Peppiat and Theroux

1. Strange Bedfellows

There is an enthralling painting by Francis Bacon from 1975 which Michael Peppiat describes in Francis Bacon in Your Blood (p.266) . It depicts two commingled bodies, a blur of bruised flesh, falling through space, so interfused that they seem to form a single swirling entity, recalling Nabokov’s Double Monster, with the feeblest gestures towards individual, vestigial body parts; something like a head, something like a foot. They freefall headlong but are somehow also trapped in a diaphanous box. It could be an allegory of Catholic lapse, or of the delimitations of sadomasochistic queer love (it may present Bacon and his doomed lover and muse, the part-time criminal and eventual suicide George Dyer). In the painting Peppiat describes, there is also a malevolent dwarf sitting on a stool, apart from the doomed duet, supposedly an allusion to the act of voyeurism, perhaps referring to the gallery-goer who dresses up and heads out to consume such visceral grotesquerie.

But—if this is not too melodramatic—might this not also stand as the perfect illustration for the strange, prodigious, unequally codependent relationship between the protégé biographer and the maestro biographee, in which one is consumed by the other and is in turn consumed? In the version of the painting version I have reproduced above, Bacon has removed the stooled manikin, but there is still the ghostly implication of the reader of biographies, as well as the biographer himself who makes a living observing other people’s lives. What are the strange forces that pull all three parties into such compromising positions?

My aim in this essay is to explore this question through two quasi-Boswellian memoirs, Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow and Michael Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon in Your Blood, which respectively narrate thirty-year friendships to great, complicated artists, V.S. Naipaul and Francis Bacon. I call them quasi-Boswellian because even though they follow the tradition of Boswell in presenting warts and all portraits of their subjects, whom they have the benefit of observing over a long time at close quarters, their aims are somewhat different. Boswell’s aim was to present a portrait of an intriguingly human great man; Theroux and Peppiatt go one further by being just as concerned with the influence that their subjects have over their own lives. As such, they present hybrid works (as all biographies are), which dialogue with the forms of Bildungsroman, personal diary, Roman-a-clef, as well as Boswellian biography with all its concomitant techniques. My argument is that the two narratives present the charismatic allure of ‘illustrious’ men as the strange binding force that provides the initial attraction; they then chart the gradual disillusionment that comes with the maturity and burgeoning independence of the once-impressionable biographers.

To this effect, I will provide a brief sketch of the Boswellian biography, before analysing Theroux’s and Peppiatt’s presentation of a warts and all portrait of their subjects, and suggesting, with reference to Freud’s ideas on idealisation of the biographical subject and C. Stephen Jaeger’s elaboration of the concept of charisma, that while the narratives both map out disillusionment. Peppiatt remains somewhat enthralled by Bacon, while Theroux is left totally disenchanted in a way that more or less amounts to a resolution of what may be called his anxiety of influence.

2. Taking Down

Boswell is of course not the first or only writer who has embarked upon the task of creating a portrait of a great man whom he knew, as Hermione Lee, for example, has pointed out: “the literary disciple following the great man around and taking down everything he says has stayed with us as an almost parodic image of biography (58)”. The reason, nonetheless that Boswell should become the posterboy for this often thankless task, is that he assiduously labours to provide a thorough, “authentick”, portrait of his subject, warts and all — which even though the veracity of which can be challenged and has been, remains an enduringly charismatic creation in its own right. This portrait came out of heroic diligence in dredging up and presenting documents pertaining to Johnson’s life and off course undergoing the famous role of being his incessant interviewer and listener, writing up his notes and storing up information in his exceptional memory.

In dialogue with the tradition of realism in vogue at the time, the narrative is also set within a context of a complex social landscape: “it keeps opening out into the surrounding texture of urban society, politics, manners and domestic scenes, and provides a running commentary on the literary, theatrical, legal, artistic, and journalistic professions”. Against this background, he gives us a vivid, grotesque, spitting image of Johnson with his immense size, and his tics and quirks; we can imagine the voice that comes out of this presence. This charismatic presence, (and it is pertinent to note as Lee does, that Boswell becomes, “Better at ‘taking down’ Johnson as he grew less in awe of him”) has endured and we understand Boswell’s attraction to the character because we are attracted to this larger than life persona.

Jaeger’s suggestion is that charisma be understood as pertaining to works of art and the characters they depict. This is an intriguing proposition for books about Bacon and Naipaul who make art out of their own lives as much as Theroux and Peppiatt do. The argument is that charisma functions through a process of enchantment, which comes on like an epiphany, similar to a spell cast on the reciever and results in a surrender of will and idealisation of the charismatic figure. Pertinently Jaeger says: “Charisms affirms whatever is experienced and inspired in its spell. That includes enterprises that reveal themselves as demonic once the spell fades”. (P.14)

The spell takes hold on our biographers through a confluence of aura, the reputation of the artist, and their art, their personalities, even their distinctive physical appearances; small men with big personalities, their penetrating intellects, as well as the glamour of the circles they move around in; at first Peppiatt and Theroux simply plod about dutifully like Watsons to their Holmeses, but as we will see, even though Johnson is not revealed to be demonic, they are like Boswell in being better in their taking down (in the sense of capturing as well as of taking down a notch, and especially in Theroux of ridiculing) of their subjects.

Besides this, Boswell’s motivations are notable. As much as he wished to represent epically the subject whom he respected and was obviously awestruck by, there was surely of course a certain artistic ego at play: ‘he was also trying to make his mark in a self-advertising literary world”(60).

These central concepts, of intimate authenticity, motivation, artistic ambition, and the charisma of the subject as we will see, are highly relevant to how we read Theroux and Peppiatt, and above there is the central idea of this kind of writing as a ‘co-partnership’, which dynamic I believe is fleshed out more in the memoirs. Lee evocatively sums up the effect, in words that slightly recall Bacon’s painting :” in the dance and copartnership between the two, the figures seem to move about, talk and think in front of us, embodied and immediate…”(63).

3. Ecce Puer

Having established the main parameters of Boswellian life-writing, let us now turn to Francis Bacon in your blood. Somewhere in the middle of the narrative, Peppiatt describes an opportunity which has arisen for him to write a book about Bacon. It seems a natural and welcome development; although he has nursed ambitions of being a serious writer and has published occasional creative work alongside his art journalism, he has frustrating life hitherto been been unable to create work of ambition: “I haven’t yet been able to do much of what’s called uninspiringly, ‘writing for myself’. Put two and two together and you’ll have me writing a book about Francis Bacon’(277). It is rather telling that he seems to equate writing for himself with writing about Bacon, but his reasoning is that this is the perfect subject, which will reveal something about Bacon as much as himself, so closely identified is he with this subject whom he has become an expert on by virtue of his close and privileged association since his foundational years. He says: “I don’t have a better subject and , though I say it myself, I have become something of an expert on the man, the work and the whole Bacon universe” (278). There is also the allure of prestige, with the book being solicited by none other than the revered Nouvelle Revue Francaise; so that there is the promise of clout as well as personally fulfilling work.

In a way, Peppiatt has been training for this opportunity his whole life, since he first found his way into Bacon’s orbit as a student reporter seeking an interview, which is where he begins his narrative. The first contact, which is enabled by the photographer John Deakin, in a bar in bohemian Soho has Bacon taking an inexplicable liking to him. Peppiatt not too humbly suggests this may be initially homosexual attraction, strengthened by the fact that Peppiatt is straight and thus unattainable; the objet petit a, (which describes, after all, a different form of charisma).There is also the respect that Bacon has for Peppiatt’s intellect, tact, linguistic aptitude and affinity for his work. Whatever the root of the attraction is, it leads Bacon to be unusually forthcoming to Peppiatt about his life and art. Deakin privately instructs Peppiatt to take advantage of this:

“I hope you’re getting it all down my dear. One day it will be of such value…it’s incredible, but you’re becoming a sort of Boswell to Francis. It’s simply marvellous. He talks to you about everything. Even I didn’t foresee that. Don’t screw it all up now, kiddo. Remember, get it down.” (Pp. 53-54)

This becomes a kind of guiding principle for Peppiatt and reveals much of what he figures of his responsibility to Bacon, paying Boswellian attention to his tumultuous idiosyncrasies, his alcoholism, his speech, his repetitive catchphrases, his Francophilia; topics he returns to frequently (childhood, his former shyness, his masochistic sexuality), as well as his private rhythms, his studio space and working methods,, his haunts, his associates—the man and his world. At some point, at this point ten years after the initial meeting, Peppiatt remarks, “for a long a long time I didn’t even question the fact that I jotted down what happened and what I said when I was with Francis…Francis could hardly be relaying all the information he passes on to me for no reason”.(277)

As it stands the book is promising; the problem however comes when Bacon, who is at first open, rejects the idea bluntly, for the sake of discretion, advising him to publish it only when he is dead. The publishing deal is scrapped and Peppiatt is plunged into emotional turmoil. It is heavily implied that what we read in Bacon in Your Blood is the very book that was scrapped. It is not the first Peppiatt is hurt or disillusioned by his Johnson in this copartnerhsip, nor will it be the last; the question that is left begging is why he puts up with it so dutifully regardless?

NEED TO SKETCH OUT BACON’S SEDUCTION OF HIM AND ITS LINK TO CHARISMA, AND HOW THIS CHARISMA FADES AS PEPPIATT GROWS OLDER AND THE SPELL WEAKENS. EVEN THOUGH PEPPIATT IS NOT HOMOSEXUAL IT IS VERY MUCH LIKE FALLING IN LOVE, AND IT IS ENABLED BY BACON’S CHARISMATIC ART, WHICH HAS A STRONG EFFECT ON PEPPIATT, AS HE EQUATES BACON WITH HIS PAINTINGS.

3. Nor Hell a Fury

Theroux has written explicitly about consciously undertaking the role of Boswell in his Railway to Patagonia, his travel narrative (of course a mode of biographical writing) set in Latin America. In the course of his journey he reads Boswell’s Life of Johnson and is thus inspired to delay his trip and perform the biographer’s role when he meets Borges. It is such that Theroux, the lifelong jotter and professional observer, who has made both fiction and non fiction out of his own life, is perfectly positioned to deconstruct the Boswellian role in his relationship to Naipaul.

After describing his first meeting with Naipaul in Uganda, where Theroux is a young lecturer and upstart writer trying to escape the provinciality of his middle America upbringing, he is introduced to Naipaul, who impresses him by his sense of self-worth and his reputation as a writer and no-nonsense and who repels him by his casual racism and snobbery and demanding, curmudgeonly behaviour. The fascination is stronger however, and a friendship is struck up when he takes a liking to Theroux for his candour, intelligence and promise (as well as the fact that Theroux has read his books); the initial dynamic is very similar to Bacon and Peppiatt. Theroux drives him around and helps him settle in while Naipaul offers him writing mentorship, until the irritable Naipaul decides to abandon his residency, fed up as he is with the backwardness of the ‘bitches’, ‘bow-and-arrow men’ and ‘infies’ (his word for his supposed ‘inferiors’). Paul is left to deal with ostracisation for his close association with the generally repulsed Naipaul. They nevertheless maintain a friendship and Naipaul invites him for the first time to London, where he later moves and establishes his literary career. He speaks of the significance of meeting Naipaul: “I certainly had no idea that my meeting with Vidia’s would look so large in my life, or his” (104).

It is such that his literary career cannot escape his association to Naipaul, even as Naipaul shows no real interest in Theroux’s personal life: “almost everywhere I went I was asked about Vidia”(286). This impression is not helped by the fact that he, like Peppiatt, writes a book about Naipaul and his work, interpreting the work through the context of Naipaul’s complex postcolonial, diasporic identity, which Naipaul, smugly in the role of Johnson encourages and writes approvingly of in a letter to Paul:

You must give me the pleasure of seeing what I look like…I have changed; lost and gained and sometimes strayed, as I have grown older. Show me!(5)

Theroux is so thorough and so dutiful in the comprehensively sympathetic account of his monograph— baffling given his constant reference to Naipaul’s foibles (his adultery, his hypocritical grousing, his racism, his misogyny, his fussiness over food and contamination, his anger— in Sir Vidia’s Shadow, that even Naipaul’s wife Pat remarks on the elective affinity: “Pat said she saw the love and understanding in my book…and the depths of these feelings that had given me insights into Vidia’s work” (202). The work of course, is not just a matter of piety, as Theroux notes, much like what Lee says if the self-promoting Boswell,, ‘it was done out of friendship, but like many gifts it was also self-serving’, for it was intended to bolster both their reputations in America (195).

Perhaps Naipaul should have been careful what he wished for. In a sense, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, with its description of Vidia’s various flaws and absurdities, and can be seen as a revision of this original glowing study, which gives a picture under the harsh light of hindsight, so that Theroux can say:

I had admired his talent. After a while I admired nothing else. Finally I began to wonder about his talent, seriously to wonder, and doubted it when I found myself skipping pages in his more recent books. In the past I would have said the fault was mine. Now I knew that he could be the monomaniac in print that he was in person. (363)

The eventual disillusionment comes at the end of the friendship, after Pat Naipaul, who is endeared to Theroux and who has been neglected and abused by Naipaul dies of cancer. Vidia gets married to a new wife not long after, who encourages him to cut Paul off abruptly. Theroux is left reeling; similar to the question we ask of Peppiatt, why did he put up with it all for so long?

IN THEROUX IT SEEMS TO BE MORE OF PROJECTION, WANTING TO BE AS GOOD A WRITER AS NAIPAUL, FROM VERY EARLY HE CONSIDERS HIMSELF SOMETHING LIKE NAIPAUL’S EQUAL, AND ONLY STICKS AROUND BECAUSE NAIPAUL DOES NOT DO MUCH TO HURT HIM DIRECTLY…THE LOST OF ENCHANTMENT COMES WHEN NAIPAUL CUTS HIM OFF AND HE BECOMES LIKE A LOVER SCORNED, REALISING THAT NAIPAUL DIDNT LOVE HIM AS MUCH. IT IS INTERESTING THAT THEY BECOME FRIENDS AGAIN 8 YEARS AFTER

4. Special Affections

Let us consider this somewhat lengthy passage from Freud:

biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because--for reasons of their personal emotional life--they have felt a special affection for him from the very first. They then devote their energies to the task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile models…To gratify this wish they obliteratre the individual features of their subject’s physiognomy; they smooth over the traces of his life’s struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestige of human weakness or imperfection…That they should do this is regrettable, for they thereby sacrifice truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasises abandon the opportunity of penetrating the most fascinating secrets of human nature. (Italics mine.)(130) by

In the first instance, it may be said that both Peppiatt and Theroux are working within Freud’s pathographic method, even if it sometimes reads like Pop-Freud, discussing the character flaws and monstrosities of their subjects, and trying to understand from whence they come. There are suggestions that Bacon’s sadomasochism may come from his inherent loneliness and from his relationship with his abusive father; Peppiatt rationalises away his volatile jealous my by trying to relate them to the pressures of life and work and to Bacon’s senile jealousy. Theroux is unsparing in his detailing of Naipaul’s dependence on uxorial, maternal attention, and refers to his fractured relationship with his domineering mother (Theroux has written about his own domineering mother in the semi-autobiographical Motherland). Peppiatt seems to pity Bacon; there’s a sense of humourism in his description of Bacon’s foibles; with Paul it is more scathing mocking that seldom passes over to sentiment. Peppiatt pities Bacon, the victim of sadomasochists. Theroux on the other hand vilifies Naipaul for what he sees as intimations of his masochism in his novel. In any case, there is always a focus on trying to get the mind of the subject. And of course what is relevant about these books is that there is more than one subject; there is also a fair amount of the writers trying to understand themselves, their insecurities, their attractions to the older men. They acknowledge indeed that they developed ‘special affection’ for their subject, and as I have describe take efforts to unpack this. It can be said that their books stand as a sort of rejoinder to Freud’s complaint, an implicit call for the biographer to examine themselves; to understand their own psychic impulses so that they may better understand that of their subjects, and ultimately so that they may understand their relationships to them, and the other way round too; an analytical ouroboros. This evolution of the Boswellian form seems to be an excellent one for this threefold analysis, which in the end does amount rather to ‘penetrating the most fascinating secrets of human nature’.

The special affection; tested though it is in Peppiatt comes fully realised in the end, Theroux seems to lose it; though they later reconcile (and the context may have something to do with it; Bacon is dead and Naipaul is still alive) paul wrote his obituary and still mentions him in his occasional writing.

The special affection, anyway, is what we may understand as charisma, how it relates to this kind of biography is that it depends on a subject and an object; the book may be seen as a talking cure, Peppiat solidifies his identification and Theroux loses the glamour, describing this clearly when the roles reverse and from being Vidia’s shadow, his boswell, living in his shadow, he steps into the light and sees Vidia as the shadow, the shade, the ghost of himself of Paul’s first impression of him.

5. Real Life

Who can say in all certainty what force compels one to read or write a life? I cannot remember now how I first came across Sir Vidia’s Shadow. My aim, disrobing as it is to reveal it in this supposedly cold, analytical context, was to learn something about the practicalities of starting out as a writer; to try to see how my own life might turn out if I made similar decisions to the young Theroux. At the same time I was reading JM Coetzee’s account of his own faltering early days in London; but Coetzee did not have a mentor. Theroux’s description of Naipaul did not put me off; it had the effect of making more interested in Naipaul’s work. What kind of work, created by so complex and controversial, beguiling a character, would warrant a Nobel Prize? I was repulsed by Naipaul and also drawn to him, and I was captivated by this fascinating relationship in the same way one is captivated by the story of Saul and David or Lolita or The Comfort of Strangers. It also had the effect of making Peppiat’s memoir stand out to me from the stacks in a charity bookshop. It was a serendipitously signed copy, and despite the gruesome descriptions of Bacon’s occasionally dinghy world, there was a captivating warm familiarity spurred on by Theroux’s precedent. There is no way to ascertain if Peppiatt read Theroux’s work; perhaps lightning merely struck twice. Both books inspired me to read the official biographies, to compare notes, but I confess that I soon grew bored with the ‘objective’ accounts. The truth held me less than the art and the charisma of all parties, experienced directly in their accounts or recreated. So that, here I am, hunched over homunculus, reveling in these strange Lives enough to write about them.