. The morning session, begun perhaps not long after returning from a night in the bars, cleansed Mr Hyde. He could work out all his murderous voluptuousness on the canvas and, thus purged, the urbane Dr Jekyll could straighten his tie in the mirror and walk out to an establishment in Soho to imbibe his first glass of champagne at midday and then carouse and entertain his friends until dawn.

Since none of the rivers of paint appears to lead back to any identifiable source, where did the fury originate? What could have happened to this suave adventurer, habitué of the Ritz and Crockford's Casino, as well as Muriel's and several of Soho's lowest dives, that he found himself marked out to express the horror and outrage of a whole generation? Francis may well have had a childhood inkling of the First World War and been aware of the Irish troubles from the vantage of his father's stud farm on the Curragh, but how many thousands at that time had not lived far closer to terror and death? Was the suffering that obsessed him sparked off by the images of the death camps that started to circulate just as he first began painting with a vengeance? Francis himself had said not, but then with dandyish disdain he had always refused to say where his imagery came from. The
brutality and horror just ‘happened', pictures came about by the ‘chance marks' the brush made as it moved oil paint across the canvas, and there was no explanation to anything since there was nothing to explain beyond the odd reference to Shakespeare or the
Oresteia
, Muybridge or Michelangelo, which seemed to be relevant but in the end merely diverted attention from the central enigma as to why Francis Bacon's paintings spoke only of pain and destruction.

‘Are you ready for some more, sir?'

Two grinning assistants take the pictures away and replace them with a new batch.

The range and inventiveness in tearing and flaying human shapes is overwhelming. Heads and bodies tumble out in ever-greater extremity, ever-greater virtuosity, on to the picture plane. All the forms in this high-wire act are taken to the brink of abstraction. But they don't topple over, they're brought to the edge and held in check, a hair's breadth from dissolving into formless, painterly chaos. And this seems to me the key, though I could hardly ever explain it in a magazine review: the balance is maintained by the vitality that courses beneath. Under this raging destruction the blood runs so ruddily, as if in defiance, and thick white flares of sperm lace the mutilated body parts together. Are these things essentially about sex? I suddenly wonder. No one as far as I know has ever suggested this before. Far from an anguished record of our brutal times, from death camp to nuclear bomb, are the flailings and gougings, the twisted limbs and half-obliterated heads a kind of paean to the further reaches of sadomasochistic coupling? Is this an extended love song?

As this unthinkable thought occurs to me, there is a sudden subtle change in the room. An exotically beautiful woman has been led into the basement by the secretary. She takes off her dark glasses and looks round, filling the damp air with a haunting perfume. She's so familiar I feel I know her well, and then I realize it's Sophia Loren, and it's her films and photographs I know so well. Behind her, the thickset older man I take to be her husband
is peering into the paintings. I know they are connoisseurs of Bacon and have been buying his work since it was shown in the late 1950s in several galleries in Italy. I look back at the pictures I have spent the last hour with alone and imagine them in an ochre-coloured Roman palazzo or a white villa on the Amalfi coast, luxury objects with their human turmoil encased in gilt frames hanging among other masterpieces in elegant rooms filled with beautiful, bronzed people admiring them.

‘Only three more to go now, sir,' says one of the assistants kindly. But I can't look at any more. My train of thought is completely broken by the idea that these dramatic statements about the human condition are also collectibles, destined for rich people's walls. May 1968 affected me more than I'd thought, I reflect wryly, and in any case it's naive of me to think that these paintings belong only in museums. They are made to be sold, and I'd better get used to it. I'm keen now to go and glad when the secretary tells me that Miss Beston has asked to see me. I follow her back up the carpeted stairs and through a warren of corridors.

Miss Beston looks up from her desk as I'm ushered in. Although diminutive and comfortably plump, she is a forbidding person, somehow reminding me of the stern matron we had at school. I take heart, however, when I notice that she is so tiny that her legs don't touch the floor. I have another advantage: since I've always met her with Francis, I call her Valerie, as he does (‘Valerie at the gallery', as he refers to her when he's in a genial mood). There is an air of secrecy around her, and it's said that she did hush-hush work at Bletchley during the war. Perhaps because of that, her speech is clipped and her manner quite formal. I've heard that someone who was working closely with her on a Bacon exhibition suggested that he might call her ‘Valerie', only to receive the sharp reminder from her: ‘I think you'll find most people call me Miss Beston.'

‘So what did you think of the new paintings, Michael?' she asks without wasting time on small talk.

I'm a bit at a loss to sum up the welter of reactions I've had in a single phrase.

‘Well, they're, er, impressive,' I mumble.

‘They certainly are,' says Miss Beston. ‘He's caught George to an absolute T.'