Francis Bacon in Your Blood (35 page)

Francis is back in London now and I'm a bit concerned he won't accept this solution since he always insists on paying for everything himself, perhaps thereby keeping control of any given situation, but when I suggest it over the phone he accepts the idea enthusiastically, so I put both the purchase of the flat and the sale of the painting in motion. I'm very sad to be parting with my
Pope
, which has acted as a kind of talisman for me, the act of owning it reinforcing my sense of identity and self-belief. On the other hand, I like to think that I am growing less romantic and more mature, and that I
should heed the more practical side of my nature which argues that an artist's reputation is almost chimerical by definition whereas a property next to the Place des Vosges can hardly fail to go up steadily in value. I've never been through this kind of reasoning before, and I'm amused by the idea that from eking out a living in journalism I might soon be a man of substance as well as being very pleased that Francis will now be spending more and more time right here among us in the Marais.

There are archaic, almost medieval aspects to purchasing a property in France, and the whole transaction has taken considerably longer than anticipated. The money is being held in escrow by the notary, and tomorrow we should at last be signing off on everything and I should be handed both the deeds and the keys. Francis is already over here, clearly excited by the prospect of having his own place in Paris. We're having an early lunch at the Coupole, where I haven't been in years, and when I get there he's already sitting over a café au lait. Since he always seems to arrive before everyone and be the last to leave when we hit the bars I wonder how he finds the time to work in between while keeping so many different friendships and all the other areas of his life going, even though I know he gets by on very little sleep and that when he focuses on a new image it tends to come off quickly if it's going to come off at all. He's in a fairly sombre mood this morning. We discuss ‘despair', a favourite notion of his, and when I make a remark to the effect that ‘people only have the despair they can afford', he tells me, ‘You've just said something very profound,' and I feel absurdly proud. Meanwhile, Francis has been eyeing a puddle of milk on the table, and as though giving in to an impulse he had been repressing for some time he suddenly dips his thick white finger into it and draws a shape. I tell him we'll have the keys to the flat tomorrow, and he suggests that I pick up some champagne and a few glasses and we meet there with Sonia, who's in town, and his would-be dealer's sister Nadine Haïm to celebrate before we go on to dinner together. A
waiter comes to lay the table and suggests we might try a
petit vin léger
that's on offer, to which Francis replies balefully, ‘
Pas trop léger
,' before going through the wine list and ordering a very full-bodied red Graves. The brasserie begins to fill up and Francis has focused with unusual malevolence on a flamboyant, statuesque woman who's been behaving as if she were a famous star throwing tantrum after tantrum at a table across the large, noisy room. At one point the woman gets up and sets off for the toilets. When she returns, she walks past our table in a cloud of perfume, at which Francis, as if no longer able to contain himself, bursts out: ‘She goes down to have a shit and comes back smelling of roses! There it is. We eat and we shit, and that's about all there is to life if you really think about it.'

The food is mediocre, which does nothing to improve Francis's mood. I remain very neutral about everything, because I know from past experience that enunciating any kind of opinion about anything is likely to be a red rag to a bull. Just as we're preparing to leave, David Hockney arrives with a couple of American painter friends, Shirley Goldfarb and Gregory Masurovsky, and comes over to kiss Francis affectionately on either cheek. As David moves on, Francis takes out a handkerchief and wipes his cheeks very elaborately.

‘Now I wonder why he did that?' Francis says to me. ‘I suppose he must have some ghastly disease.'

The following evening I arrive jingling keys with several bottles of Cristal, a champagne Francis has developed a notable taste for while in Paris. Like a seasoned barman, I stow these away in the fridge and polish the glasses. Alice arrives first and admires the space. Then, clearly already drunk after what must have been an epic afternoon, Francis, Sonia and Nadine make their entry. I pop open the champagne and make sure everyone's glass is kept filled. The empty new space is suddenly filled with loud, lively conversation and slightly hysterical laughter. Sonia and Nadine vie with each other to advise Francis which bed to buy
and where to stock his kitchen. Francis seems to find the whole event hugely amusing, although I know that, like me, he hates the unsightly gold-and-black flock wallpaper chosen by the former owner – an almost comically pompous architect who has bought up and ‘developed' the whole house while describing in detail to everyone who will listen the myriad advantages of his tasteful renovation of the various flats he has put on the market. Francis is clearly itching to do something about it and, as more bottles are opened, he tells the ladies how much he'd like to get rid of the wallpaper and have everything painted simply in white. Suddenly Francis goes over to the wall and rips off a large swathe of the offending wallpaper without further ado. We all applaud, then move in with gusto to help, grabbing handfuls of the stuff which peels off with admirable ease, until the parquet floor is ankle-deep in flock and we are all guffawing like student pranksters until we realize that the studio door has been left open and the pompous architect, his mouth literally agape, is standing there watching the spontaneous destruction of his art.

‘Since all the people around me have been dying like flies,' Francis's most recent refrain goes, ‘I have nothing to paint but this old pudding face of mine.' It's an exaggeration, like much of what he says, but it reminds me that on a couple of occasions we have discussed the idea that he might paint my portrait. Those things are easier said than done, I know. I've been seeing a bit of Henri Cartier-Bresson recently, and he's suggested photographing me but no date has ever been set and he's never come back to it, so neither have I. Perhaps when he says he wants to photograph me, he means he wants to photograph Francis, since I'm coming to be seen in the Paris art world as a sort of gateway to him. I know that someone Francis has portrayed began by deluging him with photos, so rather than bring the subject up again I've asked Alice to take lots of shots of me, full face and profile, and quite a few full-length ones stripped to the waist. Francis seems quite interested in them, then one evening he explains to me that
I'd have to shave off my beard and have the photographs done again because he needed to ‘see the bone structure clearly' before he could embark on a portrait. I always keep my beard trimmed short, so this sounds evasive to me, even though it's true to say that I can't think of any bearded men in his paintings. But what, I wonder, would I feel like if I did shave off my beard, which has become part of my personality, and then Francis still didn't see his way to painting me? I decide in favour of the beard.

Francis has just done two heads of Michel Leiris which capture the extraordinary mobility of his face with quite uncanny accuracy. They are also beautiful, inventive images in their own right. What people seem to forget in all the talk about violence and distortion and the legacy of the death camps and so on is his delicacy and skill simply as a painter. Here he hasn't been as radical or destructive as in some of his portraits of George or in his self-portraits, where perhaps he feels much freer, but in one of the Michel heads he's cut out the whole temple and replaced it with a dotted line joining the nose to the isolated ear. It makes me think of the Valéry line that Francis likes to quote about ‘giving the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance'. If I'm particularly impressed by this head, it may be partly because Francis has chosen to give it to me. I protested, feebly enough, but he insisted he wanted me to have it because he's so pleased with the translation I did with Michel, saying he sounds so much more intelligent in the French version (though that could hardly be credited to me). A couple of painter friends of mine have come round to see the new picture hanging on its nail, and one of them, an extraordinary character from Montenegro called Dado, has given me an enormous, very powerful oil painting of his – a collage of fragments of figures – not only because we're old friends and I've written about his work, I suspect, but because he wants it to be hung in the same space as a Bacon.

I've been down to the studio a couple of times since Francis has moved in and started working. He's obviously delighted to have a place here, and I've been wondering whether one of
the reasons he made up his mind to take it so quickly was the address: 14 rue de Birague. I'm pretty sure Francis has a thing about numbers, odd though that is in someone who furiously eschews any form of belief or ‘superstition'. It may come from some gambling strategy he has devised, but the number 7 is key. Several of his previous studios have been at a number 7, or a multiple thereof, and when I tell him I'm hoping to move to a new, larger flat at 77 rue des Archives, the idea seems to appeal to him instantly. It's also not for nothing, of course, that he has his permanent abode at 7 Reece Mews, London SW7.

The chaos in the Paris studio is nothing like Reece Mews but it's growing. There's a big trestle table beside the easel that's already like an archive of the way he works. It's covered in dried brushes, half-used Winsor & Newton paint tubes, Sennelier pastel sticks, acrylic sprays, old colour-caked socks and sweaters along with several green-and-gold-edged dinner plates from Heal's and even a brand-new frying pan that have been used to mix colours. The latter always stands out, because where you might expect to find a couple of fried eggs, you get a rich, pounded swirl of bright oils that, like a signature, could only be Francis's. Similar patches of paint reappear all over the table, as well, oddly, as several scattered oyster knives. There are also photos and books, loose change and restaurant bills, notes, Métro tickets and letters flowing on to the floor, which in itself remains comparatively pristine, perhaps because the parquet was made specially, and expensively, for the space and so imposes a certain respect. What has been less respected, I'm shocked to discover, is one of the volumes of the Degas catalogue raisonné by Lemoisne that I gave Francis as a present, having gone to considerable trouble to track down the complete, original edition through an antiquarian bookseller on the Place Saint-Sulpice. It's lying open under the table now, with paint all over it and several pages clearly ripped out.

Beside it there's also a copy of the original draft of
The Waste Land
with Ezra Pound's annotations that Francis gave me once
in London and that I've brought back to the studio here because I know the whole idea of one great poet being edited by another fascinates him. We've talked about it several times and Francis says how lucky Eliot was to have Pound's editing since he thinks the poem became so much better as a result. ‘I long to have someone telling me “Do this. Don't do that,” but of course I've never found anybody.' Every time I try to imagine the kind of person Francis would take instruction from I come up with a total blank.

By the windows Francis has put a large, brass-bound sea chest. I've no idea what's in it because it's always kept locked, but I imagine he has other, no doubt more personal or secret photos and painting paraphernalia in it. Along with the brightly coloured frying pan, he also keeps an old wooden T-square and a large plastic dustbin lid to hand, and every now and then I'm amused to see how he has used them to get angles or circles in the paintings. There are also quite a few books that Francis has been given by friends and admirers on the bookshelves. He's become quite a star in Paris since the Grand Palais show, and I've seen people come up to him in restaurants and cafés and ask for signatures or press some publication of their own on him. We were going down the rue de Seine the other day when a woman suddenly threw her arms round him and kissed him. I imagined they were good friends until he told me he hadn't the faintest idea who she was.

I suppose this kind of fame has come to Francis not only from all the exhibitions of his work and the books and countless articles about him in the press that have appeared over the years, but also from less obvious sources like the cinema.
Last Tango in Paris
, for instance, which has been hugely controversial and widely successful, was influenced in all kinds of ways by Francis's paintings, it seems, and it featured reproductions of two of them in the opening credits. Apparently the film's director, Bernardo Bertolucci, visited the Grand Palais show several times and wanted to incorporate some of Francis's colours, notably his
very distinctive orange, into
Last Tango
. I particularly like the fact that Bertolucci took Marlon Brando into the exhibition and suggested that Paul, his character in the film, should absorb as much as possible from Bacon's figures and especially from their faces, that were ‘eaten', Bertolucci suggested, ‘by something coming from the inside'.

I know Francis has been working on several pictures commemorating George's death, and I sometimes wonder whether the real reason why he wants a place in Paris (whether he himself is conscious of it or not) is to be close to that loss and that pain. One of the things that make Francis stand out, I think, is what you might call an ‘appetite' for suffering, which is perhaps as strong in him as his appetite for pleasure. He's said to me that he thinks that ‘an artist's sensibility should always be kept stretched', and sometimes one can actually sense the tension this must set up coming off him in waves. So I suppose that by living in Paris he now feels closer to the source of pain and that, artistically, he can feed off it.