Book review: Portrait of Bacon in a different light

An absorbing and engaging read

Maylis Besserie author of Yell, Sam, If You Still Can. Picture: Francesca Mantovani

• Francis Bacon’s Nanny 
• Maylis Besserie 
• Translated by Clíona Ní Ríordáin 
• Lilliput, €15.95 

This is the third and final part of Maylis Besserie’s trilogy, focusing on Irish artists and writers whose lives interacted with France — Samuel Beckett in Yell, Sam, If you Still Can, WB Yeats in Scattered Love and now Francis Bacon, one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, revered for his tortuous, intense paintings of crucifixions, popes and mouths. Besserie’s first book won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in 2020, and was widely translated, while this novel won the Prix du Roman des Écrivains du Sud in 2023.

Besserie, a producer on the radio channel, France Culture, was born in Bordeaux in 1982 and was sent to Ireland as a child to learn English. All three books are ably translated by Clíona Ní Ríordáin, formerly of the Sorbonne, now O’Donnell Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

I had forgotten the strange fact that Bacon shared his London homes with his nanny, a Cornishwoman called Jessie Lightfoot, until her death in 1951. She is the main narrator of this extraordinary novel.

Though Bacon spent most of his working life in London, he was born in Dublin and grew up on a stud farm in Co Kildare. By the age of 16, the violent abuse of his father became intolerable, and he fled to London, then Paris. He never returned to Ireland.

Francis Bacon’s Nanny Maylis Besserie

Nanny arrived on the scene as a young woman when Francis was just a year old. As an Englishwoman from Cornwall, she considered herself superior to the Irish. She chats away about her new employers and the children as if talking over a cuppa in the kitchen: “Two little fellows, as tiny and handsome as could be:…Harley trotting along with his head down like a damned soul while my baby Francis crawled at his feet…” 

Nothing fazes Nanny. She is shocked more by the violence of Bacon’s father, the Captain, who regularly whips his son, than she is by the fact that the young Francis seems to like it. When his father discovers Francis once again half-naked in his mother’s underwear, it is her familiar warning cry of “No, Francis!”, which he has known since childhood, that stops him jumping off the stairs.

Nanny’s narrative alternates with shorter sections in the voice of Bacon himself, usually about his struggles to paint: “You stick your little faggot head on the canvas, the image of Francis that you see in the speckled mirror. That you distort with your eyes, slit with your pupils. Crack, you take out your knife, crush the pigments in the porcelain dish, bind the powder to the glue so that the colour stands out, the moiré of the puffy skin, the gleam on your bruised mug.” 

Besserie has obviously immersed herself in biographies and critical writings about Francis Bacon, though no sources are cited (unlike Colm Tóibín’s long reading list in The Magician). Read cumulatively, Bacon’s sections give interesting insights into the correlation between his struggles to paint and the excesses of alcohol, violent sex, and gambling in his life.

Times were often hard in the Bacon household, and Nanny made sandwiches for the roulette players and the look-outs, keeping an eye out for cops. An unforgettable image is of Nanny stoically sleeping on the kitchen table in a particularly cramped studio-home. The familiar stories of gambling in Monte Carlo, boozing at the Colony Club and the suicide of Bacon’s lover George Dyer are seen afresh, as Nanny’s monologues continue to haunt the artist from beyond the grave.

While essentially a work of fiction, the novel shows Bacon and his work in a new light. It is an absorbing and memorable read.

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