Death, grief and Bacon

A small thumbs up for Max Porter’s The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber, £6.99), in which the painter’s last days in 1992, attended by nuns in a Madrid hospital, are imagined as a series of confused reveries and recollections. It’s been saluted by many, but it’s also singled out for a good roughing–up in the latest Private Eye.  

The Eye’s literary kickings are reserved for the feeble and the ‘difficult’, so Porter qualifies for the latter. The nameless reviewer laments the book’s shortness as a ‘novella’ but seems to have missed that it’s better understood as a long prose poem (74 small pages), which to some extent justifies the perceived difficulties of its collaged ‘modern’ manner. The Eye’s reviewer gets particularly exercised by this modernist register, damning it as ‘old-fashioned’. (A tired jibe – old fashioned, even.)

S/he particularly dislikes a robustly drunken, orgiastic section where speech slides about –

Take a seat wh
                          y don’t you?rattdpissed as a afrt
Siddow
       nstand upBackto me. Great long
gdrooping fagash, fooping drag ashnever
know what hethinking. Whatsehithiking.

– which I like because I think it works splendidly. The Eye disagrees, putting the boot for good measure into poor old B S Johnson, who is too dead to defend himself:

I mean, B.S. Johnson was doing this kind of thing nearly half a century ago – see House Mother Normal (1971) … and it wasn’t particularly convincing back then.

Even if both these statements were true, it would hardly disqualify Porter from having another go today. In any case – reaching for my House Mother Normal – they’re not. Johnson, a brave writer, cuts up and disintegrates the written thoughts of elderly nursing home residents to suggest, pretty effectively I think, the thinning and decaying of their consciousness. So two fingers to Private Eye.

No. The problem here isn’t the form, which is fine and dandy, but the privileged nature of the content. If you don’t already know of George Dyer, John Deakin, Muriel Belcher and others who surface in Porter’s conjurations of Bacon’s dying ramblings – and why should you? – you’re at a disadvantage. There’s no explanatory intro, no contextual guidance, no wodge of Wasteland-type notes, which is an issue even down at the fine detail. For example:

I did it because it was easy, your profile, cut out, ready …

This put-down of Bacon’s suicided lover Dyer references a snipped-out portrait photo of his distinctive profile that Bacon used as a template for Dyer’s image on canvas. The cut-up photo survived among the famous studio detritus, but if you’ve not come across it, this profound and touching little passage will mean next to nothing.

Sympathetic reviewers have admitted this weakness – ‘brilliant notes towards a very private communion with the painter, which sometimes forgets there might also be a reader listening in’ (Tim Adams, The Guardian); ‘needs to be self-reliant, not crying out for its own exhibition notes’ (Johanna Thomas-Corr, New Statesman). Even the rather tacky verdict of ‘tricky, wicked and wonderfully weird’ (Laura Freeman, Spectator) reads as an admission of bafflement. There’s a bigger debate to be had here, of course.

One last bone to pick – are these the reveries of a man who thinks that he may soon die? He has, after all, put himself, body and soul, under the care of nuns. His diminishing into the moment of death is acknowledged – ‘pure throb colour on the heart inside’ – but the possibilities of death as a passage, or of some sort of repentance (I use the word carefully) seem closed to Porter. In fact much from these sequences could be detached from the context of Bacon’s dying to make a set of floating contemplations on a selection of his paintings. (Did they start life that way?) There is much that is dark in this book, but grief and metaphysics are carefully avoided.

Oh, and did the sisters really pun his nickname as ‘Piggy’? Surely not. It’s kind of clever, but it irritates. Even so, beyond these reservations The Death of Francis Bacon is a very able and recommendable piece of writing.

I read that  Porter is a winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize. (Though I can’t buy Stuart Kelly’s comparison of Porter to Thomas in his Scotsman review of this book. Porter’s style here evokes modernisms that both pre and post-date the neo-romantics of the ‘forties.) Putting down Porter I happened to pick up J M Brinnin’s 1956 best seller Dylan Thomas in America, which might almost be titled The Death of Dylan Thomas. It’s a long, exhausting read, chronicling every face, every pint and every drunken row, culminating in Thomas’ awful collapse and death and in Caitlin Thomas’ epic despair and immediate hospitalisation.

As it happens, Dylan Thomas, like Francis Bacon, died in a hospital attended by nuns. Caitlin, in her reactive rage, demolished a nearby crucifix and a statue of the Virgin, as well as taking chunks out of a few doctors, nurses and nuns on her way to the exit. There’s proper grief for you.