Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (London: Vintage Books, 1994), originally published 1993.
The gilded gutter life, that is, of Francis Bacon the twentieth century figurative painter, not Francis Bacon the Elizabethan philosopher—the latter of whose life may have been no less gilded and gutter-ridden, for all I know, but who is at any rate not the subject of this book (though the family of Bacon the painter alleged descent from the author of the Novum Organum, according to Farson). The book is more personal memoir of a friendship with the painter than artistic monograph. It is, for that reason, a vastly more interesting trove of gossip than one might expect. Gilded Gutter Life is devoted to that most fascinating of all subjects: Artists Behaving Badly.
And behave badly they do—in the process running afoul of, or bringing along for the ride, all the figures that populate one's private literary and artistic pantheon. If you are, like me, a mental inhabitant of mid-twentieth-century Britain, trapped in a twenty-first century coronavirus-quarantined American body, you will think you have died and gone to celebrity paradise once you get to sections in which, say, Kingsley Amis is inventing a false story about a sexual pass at himself by Francis Bacon and the book's author, Dan Farson, and Lucian Freud has to weigh in with a letter to Farson to condemn Amis' performative displays of homophobia and philistinism.
Or would you ever have guessed that Orwell's second wife Sonia Brownell had once hired a hitman to do a contract killing of a former lover who was bothering Francis Bacon, and that Lucian Freud had to personally talk her out of it, in order to avert a planned assassination? (Freud, for whatever reason, often plays this role of level-headed gallant in the book, though that is not what I recall of his reputation from other available memoirs.) Oftentimes, as in this example, the Bad Artistic Behavior is astonishingly sordid and pathetic. Indeed, in some cases it is viciously and pointlessly cruel, as when Francis Bacon destroys the painting of a young West Indian artist before his eyes and sends him away in tears.
At others, however, the bohemians of Farson's work of first-person art history decide to pick on someone their own size or larger. It is here, when they are punching up rather than down, that their indifference to the social impact of their actions ceases to be ugly and becomes an occasion for high comedy. When fabulously wealthy heiress Barbara Hutton decides to take a team of them on a tour through her thousand-and-one-nights-style palace in Algeria, for example, she made the mistake of asking photographer John Deakin along. He proceeds to make devious remarks about her choice of interior decor, questioning whether the Venetian mirrors she has selected are from "the right century," before settling for becoming outrageously drunk.
On another occasion, Princess Margaret decides to personally perform a saucy rendition of Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" at a party given by Lady Rothermere, the future wife of Ian Fleming. Francis Bacon, at least in the recollection of Caroline Blackwood (titanically witty Anglo-Irish writer married at various times to Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell), as transmitted by Farson, was the only one in attendance that day to place honesty of artistic judgment ahead of the divine rights of monarchy. After Princess Margaret began, his voice, she tells us, was the only one booing. And he didn't wait until the end, but started in the middle of the song.
Why does one —why, at any rate, do I—want so much to read about Artists Behaving Badly? Surely, not because one lives that way oneself, or would even wish to do so. Flaubert's comment about living like a bourgeois in one's own life, so that one could be more daring in one's art, is more my speed (to the extent I am particularly daring in anything, and to the extent I produce art of any description). But the Artist as Rebel is a myth we keep coming back to for a reason. It represents a vicarious wish that is of inordinate and intoxicating power: the thought that it might be possible to create without fear of social repercussions.
Most of us will never achieve it, and don't particularly want to, because we in fact value our social connections; we even rate them more highly than we do the expression of our raw individual selfhood under all conditions. We do this not because we are cowardly or snobbish, but because—for the most part—it is the right thing to do. Humanity would be in trouble if we were all Francis Bacons. But some Francis Bacons among us there must also be. We cannot help but marvel and delight when we contemplate such people, and realize that there are some out there who have managed to wholly transcend convention— "I never hear the word 'Escape,'" as Emily Dickinson once wrote, "Without a quicker blood[.]"
Farson's book contains a number of typos and mistakes, and I cannot let them pass without fulfilling my self-appointed social duty as cleanser of dropped commas from the world's printed pages. Here they are:
p. 39 "The High Diver" does not need the definite article. Farson has an odd habit throughout the book, in fact, of placing "The" in front of the titles of books and films that do not actually include it.
p. 44 "I could hardly asked for" sic—needs a "have"
p. 46 "I had move out of my father's shadow" sic- needs "moved"
p. 126 "Tod Browning's film, The Freaks" extraneous "The," see first note
p. 129 "Bacon deystroyed [sic] it"
p. 130 "Giacometti's biographer, James Land" Searching for this book online, one finds that the name should be "James Lord"
p. 139 "My Name is Dora Suarez,"—the only version of the title of the book mentioned here that I can find online is I Was Dora Suarez.
p. 142 He refers to the book, incorrectly, as The Naked Lunch. Extraneous "The" again.
p. 182 "His own invitation hadbeen [sic] withdrawn"
p. 185 "Dennis [sic] Wirth-Miller" It is spelled "Denis" elsewhere
p. 197 "Have you see [sic] any of them?"
p. 218 "this is what he wanted to hear an impression he wanted to give." Needs some punctuation after "hear" —perhaps a dash or comma was dropped?
p. 221 "went back at six thirty, for [sic] seven"
p. 243 "No Francis, Leventis corrected him [...]" Missing closing quotation mark.
p. 260 "Mind you, all those Marilyn's and Jackies are rubbish." This is Bacon on the subject of Warhol. Be that as it may, the apostrophe after Marilyn is unnecessary.
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