Francis Bacon’s Gilded Gutter Life

"What makes Francis an interesting figure is that he knew Berlin in the 1930s, the time of Cabaret . He’d seen Picasso’s paintings whilst in pre-war Paris and that’s what made him want to become a painter. He started off as a designer, making tubular furniture which looked rather Bauhaus. He came back to London wanting to create things that were reflecting the latest aesthetic and ideological thinking in art and design that he’d seen on the continent. His relationship to bohemia is interesting. He came from quite a monied background and rebelled against that. He hated his father, who was a horse trainer and got his grooms to horsewhip Francis. The whole thing was rather brutal and he wanted to escape its bourgeoise conformity, which he saw as a prison. He grew up in Ireland. His grandmother married the head of police in County Kildare, which made him one of the most hated men in Ireland. They lived with sandbags all round their house, as they were under constant threat of being murdered by the IRA. He found the memory of Ireland problematical. He came to bohemia, like so many people did, and discovered a new family of misfits like himself. No matter where he went in the world, he’d always come back to Soho, because it was his home and the Colony Room was his front room. Even after the club’s proprietor, Muriel Belcher (whom he called mother), died, he always went back there. What’s interesting about Daniel Farson’s biography compared to any other book on Francis Bacon is that Daniel Farson observed, caroused and got drunk with Francis during his rise to great heights in the 1950s. Daniel was also the first person to interview Francis on television. Although he’s completely forgotten now, Daniel Farson was a household name back then. He was one of the first independent reporters on television. Prior to Dan’s arrival, you had to have a script if you were interviewing someone on television and they had to vet and agree to the questions beforehand. You certainly weren’t allowed to ask any difficult questions. Dan was the first to interview people completely off-script. It made compelling television because no one had ever seen anyone being put on the spot like that. He was a great interviewer and a very interesting man. He coined the term ‘angry young men’ to describe that whole post-war generation of young writers—he was the first to recognise this new movement in British literature. In the early days of their relationship, he was far better known than Francis Bacon. “What’s interesting about Hamnett is not just that she’s an artist, muse and model, but she also links bohemian Paris to bohemian London… You get a real sense of this intellectual and cultural exchange going on between the two cities” Francis didn’t want anyone to write a biography of him during his lifetime. His good friend, Frank Norman, tired to write a book, but gave up. Other people tried to write biographies, but Francis took out various legal injunctions to block them. Then Dan was offered £10,000 to write Francis’s biography. So, Francis paid him £10,000 not to write it. But Dan was quite sly, going around asking people questions about Francis and doing some research while Francis was still alive. Then, the moment Francis died, there was a huge race in the publishing world to publish the first biography of Francis Bacon, which Daniel obviously won. What makes Dan’s book so good compared to all the other biographies of Francis Bacon is that it’s written purely off-the-cuff, as an observer. It’s not talking about why Francis painted triptychs, or why he used orange in his paintings. He’s talking about what it was like to be with Francis, what influenced him, what he liked, what he didn’t like, where he went. You get a real sense of what Francis Bacon was like. Unfortunately, most books on him are tedious, boring and written by academic hacks who like to hold forth about Francis’s angst and existentialism, even though they haven’t really got the foggiest. Dan once asked Francis what would be a good title for his biography and Francis sent him a telegram saying he thought that ‘the gilded gutter life’ would be a good title. The other interesting thing about the book is that Farson knew all the people in Francis’s life. He knew Muriel Belcher. He knew George Dyer. He knew Peter Lacy, who was Bacon’s first lover. He went to Tangiers with John Deakin, who took a lot of photographs that influenced Francis’ paintings. He knew these people intimately. You get this very candid warts-and-all look at what went on and it’s absolutely fascinating. People have tried to imitate it, but even after 25 years, it stands out as the best. It shows the attraction of bohemia for both Daniel Farson and Francis Bacon. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, I used to see him often around Soho. He didn’t make much sense after six o’clock at night. By that time the drink had taken hold and he became a gnarling werewolf. But he was an extraordinary character. There are so many amazing stories about Daniel Farson—too many to include them all in my book, unfortunately. Homosexuality was illegal. He had to resign his television career in 1963 for fear of being exposed. He didn’t bother keeping it under the radar. He liked to go out at night, in Soho, and get beaten up by sailors. His nickname was ‘mind-the-face’. He didn’t want to be punched in the face while he was being beaten up because he couldn’t appear on national television with two black eyes. He was into sadomasochistic practices like Francis Bacon and Ian Board, the barman of the Colony Room Club. It’s something that bound them all together. The idea of being tied up and beaten appealed to them. In 2022. I’ve got so much information I might have to divide it into two books, one on Soho women and another on artists’ muses."