Rothschild to Rough Trade:
The Ascension of Francis Bacon
“How much does it help to drink when you’re painting?” — David Sylvester.
Unlike other séance fictions in this series, this was much easier to compose. Not in any trite way or sleight of hand, but rather the manner and speed with which Bacon emerged as a voice and very palpable presence. Most of the time he was eagerly responsive, charming and flirtatious. But he could also be irascible, bitchy and cruel, especially after a few bottles of Barons de Rothschild. When in this state of heightened inebriation he was the perfect subject to niggle and prompt, as I have happily done with other shades in this series, especially Nick Tosches and he was a real tough nut. During the mediation Bacon slowly gets drunker and drunker, slurring his words and becoming increasingly belligerent. This is the exact moment I have been waiting for. Then I will pounce.
This séance takes place in a roughly accurate manifestation of a room in Bacon’s Reece Mews studio in Dublin. I am present in this simulacrum as a techno-spectral form that resembles something we would understand as an asterisk, rendered by a virtual reality engine in a non-time void in which spectres can usually be invoked. Everything shivers like the static of television, after William Gibson, tuned to a dead channel.
*
DT: Now Francis please indulge me for a moment, if temporality means anything to you, for spending more time on this Prefatory text than I would normally in this series. I have to say that I have been planning this séance with you for quite some time. But I also have deliberately been putting it off, not though out of any fetishistic sense that you no doubt would understand and appreciate, but rather because the prospect of engaging with you, even in my presence as a hologram, is rather daunting. Your bad temper precedes you like the calm before a storm. It resembles something like a terrifying happening in the gorge rising manner of Joseph Beuys, or the explosive, visceral performances of Orgies and Mysteries Theatre, flaying carcasses of meat, covered in blood and ordure in the name of art, in front of a live audience. Your preferred method of destruction, if a painting didn’t express your vision, was charging at the canvas hurling tins of paint at it in a savage rage, screaming like one of your popes. William Faulkner’s sound and fury is a pale fire compared to these spectacles.
FB: Well that was quite an elaborate introduction to this conjunction, I must say. And I’m sure it will be for both of us a union to remember.
DT: Now Francis I am not part of your legion of rough trade, so let’s leave that out of this shall we
FB: Well, for now.
DT: Can we move on?
*
DT: Francis can you tell me about your interview with Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show in 1978.
FB: What ever for?
DT: It is well known that during the session in your studio you get progressively drunk. It’s quite a spectacle that I always find hilarious.
FB: There’s nothing wrong with intoxication on the screen.
DT: Of course not. But sexual harassment is another matter.
Bacon stands up indignantly, spilling champagne all over his trousers.
FB: What on earth do you mean?
DT: Ah you’ve forgotten. You attempted to feel him up.
FB: Well what of it. If it is there, why not simply take it.
DT: Ah yes of course, your curb-crawling days in Paris. And don’t tell me it was because you were down and out. The shade of George Orwell would be rolling his eyes.
FB: [Very heavy silence]
DT: Speaking of another scribbler shade, did you ever consider adopting Samuel Beckett’s dictum for his approach to writing?
FB: And what might that be?
DT: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
FB: Well that sounds rather dreary.
DT: I think it’s incredibly optimistic and after you, I must say.
FB: Well if your going to be rude I’m off to the Colony for a fish luncheon.
DT: To bitch about me with your cronies?
[Bacon does not respond and vanishes in an overwhelming cloud of smoke that wreaks of acrid whiskey]
DT: [Shouting] Give my love to George!
*
Three days pass before the shade of Bacon deigns to reappear at my request. He is a wraith who can be flirty, charming and combative, especially when drunk. This, after suffering from asthma as a child, is why he never smoked and instead used alcohol as his vice, well one of them, gambling and rough trade were two more. For this encounter he is manifest as a shuddering and rather gruesome hologram of Muriel Belcher, the feisty and sometimes terrifying Madame of the Colony Room, in which she holds court to an adoring rogues gallery of artists, prostitutes, ratbags, lowlifes and the occasional Royal. She was as hard as nails and unaffectedly terrifying, eyeing off any newcomer who was not a member or whom she disliked. They would be the butt of her merciless venom for the duration of their stay, which would be short, as the latest victim who couldn’t take it any more and withered towards the exit. Bacon on the hand was one of her absolute favourites, her beloved “naughty daughter”. The Colony Room was his second home.
*
DT: Ah, you have returned.
FB: Now your attempt at baiting me into some kind of tawdry argument simply won’t work. So if we must conduct this, this, for want of a better word, discussion, can we please move on? I have several spectral canvases that I am working on simultaneously and
DT: [Interjects] Now Frauncis, to use the Cockney patois of your Colony Room chums, as you are already in drag, with your vain foundation and eye mascara, can you do a little vamp for me?
FB: Now this is simply getting more dreary by the minute and
DT: [Interjects again] Now come on, you can’t wear silk stockings under your Saville Row suits and tell me that it is not some kind of exhibitionistic vanitas, not to mention your make up and lippy, which, by the way, is looking a little tawdry.
FB: [Angrily] If you are trying piss me off then it is working and if it continues you are sure to be on a road to disaster so you can fuck off right now.
*
DT: In a fit of pique the shade of Bacon becomes more agitated and whorls into a form that resembles a small tornado, spinning towards me at breakneck speed. I make it to the gents and lock the door. Luckily there is a simulacrum of a toilet with an open window and I stand on the cistern and clamber on to the ledge and drop down to the reassuring materiality of my couch. On a table next to me, my virtual copy of David Sylvester’s The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon suddenly seems to be a document not of this world. On the front cover there is an image of Bacon in a photo-booth looking very small and very cramped. What transformative liquor I wonder had he imbibed at that spectral time-place ? Perhaps he had answered the call of a Siren, similar to that which beguiled Homer’s Odysseus. But the image which persists in my mind is Louis Carroll’s Alice holding a small glass vial containing a transformative elixir unknown to her, on which is written two simple words.
Drink me.
