One of the many, many aphorisms uttered by the painter Francis Bacon was that “You always have to go too far to get anywhere at all, in art or life.” The artist, who died in 1992, was as good as his word: he was an unashamed homosexual with a taste for brutal masochism and a relish for rough trade and high life; a gambler and bon viveur with a superhuman capacity for drink — a couple of bottles was barely a snifter; and a painter whose flayed imagery of the dark side of the human condition both outraged (Margaret Thatcher once described him as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures”) and enlightened. He had vast charisma, an acid tongue and deep pockets — and was liberal in his use of all of them.
In 1963, Michael Peppiatt was an entirely conventional, home counties-bred Cambridge undergraduate who had never heard of Bacon. When he took over a student magazine, however, and planned an art issue, he was told by a friend that he should interview the liveliest character in the modern British scene. Peppiatt tracked Bacon down to the French House pub in Soho where he introduced himself to the painter (and to his coterie, among them Lucian Freud, the photographer John Deakin and the boozer-writer Daniel Farson) and ended up accompanying him on the first of what would turn out to be innumerable epic benders. During a restaurant, pub and club crawl that wound its way from Soho to the grimmest parts of the Isle of Dogs in the East End, artist and student struck up an unlikely friendship that was to last for 30 years.
Peppiatt has gone on to become a respected art critic, publisher, writer and exhibition curator. It was Bacon though who, in Peppiatt’s words, was “the making of me”, a “father figure and the central influence on my life”. Francis Bacon in Your Blood is his sixth book about the artist and the most personal. The interview he started in 1963 in effect never really ended; every subsequent meeting was a continuation and deepening of their initial conversations. This memoir — or rather double portrait — of both men, is one of the best art books I have read, by turns atmospheric and waspishly gossipy but also profound and poignant. That Peppiatt emerges as every bit as interesting a figure as Bacon himself is meant entirely as a term of praise.
Peppiatt was in many ways an odd addition to Bacon’s world. Young and defiantly heterosexual he became “adept at brushing off the hand that strayed above the knee” and if, as he suspects, part of his appeal to Bacon lay in the possibility that he might be “turned”, the painter was wrong: the friendship survived nevertheless. Apart from the rackety glamour and the entrée into the orbit of gallerists, writers and artists that Bacon provided, Peppiatt saw in him a substitute for his own depressive father with whom he had an uncomfortable relationship (this was nothing compared with the strains of Bacon’s relationship with his own father, a racehorse-trainer, which were compounded by the fact that the would-be painter found him both sexually attractive and chased after his grooms). In Bacon, the “bleak despair and spectacular exuberance” also inherent in Peppiatt père were “miraculously held in check”.
Whatever the unspoken basis of their bond, Peppiatt became witness, confidant, friend, and in the queeny Deakin’s phrase “Bacon’s Boswell”. This book recounts their carousing and conversations in minute detail. As Bacon takes his protégé off to the Ritz, Wheeler’s or Claridges and the cork pops on the third or fourth bottle of Krug and Château Lynch-Bages (Bacon: “I might live in squalor but I don’t see why I should drink filth”) Peppiatt, deep in his cups, nevertheless notes the painter’s constant stream of sayings and opinions. With barely believable recall (in fact, I don’t believe it) he quotes whole paragraphs verbatim as Bacon holds forth about his “gilded gutter life”.
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The book is full of vivid scenes: there is Bacon wiping his cheeks with a handkerchief after being kissed in greeting by David Hockney (“I suppose he must have some ghastly disease”); Peppiatt asking George Dyer, the East End tough who was Bacon’s lover and subject (who later committed suicide) what he thought of the paintings of him — “I think they’re f***in’ ’orrible, reely f***in’ orful. An ’e’s getting all that money for ’em”; the foul-mouthed Muriel Belcher, châtelaine of the Colony Club, keeping her sottish members under near-control; the Krays at the height of their notoriety wanting to buy a painting but Bacon having none ready . . . All such episodes serving as proof for the author of Bacon’s worldview: “Life is nothing but a futile series of moments, so the more intense they are the better.”
While playing a full role in Bacon’s life, Peppiatt was busy making his own. This book is also the story of Peppiatt’s growing up and recounts with frankness the love affairs and romantic imbroglios, a move to Paris to be a writer (though what sort of writer he himself was never sure), and the reviewing and publishing jobs that waymarked his route to maturity. Although often fraught, in their nevertheless calmer tone they offer a useful counterpoint to the bibulous chaos of his meetings with Bacon.
And underlying it all is Bacon’s art. Peppiatt has written about it too much before to overdo it here but his and Bacon’s comments on it are incisive. For Peppiatt the power of the paintings lay in the way “the paint itself revealed pain”, while Bacon wanted each picture to look as though “it’s come directly off the nervous system”. Throughout, Peppiatt is in no doubt as to Bacon’s greatness.
The two men who emerge here are very different but share the traits of honesty, generosity and vulnerability and one finishes this wonderful, gamey book liking them both immensely. While reading Francis Bacon in Your Blood is undoubtedly easier on the liver than a night out with Bacon, one suspects it is just as entertaining.
Michael Prodger is senior research fellow in the History of Modern Art at the University of Buckingham
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Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir by Michael Peppiatt (Bloomsbury Circus, 401pp, £25). To buy this book for £19.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134