Free Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt

the people turn out to be kinds of cyphers out of which the whole book has been made.’
    â€˜But Francis, you always say, like Ezra Pound, that you have to make it new,’ I venture. ‘So wouldn’t you think of Joyce, who after all, completely reinvented technique – like Picasso, with allthese great stylistic fireworks – as the more important writer, the one who changed the course of literature?’
    â€˜Well yes, Joyce is marvellous,’ Francis concedes, as I thought he would. ‘It’s remarkable the way you get the whole feeling of Dublin in
Ulysses
. It really is like that, you know. And the way he just invented one technique after another. It’s an extraordinary thing to have done. But I myself feel he went too far in that last book of his. He made it quite abstract, I think, and that of course is bound to be less interesting. Because abstraction can never convey fact in a precise way. It can’t be made to convey anything precisely. In that sense, I prefer Proust. I know it’s ridiculous to compare them, but for some reason people do. With Proust, you get this profound change
within
tradition. That’s what I love, and of course the fact that it is the last great document – a deeply edited document, it’s true – about social behaviour. You just get everything in it, it’s a complete record. I’m not sure that kind of thing is at all possible any more. People have tried it of course, but I don’t think it’s worked. I imagine things have become terribly difficult since Proust and Joyce, just as they’ve become so difficult in painting. I don’t know. But I do think there’s less and less nowadays between the documentary and
great
art, the art that returns you more vividly to life.
    â€˜In painting, well, in all art I imagine, one always hopes to recreate experience in a way that makes it come back on to the nervous system with greater intensity. Makes it more specific and more direct. What one wants is that thing Valéry meant when he talked about giving the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. Ah, but whether one can actually ever get that is another story.’
    On other evenings we get caught up again in a round of bars like mice on a treadmill without stopping until exhaustion sets in and we part, grey with fatigue and barely able to stand, at dawn. I follow him now unquestioningly through secret Soho, from forgotten afternoon drinking dens to specialist clubs run by ageinglesbians, retired policemen or ex-prostitutes in marquise wigs. The Iron Lung gives way to the Music Box and the Maisonette. In one of them, presided over by a voluminous
patronne
with a black velvet beauty spot, they are playing Chubby Checker on the jukebox and to my delight, having delivered himself of a long, drunken diatribe against the futility of life, Francis is invited to dance by the bouncer figure who passed out at Wheeler’s and, without hesitation, he breaks into a supple, dainty twist that would not look out of place on a professional dance floor. In another crowded bar, while the evening is still young, a girl comes over to Francis and drops some little triangular capsules into his hand and he knocks them back without even looking at them. She puts some into my hand, too, with a knowing look, and I hesitate before discreetly dropping them on to the floor. I think of a story Francis has told me about how he rented a room in Chelsea when he was very young and found a large pill stuck in the floorboards and just swallowed it, and afterwards he needed to go to hospital to get it pumped out of him. (‘Why did you do it?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, a bit irritatedly. ‘Just for something to do, I suppose.’) So I’m relieved I’m not taking this risk, even though they’re probably purple hearts or bennies or some other upper, because I think, with all the new