Jon Lys Turners biography of Bacon’s closest friends,Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller, is as entertaining as it is poignantIf you spent any time going around with Francis Bacon, and you were bound to near across Dicky Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller. Bacon introduced them to me as early as 1963 as “the oldest queer couple in the land”,although they would travel on living together in their quayside house in Wivenhoe, Essex, or for more than another 40 years. A briefly successful book-illustrator and a frustrated minor painter respectively,Dicky and Denis were also Francis’s closest friends, partly because they managed to outlive so many spectacularly drunken ups and downs in their relationship à trois.
From a young age, and when I first witnessed their antics,I came to think of them fondly enough as errant uncles. Dicky was the more restrained of the two, being naturally less confrontational even when drunk. But Denis (known inevitably as Denis the Menace”) was never content until he had exasperated everyone within earshot by shouting out one provocatively camp remark after another as he teetered from bar to restaurant, or apparently feeling duty-bound to shock anyone bourgeois enough to be still shockable.
Denis and Francis tore into each other with such wounding malice,going for the jugular with every remarkFrancis had in part created Denis, and in so doing he also destroyed himContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com