posted on 03 Apr 2020

The Existential Englishman: Paris Among the Artists by Michael Peppiatt

Michael Peppiatt’s biographical details are positively mouth-watering for anyone with my interests. His agent’s website goes some way to capturing a life at the cutting edge of late 20th century art appreciation and scholarship:

“ After graduating from Cambridge in 1964, Michael Peppiatt joined the Observer as art critic, then went to Paris to take up an editorial job at Réalités magazine. In 1969 he was appointed arts editor at Le Monde. In the mid-1970s he began reporting on cultural events across Europe for The New York Times and The Financial Times, becoming Paris correspondent for several art magazines. In 1985, Peppiatt became owner and editor of Art International magazine, which he relaunched from Paris, devoting special issues to the artists he most admired.

In 1994, Peppiatt returned with his wife, the art historian Jill Lloyd, and their two children to London, where he wrote the biography of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), whose close friend and commentator he had been for thirty years. Chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ by The New York Times and translated into several languages, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (revised ed. 2008) is considered the definitive account of Bacon’s life and work. Peppiatt’s other books include Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris (2001), Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (2008), In Giacometti’s Studio (2010) and Interviews with Artists (2012).”

So I went to his recent autobiography – The Existential Englishman - with a real sense of expectation and anticipation. A life of this richness in the hands of a tried and tested author just couldn’t fail. Well, it couldn’t, could it?  Sadly, yes it could.

There are long stretches of this book that I can only describe as turgid. I’m not sure how or why but he seems to have decided to concentrate on the detail of the more mundane aspects of his life and career at the expense of those parts that really piqued my interest. Why were the earlier days of his friendship with Francis Bacon thrown away so lightly, for example. I for one wanted some detail. How did he make the political and intellectual transition from disengaged art critic to radical street fighter in the Paris of ’68?

However, when it came to his love life and general peccadillos he labours on the detail of these – but to be quite honest, and I’m prepared to accept that this says something about me as a reader, I just didn’t want to know the day by day, blow by blow account of his love life. Yawn.

And it requires me to make full disclosure here – half way through this or thereabouts, I gave it up and decided my time was better spent elsewhere. Writing a review of this book for The Guardian in 2019, Alexander Larman, I think, puts his finger on a key characteristic of Peppiatt’s memoir – the almost obsessive attention to detail. This is most engaging when he’s focussed on the detail of Parisian street life but just gets microscopically irritating when he’s bisecting his relationships. Larman also identifies, again astutely, the rather Pooterish quality of some of his accounts:

“This is a memoir in which names are not so much dropped as flung at the reader; it contains sentences such as “I also started going out on the town again with Francis Bacon.” (As in his other books, Bacon is a recurrent, often disruptive presence.) There is a vaguely Pooterish quality to some of Peppiatt’s adventures with the great and good. He fails to meet Giacometti, who lives in the studio next door to his lodgings and for whom Bacon has given him a letter of introduction, because the great sculptor is selfishly dying of stomach cancer in Switzerland. He meets Marlene Dietrich at dinner, but she drunkenly moans that her husband has forbidden her to eat hot dogs. Sonia Orwell dismisses him as an “obscure young man”. James Baldwin’s face is “full of suffering”, despite or perhaps because of Peppiatt collaring him for half an hour. He fails to speak to Samuel Beckett, despite sitting next to him, and is irked that a passing American (“complete with backpack”) is able to engage in a “brief, courteous” exchange .”

The problem with Larman’s comments is that they run the risk of making it sound as if Peppiatt has something intriguing or diverting to say about these encounters or non-encounters but in truth he hasn’t. Pooterishness can either be endearing or just plain irritating. Guess which of those I thought this was.

 

Terry Potter

April 2020