More scenes from my life with Francis Bacon

The case of Michael Peppiatt is a curious one. He first met Francis Bacon when he was an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and visited Bacon for a student magazine. Something clicked and Bacon became his sugar daddy, immediately and for ever, though Peppiatt has said that no sex was involved.

One can see what Peppiatt got out of Bacon: not cash per se, but many opportunities for money, an entrée to the great art world, a raison d’être for his pen, as well as free entertainment on a lavish scale. This he acknowledges gratefully. But what Bacon got out of Peppiatt is never quite clear. It certainly helped that Peppiatt was young, bright, and could match Bacon’s drinking. He must also have been attractive in an obliging, even submissive way. Once Peppiatt was installed in Paris, Bacon used him as eyes and ears and plug-adaptor in the city which Bacon wanted to impress above all others. But it wasn’t an infatuation; there is no Bacon portrait of Peppiatt. By contrast, most of Peppiatt’s writing has been Bacon-centric.

This latest offering implies that the key to their relationship was its flexible lack of definition. It is a memoir, written entirely in the present tense, and it recounts Peppiatt’s life in Paris, to which he moved in 1966 at the age of 24. There is a hiatus near the end when, after a long series of ramshackle affairs and mental crises, he marries an art historian and returns to London to bring up his daughters, before Paris claims him again.

Peppiatt doesn’t have the calibre of John Richardson on Picasso, but he’s a lot warmer, more open-shirted, than the vain, thin-lipped James Lord who covered comparable territory. Inevitably his many Bacon books involve repetition; and since his prose is waffly, amiable, and loaded with familiar phrases, one is never quite sure how much of the material has been covered before.