The Waste Land was one of Francis Bacon’s favourite poems. A phrase from section 2, “A Game of Chess”, exactly epitomises Study of the Human Body (1982): “And other withered stumps of time/Were told upon the walls”. This closing picture, one of 29 paintings on show at Tate Liverpool, depicts a body part, a gross truncation, bereft of torso and head. Topped by its bottom, it is a rump, a sturdy circumcised cock in a haze of pubic hair, and white-booted legs, advancing towards the viewer, clad in cricket pads. We are advised that David Gower, the England batsman, was an inspiration, but I wonder if Eliot’s word “stumps” didn’t also play its part, consciously or sub-consciously, as a verbal trigger.
The whole of Bacon’s masochistic homosexuality is encapsulated in this painting. Most of the indispensable parts are there – the penis, the buttocks, the anus – though the mouth is absent, presumably too tender for the ideal rough encounter. In fact, a mouth-part is there, displaced, but not the lips and tongue. You can see a row of teeth in the right cricket pad where, just below the knee, the white protective ridges have been summarily and severely pruned.
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