39

Friends and Rivals

AFTER THREE DECADES, two of Bacon’s intimate friends—Lucian Freud and Denis Wirth-Miller—began to wonder if he was worth the trouble. They came to different conclusions. The less important cause of strain, in each instance, was Bacon’s new relationship with John Edwards. It was never easy to bring a much younger person into a settled environment of old friends, of course, and Bacon’s infatuation perplexed some people. It was also annoying to deal not only with John but also with his friends, brothers, and the roving bands of who-are-these-people? that surrounded Bacon. Most of Bacon’s friends did their best to ignore his fame. They resembled actors in a theatrical troupe who try to set aside hierarchies; outsiders might pick out a star, but backstage the actors become a communal group making a play. That spirit continued among the artists and lost boys of the Colony, but it was more difficult to maintain.

Much more important, to Freud and Wirth-Miller, was Bacon’s impact on their artistic lives. The difficulty for Wirth-Miller was not one of “influence,” or not the kind usually described by art historians. Denis arguably lent Francis more than he borrowed. The problem lay in Denis’s lighter sensibility. He was gentler than Bacon, despite the Sturm und Drang. He was absorbed in the grasses and the subtle hues of the marshy land around Wivenhoe. There was some prick, cut, and slash in his brushwork—some turmoil in the grass—but he could reconcile himself to nature, and he had a feeling for the small or fine effect. Into this reasonably quiet place, Bacon figuratively brought spooks, a brass band, boxing gloves, and an otherworldly chorus.

Over time, Wirth-Miller—always tussling with Bacon in a playful but ambiguous way—began to wear down. So little success had come his way. In 1977, after the second apotheosis of Bacon in Paris, Wirth-Miller completed enough work for an exhibition at the Wivenhoe Arts Club. They were good paintings. Even Bacon, who disliked Wirth-Miller’s recent figurative art, expressed admiration for his landscapes. Sometime before the opening, Denis badly injured a finger. Bacon then went to Wivenhoe to nurse his friend while Dicky was abroad. Francis “was terribly kind,” Denis wrote Dicky, “and slept in your bed in case I needed anything.” As both an old friend and a famous artist, Bacon was especially welcome at the private view for Wirth-Miller’s show at the Wivenhoe Arts Club. Denis walked outside to greet Bacon, “who was already drunk and unsteady on his feet,” wrote Jon Lys Turner in The Visitors’ Book, his biography of the Wivenhoe couple. In front of the paintings, Bacon

began to rock back and forth. The guests waited respectfully to hear his opinion. Bacon stopped rocking on his heels and started laughing. For the next ten minutes, he went around the exhibition, stopping to laugh, gesticulate and insult various works—even though he was acutely familiar with the psychological crisis his friend had endured in relation to his work. Wirth-Miller’s friends and neighbours looked on in shock.

The cruelty was unconscionable. Artists did not murder artists; that was left to critics. Friends did not devastate friends; the world took care of that. Alcohol was only partly to blame for Bacon’s behaviour. Intense anxiety before a social occasion often led him to drink, of course, and attending any private view, particularly a friend’s, could make him edgy. He hated to lie but did not want to offend. And the private view of his best friend? The pressure was only that much worse. The same courage that enabled Bacon to throw off convention in both his art and his life—to leave the closet, boo Princess Margaret, and paint Three Studies—sometimes led him to tell the truth when he should not have. He could not bear watching everyone politely murmuring about the nice small paintings. Why didn’t Denis strike back at the world in his art? And so, with elation, the drunken Bacon erupted in wounding laughter.

The friendship between Francis and Denis rested on a paradox familiar to many homosexuals of the time: the unforgivable must be forgiven. It was a principle to which the acerbic but kindly Dicky, for one, pledged regular allegiance. Denis understood that Bacon must sometimes attack him. Denis must also sometimes attack Bacon. But Denis lacked Bacon’s appetite for the larger existential fight and his willingness to risk the mortal wound. It was enough simply to quarrel with his old friend. Dicky often told Denis that he must choose between Francis and art: the obsession with Bacon made his life in the studio impossible. Wirth-Miller now faced the choice again after Bacon’s shocking behaviour. He must give up Francis or his art.

He kept Francis. He gave up his art. He destroyed most of the paintings exhibited at the Wivenhoe Arts Club and took up other pursuits. He decided to master French, a language in which Francis was fluent. He blamed problems with his eyes for not working in the studio, but artists with bad eyes rarely stop painting. He tried to maintain his friendship with Bacon, but it was not easy for several years. It would have been unnatural if the decision to stop painting did not leave behind some curdling resentments. In December 1978, Wirth-Miller and Bacon flew to Nice (without Chopping) and went to Monaco where they were joined by Bacon’s cousin Diana Watson. A Christmas feast of roast turkey highlighted the holidays, with fireworks over Monaco’s royal palace. But Bacon and Wirth-Miller appeared edgy. Denis wrote to Dicky about Bacon’s heavy gambling losses. “I tried to deter him but he eventually got 24,000 francs off me—the same old song—‘when I think of what I’ve done for you’ and so on. Parted virtually no speak.” Less than than six weeks later, however, Bacon visited Wirth-Miller in Villefranche, where he was studying French. He arrived with Eddy Batache and Reinhard Hassert.

In 1978, after the Wivenhoe debacle, Bacon painted the mysterious Landscape (1978). It might almost have been called In Memory of Denis. Inside one of his transparent boxes, Bacon created a flurry of the grasslike marks that Denis used in his landscapes. Bacon would also sometimes employ this kind of mark, particularly in his early landscapes; perhaps the two artists together devised this form as they worked together in Denis’s studio during the 1950s. In contrast to Denis’s art, however, which conveyed the appearance of the landscape around him, Bacon sought something else. “I wanted it to be a landscape and look unlike a landscape,” he told David Sylvester. “And so I whittled it down and down until in the end there was just a little stretch of grass left which I enclosed in the box.” Bacon was hoping to attain what he called “the artificial,” by which he did not mean the false or abstract. In 1981, he explained to Leiris that “realism” was always subjective when it is most profoundly expressed. “When I look at grass, sometimes I feel like pulling out a clump and transplanting it inside a frame.”

In Landscape, he depicted only the bare rudiments of landscape. Large planes of featureless cobalt blue could signify the distant ocean and the sky; the colour around the grasslike forms could evoke sand dunes; a strange scumbled violence above the grass could suggest moonlight or a brief atmospheric disturbance. There was also a large swath of vacant black—the nothingness that often appeared in Bacon—and two red arrows implied an unknowable narrative. In contrast to the remote stillness of most of the forms and colours, the grassy marks appeared wind-torn and furiously alive, like an animal trapped inside a transparent cage. There was certainly something oddly human about the grass—a gathering implication, as if the whirling dervish of shape might attain human form. Bacon was now treating landscape the way he did the popes, placing the living part of nature on a stage and exposing it inside a transparent box that traps and constrains even as it provides the illusion of freedom. Nature may suppose that, like a pope, she has a godly authority. But just beyond lies the indifferent blue. Landscape (1978) is nature’s suppressed scream.

It was odd that Bacon painted only one—unnamed—portrait of Denis. The argument could be made (but only as a guess) that Landscape was among much else a concealed portrait of Denis Wirth-Miller. The picture was the first of ten artificial landscapes that do not contain a figure, though each was haunted by figural feeling, that Bacon went on to paint towards the end of his life. In spirit, they descended partly from Landscape Near Malabata, the desolate picture he painted in 1963 to commemorate the death of Peter Lacy. But they were also the ageing artist’s way of speaking simply. Taken together, wrote Sylvester, the ten paintings constituted “most of the finest paintings of Bacon’s last years.”

Bacon’s power nourished Freud, even as it paralyzed Wirth-Miller. Freud admired, as Bacon did, those strong enough to ignore convention—aristocrats especially, but also gangsters, outsiders, or anyone able to be himself. It was not surprising that the young Freud was drawn to Bacon, who appeared so flamboyantly free. Bacon’s only weakness appeared to be love, a weakness with which Freud could sympathize, but even in love-torn moments Bacon presented an imperious confidence: he refused to conceal his homosexuality or explain the beatings.

Unlike Freud, Bacon owed nothing to traditional art schools, curried no favours, laughed off Kenneth Clark, and made pictures that resembled nothing else. And he made the touch of the flesh—so important to Freud—newly alive. Bacon’s feeling for the body was always a kind of beckoning invitation to Freud, pushing him to drop the porcelain protections that represented both the charm and the weakness of his early style. Bacon seemed to get inside the paint. Others, notably Chaim Soutine and Frank Auerbach, also emphasized a fleshy physicality (as the world around them drained into etiolated abstractions), but Bacon got so close to the body that it was no wonder Freud kept Bacon’s Two Figures above his bed. Attracted by Bacon’s power and presence, Freud rarely challenged him, as Wirth-Miller invariably did. Instead Freud joined him and became part of an unassailable rather than a quarrelling couple.

The success Freud experienced at the Hayward Gallery in 1974—his first retrospective—probably initiated the strain in their friendship. Freud was now a powerful painter in his own right. And he was not shy about his power. Like two strong horses in one stall, Francis and Lucian began to stamp and kick. “When each one got very famous,” said David Somerset, “they got rather protective about their own bit.” Freud later said that when his work started selling, “Francis became bitter and bitchy.” James Kirkman, a dealer who represented Freud after he left Marlborough, first at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery and then on his own, said that Bacon could be highly supportive of other artists—so long as the other artists weren’t selling. “I remember his complaining about Frank Auerbach’s work, whereas earlier on he’d been quite keen. As soon as Frank got a bit successful, ‘Oh, those fucking muddy things!’” An insult intended to remain private easily spread, of course. “Lucian took the view that Francis’s late paintings were frightfully bad,” said Somerset. “Bacon was saying the same about Lucian. ‘Such a pity he doesn’t go on doing his little things.’”

Bacon was gifted at insults—and so was Freud. Freud criticized Bacon’s skill as a draughtsman and disliked the way, in his later work, he often evenly filled in the background behind his forms rather than animating the negative space. He told the art critic Martin Gayford, “Having a plain-coloured background and putting the subject matter as such on it is, one can really say, a recipe for illustration. Of course, the best things, when Francis worked on the whole canvas and livened it up, are very different. But when he simply put, as he did later more and more and more frequently, something onto the … canvas without it relating in any way, well of course the result was illustration.” And he complained that Bacon was repeating himself. Bacon could be no less cutting, taking every opportunity, said the art critic and Freud biographer William Feaver, “to say waspish things about Lucian.” Bacon called the Hayward show—a turning point in Freud’s career—“far too expressionist for my liking.” To Kirkman, Bacon shrugged off one of Freud’s strongest paintings—Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), 1981–83—by saying, “Congratulations, James. Lucian has really reached the peak of the Euston Road School”—a reference to the group of painters who, before the Second World War, sought to make realistic paintings of modern everyday life in a rather dutiful left-wing way. As with all good but unfair insults, there was a small measure of truth in Bacon’s charge—a note of drab depression enfolded the figures—but the true cut lay in the suggestion that Freud’s instincts were proletarian rather than aristocratic; backward-, not forward-looking; and small-time rather than big-stage.

Bacon and Freud remained friends until the 1970s, but rivalry gradually got in the way

Photograph by Harry Diamond. © National Portrait Gallery (MB Art Collection)

In the early 1980s, said David Russell, the new driver for the Marlborough gallery, Freud would still occasionally show up at Reece Mews around dawn, and the two would head off to Smithfield Market for breakfast in Freud’s Bentley, just as they had in the old days. But their relations gradually became so strained that other friends sometimes tried to bring them back together. John Edwards once set up a conciliatory lunch with Freud, who arrived for drinks at the Connaught with Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, the great art collector, whose portrait Freud had recently completed. Bacon came with Edwards and the Leventises, a couple whom he met and befriended in 1980 after the couple sent him a bottle of champagne in a Soho restaurant. “He was my iconic figure,” said Michael Leventis. Michael, who was Greek, was a painter; Geraldine launched a successful restaurant in Maida Vale. Thyssen left after drinks, and the remaining party then went to lunch at the Dorchester. Freud was in a terrible mood. He had been with Baron Thyssen. Now, he was trapped with a cockney and some couple with a restaurant in Maida Vale? “Lucian made no effort at pleasantness,” said Geraldine Leventis. He was particularly unpleasant to her. “‘You’re in the restaurant business,’ he kept saying. ‘Why didn’t you taste the wine?’”

Graham Greene famously referred to the “splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.” Neither saintly nor sentimental, a writer will do what is best for his or her own work, which can mean ending friendships that are no longer helpful. Although Bacon and Freud were occasionally sighted together, they did not pick up their dropped thread.

Bacon’s most relaxed moments in the late 1970s and early 1980s came with Eddy Batache and Reinhard Hassert. Not only did they take him on trips, as Dicky and Denis did for decades, stealing him from the difficulties of the moment: they also did not arouse new anxieties. It probably helped that they were not French, but—like Bacon—people who loved France. Bacon was more comfortable speaking English than French with Eddy and Reinhard, but he liked to show off his French to other Englishmen, who had often not mastered the language. At a restaurant once, the three friends noticed the English actor Rex Harrison sitting nearby, who also noticed Francis Bacon. No acknowledgement of any kind was made except that Eddy and Reinhard observed that Francis suddenly spoke only French.

In July 1978, they drove with Bacon through the Burgundy region to Colmar, in Alsace, to see Matthias Grünewald’s altarpiece in Isenheim, which had influenced Bacon as a young man. The Crucifixion scene was one of the most powerful renderings of physical suffering in art: sores pucker the body of Christ, and his nailed palms almost cry out in pain. The three travellers stayed at the Chateau d’Isenbourg, just to the south, which was a grand house surrounded by vineyards. It was a perfect day for Bacon, and one in which he would find no contradiction. Suffering acknowledged, pleasure indulged: the trip set the pattern for subsequent travels. There would often be a museum or particular painting to see, but—as Batache put it—“art was far from being the only lure in our wanderings: gastronomy and fine wine, landscapes and architecture all helped to intensify his joie de vivre. He would exclaim with a radiant smile: ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be alive?’”

The following year, they travelled in February to Castres, in the French Pyrenees, on their winding way to Nice. Castres had a lovely small museum—the Musée Goya—with one of the most important collections of Spanish art in France. Bacon wanted to see Goya’s L’Assemblée de la Compagnie royale des Philippines (1815), which conveyed a peculiarly palpable sensation of a large and shadowy interior, one illuminated by the shafts of light that streamed down from one imposingly tall window. The echoes were almost seen, the light almost heard. “Some friends of Francis told him, ‘It’s quite outstanding, you have to see it,’” said Batache. “So we went there to look at it.” Bacon’s reaction, he said, was characteristic. “He thought it was a very good painting,” said Batache. “But, you know, he was never really impressed by anything. He would be enthusiastic about one thing and then the next day he’d say, ‘Yes, well, that wasn’t much.’” It was only once that Batache and Hassert saw Bacon truly overcome with admiration. “It was in Amsterdam, with the Rembrandts and van Goghs, that we were able to see him in the grip of genuine jubilation.”

Paris was a convenient base for trips. The three could drive to Brittany or Normandy in a few hours, though Bacon’s favourite destination remained the Riviera. He usually went to Nice or Monte Carlo once or twice a year, sometimes with Wirth-Miller, sometimes with Batache and Hassert. Occasionally, Dicky made the trip. In time, Bacon came to know Eddy and Reinhard well enough to want to paint their portraits. (He granted Batache permission to use reproductions of his paintings in two of his books.) Painting their portraits was not something, as Batache understood, that Bacon undertook lightly. “His models can be counted on the fingers of both hands.” He would only paint faces and features that he found “sufficiently interesting,” and “he also had to have known you for a long time, because what fascinated him beyond appearances, and what he needed to fuel his creativity, was your inner self.” Bacon even asked Batache to shave his beard, saying that he must see the shape of the face and head before he could paint the portrait. And so he shaved it off—only to have Bacon murmur, “Oh no! You were better with it.”

Bacon and Reinhard Hassert in front of the Monte Carlo Casino, where Bacon returned again and again over the decades

© Eddy Batache (courtesy MB Art Collection)

It took Bacon three weeks to finish the pair of portraits, said Batache, and “we weren’t allowed in to see it till it was finished.” The result was a pairing of intimate, pastel-coloured images that stand apart from the other portraits of the period. Instead of the more typical dark background found in many small head paintings of the 1970s, Bacon used a pale blue. Hassert’s and Batache’s cheeks and chin were painted in a purplish and pink tint. The small diptych paired Hassert on the left—one eye obscured and the other magnified and gazing out directly at the viewer—with Batache on the right, also staring intently at the viewer and with a sketched-in beard. In the portraits of his young friends there was something both sprightly and intimate, a sign of his affection for them. The colour in the portraits owed a debt to the pastel colouring in Chardin’s self-portraits, which the three friends had recently examined together; Chardin’s way of painting round spectacles on a nose fascinated Bacon. When he showed the couple their portraits, said Reinhard, he appeared “shy.”

The year before, Bacon had painted a similar portrait of his friend Clive Barker, who had been one of the stars of Robert Fraser’s trendy gallery in the 1960s. Born in 1940, Barker was a year younger than Batache and a year older than Reinhard. Bacon and Barker maintained an easy friendship over the years. In 1978, Bacon admired a sculpture Barker made for one of Bacon’s favourite restaurants, MR CHOW, that depicted three Peking ducks hanging down on a rail. Bacon told Barker: “That’s what I want to do. A figure on a rail that I can move around.” Bacon painted several works with the idea in mind, seemingly drawn to the idea of a sculptural male body in motion. Then, when Bacon proposed painting a portrait of Barker, the younger artist suggested a portrait idea of his own—specifically, a series of life masks of Bacon. “He had been looking at a show—it might have been at the British Museum,” said Barker. “Of gold Aztec masks. He thought it was so marvellous.”

The process of making a life mask was intimidating, particularly for an asthmatic. Bacon would have to lie perfectly still for almost an hour, breathing through a straw while the liquid mask hardened (no longer made of plaster, said Barker, but a “new rubbery Swiss material. You boiled it and then let it cool”). In the end, Bacon could not resist the challenge, the discomfort, or the historical example. Not only had William Blake agreed to have a life mask made, but Bacon owned one of the Blake life masks. And so, Bacon “lay on the couch,” said Barker. “I told him, ‘Francis, there’s going to be no way to communicate. So I’m going to hold your hand. Squeeze my hand if it gets to be too much.’” Barker painted on the rubber as Bacon sucked on the straw, then added a layer of plaster. Bacon proved an ideal subject, although he later called the process “right difficult.” The idea of a life mask naturally appealed to an ageing artist who spent his life disrupting faces and contemplating death.

One day not long afterward, Bacon telephoned Barker to tell him that he had completed a small triptych of him from Polaroid photographs taken by Barker’s wife. “He did them in Paris,” said Barker, but shipped them to Reece Mews. He asked Barker over for a look. “I remember standing looking at them in his studio. He was sitting there having a cup of tea. ‘You know, I don’t think that looks anything like me,’ I said of one of them. ‘It’s a strange one.’” The next time Barker visited the studio, the “strange” panel was out of its frame “and the other two were now framed as two.” Bacon gave the diptych to Barker.

In Paris, Batache and Hassert had a hand—serendipitously—in helping Bacon complete, at the end of the decade, another of his new “landscape” paintings. As early as December 1977, on a visit to Monte Carlo over Christmas, Bacon was talking about painting a wave of water. “He was in the Hotel Westminster,” said Louis le Brocquy, “and looking at the sea because he wanted to paint a wave.” He did not have in mind a wave mildly lapping on the seashore. He was imagining, said le Brocquy, “jeux d’eau [water sport] in the bathroom of the mind. That’s what is extraordinary.” The idea of painting some kind of wave continued well after Bacon completed Landscape (1978), and into March 1979, when, now struggling to paint the idea, he talked at length to his neighbour Madame Veličković about his efforts. It seemed impossible to paint a wave. He doubted he would succeed.

At one point, Bacon invited Batache and Hassert to his studio to examine the painting, which he was not certain was completed. “He would sometimes share his doubts with us when a work was finished,” said Batache, “and even asked our opinion on occasion.” What they saw was an erupting arc of water in a disembodied landscape. The spurting jet, at the centre of the image, was framed by pipes and rectilinear pink structures. “The only possibility of doing it,” Bacon said to David Sylvester while working out his ideas, “will be to put the beach and the wave on a kind of … artificial structure.” Bacon told Batache and Reinhard, “It’s finished; but I’m not happy with it. I have a feeling there’s something missing but I don’t know what.” At that moment, the phone rang. Bacon left them looking at the painting. Batache pointed out what he considered a problem to Reinhard—an empty space on the canvas:

I did not realize that Francis had not taken his eyes off us while he was on the phone. He was back very soon: “I saw what you were pointing at, Eddy. You’re right. That’s exactly where something needs to be done. I know just what to do.” He quickly pulled on his gloves and, with all his strength, hurled a pellet of white paint at the canvas, which stuck by chance in the desired area. After that, it only took him a few minutes to blend the paint into the canvas.

Batache and Hassert felt “shaken” by the risk Bacon took. What if the pellet of white paint had missed and the painting had been ruined? They recognized that Jet of Water (1979) was an unusual picture. It would be another of the small late group that lacked a figure. It was certainly more evocative (and provocative) than a term like “wave” or “artificial structure” could suggest. The painting depicted an explosive release of tension that the rational geometry of pipes and plumbing could not suppress. It could be a burst pipe, an erupting fountain, a ruptured manhole. It could be the overpowering wave of male sexual orgasm. All settled form was momentarily destroyed by the explosive “jet.” It was not possible to say whether the release was angry or joyful, destructive or cathartic. It simply appeared necessary.

If the wave sounded, the sky was silent. Under the calm and careless sky the glorious eruption would fall back soon enough, of course, becoming just another puddle. Perhaps, in Jet of Water, Bacon was also thinking of the pressure of time.

Illness and death now regularly interrupted Bacon. In August 1977, the younger of his sisters, Winifred, suffering from multiple sclerosis in Rhodesia, came to London for treatment and was admitted to the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables. The name itself, to a man like Bacon, must have aroused a feeling of Victorian dread. Bacon never had much to say to Winnie, but he remained loyal. “Eventually Winnie couldn’t cope at all,” said his sister Ianthe. “Then Francis offered to look after her.” Not only did Bacon arrange for her transport; he also wrote, in a letter of July 22, 1977, to the Royal Hospital, that he had now “undertaken to be responsible for all payments.” Winnie had money in Rhodesia that could be tapped, he wrote, “but should there be any delay in arranging this, I will in the meantime make any payments that become due.” Bacon made certain she had a colour television set.

Muriel Belcher began to have medical problems in the mid-1970s. She may have had a minor stroke in late 1974 and subsequently fell and broke her thighbone. She became increasingly frail later in the decade. It seemed a crime against the natural order, Muriel’s frailty: she must remain for ever the half mother, half dragon, guarding the door. Bacon paid her medical bills, too. And something was going wrong with Sonia Orwell. In the spring of 1977, she impulsively moved to Paris, leaving her two-storey house on Gloucester Road. Her friends were shocked. She was a Londoner who was also a Parisian, not a Parisian who was also a Londoner. She did not move like Bacon into an elegant space near the place des Vosges. “She rented a single damp furnished room, on the ground floor of a block on the rue d’Assas, with a basement kitchen that smelt of escaping gas,” wrote Hilary Spurling in The Girl from the Fiction Department. “She had no oven and no bath. People who visited her in Paris were bewildered.”

In 1979, at the Colony, Muriel fell again and knocked out her two front teeth. Only Robert Carrier, among the drinkers that day, rushed to her assistance. Soon, she was bedridden in her flat in Wellington Court, in the West End theatre district. In early August, Bacon took Muriel’s partner, Carmel, to dinner at Wheeler’s. Valerie Beston was also there—and noted in her diary, for the first time, the presence of John Edwards. Bacon, she wrote, was “very depressed.” Eventually, Belcher moved into Athlone House, a nursing home connected to Middlesex Hospital. “When Ian [Board] told Francis how ill Muriel was, he wept,” said the artist and Colony regular Michael Clark. “That was the only time I saw [Bacon] cry.” Bacon regularly visited Muriel, who shared a room with a rather starchy, old-fashioned lady. At each visit, Muriel greeted Bacon with a cheery, “Hello, daughter!” Eventually, the lady in the neighbouring bed asked Bacon, “Are you a woman?” Bacon thought about it. “Sometimes.”

In one memorably difficult week, Bacon visited Muriel at Athlone House in Hampstead and, two days later, his sister at the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables in Putney. He continued to visit Muriel periodically until her death on Halloween in 1979. (She was cremated on Bonfire Night.) Before she died, Bacon—with Muriel’s blessing—arranged for John Edwards to assume the lease on her flat. “In order to transfer the flat to John, at the suggestion of Francis,” said Brian Clarke, “John changed his name to John Belcher Edwards.” That way it would stay in the “family.”

In 1980, Sonia Orwell returned to London, now suffering from a brain tumor that would eventually cause her to hallucinate—and penniless after a bitter copyright battle over George Orwell’s writing. “Sonia came back to England to spend the final months of her life camping out in hotels, friends’ spare bedrooms, and eventually public hospital wards,” wrote Spurling. Flowers, cards, letters, and phone calls arrived from friends attempting to track her down. The Spenders invited her to stay. “Mary McCarthy sent a long, fond, gossipy letter, begging her to come to Maine for the summer. Francis Bacon’s French dealer, Claude Bernard, offered his house and staff.” In the end, Orwell spent her last days at Blakes, a small luxury hotel in Roland Gardens not far from the studio that Bacon once purchased and then gave to George. It was Bacon who brought Sonia from the hospital to Blakes. Valerie Beston ordered lavish bouquets of flowers. Bacon did not visit her while she was actually in the hospital. “He used to have to go and see his sister at the Hospital for Incurable Diseases,” said Paul Brass, who also tended to Sonia. “And he told me that the days before he knew he was going, he felt absolutely sickened ill.” But Bacon visited and served Sonia attentively at Blakes, where he paid the bills. One night in December she died after being rushed to St. Stephen’s, a hospital in Chelsea. Bacon’s closest French friends—Michel and Zette Leiris and Nadine Haim—came to the funeral in London a week later.

His sister continued to fail. Not long after Belcher died, Winnie also broke her hip. Valerie Beston visited her more often than Bacon did, but when the hospital called one night in March 1981 to report that Winnie had fallen ill with a chest infection then sweeping through the hospital, both of them went to her side. Her son John Stephenson arrived on March 23 from Tanzania, and four days later Winnie died. Bacon hosted a lunch for John and his wife, Susan. Bacon had always portrayed Winnie to his friends as someone unlucky in love and in life. They had nothing in common, but she was family, and Bacon would honour the connection.

Three people close to Bacon had now suffered slow, wasting deaths, the kind Bacon himself most feared. It was likely Muriel’s death in 1979 that particularly troubled Bacon. She had provided the stage—for three decades—for so many days and nights. Her death marked the end of an era, which was also his era. In the months before her death, Bacon had been working on a large triptych based on the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx. He retained only the left panel—a depiction of the Great Sphinx of Giza—that began to assume the unmistakable features of Muriel. It was no longer a lion’s paws but a woman’s arms that, in Sphinx—Portrait of Muriel Belcher (1979), stretched catlike before the world. “Francis came into the club one afternoon and was in an elated mood,” said Michael Clark. “He said, ‘I’ve just finished this painting called The Sphinx. And the extraordinary thing is that it looks just like Muriel.’”

Bacon’s sense of control slipped in the late 1970s. It was a loss when Lucian was no longer regularly there. It was a loss when Denis stopped painting, and Bacon could no longer be certain of their relationship. It was a loss when John Deakin died and then Sonia and Winnie too, all of them younger than Bacon. And Muriel was his age, or just a year older. The Colony could no longer be the same kind of home. In this situation, the relationship with John Edwards became all the more important to Bacon. John could provide focus. John could fill the hours. And yet, John was not quite yielding to him. He would not drop everything. In Study for Self-Portrait (1979) Bacon painted an image of crushing pathos, portraying himself as a ghostly old queen with bloodshot eyes, powdered cheeks, and pursed red lips. His haunted eyes stared to one side. The facial cake could not conceal the wounds of age. The mask might fall at any moment, it seemed, into a heap of dust, powder, and rouge.

Bacon resented anyone—not only Philip Mordue—who fancied John. “Francis was very, very jealous,” said Michael Dillon, a former actor and Colony regular who eventually took over Gerry’s, a neighbouring club in Soho for actors, writers, and theatre people. Once, when Edwards was paying attention to Dillon—a man about his own age—Bacon expostulated: “What are you two up to? I’m going home.” Neither young man felt intimidated. Dillon told him, “Sit down.” Edwards said, “You fucking silly old queen, behave yourself. Sit down.” In her diary on February 28, 1980, Valerie Beston noted: “FB very depressed over JE. Feels he cannot paint ever again.” Bacon regularly booked the train to Paris in order to escape and just as regularly came back to John. The ageing Bacon was slowly beginning to acknowledge that in the struggle to possess John Edwards, Philip Mordue might have the stronger hand.

David Plante captured the uncertain dynamics of the relationship during this period when he and his partner, the poet and editor Nikos Stangos, dined with Edwards and Bacon in 1979 at MR CHOW in Knightsbridge. The dinner was ostensibly to discuss a book about Bacon’s art. But Bacon brought John along and introduced him, inaccurately, with a jaunty “haven’t known him long, six weeks or so.” Bacon and Edwards began edgily bantering. “There was very little discussion about the book”:

Francis said, “John doesn’t like my paintings. Do you?”

“Fuckin’ awful I think they are.”

Francis laughed.

John said, “He can’t even do a fuckin’ drawin.”

“It’s true,” Francis said, “I can’t. I can’t draw at all. I can’t do anything.”

“You fuckin’ can’t.”

“Nikos and I got on very well with John,” Plante wrote, shrewdly noting, “Francis less so, but maybe not getting on for them was getting on.” Towards the end of the evening, Edwards “braced” Bacon for standing him up on a date the week before. “Francis, clasping John’s hand, said over and over, ‘I’m sorry. I had to see a Belgian dealer. I had to. You have no idea how hard it is to sell my paintings. No one wants them.’ ‘Fuckin’ right,’ John said.” The evening appeared to end badly when John disappeared, as he was prone to do. Later, Bacon, Stangos, and Plante found him standing outside the pub next to Mr Chow. “John said, staring aggressively at Francis, ‘You’ll have a whiskey,’” wrote Plante. “‘No,’ said Francis. ‘That’s what you’ll have,’ John said, and he ordered a whiskey for Francis, who shrugged.”

Among the drinkers in the pub were “two boys, one with dyed red, the other bleached hair, wearing what looked like public-school uniforms, their ties askew,” wrote Plante. “They might have been Piccadilly boy whores.” Earlier, Bacon had said, “John really likes boys. That’s what he likes,” while John was looking past Bacon at the boys with dyed hair. “That’s my scene,” Edwards said. When Plante offered to drive Edwards and Bacon home, John said, “No, just leave me here with Francis. We’ll sort things out. Won’t we, Francis?” “Anything you say,” replied Francis, “with a bright, matter-of-fact voice.” Bacon called the next morning to make sure that Plante and Stangos had arrived home safely. “He said John was there, getting dressed.”