IT WAS HARD TO BURY GEORGE. The authorities were eventually notified, and Miss Beston, who spoke perfect French—and knew the French—handled the situation upstairs with aplomb. The officials did not want to disturb the great man, but there would have to be a postmortem. Delays began to develop. The note of poignant farce, never far removed from George’s life, persisted after his death as Ronnie Dryden, George’s older stepbrother and the family leader, lost patience and threatened to come to Paris himself to bring his little brother home. Francis Chappell & Sons—the undertakers who, as Ronnie put it, “had a lot of business all over the world”—finally succeeded in shipping the body back to London, but the airport workers at Heathrow were on strike, so the coffin was diverted to Luton, north of London. “He had to go up to Manchester or somewhere,” said Lee Dyer, “and come back down through all the villages. It cost a fortune.” Bacon, who paid for everything, knew the family blamed him for George’s death. And he did not disagree. He was shuttered in with guilt.
It was probably Bacon who informed Mag of her son’s death. He responded on such occasions to the call of duty. Bacon always got along well with Mag, visiting her, said Lee Dyer, with “the usual ‘Hello, Mum,’ and he was only a few years older than my mother.” Bacon purchased a plot large enough to hold George’s parents and all his siblings, in the City of London Cemetery in east London. (“George was the first one there,” said Ronnie, years later. “Now the mother’s there, the father’s there, the brothers are there.”) Before the funeral, at an open-coffin viewing, George’s sister, Rita Isaacs, did not want to look at the body. A relative told her, “‘You’ve got to look,’ and I was shocked when I seen him because all his hair had gone grey and evidently he used to touch it up with man’s hair dye, Grecian 2000.”
The funeral took place on the 8th of November, two and a half weeks after George’s death. Rita Isaacs called it “massive.” Bacon arrived in a limousine with Miss Beston. Quite a few of the mourners were friends of Bacon’s. They did not attend simply to satisfy their curiosity or to support a friend. They valued the rare sweetness of George’s nature—he remained an innocent, behind the drink and the petty thievery. “The little church was packed with very, very large men who were undoubtedly on day-to-day terms with what Bacon called ‘the brutality of fact,’” wrote John Russell. “As the service proceeded, those men broke down, one after another in floods of uncontrollable tears.” But, wrote Russell, “neither then nor at the graveside did Bacon give away anything of his feelings.” He behaved with “a stoicism for which even Homer might have been hard put to find words.”
At the gravesite, Bacon and Miss Beston stood some distance apart. They did not want to intrude upon the family, but were also concerned about trouble from Ronnie Dryden, who was upset: “We was close, me and him, but he drifted away,” said Ronnie. “When he met that crowd what he got involved with, with Bacon and all them, he started getting drunk and that was his downfall. George, he changed into a different person. He was getting out of hand, he was getting drunk, he was getting abusive to people. It wasn’t Georgie.” Ronnie wanted to discuss the matter further with Bacon. “I was going to give him a clump, to be honest. It wasn’t Bacon’s fault, but in my mind it was. And the other brothers—Bobby and Terry and Patsy—were all there, and Lenny (Lee) and they said, ‘Oh, don’t,’ and my mother said, ‘Look, don’t you start.’ And I said, ‘Oh, all right then,’ and that was it and I let it go by.”
Miss Beston worked assiduously to defuse any difficulties with the family. When Rita walked up to Bacon at the funeral, she could hardly say her name before Miss Beston was giving her a telephone number and telling her to call anytime if she or the family should need anything. Not long after the funeral, Bacon gave the family the flat at Roland Gardens. “Bacon paid £8,010 for Roland Gardens,” said Lee Dyer. “And when George died I went to Roland Gardens with my mother, and Bacon said to my mother, ‘Don’t let this go, Mrs Dyer, for under £12,000.’ He said, ‘I paid eight grand for this.’ And the property was then put in the hands of the estate agents and his furniture was put in I believe into Christie’s or Sotheby’s, I’m not sure.” In the end, said Rita, the flat sold for £14,000, and the furniture fetched a good sum. The proceeds “kept my mother and father until they died.”
Bacon was inconsolable, his grief sharpened by remorse. “He was shattered by George’s death,” said Anne Dunn. “He felt tremendously responsible—he hadn’t realized that George was in the state that he was in.” Bacon’s friends closed protectively around him, in particular Sonia Orwell, who specialized in moments of emotional crisis. Not long after George’s death, David Plante saw Sonia at a party standing in front of the fireplace with Bacon, her face “drawn as with the fatigue of her seriousness” and “too occupied with [Bacon] to take me in.” Later, after Bacon left and Orwell was emboldened by drink, she went on a tirade about George’s death and Bacon’s acute feelings of guilt. “You don’t understand,” she shouted. “None of you understands what desperation is. You won’t help. I could kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill you all for your lack of sensitivity. He is suffering. Does any one of you care? Do you ring him up? Fuck all if you do.’” Sonia wrote to Michel Leiris about Bacon: “We talked about George and guilt for a very long time.”
The death of a lover before each of his two retrospectives looked very much, Bacon acknowledged, “like a Greek tragedy.” Or, to sceptics, like Grand Guignol. In any case, George’s death was much more vivid than Lacy’s had been in distant Tangier. The punishing gods, demanding a sacrifice, were edging closer. Most people assumed George committed suicide. His death seemed too well timed and positioned to be otherwise: George dead on the loo, in a fit of existential pique, on the occasion of his lover’s apotheosis. They wondered: was this an act of revenge? Some people close to the situation doubted that he was serious about suicide. Drink made him hot-tempered and capricious, and he had taken more or less serious overdoses in New York and London. But a constitution already gravely weakened by years of heavy drinking and smoking—the postmortem indicated liver damage—might also not tolerate an innocent ingestion of alcohol and barbiturates. Sonia Orwell, who read the coroner’s report, resolutely maintained that George’s death was an accident. And Paul Brass, the doctor who treated both George and Bacon in London, reported that George rarely took sleeping pills and was not aware of the power of Tuinal. Brass believed that George—upset by a row, woozy with drink, and desiring sleep—mistakenly gulped a few too many pills, which, combined with the elevated amounts of alcohol in his weakened system, killed him. In the end, no one could be certain what happened. It may well have been just another drunken muddle.
At first, Bacon publicly rejected the idea of suicide. Suicide was too painful a rebuke, with its implicit suggestion that Bacon failed to look after his younger (and weaker) lover. George’s family also wanted to believe that George, only thirty-seven years old, died of natural causes. The postmortem determined that he died of a heart attack, the family was informed, with additional signs of cirrhosis. When the New Statesman published a piece the day after Dyer’s funeral alluding to suicide, Bacon took legal action, forcing the journalist to print a retraction that read: “The death of Francis Bacon’s friend George Dyer has been certified as due to heart failure, and I am profoundly sorry to have made the totally mistaken assumption in my article last week that he took his own life.” Bacon was determined to protect George after his death.
Privately, Bacon did not shirk responsibility. Michael Peppiatt, who met him for lunch at Wheeler’s a few weeks after George’s death, thought he looked dreadful—not just pale but “almost translucent, with a strange bluish hue as if he were deathly cold.” He would stare into the middle distance and then circle back again and again to the ways in which he might have prevented George’s death had he been more observant. More than ever, Bacon turned to Dr Brass for help during this crisis. Along with Librium and the high blood pressure medication that he regularly prescribed for Bacon, the doctor now added two powerful new drugs. Drinamyl was an antidepressant—extremely habit-forming—that also led to weight loss. (It was discontinued in 1983.) Bacon, who usually struggled to keep his weight down, now lost so many pounds that he looked almost anorexic. The second drug, Surmontil, was both an antidepressant and a sedative. Not surprisingly, Bacon also drank. One night, he became blindingly drunk in the Caves de France, a bar in the building next door to the Colony that was once described as possessing “an atmosphere almost solid with failure.” When he tried to move on to the Colony, “he slipped on the stairs and one of the metal strips hit the right side of his eye and put it half out,” remembered a fellow drinker. “Francis forced it back in and went to a hospital.” It was this fall that inspired Bacon’s 1972 Self-Portrait with Injured Eye and several more portraits in which dark patches ate into his cheek.
To exorcise George’s ghost—or perhaps welcome it—Bacon began in 1972 to return regularly to the Hôtel des Saints-Pères where, said Françoise Salmon, who was employed at the hotel in the early 1970s, he usually asked for the suite in which George died. He sometimes booked for two weeks. He would walk through the same hotel lobby, strangers passing him by, where George and the rest of the Bacon party once walked. He would sit on the loo where George died, sleep in the bed where George had lain with the rent boy with smelly feet. Bacon, always a poor sleeper, left himself open, during this private ritual of expiation, to the night thoughts most people would do anything to avoid, enclosing himself in the ghostly room with only the vague hotel sounds to keep him company. Bacon appeared to Salmon “never a very, very happy person,” but she understood his need to return. She had joined the staff not long after George’s death and knew the situation “I think it’s something that made Mr Bacon want to come back to this hotel,” she said. “People kept it quiet, but we knew … An accident that happens in a hotel where there are other people, it’s something we’d try to hush up a bit … It was a link that bound Mr Bacon to the hotel and the management, let’s say. Perhaps he liked the way the management handled it at the time. It was a rather shocking event, rather striking.”
It may have been during this disorienting time that Bacon was suddenly overcome by a religious experience in the South of France. He told Wirth-Miller what happened, but swore him to secrecy. Many years later, Denis let the fact slip to a friend named David Wallace, an appealing young man and aspiring journalist in Wivenhoe who, while not homosexual, was befriended by Dicky and Denis. Sometimes, Denis asked Wallace to go to dinner with Francis when he and Dicky were not there and Bacon was alone. The religious experience happened, Wirth-Miller told Wallace, during the 1960s or early 1970s. “Denis never told me what [Bacon’s] religious experience was, other than he indicated it happened somewhere in southern France. I got a feeling it might have been relating to a building, maybe a church, a cathedral, something like that, but Francis definitely had a massive religious experience … I think there was a loss of control. I don’t know whether Denis was present, or Francis told Denis. Denis indicated to me that I shouldn’t mention it [to Bacon]. But I did.”
Wallace brought up the subject one evening when he was having dinner with Bacon in Le Talbooth in Dedham, not far from Wivenhoe. “He was very comfortable talking about film,” said Wallace, who took a particular interest in films. “In particular, he wanted to talk about Eisenstein. He did say to me that there was a sort of point where he could have done something different in his career. He might have talked about maybe wanting to have been a filmmaker.” It was during easygoing talk of this kind that Wallace alluded to Bacon’s religious experience “in the most oblique way. Honestly, I was very circumspect.” But Bacon, said Wallace, was “on to it instantly. It was like a spider’s web. I touched it on the outermost perimeter, but he instantly knew where this was going.” Bacon stared furiously at Wallace, not saying a word. “It was one of the most powerful things that ever happened to me in my life,” Wallace said. “I didn’t know how he could be so angry, how he could put me in such fear, but there was just the way he looked at you, I can remember being … I was very scared: I’ve never been terrified like that before. You can meet people who are pretty scary, but this was the scariest. A small man, he wasn’t a big bloke, suddenly being able to create that kind of anger and fear in you is quite astonishing. Denis couldn’t make me feel scared like that. But this guy … with his little leather jacket sitting there … Yes, a darkness … I got the feeling that the genie came out of the bottle for a moment and then was rammed back. So any attempt to fiddle around with the stopper was not welcome.”
Bacon remained an avowed atheist, but the religious moment he experienced to Denis indicated just how troubled he could become about his years with George. It also suggested that he was instinctively susceptible to religious and spiritual feeling: that, indeed, his rage at Christianity was more that of an enraged or rejected lover than of an indifferent sceptic. Helen Lessore, an astute friend of Bacon’s, once wrote: “For the truth is that Bacon’s works are great religious paintings. The very agony of his unbelief becomes so acute that, by the intensity of its involvement with final questions, the negative becomes as religious as the positive.”
With time, Bacon resumed his regular life, but he could not easily shake off two shadows. One, of course, was George. The other was the image of himself as a celebrity, the hard-living artist whose East End lover killed himself on the loo. Some people now looked at Bacon with gossip in their eyes, titillated by the dark and salacious. Eventually, Bacon also referred to George’s death as a suicide. He was not yielding to the celebrity gossip, however, but demonstrating his willingness to face the most brutal kind of fact and story. In the immediate aftermath of George’s death, he sought escape and spoke of moving elsewhere—and not only to Paris—as if he might actually recast his life. In 1972, he visited his old friend Janetta, who now lived in a fine house in Marbella, Spain, with her new husband, Jaime Parladé, a noted decorator and Andalusian grandee (the 3rd Marques of Apezteguia). During this period, Bacon also mused about moving to Athens. “Francis said he was fed-up with living in London and was thinking of moving to Greece, to live in Athens,” recalled the Australian artist Jeffrey Smart, after a lunch with Bacon. “I warned him that my American and English friends there had complained that they became depressed with the life there—too much promiscuity and heavy drinking. Francis replied that was just his ideal sort of life and he added, ‘And you know, I never get depressed.’”
George’s death led to important work. In under two years, Bacon painted four triptychs on the subject—a modern meditation on death. The first was Triptych—In Memory of George Dyer (1971), painted so soon after Bacon’s return home from the retrospective that he was still writing thank-you notes to friends. The triptych contained elements of illustration and narrative that Bacon ordinarily disparaged. In the central panel, he depicted the staircase of the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, not only capturing the lovely, musty feeling of a staircase in an old Left Bank hotel but also endowing the passageway with a haunting allegorical power. The steps rise, but towards a bare bulb. At the door to his hotel room George stood looking up the stairs. Death was already claiming him, his body filling with shadow except for one heroically muscled arm about to turn the key in the lock. In the left panel, Bacon painted George cast on his side, another image of wrestling, but here George was tangled up in death, a shadow spilling from his body and his face the pulpy colour that Terry Miles noticed. In the right panel, Bacon depicted George as melting or dissolving—in a kind of draining away—from what could be a painting (or mirrored image) of himself. The melting George appeared more vivid —and alive—than the static standing image.
Many of the details probably had a personal significance for Bacon. To a viewer knowing nothing of the circumstances, such details could nonetheless provoke a contemplative walkabout in the neighbourhood of death. Two scraps of newspaper lie under George’s feet, for example, partly concealed by the deathly darkness emanating from him. This newspaper could equally suggest the attention generated by the Grand Palais show, the fading of fame, and the corruption of matter. Between the two scraps of newspaper Bacon left (or painted) a seemingly accidental drip of white paint. Why? It visually awakened the floor of the landing, which would otherwise be too dark, but it also evoked an accident, mistake, or forgotten detail. Wasn’t death often a kind of unexpected leak? Bacon’s focus on the key at the door unlocked many allusions, of course, notably to Picasso’s Dinard period, where the key that opens the bath hut also provided entry into the hidden recesses of love. George, who once entered Bacon’s “hut” through the skylight—or so the story went—and found a forbidden love was now unlocking the other great, dark, and mysterious door. The key may also have been suggested by two poems of T. S. Eliot. A figure climbs a staircase in Ash Wednesday all the while “struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears / The deceitful face of hope and of despair.” And in The Waste Land:
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison …
While the first triptych—painted when Bacon was wracked by “if onlys”—recalled the moment when the turn of the key might have been stopped, the second, Triptych August 1972, was stripped of such illustration and narrative detail. It was instead an otherworldly dream of formal grandeur in which death appears as spare, austere, and desolate. In the side panels, George sat bare-chested on a bentwood chair, placed on what resembled a stage, in front of a large, cold rectangle of darkness that starkly contrasts with his still-living body. In these two panels, George leaked a pinkish shadow, full of visual incident, that formed a lively shape; a diagonal black space sealed him off, as a stage might, from the viewer. In the central panel, however, there was no such separation. The stage pitched towards the viewer. George’s body had fallen from the chair and was now a dead tangle of dissolving form. Although the body in each of the three panels leaked a shadow, the shadow in this central panel appeared shockingly still. It contained no visual incident and, instead of pink, was a cold and declarative opaque violet. There have been many images of death in the history of art, but none like Bacon’s violet.
The third triptych commemorating George, Three Portraits—Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer; Self-Portrait; Portrait of Lucian Freud (1973), was a dispassionate contemplation of love and friendship during a time of death. Bacon painted himself in the centre, looking straight ahead, flanked by George (on the left) and Freud (on the right). Freud and Bacon were casually dressed while the dead Dyer appeared in his underpants, as if about to pose for Bacon. Each figure was draining a black shadow; each was illuminated by a bare bulb. In the George panel, an image of Bacon was pinned to the wall. In the Freud panel, an image of George was similarly pinned to the wall. Why? Bacon would have his private reasons, of course, and viewers contemplating the picture could as usual answer the question in different ways, never conclusively, which was an apt description of the emotional complexities of love and friendship. It was only in the fourth and final triptych, Triptych May–June 1973, that Bacon—who so often hoped to touch the deepest nerve—finally forced himself to face the brute fact of sink and toilet. In this central panel, however, he also pulled from the scene (like a medium) an extraordinary death shadow. Bacon later told the art historian Hugh Davies he “regretted the sensational nature” of his George triptychs but felt compelled to do them to confront his guilt, as if he were continuing to play his fated part in this personal tragedy.
Bacon drew closer to his family. He liked to complain of the intrusion upon his time when they visited from South Africa, but he also seemed pleased to see them. Besides, they were well-mannered and understood that he required time alone. Wendy Knott, the wife of Ianthe’s son Keith, called Francis “welcoming, but you mustn’t stay too long.” Bacon would always make an effort to meet family members at Heathrow, and he would book lunches and dinners. “But you could see that after a couple of days … he would become a little bit abrupt.” He might even announce: “Got to go and paint.” Unconcerned about the gentrification of Narrow Street, Bacon’s family liked to stay in the impeccable house on Narrow Street with the perfect river view. Bacon took pride that the house was more to his sister’s taste than “my dump in Reece Mews.” With Sonia Orwell’s help, he sometimes organized a picnic on the jetty or took them to the Grapes.
In 1973, Ianthe’s son Harley Knott—a young man on his first trip to London—knocked on the door to Reece Mews with two friends. “He told us to come up for a quick drink.” Then Bacon spent the next few days showing Harley the sights. Perhaps he was reliving, in part, his own early days in London. He remained always aware of what a young man might enjoy. “He took me to the V&A Museum. He took me to Greenwich to see the Cutty Sark. We went to Madame Tussauds. He was looking at somebody [real] and said, ‘Is that a person or is that wax?’ He had a wonderful sense of humour. We also went to the planetarium together. He was just fascinated by all this stuff.” Bacon was probably not all that fascinated, in fact, but he could join in another’s pleasure. Bacon did not insulate Harley from his drinking or his less reputable haunts, which would naturally be of great interest to many young men. “The first place he took me to was the York Minster [the French] and the Colony Room.” They also went to Crockfords, the elegant casino. Bacon judged Charlie Chester’s, located near the Colony, a bit rough-and-ready for a young man from Rhodesia. According to Harley, Bacon “got this funny look on his face when he gambled—this glassy-eyed look. He used to walk along with these great wads of notes. He used to just peel them off, as if they were lettuce leaves. He would throw the money on the table. He’d be totally focused on it. Then afterwards he said, ‘My failure was greed. Greed was my failure.’”
Harley also observed the practised survival instincts of an experienced drinker. “He knew exactly what he was doing. He used to get drunk and he would say, ‘I’m really hungry now.’ We’d had a meal but he was really hungry. He ordered himself bacon and eggs.” He tolerated no assistance when he couldn’t get the door open at Reece Mews. “I tried to take the keys away from him and he slapped me. He said, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m all right.’ And he went lumbering up the stairs.” Bacon included Harley in dinners and lunches with friends, but also sensed that his nephew might prefer people his own age and, like a conscientious parent, took the trouble to arrange meetings and gatherings. Harley considered his uncle “such a kind man,” who “looked you straight in the face as if you were the most important person in the world to him. And he did so much good. When I used to arrive he’d give me a thousand pounds. I mean, a thousand pounds for a poor kid from Rhodesia, where money was very tight.”
The highlight of Harley’s first trip to London was Christmas Day. He joined his uncle, Muriel Belcher, Muriel’s Jamaican girlfriend, Carmel, and Ian Board—the barman at the Colony—for a Christmas feast at a cheerfully decorated hotel near St. James’s Park. Bacon almost invariably left London during the holidays, both to avoid invitations from people who might feel obliged to take him in and also to shield himself from family treacle. Perhaps, this time, he felt obliged to look after Harley. After the feast, Bacon took the group to Narrow Street. “It was cold,” said Harley, “and everyone was confined and we had wonderful conversations. He was a fantastic conversationalist. He knew everything about everything. We used to speak about Kierkegaard and existentialism and the ambivalence of Nietzsche. He thought that Nietzsche was absolutely fantastic.”
After George’s death, Bacon often saw his “brothers” Denis and Lucian. He mixed his real and adopted families, taking both Ianthe and Harley to Wivenhoe on separate occasions, and he playfully taught his nephew some manners. “We had a magnificent roast beef at Denis’s,” said Harley. “The port was going around the table. The port came to me and I put it down on the table. And Uncle Francis said, ‘You never put the port down on the table. You hand it around until the butler takes it.’” Ianthe twice accompanied Bacon to Wivenhoe. “We went over to the boats and walked around and talked—and drank. There was always a joke. Francis had painted a dog and I think Denis had painted a dog, hadn’t he? There was a joke about who had the better dog.” Ianthe probably did not note the edge in their joking. Bacon and Denis remained close friends after George’s death, each the confidant of the other, and Bacon willingly helped Denis with galleries. They still sometimes worked together in the studio behind the Storehouse while, next door, Dicky craned over his spidery drawings. But Bacon could not quite pretend to admire Denis’s landscapes—not the way Denis admired the work of the artist who exhibited at the Grand Palais.
Dicky and Denis were “family” with whom Bacon was comfortable enough to be on his worst behaviour, and the roaring pub life of the little town provided a perfect place to discharge tension. (If Bacon went to Wivenhoe to recover from London, he also went to London to recover from Wivenhoe.) “We had the most extraordinary pub culture [in Wivenhoe],” said Pam Dan. “In those days there were lots of quite good artists in my age group. There was a post-Chelsea feel to the pubs. We had such a very exciting variety of people coming to the pubs because of the university [the University of Essex, which was nearby and had been founded in 1963] … The artists were here, the sculptors and writers and music people were here.” There was even a Wivenhoe Arts Club, run by the editor of The Spectator, George Gale. “Half of Fleet Street used to come down,” said Dan. “Kingsley Amis would be playing the piano. And Peregrine [Worsthorne, then deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph] and Francis and everyone were all very civil to each other.”
Still, the unstable family triangle of Dicky, Denis, and Francis often cracked open, according to Dan and to Celia Hirst, a blues and jazz singer who moved to Wivenhoe in 1975. “Three men each with a different and incredibly strong personality,” said Dan. “Francis, Denis—and Dicky was trying to sort it all out.” If Dicky was sometimes bitchy, she said, Denis could be “downright rude.” Dicky had a “quirky sense of humour, a little bit surrealistic.” Denis in turn was wholly unpredictable. “You never knew what Denis would come out with … He could be very nice … or else blow your head off with words.” According to Hurst, Dicky would sometimes retreat to the house of the local doctor, Edward Palmer, where his wife, Hally, “would say, ‘Come in, Dicky. Now what’s wrong?’ And Dicky would say, ‘I can’t stand that man [Denis] anymore. I can’t bear to go back.’” Dicky would sometimes hole up inside the Scheregate Hotel in Colchester, a haven of provincial gentility, in order to dry out and decompress. During the scenes between Dicky and Denis, or Francis and Denis, or among Francis, Denis, and Dicky, Bacon was “gentlemanly in this funny sort of way,” said Dan. “It would be Denis doing most of the shouting. And annoying people.” Only rarely was Bacon as rude as Wirth-Miller—but then “ruder, actually,” said Hurst. “He would begin to act important. He would wonder why he was trapped with these people.”
Sometimes, when Bacon wanted to escape London on a weekend, he would ask Terry Danziger Miles from Marlborough to drive him to Hintlesham Hall, in Suffolk, not far from Dicky and Denis’s house in Wivenhoe. The chef Robert Carrier had opened a restaurant and hotel there in the summer of 1972, on a lovely Georgian estate that he painstakingly renovated. Carrier was “what is now known as a celebrity chef,” said Miles. “And Hintlesham Hall was a big baronial mansion that Robert had turned into a fantastic restaurant and sort of guest house. It was the first of the sort of Michelin-star restaurants in that area. And he lived on the upper floors.” Carrier was also a Colony member who got along well with Bacon and Muriel’s other favourites. “Our company had this big shooting brake,” said Miles. It was a Vauxhall estate “that had lift-up seats in the back so you had six standard—two and the driver in the front on the bench seat and three on the next bench seat—and then you had these two lift-up seats in the back.” In London, seven people would get into the vehicle. “It would start with me picking up Francis, going round to Muriel’s flat, where she would have an entourage there, already having champagne or whatever, and this would be seven in the morning. Then after drinks everyone would pile into the car.”
The drive was nightmarish, almost four hours, “because going out east,” said Miles, there were “no decent roadways.” They would therefore stop at a pub, or the house of a friend, or a place in Suffolk they called Auntie Mary’s. Auntie was a homosexual man who in good weather maintained a weekend open house. “You would never know who you would get there, and maybe it would be artists in the region or just local people, anybody could go,” said Miles. “He opened the doors at ten in the morning and closed whenever everybody went. And it had a pool, and in the summer people would be in and out of the pool.” Auntie Mary’s was not far from Wivenhoe, and Dicky and Denis often met up with the entourage there. “It was always a big palaver when Denis arrived,” said Miles, “coming in and starting in on Francis about this that or the other.” The group might then continue to Hintlesham Hall, where for Bacon the draw was less Robert Carrier and his restaurant than the British-American jazz singer Annie Ross, a regular at the Colony whom Bacon particularly liked. (She would sometimes sing for free at Muriel’s.) Ross also liked Bacon. He seemed “slight” to her; she sensed, as some women did, his vulnerability. “He was always gentle to me. He was sensitive. And charming. He could charm the birds off the trees, and funny.” Whenever Ross was performing for a day or two at Hintlesham Hall, said Miles, “Francis with his loyalty would want to go see her.”
Ross often performed during a lunch prepared for people who bought tickets. Then the real party began. “[Bacon] had the most impeccable taste,” said Ross. “We would do a show [for the public] and then afterwards a sumptuous private meal and sit around and drink brandy.” Usually, it was about twenty or twenty-five people at the private party, friends of Annie’s or Carrier’s or Bacon’s, “all played by ear by Carrier,” said Ross, “about when there should be food and when drink. One of those English afternoons when lunch merges into dinner and the party just keeps going.” At the Colony, Bacon once approached Ross just to tell her how much he loved her music: “I think I told a story and [Bacon] liked that.” Terry Miles was never excluded from these private parties. “The minute you drop in you’re no longer a driver,” he said. “You were, ‘Terry, come on’ and off you went.”
Bacon would also bring his family to see Lucian Freud. The two artists remained so comfortable together, in the early 1970s, that each seemed to invite the other into his work. One day Freud came to Reece Mews, said Harley, and began “speaking to [Bacon] about one of his paintings. About how he thought that he should [paint] something there.” Later, they went to dinner at Freud’s place, and Freud, as if drawing back a curtain, “showed me that picture [Two Figures (1953), sometimes called The Wrestlers].” If Bacon happened to be queening at the Colony, he would immediately drop the theatrical play of voices and affectation whenever Freud arrived. The two men would instead retire to a corner to catch up and discuss art. One time, the painter Timothy Behrens was at the Colony with Bacon and “a group of his hangers-on” when one of them said, “What’s the matter, Francis? You’re not your usual brilliant self”:
At this point Lucian came in, but Francis had his back to him so didn’t see him. Francis said to the man in his most mannered style, “If you must know, duckie, I’ve got the curse.” Lucian, who was embarrassed by that side of Francis, pretended not to have heard, but he must have done because the Colony was such a small space. Then Francis turned round and saw Lucian standing there. He dropped the gang like a stone and retreated into a corner with Lucian. A bit later I joined them there. They were talking as usual about Velázquez, Giacometti, risk, danger and so on, as if the awkward little incident had never happened.
Annie Freud believed a powerful chemistry existed between the two men. “Theirs was a deep love.” They had eyes only for each other when they were together, she said, and the relationship appeared almost physical. “I’ll tell you something that Dad said about Francis that was so lovely,” she said. “He said he had the most sensuous forearms. That is lover-like, isn’t it?” In the 1970s, she would occasionally join her father and Bacon at Wheeler’s. At one dinner,
Francis was there, and Dad was there and he was telling a story about being in Paris, when he hung out with Giacometti and Picasso and all these different people. And they were all talking about all the kinds of girls they liked. And one of them said that he didn’t like girls who really really liked him; he preferred girls who didn’t like him all that much because it was so difficult when somebody really liked you and he preferred girls that didn’t like him very much and apparently Giacometti’s younger brother, Diego, said, “Moi, je préfère la chèvre. Me, I prefer the goat.” And that’s the sort of conversation they had. It was flashy, it was like being at the theatre. It was like a kind of public verbal love-making—telling stories, and being absolutely scandalous and looking fantastic, and attracting attention and showing off. They were together a lot. Dinner after dinner after dinner after dinner.
Earlier in their relationship, Freud had been known for meticulously made paintings, often likened to the art of the Northern Renaissance. A small but dedicated circle of collectors admired the delicate melancholy of his art and draughtsmanship. But his reputation languished during the 1960s. His style then began to change—under the influence, many believed, of Bacon, and perhaps of Frank Auerbach. Although he remained as meticulous as ever, studying his models for hours on end, Freud developed a more visceral feeling for the body. His paint became tumid; he presented his models in sometimes grotesque or vulnerable poses. Anne Dunn believed that Freud—however assertive his social performance—remained artistically timid during the 1950s and sought the approval of the keepers of taste, such as Kenneth Clark. Bacon’s brave example and fleshy art, she said, helped him develop a more confrontational style. She considered Freud’s 1963–64 portrait of John Deakin—a man of rumpled flesh and indelicate line—a key indicator of the change.
Initially, Freud’s shifting style attracted little interest. His sales were even worse than Bacon’s. His obsessive womanizing also bothered some people in the society he frequented. According to James Kirkman, who worked at the Marlborough gallery from 1962 until the early 1970s, the early shows of Freud were “very unprofitable, and Marlborough liked to look at the bottom line. Lucian liked to borrow back the work he’d done in the previous five years, so there wasn’t much at the gallery, and he didn’t paint very much in those days, so it wasn’t very profitable, and nobody cared a hoot about him, I can tell you that. He was pretty much disliked by everyone on a personal and on a painting level.” Bacon did not agree. In 1972, he sent Freud a cable—Freud maintained no street address or telephone, and even his children communicated with him by telegram—to congratulate him on his recent Marlborough exhibition. “Your show looks marvellous stop Can you come to lunch at Wheelers at one o’clock tomorrow and see Warhol film afterwards stop Francis.”
Freud left Marlborough for the gallery of Anthony d’Offay, one of the critical art dealers of the next generation, in 1972. The move suggested a refreshed determination on Freud’s part to succeed not only in the studio but also in the larger world. D’Offay, working with Kirkman, began to increase Freud’s profile. Two years later, in April 1974, came Freud’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, opened in 1968 as part of the Southbank Centre. The show aroused a great deal of attention. It travelled to Bristol, Birmingham, and Leeds. Freud had been viewed as “Francis Bacon’s sort of pet,” said d’Offay. “And then with the show at the Hayward, it really opened up, and he was seen for the first time as a painter in his own right.” Freud’s changing fortunes had no perceptible impact on his friendship with Bacon, but their relationship—like that between Bacon and Wirth-Miller—developed some edges. Lucian a widely admired artist? Bacon had never thought of him like that. Francis a Parisian divinity? Lucian did not think of him in those terms.
Freud and Bacon, like any couple, maintained certain traditions and unvoiced understandings that time, age, and fortune could affect. The weaknesses each discerned in the other, once perhaps easily set aside, slowly became more annoying. The sycophants who gathered around Bacon exasperated Freud (and also Wirth-Miller), and neither Bacon nor Freud easily tolerated the other’s sexual obsessions. Freud was disconcerted by Bacon’s interest in rough trade and Bacon bewildered by Freud’s obsession with the high-born and dull. Why this endless pursuit of young but needy aristocratic girls? Why this taste for cockney boys? Christopher Gibbs, with his sharp eye for the society of his time, contrasted the two: Bacon was “not a social mountaineer like Lucian—Lucian climbing to the last gasp.”
Bacon also found Freud’s refusal to acknowledge any kind of “duty” annoying. Freud “shunned dutifulness,” said the artist Alice Weldon, who knew him well; and while his values might be “very good in some respects and better than those of other people,” he had no scruples about trying to seduce women in committed relationships, even among his friends. Nor did he feel obliged to honour certain other implicit understandings. It dismayed Bacon that Freud would not loan Two Figures to a later exhibition of Bacon’s work. When Valerie Beston wrote to Freud—yet again—requesting the loan of the painting, Freud wrote a charming reply:
Dear VB, Thank you for your letter. There has never been a show of any great painters work without at least one masterpiece missing. Painters through the ages have been affected and inspired by reproductions. Francis, in all the time he spent at Ostia never once went to look at the Velasquez Pope the source of many of his works preferring to rely on photographs. I really love “the wrestlers” and need it here to enrich my privacy. Love Lucian.
No doubt Bacon also recognized the compliment embedded in the refusal. Freud hung the painting where a chaste man might hang a crucifix. The painting was steeped in art, love, and flesh. It had the muscle of sexual obsession. The mouth of the submissive “wrestler” was opened in a smile that with uncanny precision described the space between pain and pleasure. For Freud the picture was a magical touchstone, more difficult to let go of than a lover. When his longtime close friend Alice Weldon asked why he did not loan the painting, he replied, “It wouldn’t be the same when it came back.”
After the show at the Grand Palais, the atmosphere at the Colony changed. Muriel did not usually acknowledge reputation, but by the early 1970s when “Daughter” arrived she would drily announce, “Oh, royalty’s arrived.” “Most of the time when [Bacon] was in London, he did come here often,” said David Marrion, who worked with Ian Board behind the bar. “He would go out for lunch or whatever. There would always be a buzz around at the time if he was in the area, or ‘the Village,’ as it’s called. People would say ‘Francis is around.’” The old-timers, “Muriel’s boys,” were now beginning to fade, and a new wave, including many younger artists, were coming into the club. Bacon paid for drinks less often than he once did. “He would say hello to everyone, but he didn’t want to get in a conversation with everyone,” said Marrion. “He’d never stay by the bar on his own, ’cause he didn’t want to attract people around him. He didn’t want people sort of coming up to talk to him—‘Oh, thank you for the drink.’ He liked the people he wanted to talk to and he would choose what people.” Bacon, lonely after George’s death, increasingly arrived with the entourage Lucian and Denis detested. When Denis told him he “only had sycophants for friends,” Bacon replied: “I wonder Dicky doesn’t cut your throat.”
Bacon’s own sense of mortality was underscored in January 1974 when he developed gallbladder colic, which, said Dr Brass, was “known to be terribly painful.” The year before, Bacon had some gallstones removed but that had not ended his troubles. He tried to conceal the subsequent operation from his friends. The prospect of death did not especially frighten him, and he was not squeamish about blood or pain, but he had a dread of hospitals. The enclosed atmosphere of the sickroom recalled his childhood—the smell of illness, the hush of voices, the administering of medicine. A few months after George’s death, John Deakin contracted lung cancer. After he underwent a successful operation, Bacon bought him a trip to Brighton to convalesce. Deakin was an essential piece of Bacon’s world—and not just because he provided photographs of Isabel, Henrietta, and George. He came from “before,” and he was a master, as was Bacon, of what Hugh Davies called “the unrehearsed face.” He did not seek fame and stored his negatives under his bed. 99 per cent of people never become themselves, Bacon liked to say, remaining passive creatures who wait to be entertained. Bacon later corrected himself. It was 99.99 per cent. And Deakin was among the .01 per cent.
In Brighton, the incorrigible Deakin went out drinking, which precipitated a massive heart attack. Before he died, Deakin informed the hospital—in a final stroke of black humour—that Bacon was his next of kin. It was the “last dirty trick,” Bacon told his friends in Soho, “he played on me.” Bacon was working on the paintings triggered by George’s death when, in May 1972, he heard the news about Deakin. He travelled to the Brighton mortuary to identify the body. Later, at the Colony, the photographer Bruce Bernard asked him: “Was it alarming to see someone you’ve known for years dead? How did you feel?” The question annoyed Bacon, as questions about feelings often did. Such questions implied that he was vulnerable—that he must be predictably horrified, moved, sad, poignant, overwhelmed, teary. In a full and flutey register, Bacon sang out, “It was the first time I’ve ever seen him with his mouth closed.”
One death may inform another. Bacon was the last left alive of the three travellers who once set out together for Greece. His young lover George was dead. His old Colony comrade was now dead. And Deakin was three years his junior. Bacon began complaining, only partly in jest, that everyone seemed to be dying—that the reason he painted self-portraits was because no one was left alive to paint. Not long after George’s death, Thomas Blackburn—the intense poet with whom Bacon had a brief affair in the late 1940s and early ’50s—staged a reunion with Bacon at the Colony. They had not seen each other for years. Blackburn brought his daughter, Julia, who described the meeting in The Three of Us: A Family Story. Her father arrived first, waiting nervously at the bar for the celebrated painter. “Then Francis entered the room,” she wrote, “four or five young men dancing attendance, like a flurry of courtiers around their king.” Bacon, upon seeing “Tony,” abandoned his entourage and became himself. “‘My god, Tony!’ he said, ‘you look awful! You used to be so beautiful!’ ‘You look pretty horrible yourself,’ said my father hopefully, bobbing up and down like a courting bird, his head bent slightly forward and his mouth pulled into a tight grin. Francis was dressed in a black leather biker’s jacket and black leather trousers, while my father had put on his best white linen suit, which was by now far too tight for him so that his arms, his chest and his legs seemed to be trying to burst out from the confines of the cloth.” Blackburn tried to introduce his daughter, but Bacon replied—continuing to use his intimate nickname for Blackburn—“It’s you I am interested in, Tony. Only you! Drink up your champagne, there’s a dear, and let’s dance!” Then they “curled into each other’s arms, the man in white and the man in black, and they began a slow waltz, each holding an almost empty glass of champagne over the other’s shoulder. They were ironic in their manner, yet they were also tender.”
“Champagne!” cried Bacon. “Champagne to celebrate the death of love!”
TRIPTYCH (MAY–JUNE 1973)
Bacon made four large triptychs after the death of George Dyer. It was only in the fourth and last that he confronted the gruesome details of the overdose, which included vomiting into the bathroom sink and dying on the toilet. The central panel depicts the moment of death, with a batlike shadow flaring out from George’s body. The side panels are provocatively placed. After confronting the central panel, viewers instinctively “read” from left to right, expecting some narrative line culminating in death. Instead, they begin on the left with an image of George after his death, the least disturbing of the three panels. He is hunched over, his face not visible, in a calm abstract shape. But the right panel—where a “reading” ordinarily concludes—portrays George actively vomiting towards the central image of death. Bacon forces the viewer back into the brutal scene, with the stage prop arrows also encouraging a right-to-left reading.
The batlike shadow emerging from George’s body is one of the strangest—and possibly bravest—moments in Bacon’s art. He usually gleefully declared that dead means dead, as in meat on the floor. Why add an outlandish bat shadow? Bacon did not believe in spirits leaving the body (even on their way to hell), and the shadow also looks goofy, like a melodramatic spook in a horror movie. Bacon’s detractors might be reminded, as usual, of Grand Guignol or ectoplasmic spiritualism. Perhaps Bacon created the shadow because George’s death did, in fact, have some tabloid or Grand Guignol elements. Perhaps he was acknowledging that death is haunting to atheists no less than to believers, sometimes crazily haunting and in bad taste, and that the moment when life leaves the body remains absurdly mysterious. Bacon did not like to let the flesh go.