In his eightieth year, Iain Sinclair remains the specialist in —and conjurer of— connections. The compulsion is time-honoured: to hoard and continually re-curate a museum of memory, which always becomes the business of provoking and reigniting the past. Words provide a power boost to what are by now some seriously fading transmissions, such as the position of the photographer John Deakin in a particularly mythologised Soho at the height of Francis Bacon’s reign. It’s a London that Sinclair makes a live proposition once more. In the limelight as Pariah Genius, Deakin walks (or rather skulks) again, armed with his Rolleiflex; nearby might be Robert Cook, prime purveyor of queasy pulp fiction under the name Derek Raymond. Both are no strangers to the house of an inscrutable Henrietta Moraes, her figure a living portrait yet to be contorted and framed by Bacon from a base of Deakin prints. We’re here right in the midst of Sinclair’s Reforgotten, the term that he employs to periodically regenerate erased novelists, cutting-room-floor actors, and peripheral painters. Patrick Hamilton and Elizabeth Smart are willed from the footnotes of time, while Pinter’s bittersweet scripting is examined for telling signs. John MacKenzie and Barry Keeffe’s The Long Good Friday is summoned back from 1980 like an old friend, a cast-iron premonition of the London Docklands development to come and the portent of a major Sinclair bête noir, the Stratford 2012 Olympics site. John Maybury’s Love Is The Devil, with a pre-Bond Daniel Craig as Bacon’s troubled lover George Dyer, is prominently dissected, with Deakin lurking in the form of the actor Karl Johnson. Light is shed on the novels and also on the character of Colin MacInnes as captured by Deakin... the threads just keep on forming, and don’t stop. In fact, you have to wonder what didn’t make it in. Is there anything still left out there?
Scholars of the historical insanity and folly of Soho who read this book may already have John Deakin lodged in his unique pigeonhole: odd-looking but curiously penetrating image-smith to the artistic and bohemian inner circle, who very nearly died after necking a glass of cleaning fluid erroneously served from a mislabelled bottle in The French House, a widely disliked and often loathed person of whom Noel Coward once shuddered “never let that man near me again.” The irony of inner circles, as we know, is that their existence depends on those not in them. Deakin, as Sinclair has it, is the “unpaid spy,” who can be heard sneering his thoughts in the wings, bad-mouthing the others, getting what he can while providing what he can; an unspoken deal (in lieu of anything better) in which Deakin is plankton in the main players' ecosystem. Like a great many creatures of that Soho company (such as Ian Board, Muriel Belcher's horribly corrosive lapdog bartender at The Colony Room), history has given Deakin the status of a decidedly minor character. He was ripe, therefore, to become one of Sinclair’s Reforgotten as a taker of pictures who once declared, "my sitters turn into victims."
A neglected cache of archival material offered up to Sinclair during the Covid lockdown presented an unexpected device, a means through which Deakin, deceased since 1972, could now dictate his autobiography. It opened a portal to that woozy fairy-tale time of Soho and Fitzrovia, a period which now feels like a doubtful memory or a psychic candle lit in the mid-thirties and extinguished in the early nineties, in other words from the appearance of a boozing, rumbustious Dylan Thomas to the death in 1992 of he who became the fulcrum of it all, the living brand, Francis Bacon. Deakin photographed both poet and painter, Thomas rather preposterously in an overgrown cemetery in Laugharne, bow-tied, waist high in foliage, Bacon with George Dyer on route to Venice, their ease and intimacy unsentimentally pinned down by Deakin in an image that seems a knowing portent of future doom. For Bacon, Deakin provided the set-piece photographs for some important paintings. Indeed, after the painter’s death over three hundred Deakin prints in varying states of distress were discovered in Bacon’s chaotic Reece Mews studio.
Many say that Bacon rescued the human figure from conceptual oblivion in art, and John Deakin’s contribution was a valid part of that process. So putting him on the same approximate billing as the likes of Ian Board, even though this may be more or less how it was in the grand scheme of things, should be slightly mitigated. Board’s only talent was for abuse, at least while ‘in character’ at the bar. Deakin, by contrast, served in the Army, was posted to North Africa, and went on to a job as a Vogue photographer, although his abrasive nature and disregard for both his loaned equipment and the politesse of the fashion world ensured that this soon ended. Nevertheless, he was invited back for a second stint, which says something for his technical reputation. And while the Boards of this world lurk dimly inside various reels of obscure footage, Deakin was painted by Lucian Freud, and the result is regarded as a major work.
While Deakin’s pictures have failed to intrude on the mainstream, art aficionados may know those commissioned for a never-published article in the society magazine Queen in 1963: a strange, stilted record of a failed event known anecdotally as the Wheeler’s Lunch, which even nowadays will pop up mistakenly back-storied in some article, always beneath Deakin’s imagery, as an impromptu and rambunctious gathering of London’s important artists of the day. Sinclair’s rendering, in a chapter named Last Supper at Lunchtime, is a highlight. The composition (which does slightly resemble The Last Supper) was in fact staged: a set piece to suggest a manifesto for R B Kitaj’s rather floaty idea of a 'School of London' art movement. Maybe this had seemed a splendid notion over drinks one evening in The Colony Room, but in any case, here are Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Michael Andrews, all lined up like porcelain ducks in a provincial front parlour. They grudgingly converged, according to Auerbach’s later recollections, at eleven in the morning. Deakin’s results reveal that no lunch was in fact consumed —the empty glasses and unopened champagne bottle are the biggest giveaway— despite Wheeler’s restaurant being a favourite haunt of Bacon’s entourage. It is said that Deakin took thirty-six shots of this scene, which sounds interminable, and afterwards got them autographed like a giddy fan (though perhaps more like a man who sensed a commercial opportunity). It’s a nervous tableau, and one senses that the protagonists would have preferred a 'say cheese' merchant. Instead they had Deakin: in one frame he corners an uncomfortable, perplexed Freud, who resorts to deploying his trademark goggle-eyed stare on a helpless Bacon, himself long since mentally checked out for The French House. "My sitters turn into victims," indeed.
The end of Deakin’s life in a lonely room in Brighton, during an attempted convalescence from surgery paid for by Francis Bacon, forms the lyrical beginning of Sinclair’s book, and it was characterised by one last barb: Deakin had named Bacon as next of kin, requiring formal identification duties. You could say that this was an act consistent with the bohemian ‘anything is fair game’ rules of the set, and Bacon took it well enough. He was known to have said complimentary things about Deakin’s work —although it does feel, within the wider story, as if Deakin had for whatever reason simply shuffled onto Bacon’s arbitrary list of those to whom he’d decided to be benevolent. As Sinclair makes clear, Deakin cared not a jot for practically anything, a trait which was probably appealing to a mind like Bacon’s. Both men drank abundantly, but from different perspectives: the painter generally ebullient, the photographer —to borrow the title of Nigel Jones’ life story of Patrick Hamilton— through a glass darkly. Perhaps it was all just a fluke of place and time. As Sinclair writes, “all I know is that place dictates the story.”--Neil Jackson