Florida Daze and Bacon in Between

Letter to a friend dated 11/2/09
Subject: Florida Daze and Bacon in Between.
Dear Stan,
If the subject sounds a little bewildering let me explain. “Florida Daze” refers generally to our two week vacation along the Eastern Coast of Florida, ranging in the North to St. Augustine, in the South to Sebastian’s Inlet, with the city of Melbourne in the middle. The reference to Bacon is not the kind you eat, but to Francis Bacon, the most well known British painter of the 20th century, whose biography I finished while in Florida.
First, about Florida. The first week was taken up with visiting with Nasima and her family in Melbourne. We spent a lot in time in conversation and even more playing 4 or 5 board games—she and her husband are near fanatical game players—in fact, they own 60 different board games—and eating out frequently, with a Thai restaurant and Galleria Pizzeria serving the most delicious food. I was given an assignment the day after we arrived in town: paint some heraldic figures on a shield of Liam’s for a Halloween Party on the weekend. He had the design for me to follow, but first I had to put two coats of primer on the shield, using acrylic paint. Since I put it on thick I waited till morning to paint the signs and symbols on it, which took me about three hours. I finished just in time for him to go off with it. It came out well and he was quite happy with it. Mission accomplished.
On our first Sunday there Nasima cooked a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. She did it because in the 12 years they have lived in Melbourne we have never had Thanksgiving dinner together. We were a little early on the holiday but no one fussed about that. I’ll take a turkey dinner ant time I can get it.
During our second week there Sue, Nasima, and I went to St. Augustine for two days, our third visit to the oldest settlement in America, a city I have grown quite fond of which exists in an especially beautiful environment, on a Bay where the Indian River meets up with the Atlantic Ocean. The atmosphere of the place is soft and endearing, with lovely blue water and white sand beaches. We visited some Art Galleries, shops, and ate at seafood restaurants; but the most interesting thing we did was the “Eco Tour.” We traveled the Bay from north to south for 90 minutes in a small but fast craft that could carry 5 passengers and the pilot, in this case a young man with an ecological background. We went out at 9 o’clock in the morning when a heavy fog laid over the Bay. The first thing we saw was “Bird Island,” a sand bar where scores of seagulls and pelicans gathered in a dark group in the fog and many of the birds flew off as we approached. I got a good picture of their flight. As we proceeded we saw a sea turtle poke its head out of the water and a small shark swam by. Twice we came across dolphins that were bigger than I imagined they would be. The boat had a mic down in the water so we could hear their dolphin-speak, squeaks and trills of various sort. We saw three Ospreys, a beautiful Hawk that hangs out around water and lives of fish; it is a bird that has made a big comeback after DDT was banned. We saw an eagle’s nest high up in a tree, a nest that has been there for 16 years. Egrets were everywhere but less visible were pink spoonbills, and we saw two on the shore at the south end of the Bay. At times the pilot would run fast through the water, which I found exhilarating. Both Sue and Nasima were so pleased with the trip that they gave the pilot a $40 tip. By the time we got back the fog was gone. It reminded me of my days in the Bay Area, especially around Monterey, California, where likewise the sun would burn off the morning fog.
On our second Sunday in Town, we drove 40 miles south to Sebastian Inlet, where Sue and Liam were able to get within a few feet of a manatee, as two of them had entered the wading area. We walked along the ocean where the Indian River once again meets the Atlantic Ocean at its south end. We checked out the fishing on the jetty and I took about ten pictures while we were there. However, what we will all remember is the attack of sand fleas that took place as we ate our picnic lunch at a table in a grassy area. That night I realized I had hundreds of bites all over my legs and buttocks. Everyone was in the same shape. I am still putting Hydrocortisone on the bites so I can sleep at night.
Now to Bacon. The Biography by Michael Peppiatt has had me in thrall since I started the book a couple of days before we flew to Florida. The author was a member of Bacon’s entourage for 30 years and he was in the habit of writing down much of what the painter said over the years—Bacon’s Boswell, if you will. The book has as a result a very personal quality. It is as modern biographies go very well done and full of cogent insights about a Painter who was surrounded with by cloak of mystery. The book was like a separate world I had one foot in while the other was enjoying the delights of family and Florida.
I knew very little about Bacon, although I knew his work and valued its power to disturb people. I admired his grit and skills as a painter. He had invented a niche that only he could fit in. How he had come by it, I did not know. I knew he was a homosexual but what kind and with what nuances, I did not have a clue. It turns out he was a bit of a wild man, a theatrical, rather swishy gay man who had sado-masochistic tendencies. He was bad luck to his three long-time lovers, men who all died tragically. It all started with his father, a military man, very straight and conventional, who threw Francis out of the house when he found him dressed in his mother’s undies at age 16. They never reconciled after that and Bacon carried that rejection as a terrible burden the rest of his life. He stayed a cross-dresser the rest of his life, indeed, some of his close friends would refer to him as “she’ when they talked about him. As he grew older he could drink any man under the table and he could revel all night and get very little sleep but always seemed fresh as a daisy the next day. He was a well know habitué of sleazy night clubs in London and all its gambling establishments. He liked to visit the shadier spots too, where he could be a male prostitute, someone to be picked up by tough sailors who would beat him up after some sex. But he would always bounce back and be ready for another go at it a few days later. By some miracle of Alchemy he stayed slim his entire life and healthy till he was an old man, although he did suffer from asthma, which kept him out of WW II. When he showed up at a bar or restaurant his personality was instantly the dominate one, like it was a rule of nature. He was charming, a sparkling conversationalist, very clever and witty, the life of the party. He was also very loyal to his friends and doled out big bucks to many of them when he had the cash. For example, when his first gallery owner became seriously ill, he paid for all her medical expenses.
Meanwhile, he kept developing as an artist, drip by drip, step by step, and brush stroke by brush stroke, until about age 35 when he started to show his paintings. His first motif was ‘the scream,’ as that was a major part of his portraits of popes and baboons. One example he liked was Eisenstein’s nurse in the Odessa steps scene in The Battleship Potemkin. I found it curious that Eduard Munch’s painting “The Scream” was not mentioned in the book. He had to have seen it. Perhaps it wasn’t violent or angry enough for Bacon. He wanted the scream to howl a pain new to Modern Man and his tidy vision of what’s real and what’s not. Bacon came of age between the two most destructive wars that mankind had ever seen, and atom bombs were on the ready to go farther into the possibility of total annihilation. While being a through-going pessimist and hard-core atheist, he was a cheerful man and always laughing, full of positive energy, which seemed contradictory but cohabited inside him with no problem or conflict. One of his favorite sayings was this: “We come from nothing and go to nothing, with a brief interval in between, with a chance to learn a few things about ourselves.”
After the scream came those pulverized, oddly shaped and distorted flesh bags with blood spots and loose membranes, puddles of body parts, horrific remnants of humanity after some ultimate melting disaster. They were ghoulish creatures who existed in surreal spaces that seemed like confinement, even cages. Often it was lush life, say, a vivid orange, combined with neutral smudges of organic disintegration and putrefaction. It was one long sustained nightmare by a painter steeped in his own brand of savagery. Yet, he lived with the enthusiasm of a kid, had an endless curiosity within a narrow orbit, and attracted friends from all walks of life because he had such a lively and interesting personality. And there is nothing as unique as an image produced by Francis Bacon. His originality was never questioned.