Michael Peppiatt was twenty-one when he first met the now mythic shock painter Francis Bacon, then fifty-three, for an interview. From there they begun a life long friendship, spiky though it could be, and Peppiatt charts it all in 'Francis Bacon In Your Blood', a subjective memoir.
And what memories. Peppiatt seems to have remembered all of Bacon's cutting remarks, his witty retorts and his acid phrases. "Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends" was one of his most memorable sayings, probably because it so well distils Bacon's feeling for life. He was a great boozer; settling in dingy Soho clubs drinking wine after wine (that's bottles, not glasses) and gambling in casinos until his money ran out. He also seemed to know something about pain.
If you've ever seen a painting by Bacon then you will know that pain was his subject, the great existential questions as to why we suffer. Cadavers with wide open mouths on plinths and screaming bishops, he was no picturesque portrait painter. With his brush he could dissect a victim, blood streaming and with a vital viciousness that went beyond mere sadness.
Of his youth little is known and came to painting somewhat late, just after he was thirty. When asked how he became a painter he says:
"Well, I've spent so much of my life just drifting...from bar to bar, person to person. I often regret that I didn't have more discipline and concentrate myself when I was young. I mean, when you think of how many French artists...have been so concentrated from the start. I didn't really to paint at all seriously until the war. I did little before, but it was no good. When the war came, I was turned down because of this asthma of mine. So I had that time to just drift in and do nothing. It's true I'd been doing odd jobs to make my way- I worked in an office for a bit, then I tried to design some furniture. I even became someone's valet. But I had been thinking a great deal about painting. about how I might perhaps begin to make this thing work a little."
Worked it did. Bacon was one of the greatest British painters in the twentieth century who pulled no punches and did extraordinary works of art.
Though a great drinker he was also extremely hard working. He went over and over canvases and was always trying to go deeper into his subjects for many hours in the day. "One is never hard enough on oneself" he says. He was also a great lover of life, laughing until he cries and drinking bottles of champagne as "it's all we have" and that "for some reason, although I believe in nothing, my nervous system is filled with this optimism".
It's no wonder that Peppiatt feels surprised that he's drinking with one of the great masters of art as a friend and confidant. In fact for Peppiatt, Bacon is like a 'father figure' where he helped guided the young Cambridge student into maturity and worldliness.
Bacon is a great personality and looms large in these pages and though I wouldn't be so comfortable with meeting him, I am glad that he lived (to 82, 82!) and glad that Peppiatt recorded it all for us. Though Bacon is a spiky figure the friendship between the writer and painter is actually a tender one and an interesting one. His opinions on then current art trends and his place in it are fascinating glimpses into an uncommon mind. Yet Peppiatt remembers fairly of his father figure and doesn't write a hagiography as Bacon can be kneecapingly unpleasant and his treatment of those who he dislikes is visceral.
Reading this book made me feel like I was drinking with them, that close and personal is the tone of this book and it was one hell of a drinking session.
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