Knopf, 880 pp., $60.00
This episode suggests
ruthless careerism, but as the Pulitzer Prize–winning critics Mark Stevens and
Annalyn Swan write in their new biography,
Francis Bacon: Revelations,
the reality turned out to be more haunting. Beginning in 1972, Bacon regularly
checked into the hotel room where Dyer died. He slept in the same bed where
Dyer had cheated on him; he sat on the toilet where Dyer took his last breath.
Bacon wasn’t spiritual, but these private rituals, which could last up to two
weeks, had the intimacy of a séance. It was the closest Bacon came to
sentimentality.