Paint in the bloodstream: The Death of Francis Bacon, by Max Porter, reviewed

Francis Bacon once told the art critic Richard Cork: ‘I certainly hope I’ll go on till I drop dead.’ Max Porter’s The Death of Francis Bacon is a book about painting to the end. It is about art, rags and the restless artist’s eye. Porter, the author of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny, has called it ‘my attempt to write as painting, not about it’. In this he brilliantly succeeds.

The writing is matted and clotted and thickly impastoed. Each page has the ridge and texture of paint; the paper is like scabby canvas, the words are like drying oil. There is a sticky, tacky quality, as if the author has only just stopped and stood back to look at his work. The book feels unfinished and that seems right. Bacon painted till the end of his life, but not to the end of his creative energy. Porter writes powerfully about the artist’s bodily contortions and the cut and thrust of his brush. He has Bacon say to a sitter, or perhaps to a picture itself: ‘I’m going to tip you forward out of the frame and whip your buttock with lead white to give a sense of fight.’

Bacon fights against the dying of the studio light. Porter has him rail against ‘one of these shits who will write a god-awful hack-tosh-hagiography of me after I’m gone. Oh he was so scabrous, the monstrous pitiable Bacon, up at the bar, buying us drinks’. We hear Bacon parody his own reputation as ‘the empty-head celebrity meat-master of macabre’. He says to one model (and to posterity): ‘This is going to upset you, exhilarate me and interest scholars.’ We hear voices off and fractured thoughts: nuns and pundits, lovers and critics.