James Boswell has much to answer for. Proximity to genius is the sorest temptation to a writer. As is the desire to have your authorial name in the same breath as your biographical hero. This is Michael Peppiatt’s second stab at containing his lasting impressions of his wayward mentor Francis Bacon in a book. The first, Anatomy of an Enigma, was begun, furtively, while Bacon – who hated the idea of biography – was alive and published four years after his death in 1996. It was a full-scale investigative effort, beginning with the Bacon begat Bacon grandparental lineage and ending with the final acts of the artist’s much-mythologised “gilded gutter” life.
This volume is really the story of the story of that book – the tale of how, as a 21-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, Peppiatt inveigled his way into the painter’s Soho drinking circle and how he subsequently became, for 30 years, one of Bacon’s primary confidants. There were plenty of others, of course. Bacon was as promiscuous in his confessors as in every other aspect of his life. Daniel Farson and David Sylvester both have claims to being gospeller-in-chief to Bacon’s rigorous morning work regime and after-hours extremes. Peppiatt gives each his due here, but reminds his readers from time to time that it was he who was singled out as the artist’s amanuensis. John Deakin, Bacon’s chosen photographer, introduced the pair one alcoholic afternoon in 1963 in the French House pub; and it was Deakin who at a subsequent lunch drawled to Peppiatt what sounds in retrospect a lot like a fateful life sentence: “I hope you are getting it all down, my dear. One day it will be of such value… It’s incredible, but you’ve become a sort of Boswell to Francis. It’s simply marvellous. He talks to you about everything. Don’t screw it up, now kiddo. Remember, get it down.”
Get it down, Peppiatt does. Though quite how he managed to recall with such precision Bacon’s table talk, in the aftershock of lunches that invariably began with several bottles of champagne and ended in the derelict small hours, is one of those miracles of journalistic transcription that readers are invited to accept as an act of faith. Certainly Bacon, in Peppiatt’s hands, mostly sounds like Bacon ought to sound, bitchy and quick and wildly exuberant and maudlin by turns. And, as Peppiatt says, by way of explanation of his uncanny methods, Bacon’s anecdotes and philosophy were rarely for one night only. If you happened to be semi-comatose the first time they were uttered, there would always be another opportunity to catch them once the venue or the company had changed.
By the time Peppiatt met Bacon, on the premise of an interview for a student magazine, the artist was already hefting his legend from the Colony Club to Wheeler’s to the Ritz, taking on all comers. To the polo-necked student he looked like a living rite of passage. The necessity of the next three decades (and 400 pages) for Peppiatt lay mostly in how he would keep up, and stay interesting enough for the artist to want him around. His fluent French alone got him an entrée to the self-conscious salon of Sonia Orwell. He paid his respects to Lucian Freud, the only figure to whom Bacon appeared to defer; and somewhere along the way he grew up.
Or at least he grew up as much as Bacon, indefatigable master of revels, allowed. Peppiatt is good at exploring the power balance of his relationship with the artist, which in some ways is a shorthand for all writer/subject entanglements. He is retrospectively curious about the ways in which his own life has been both defined, enlivened and perhaps diminished by the association. Any act of biography involves a degree of self-abasement; it is based on the tacit acknowledgment that the life you are rapt by is of more interest than your own. For a long time Peppiatt lived in fear of being the “perpetual person from Porlock”, doorstepping Bacon at crucial moments and distracting him from his inspiration. Here though, you feel the conflicting appeal of this being Peppiatt’s own story – he dwells on the strictures of his parents, his academic and journalistic career, his successes and failures in love, his marriage and children – and affords them as much weight as Bacon’s passions. This is done in the somewhat desperate knowledge that none of it would be half so interesting were it not for the fact that all roads lead back to the artist’s infamous studio.
In other hands there might have been some comedy in this, but Peppiatt approaches his own life in something like the same tone he applies to Bacon: with a sense of its art historical significance. That desire to get it down, to not miss another night out in that most storied of London milieux – the bullying bar-room of Muriel Belcher’s Colony Club – can seem wearying in its devotion to duty. Bacon’s gift, Peppiatt suggests, was his ability to “raise the temperature” of any room and any gathering. Sometimes that heat became suffocating, and feels so even at one remove. Peppiatt is honest in his revelation that Bacon’s death when it came offered the hope of release; he could finally define himself. In fact, as he says, in death as in life, “Francis did not go away.” The author was branded; this book is the latest expression of the biographer as marked man.
Francis Bacon in Your Blood is published by Bloomsbury (£25). Click here to order it for £20
