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F R A N C I S B A C O N: anatomy of an enigma FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX NONFICTION 366 PAGES BY CHARLES TAYLOR | In a 1985 interview with Melvyn Bragg for British television's "South Bank Show," the painter Francis Bacon said, "We are born, and we die, and that's it." There's less torment in those words, though, than there is acceptance that life can be a pretty bleak proposition. If you don't see much point in worrying about what awaits you in the next world, or if you don't even believe there's a next world, chances are you'll be able to get on with things free of the anxiety that hounds so many. In Michael Peppiatt's new biography, "Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma," Bacon's acceptance translates into a weird capacity for enjoying life. Among friends and drinking acquaintances, he was spontaneous, generous, engaged in a hunt for the next pleasure that nightly took him from fine restaurants to seedy Soho drinking clubs to rough streets in search of rough trade. That he could also be cruel and cutting spoke not only of the sudden mood shifts induced by his large and lifelong capacity for alcohol, but of his refusal to blunt his opinions, even if it meant hurting or jettisoning people who had been his friends for years. Peppiatt met Bacon in the early '60s when he interviewed him for a student newspaper. He stayed friends with Bacon for the rest of the artist's life, and his account benefits from clear-eyed fondness. Given the details Peppiatt makes public here, we can be grateful that he hasn't written a sensationalistic book, though many of the details are juicy. In addition to the most complete view to date of the upbringing that Bacon referred to only obliquely (even to close friends), Peppiatt fills in the details of the young Bacon's travels through '20s Berlin and '30s Paris. (Bacon was kicked out of his home at 16, after his father caught him trying on his mother's underwear.) We find out that the only person from his upbringing with whom Bacon stayed close was his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. When she couldn't find work, he took her in, and she lived with him and his various lovers until her death, in 1951. When money was really tight, Jessie shoplifted food or scanned the offers Francis received after advertising himself in the Times as a "gentleman's companion." Nothing is presented moralistically here. Peppiatt doesn't gloss over the way Bacon took advantage of some lovers or the sharp-tongued remarks that left even longtime friends wounded, any more than he sentimentalizes the generosity that led Bacon to press large sums on friends who had hit hard times. Best of all, Peppiatt doesn't present Bacon's fondness for drinking or masochistic sex as sad or self-destructive. (Perhaps that's because he recognizes Bacon's extraordinary discipline.) And he doesn't shortchange the grief in Bacon's memorial triptychs to his lover George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve of Bacon's 1971 retrospective at Paris' Grand Palais (among living artists, an honor that had been accorded only to Picasso). Peppiatt's judgment of how the events of Bacon's life played out in his paintings feels very sound, if at times a bit too Freudian. The problem he faces is similar to the one Bacon said figurative painters face in the age of photography. With photography taking over the function of illustration, it is up to figurative painters to find a reality beyond literal representation. Peppiatt does an admirable job of laying out the facts of Bacon's life, and a superb job of painting a portrait of the man with both affection and perspective. But the facts cannot alone account for the shock and the mystery of Bacon's work. Peppiatt's real accomplishment is that he makes you feel Bacon as a living presence. Like any biography worth its salt, "Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma" makes you grieve for its subject. Sept. 16, 1997 Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html