Reading the 20th Century discussion

Welcome to our May 2022 buddy read of...




The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon

by

Daniel Farson


Widely regarded as the best British painter since Turner, very little is known about Francis Bacon's life. In this, the first-ever book to be written about him, Daniel Farson, friend and confidant to Bacon for over forty years, gives a highly personal, first-hand account of the man as he knew him. From his sexual adventures to his rise from obscurity to international fame, Farson gives us unique insight into Bacon's genius.

Thanks for setting up the thread, Nigeyb - I'm so looking forward to this - and what a great book title: 'gilded gutter life' is so enticing!

His private life was never dull - and never that private

I really know nothing about Bacon, apart from him being part of that Soho group. Until I read the notes at his exhibition at the RA this week I didn't even know he grew up on an Irish stud farm.

It's worth having a look at the RA website for their gallery of what's in the show, as an accompaniment to our reading.

Will do RC

I went to an exhibition at the FirstSite gallery in Colchester yesterday about the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End, run by artist-gardener Cedric Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines in the 1940s and 50s - Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud were among the artists featured in the exhibition. Bacon was mentioned as he was a friend and used to visit them.
The exhibition actually finishes tomorrow so we just got in under the wire!

Interesting that you should mention Lucian Freud, Judy, as there were a few Bacon nudes in the show that were very reminiscent of Freud in terms of their posture and fleshiness.

I've read the opening chapter and think this is going to be exactly the book I want to read on Bacon - it's illuminating and personal, not stuffy and hagiographical.

Excellent news. I mentioned on my reply on the Buddy Reads thread I won't be starting just yet but look forward to your comments now you are reading

I'll probably be slow as this is my commute read so you may well catch up with me.

Just going back now to Bacon's parents and his early childhood. I like the way Farson is commenting even as he's retelling this story and relating it to things he learns later from his long friendship with Bacon.

I'm already excited RC, you're making it sound like my kinda book.


I may be a while yet as I continue to wrestle with the behmoth that is The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography, although I am now closing in on the finish.

I then have to reread the wonderful Mayflies for my real world book group and then I will have a clear run to the two buddies I am down for in May 2022.... this one, and The Card by Arnold Bennett

What a time to be alive

I'm underway with this one now


Very impressed so far - a great blend of the personal and the biographical. Easy to read but authoritative too.

Francis broken in by his father’s grooms and stable lads 😱


Can that really be true?

I read a whole book about the Colony Room recently but the descriptions in this book are far more interesting and entertaining

Nigeyb wrote: "Francis broken in by his father’s grooms and stable lads 😱

Can that really be true?"

My reaction was exactly the same! But then, it was almost 100 years ago and a whole upper middle class/Anglo-Irish milieu, and it reminded me a little of Lady Chatterley and Mellors, the gamekeeper...

I've had a crazy-busy week so haven't read any further than this yet, looking forward to getting to Soho.

Right, back to this now and Bacon's childhood - at least the way he represented it as an adult - reminds me of the first Patrick Melrose book with the sadistic father.

Because I think of Bacon as being a modern painter, it's a bit disconcerting to be faced with him as a teenager during the Weimar Republic.

Roman Clodia wrote: "Right, back to this now and Bacon's childhood - at least the way he represented it as an adult - reminds me of the first Patrick Melrose book with the sadistic father."

Very good parallel RC

I loved those Melrose books

Roman Clodia wrote: "Because I think of Bacon as being a modern painter, it's a bit disconcerting to be faced with him as a teenager during the Weimar Republic."

Extraordinary isn't it?

Glad to see the Daily Mail hasn't changed! 14 January 1937: 'Nonsense art invades London' - which makes them chime with Nazi ideology which regarded modern art as 'decadent' and 'immoral'.

Lots of names being thrown at us in this section which I'm just passing over.

I love Muriel Belcher - what a character! And all the anecdotes about John Braine and the model for Waugh's Anthony Blanche.

Loving the evocation of old Soho


I read another Farson book about Soho which is splendid too

Overall, I'd say this is more of a memoir than a conventional biography. As much as I've also been loving the Old Soho stuff, I wanted more about Bacon's art - so was pleased to get to that chapter based on his interviews.

So often books about the immediate post-war period focus on how life was gloomy and dour so it's fabulous to get this very vibrant picture of the arty/queer/Soho scene.

Now Bacon has been taken up by Sonia Orwell and Ian Fleming's wife, Anne.

I've come across Sonia Orwell in various contexts and really need to read something about her.

Yes. Very vivid and personal.


I'm loving it.

I have never read much about Sonia Orwell. She cropped up a few times in Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, the wonderful biography of Julian Maclaren-Ross. In fact she's popped up in many biographies I have read but I don't know have much of a sense of her and what she was like, except that she was regarded as formidable by many.

I've only vaguely heard of Julian Maclaren-Ross - and probably from you! But yes, he's definitely part of Bacon's circle.

On Sonia, there's this: Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51 but the reviews are pretty iffy including from our own Judy, Alwynne and Tania.

All I really know about her is that she edited Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine. Maybe there's more about her in biographies of Orwell himself though I've heard that his biographers tend to be very negative about her, particularly in terms of money. Shame there don't seem to be any decent books about her as she sounds fascinating.

Roman Clodia wrote: "I've only vaguely heard of Julian Maclaren-Ross - and probably from you!"


Well worth investigating

He was the inspiration for the character of X Trapnel in Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

This is what Goodreads has to say about Julian Maclaren-Ross...



The English writer and dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64), is synonymous with the bohemian world of mid-twentieth-century Soho. There he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Dylan Thomas, Quentin Crisp, John Minton, Nina Hamnett, Joan Wyndham, Aleister Crowley, John Deakin, Augustus John, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. His theatrical dress sense — a sharp suit combined with his famous teddy-bear coat, aviator-style dark glasses and cigarette-holder — ensured that he stood out even in such flamboyant company. Intrigued by his stylish get-up and dissolute way of life, numerous writers, most notably Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning, used him as a model for characters in their fiction.

During the 1940s Maclaren-Ross was usually to be found in the Saloon Bar of the Wheatsheaf Pub on Rathbone Place, From the late 1930s until the late 1950s, this took over from the nearby Fitzroy Tavern as the most fashionable of the many watering-holes in North Soho, an area that has since become known as ‘Fitzrovia’.

Besides being one of Soho’s most famous denizens, Maclaren-Ross was the writer most responsible for defining its sleazy allure. He did so through a string of witty and influential short stories as well as his classic Memoirs of the Forties which also features memorable portraits of Graham Greene and Dylan Thomas.

But Maclaren-Ross is far more than just another sharp-eyed, literary bar-fly. During his lifetime he produced a substantial, astonishingly diverse body of writing which broke new ground in many genres. As an occasional film essayist, his writing about Alfred Hitchcock and film noir was well ahead of its time. As a short story writer and novelist, he introduced a new, vernacular, Americanised style to English fiction. As a writer of reportage, he anticipated Hunter S. Thomspon, Tom Wolfe and the other American ‘New Journalists’ of the 1960s. As a literary critic, he wrote with rare acuity about the writers as varied as Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, John Buchan, Frank Harris, Jean Cocteau, M.P. Sheil, Dashiell Hammett and Henry Green. As a memoirist, he was a forerunner of so many current writers who work in a similarly delicate, novelistic vein. As a literary parodist, he was praised by William Faulkner and P.G. Wodehouse. As a translator, he was very sensitive to stylistic nuances. And as a dramatist, he was hailed as ‘radio’s Alfred Hitchcock.’

His work was admired by Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell, Olivia Manning, John Lehmann, Lucian Freud and others. Since his premature death at the age of only fifty-two, he has become a cult favourite among fellow writers such as Harold Pinter, Michael Holroyd, John King, Iain Sinclair, Jonathan Meades, Chris Petit, D.J. Taylor and Virginia Ironside. His reputation has also been kept alive through the campaigning of groups such as the Lost Club and the Sohemian Society.

In the wake of the publication in 2003 of Paul Willetts’s Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, the first biography of Maclaren-Ross, there has been an enormous resurgence of interest in both his life and work. The critical and commercial success of the biography triggered a major republication programme which has brought his touching, influential and often witty work to the attention of a wider public. Critics have been unanimous in their praise, hailing him as a major twentieth-century writer.

There is a short biography of Sonia Orwell called The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell by a friend of hers, Hilary Spurling - I haven't read this but it seems to get strong reactions both ways from reviewers, 5* and 1* reviews! Has anyone here read it?

Hilary Spurling wrote the essential...


Invitation To The Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time

Essential that is if you ever have the good fortune to read Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time

Hilary Spurling wrote the essential...


Invitation To The Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time

Essential that is if you ever have the good fortune to read Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time

Something I did back in the old BYT days....

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Thanks Judy for the Sonia Orwell book - the reviews are strikingly polarised, as you say!

I've been reading the gossipy Tangiers chapter, amazing roll-call of names from Allan Ginsberg and Paul Bowles to Marlene Dietrich, Truman Capote and Isherwood. WHich reminds me that I haven't read his The Berlin Novels yet.

If you haven't read Bowles' The Sheltering Sky yet, it's brilliant.

We discussed The Berlin Novels in July 2018....



https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Revive that discussion RC - you know you want to

And it's another yes to The Sheltering Sky

Nigeyb wrote: "We discussed The Berlin Novels in July 2018."

Yes, I will when I get to it, seems like these books had quite mixed responses. Needless to say, I haven't seen Cabaret - though my French teacher at school did have a bit part in an amateur stage production that we went to.

Finished! So, this wasn't the book I wanted or expected as I was interested in reading something about Bacon as artist but once I adjusted to the fact that this is a gossipy memoir, I loved it!

I don't think I'd realised quite what a deliciously louche place post-war Soho was! I know this is one of your areas of interest, Nigeyb, so maybe it won't be quite as gripping for you? Even in the late 1990s I used to go drinking there with a gay male friend who wanted to be a writer and a pub in Poland Street was *the* place to be.

Fab that Bacon knew everyone from Allan Ginsberg to Princess Margaret :))

www.goodreads.com/review/show/4700140876

Great review RC


Thanks

Judy wrote: "There is a short biography of Sonia Orwell called The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell by a friend of hers, Hilary Spurling - I haven't re..."

I have it on my shelf somewhere.

Roman Clodia wrote:


"Finished! So, this wasn't the book I wanted or expected as I was interested in reading something about Bacon as artist but once I adjusted to the fact that this is a gossipy memoir, I loved it!

I don't think I'd realised quite what a deliciously louche place post-war Soho was! I know this is one of your areas of interest, Nigeyb, so maybe it won't be quite as gripping for you? Even in the late 1990s I used to go drinking there with a gay male friend who wanted to be a writer and a pub in Poland Street was *the* place to be.

Fab that Bacon knew everyone from Allan Ginsberg to Princess Margaret :))"

I've now finished too

I'm certainly glad to have finally read it. As you astutely observe RC, I am far more familiar with the louche world of 20th century Soho during Bacon's era and had probably already had my fill before reading this one. That aspect of Francis Bacon's life is undoubtedly where this book is strongest.

Here's my review...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

As an aside, I'm not that keen on Francis Bacon's art but can understand why he is so celebrated.

Thanks for inspiring me to read this RC

Nigeyb wrote: "I'm not that keen on Francis Bacon's art but can understand why he is so celebrated."

Yes, I can understand that - his pictures are confrontational and disturbing. I was interested that when he's discussing art in this book, he talks about wanting to unearth pain and anguish, and about communicating things that can't simply be written. I don't 'like' his paintings, even hate some of them - but they're immensely powerful and emotive. They don't reproduce well, I think, they really need to be experienced in real life.

Great review - I thought you'd recognise far more of those people than I did.