Francis Bacon in Your Blood

July 27, 2015
In this appealing but limited memoir, Peppiatt, author of the definitive biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1997), constructs an affecting personal narrative about his friendship with the great painter. In the 1960s, while a disillusioned student of art history at University of Cambridge, Peppiatt sought Bacon out for a magazine interview and was promptly swept up into his orbit, “riding a crest of Champagne,” and advancing deeper into the seamy world of London’s Soho district. Peppiatt’s descriptions of Bacon’s “masochistic generosity” and the ways he would willfully pursue punishment and pain afford some of the best insights into the artist. Peppiatt also describes Bacon as full of “boundless energy,” “a father figure,” and a man of “contrary extremes.” Bacon, Peppiatt suspects, took interest in him as a young, attractive man whose heterosexuality posed “a challenge to his undoubted powers of seduction.” The memoir relies on the meticulous notes that Peppiatt kept over these years. Bacon is quoted in long, portentous, and redundant paragraphs. He once called himself a “very superficial person,” and he can certainly sound like one. Even if true to life, this unfiltered discourse does not make for the best reading. Similarly, too much of the narrative consists of avid dining and drinking with the artist, which is repetitive and only interesting to a point. Still, Peppiatt’s book emerges as a credible document of a life spent under the heady influence of a tremendous talent and personality. Illus.

Starred review from September 1, 2015
As a frustrated art history student at Cambridge in 1963, Peppiatt, rife with hubris and rebelliousness, took over the floundering student magazine, intent on publishing an issue devoted to Modern British Art, about which he knew next to nothing. A tip led him to a London bar and the controversial, rapidly ascending painter, Francis Bacon. At 53, this artist of anguish and connoisseur of excess, who never denied his homosexuality, was only too happy to regale this handsome heterosexual naif with tales of art and angst, thus launching a volatile, wine-soaked Boswell-Johnson relationship that lasted until Bacon's death 30 years later. A man of epic zest and tempestuous emotions, Bacon spent his days painting his torqued, screaming, chthonic figures, then embarked on marathon nights of drinking in places swanky and louche, mischievously throwing his money around and talking a blue streak. Somehow, through the alcoholic haze and punishing hangovers, Peppiatt kept avidly detailed and candid diaries, the foundation for his highly respected biography of his mentor and friend and the wellspring for this eye-widening memoir-biography hybrid. Every page is fresh, immediate, and flashing with glimpses into Bacon's complicated psyche and Peppiatt's own conundrums. While Peppiatt still struggles to understand the deep-seated masochism that covertly shaped Bacon's dramatic life and ferocious art, he celebrates with ever-replenished wonder the timeless artist's creativity, freedom and energy and total individuality. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)