Free Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt Page A

people, places, drink and talk, I’ve got about as many kicks going as I can handle. Francis says you always have to go too far to get anywhere at all, in art or in life. I guess he’s right, he’s certainly shown it in his own art and life, and it certainly sounds more exciting than the kind of middle-class values and behaviour that I’ve been brought up with and, beyond a certain general rebelliousness, have never deeply questioned. I’ve had vaguely existentialist attitudes, gone to the cafés in Paris and worn the clothes, but I’ve never gone off the deep end and radically contested things. Nevertheless it’s quite clear I’m drawn like a moth to the flame to this flouting of convention, this going off the rails and doing things people say you shouldn’t. You have to drift to find yourself, Francis said, and this is what I feel I’m doing even though at times I know I’m out of my depth, withno safety cord beyond an alcoholic, sadomasochistic homosexual who likes me, and I’m terrified . . .
    At the time, I didn’t question the reasons why I was drawn so strongly to this man and his world, apart from an anxiety that the attraction belied a homosexuality so deep and so repressed in me that it might at any instant erupt, fully fledged, in camp gear and shrieking. Nor did I know then that Bacon was attracted above all to young heterosexual men whom he thought were just waiting to be ‘turned’, and that his attraction to me stemmed in part from the fact that I was so straight it didn’t even occur to me there could be any ambiguity about our friendship. I see now that since an
amitié amoureuse
requires no consummation it tends to last longer than a sexual one, though at several points in our long relationship this would also be put to the test. Otherwise the fact that I was regularly lured back to Bacon’s world – from a needy student existence, in which one was forever hoping to become someone, to a life of being fêted with champagne merely for being who one already was – needed little explanation.
    Although I could not have formulated it clearly at the time, the lure did in fact go much deeper than that. I had found not only a more exciting mode of life but an older man whom I admired increasingly for his freedom, vitality and artistic brilliance. What I needed, way beyond the flattery and luxury that I lapped up as a threadbare student, was a father figure. And in Francis I had found him.
    My parents, Edward and Elsa, were neither monstrous nor wantonly cruel. But in their increasingly loveless marriage a bitterness and despair had set in that corroded everything within their sphere. This mismatch, held together by middle-class convention and always on the point of unravelling, brought out the worst in each of them: in my mother a frivolous, snobbish superficiality, in my father a brooding egotism. I was nevertheless close to my overbearing father as a boy (apart from a painful spell with foster parents while my father was hospitalized). Butat the onset of adolescence my whole outlook changed: the docile child was replaced – as radically as my lank hair which suddenly bunched into curls – by an insolent, opinionated teenager whose main aim in existence was to oppose and wear down his father’s entrenched tyranny. Even though I was packed off to boarding school shortly thereafter, the war between us endured. I challenged his authority at every turn, mimicking him to my mother and sister and eventually – when he no longer dared hit me – to his face.
    But however hard I struggled to subvert him, my father always held the upper hand. Not only was he my father, but along with all his other sins he had inherited the family illness which he would, he promised, bequeath in turn to me. His father had suffered from ‘melancholia’ (which led, it was rumoured in the family, to his suicide); my