7. Francis and George
1963. Man, thirty-odd, walks into a pub. He’s wearing a cocky expression and a dab too much brilliantine; bit of a pompadour and his eyebrows look like two caterpillars are having a conversation on his forehead. But the Stepney spiv style is all right. London has barely begun to swing, Carnaby Street still has traffic running through it, and Soho means looking sharp the old way: big lapels, broad shoulders, clean-shaven with a bit of a curl to the lip; tight knot to the tie. George Dyer has all this. He’s done a little time in the nick so he knows what’s what, and he knows that a man who also likes a little grease on his mop is giving him the once-over.
Francis Bacon fancies what he sees over the rim of his pint. He could see the boy behind the swagger. That sort of boy would be nice, a change from some of the rougher stuff, the roughest of all being ex-fighter pilot Peter Lacy, who ran out of people to torture, especially Francis, so decamped to Tangier, where he killed himself. Bacon was not over Peter, never would be really, but this flash boy leaning on the bar could be something. One of them goes over to the other (history is not clear which) and starts it. It would indeed be something, and then it would end badly.
Bacon never stopped thinking about bodies, the pleasure and pain of them, the twist and tangle, grip and release; faces, too, sometimes; faces you could chew up and spit out, including the one he saw in the mirror when he shaved. Use the brush like a razor: slash and scoop. The most ridiculous thing about portraits was the stillness; the result of all those sittings and the relentless transcription of features. Bacon didn’t do sittings; he worked from photographs, which had a better chance of documenting vitality. And he didn’t do anyone he didn’t know and know well. The assumption had always been that you needed sittings to capture likeness. But the literal trace was a piss-poor definition of likeness; a shorthand map of a face and body. Writers about portraits had always gone on about the necessity of capturing the essence of someone, assuming that it was written on the appearance. Bacon was sure it could not, and what he was after was what he called the ‘pulsation’ of a person, their aura, the effect they had on you when they came into a room. It was a kind of emanation; something that issued from within, like a secretion. What he liked about George was not the assembly of features that made up the mug (though he was fond of the jaw and the curving nose); what he liked was the inside of him and the way that pressed against the outside; the whole slithery jumble of a person. You didn’t get that from a sitting; not that kind of sitting anyway. You needed to slam into the character.
Bacon had come to painting, his instincts uncompromised by any formal training; no life classes for him. But he had perfect touch as a draughtsman; just not the kind they drilled into you in the art schools. He understood modelling, plane, space, the mass and volume of bodies, the play and splay of muscle and limb and the way they could be disarticulated as well as articulated; the way, in fact, one could be inferred from the other. This he had got, in the first instance in 1927 in Paris, when at the Rosenberg gallery he saw one of Picasso’s startling deconstructions of the nude. He stood there in a moment of illumination and decided he had better try to be a painter. The body, he quickly grasped, was a theatre, often of pain and cruelty, without which he thought there could be no deep engagement; one kind of penetration was necessary for the other; for an intimacy of understanding. The trick was how to reproduce the sensation of that inside-outness without losing recognizable form altogether. So he let impulse take over. He would stare at photographs of the models (or of himself), sometimes beat them up a bit, cut off a corner, tear off bits of the surface with masking tape, concentrate on the image until a sense of the body – often in motion – would come to him; then he would set about it with a loaded brush; sometimes different colours in the same stroke; working off a recognizable line – the chin, the nose, a leg, an arm – but never letting anything settle or resolve; everything in a state of becoming; everything open and provisional: the brush swooping and looping; turning and pasting. Occasionally he’d throw gobs of white paint at the image, a whiplash hurl like ejaculate. It was like a good fight or a fuck, a spilling of the guts; and the thing was to catch it in the middle before it was just a mess.
George moved in. Bacon had him photographed by their drinking friend John Deakin, who had worked for Vogue. Pretty quickly it became clear that George had a thing about the bottle, but then Bacon was no sobersides himself. The trouble was that, dropped into Bacon’s world of tough, clever friends, gay and not, Lucian Freud and Isabel Rawsthorne, he felt all at sea and needed a tot to buck him up. Bacon began by being touched at George’s insecurity, until he became irritatingly dependent; a perpetually wet-nosed puppy hanging on his trouser leg. But the paintings of George were as he wanted, sensational and almost never stock-still: George Talking had him spinning naked on an office stool; a triptych, the form Bacon was experimenting with, had him perched on trapeze-like bars or wires, swinging in indeterminate space. The will o’ the wisp of nailing a figure just so was obviated by making portraits that sought to embody instability, movement, mutation; flesh itself in some sort of process of decomposition and reconstruction; wounds that leaked and then coagulated; openings that gaped and then half closed; shadows and substance, reflections and solid presences, all of which melted into one another. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen before.
Even the French, who had passed when offered a retrospective from the Tate in 1966, came to recognize this. Bacon was accorded the honour of a big one-man show at the Grand Palais. Only Picasso, among living artists, had been given the like. It was to open in October 1971. George asked to go with Bacon. But his drinking had become non-stop, sometimes washing down pills into the bargain, and it had all become unsexy for Bacon, who had had enough: ‘There had been nothing between us for ages. But since so many of the paintings were of him I could hardly say no.’ Bacon insisted on a condition: that Dyer commit himself to drying out with the help of a specialist in booze addiction. Dyer said yes, tried it out and of course relapsed.
The two of them were booked into the Hôtel des Saints-Pères. Bacon had full days and was more occupied with the hang. Neglected, as he thought, George flew off the handle in drunken rages, brought an Arab boy back for their pleasure, which made everything worse; they came to blows; guests complained. It couldn’t go on, and after they got back to London Bacon decided it wouldn’t.
It was when he was at the Grand Palais on 24 October, worrying over the final installation and paintings that somehow had still not arrived that he was told by the hotel manager that his friend had killed himself. George’s room was a pit of miserable horror: pills and bottles everywhere. There had been times when George had told Francis he would do this, but it had been just another round of emotional blackmail. And even this time, George had apparently panicked after a massive dose of barbiturates sluiced down with alcohol, the pills which Bacon kept carefully hidden sought out and used. Dyer had tried to vomit up his death sentence but couldn’t do it, and he died sitting on the loo, terminally pathetic.
Bacon went ahead with everything as planned, showing President Georges Pompidou, famously a connoisseur of contemporary art, around the show, doing interviews for the BBC and L’Express. It was only a little while later that he sank into an agony of remorse. He sat at La Coupole in Montparnasse, with the kindly David Hockney, who had come over to see what he could do, confessing his weight of guilt. If only he had not gone to the show that night George would ‘be here now but I didn’t and he’s dead. I’ve had the most disastrous life in that kind of way. Everybody I’ve ever been fond of has died … they’re always drunks or suicides. I don’t know why I seem to attract that kind of person. There it is. There’s nothing you can do about it.’
‘Nothing will make him come back,’ Bacon reiterated. But a version of him could be brought back. When the funeral, packed with a crowd of weeping East Enders, was over, he got to work on the first of a number of memorial triptychs. Though he said that making a picture of a dead person was a futile exercise, that there never could be a recovery, what else was he to do? It was a way of making his own grief and self-accusation material. In the left panel, Dyer’s body is a tangled confusion of writhing limbs, his head upturned as if after a fall; on the right, there are two Georges, one laid out on a morgue-like square table. From George’s head issues a spill of black which also reads as a pedestal support for the slab-like table top, while the profile of George, a gash of white from brow to cheek, is embedded in a tombstone. In the centre, a shadow George, a bloodied arm poised on the keyhole of a door, turns towards a flight of steps illuminated by a single naked bulb; the ascent from one existence to the beckoning dark.
Bacon needed to make the triptych, but it has the narrative quality he always said he avoided. The second triptych, stripped down and bare, is, on the other hand, overwhelmingly moving in its sculptural simplicity, not least because each of the two side panels is, for once, quite still, while the central one contains just the bucking heap of their love-making; thighs and shoulders readable but not the heads, pressed into each other, another of the thrown white whiplashes a convulsion crowned with slick black hair. To the left, Dyer sits in profile, as statuesque as a classical figure of the kind Bacon had avoided all his life, eyes closed as if in meditation, his torso cut away, filled not with innards but the flat black background, as though pieces of him are disappearing bit by bit.
Don’t go. Don’t disappear.
On a chair in the right panel the figure, his life leaking out in a pink pool of paint, as it does in the other two pictures, sits slumped, eyes closed again, hands at the groin of his Y-fronts. Opinion divides as to whether this is once more George or possibly Bacon himself; and that division of view is itself a calculated Baconian ambiguity. Reality is not the skin of appearance. The reality is the melting together of the two of them at this moment of mortal memory.
On the evening we were filming the painting, I was struck for the first time by something so obvious I hadn’t noticed it before. Bacon was a great, sly manipulator of planes, and the wedge-shaped diagonals at the bottom of each of the right and left wings can be read simply as one of his indeterminate abysses over which the sweated figures are perched as if on a precarious platform. But they also convey the sense of the panels as swinging, hinged doors, as was the case with the medieval triptychs Bacon liked; in which case each of them could close on the central panel of two bodies forever thrashing into each other, on and on until the very end.
