Francis Bacon composed his autobiography in paint, not words. His portraiture laid bare the skull beneath the skin, the beast pregnantly housed inside the human form, and all of the figures he painted – copulating men, hybrid monsters, bystanders at a crucifixion, many of them trapped in chrome cages or sadomasochistic cellars – were fractured images of himself. The verbal self-portrait that Michael Peppiatt has assembled could never match that lacerating self-scrutiny; in his correspondence, his scrappy memos for paintings and his repetitive interviews, Bacon hid behind evasive banality or wilful obscurity.
Descended from Irish gentry, he took a snobbish pride in his lack of education, and his writing is clumsy, unpunctuated and whimsically misspelled. His greatest works were triptychs, profane versions of religious altarpieces; he habitually referred to them as “tryptichs”. In an exchange that lasted for decades, he always addressed his close friend Denis Wirth-Miller as “Dennis”. In addition, as Peppiatt admits, Bacon lacked “epistolary fluency”. The volume contains dozens of postcards from Monaco or Morocco in which the laconic messages consist of weather reports, while another terse and entirely insignificant note asks his London cleaning lady to come on Monday.
