Francis Bacon in Your Blood Read Online Free PDF

the nascent sympathy I felt, there ran a powerful dark foreboding, a sense of having got involved in something that went altogether beyond my control.
    Entranced by the prospect of more wine and talk and flattery, new restaurants and increasingly bizarre little clubs, I was soon going to Soho regularly, almost as though these trips had become part of my syllabus, a new course in general awareness, a broadening out where, as well as being out on the town and having fun, I could test the merits of Borges or existentialism or Antonioni or Ray Charles – or any of my other enthusiasms of the moment – against my new circle of friends’ more mature judgements andexperienced tastes. The world was more alive and up to date here, and everything in the news, like the thunderbolt of Kennedy’s assassination, more immediate and meaningful.
    Dimly, intuitively, I sensed the importance of my discovery of these unknown shores, and the threat of the quicksands that lurked beneath them, ready to suck the unsuspecting in; the lost souls of Soho that I saw, passed out in the sawdust on the pub floor or jabbering to themselves in the afternoon drinking clubs, were a constant reminder. But being Francis’s protégé seemed to me to confer a certain inviolability, even though other people around him came to grief. I quickly grew adept at parrying unwelcome attention in the late-night bars and, like a girl who knows her way around, at brushing off the hand that strayed above the knee.
    Francis constantly smoothed my path through this uncertain, treacherous, looking-glass world. He also knew instinctively how to put me at my ease, readily deferring to my halting views about this and that, fussing in restaurants to make sure I was given the best of everything and making me feel very sophisticated by appearing to share his innermost thoughts with me. At every meeting I became more deeply flattered and more involved. How could I not? Among his many talents, Francis was an arch seducer, as lavish with his praise as with his wounding criticism, knowing unerringly in both cases where to aim. One evening, on the crest of several bottles of champagne, my open-handed host turned to me under the bar’s dimmed lights and said, ‘Listen, Michael. You’ve got looks, you’ve got charm and you’ve got intelligence. Your life’s only just beginning, you’ve got everything before you. You can go anywhere and have anyone you want.’ Now that really did hit the spot for an obscure young man filled with self-doubt and painfully adrift in the universe . . .

    For days I’ve been mooching around Cambridge with Francis’s telephone number – KNI 2925 – carefully inscribed in mydiary (although I know it now by heart), trying to screw up the courage to give him yet another call. I am very conscious that while I am regularly at a loose end, dodging lectures and not really knowing what to do with myself, he is almost certainly in the studio, squaring up to a new blank canvas or battling some terrifying new image into existence. It’s obvious even to me that my trips to London have become a kind of necessity, giving my whole existence a point that it otherwise wouldn’t have, but I am also aware that Francis has more pressing things to do than take students endlessly out on the town. Sometimes I think of myself wryly as a footnote in art history: the young man who prevented Bacon from painting more masterpieces: a sort of perpetual ‘person from Porlock’. Eventually I do go into a phone box, on impulse, and once more nothing could have seemed simpler or more obvious. It’s as if Francis has been almost waiting to hear from me, and this time we’ve decided to meet in the studio so that I can get some order into the interview we are meant to be doing – which tends to start off well then get lost as drinks go into dinner and dinner into a round of the bars.