Everything, it would seem, has its commensurate price. John Richardson, critic, sometime Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, and, most notably, author of a vast, multi-volume biography of Picasso, began life with a silver spoon in his mouth, or at least a silver-plated one. His father, Sir Wodehouse Richardson, was the proprietor of the great London shop, the Army and Navy Stores which, at its most successful, between 1890 and 1940, was, as Sir Wodehouse's son proudly informs us, "more than a mere emporium: it was a key cog in the machinery of Empire".
When he was almost 70, the owner of "the Stores", as they were familiarly known, married one of his employees, a 35-year-old called Patty Crocker. John was five when his "dashing, surprisingly liberal" father died, and his mother, though she loved her little boy dearly, sent him off to a "horrendous" - and un-named - boarding school. Eight years later he transferred to the more congenial Stowe school, situated in "one of the largest and stateliest of English houses", where he developed a lifelong passion for 18th-century architecture.
A special veneration for the grottoes and temples that dotted the park resulted from their being the scenes of my first sexual experiences. One of these escapades ended ignominiously. A friend and I were caught on a rug in a distant folly by the Hunt Club: the club's pack of hounds had mistakenly followed our scent.
Needless to say, the "friend" was a boy; thus was developed another lifelong passion.
Anyone who imagines that every homosexual comes to acknowledge his - or her - sexual nature in sorrow and self-loathing will be startled by Richardson's jaunty account of himself and his adventures. After an early, unsatisfactory romance with "an attractive, fattish girl called Diana", he seems to have achieved a perfect take-off into the upper regions of the gay world. One of his first jobs, if that is the word, was as an assistant to Prince George Chavchavadze, a concert pianist. It was the Prince's "Georgian looks and princely panache rather than his pianism, however, that had won him the hand of Elizabeth de Breteuil, owner of a Renaissance villa outside Florence, a floor of the Palazzo Polignac in Venice, and a magnificent hotel particulier on the rue de Bellechasse, which her American fortune enabled her to run more lavishly than any other Parisian hostess".
It was to the Paris apartment that Chavchavadze brought the young Richardson, giving him a bed, and his keep. There was little in the way of real work for him to do, since the Prince already had a secretary, a valet, an agent, "and a Mexican bodyguard called Puma". Richardson's real job, he soon discovered, was to sleep with his boss. After a month or two as a Proustian prisonnier in the over-perfumed Chavchavadze household, he fled Paris for the rigours of war-time England. He went to Cornwall to recuperate. "For God's sake stay there," his mother wrote. "There's a Mexican squatting on the front doorstep. He says he needs to see you. What have you been up to?"
Richardson's love of art blossomed early. As a schoolboy he had reserved a copy of Picasso's great print, Minotauromachie, for £50 at Zwemmer's bookshop in the Charing Cross Road, hoping his mother would advance him his year's allowance to pay for it. "She not only refused to do so, she called up nice Mr Zwemmer and told him she had a good mind to put the police on to him for trying to swindle little boys out of their pocket money." The adult Richardson ruefully adds that a signed copy of Minotauromachie recently fetched $1.5 million at auction. Always follow your instincts, even if your mother objects.
From the start, Richardson found his way into the heart of the artistic demi-monde with the assurance of a sleepwalker. He got to know Lucian Freud and Michael Wishart, and, through Wishart, Francis Bacon - "a youngish man with a luminous face" - and heard about Bacon's predilection for "rough trade and drinking and fishnet stockings". On Bacon's work he is very shrewd:
At his best, Francis imbued paint with such palpable physicality that it seems to slobber, shudder, scream. At his worst, he allowed melodrama, contrivance, and cheap thrills to become ends in themselves.
From Richardson's description of those years immediately after the war, London life seems to have been one long party. At the Thurloe Square house of his friend Viva King, wife of a British Museum curator - "mauve in the face from too much sherry" - Richardson met such luminaries of the intellectual world as Norman Douglas and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and, fatefully, "a sinister bugger", as Mrs King described him, called Douglas Cooper, a connoisseur and art collector.
Cooper's background was similar to Richardson's: in 1932, at the age of 21, he had inherited a trust fund of £100,000, which allowed him to devote his life to art history and "the pursuit of cubist works of art and good-looking young men". He was a shrewd buyer and seller of art, despite having lost the sight of one eye in a car crash. When Richardson asked Francis Bacon if Cooper really did have an eye for a picture, Bacon tartly responded: "She's [Cooper] only got one, so it better be good". All the same, Richardson was eager to see Cooper's pictures. "Take a look at your own risk," Bacon warned him. "She'll try to lure you into bed, and then she'll turn on you. She always does." As Richardson grimly notes, "Francis's predictions had a way of coming true."
HE did not encounter Cooper again until 1949, at another party: "I realized I was being stalked by a stout pink man in a loud checked suit", who reminded him of their meeting at the house of "that Poufmutter, Mrs King". Richardson this time seized the moment, and asked if and when he could see the Cooper collection. "Right now, my dear," said Cooper, "if you can tear yourself away from these hideous mediocrities."
Cooper was a monstre damne, a lover of beauty who loathed his own lack of it. Richardson fantasised that a kiss from him would turn the toad into a prince, but on their first amatory encounter "Douglas turned out to be as rubbery as a Dali biomorph. No wonder he was mad at the world." Still, they hit it off somehow, and so began a 12-year partnership that brought them both to Provence, where Cooper purchased and renovated a magnificent old house. To the Chateau de Castille would come all the great ones of the day, especially Picasso, who, a fellow monster, liked and was amused by the demonic Cooper.
Of course, this golden world would eventually turn to gilt, and then to lead. Richardson, who had his own ambitions as a connoisseur and critic, chafed under the despotic rule of his mentor. He is admirably honest about his reasons for staying with the old boy - "It would be hypocritical to pretend that Douglas's money was not a factor; it made everything much, much easier, but thank God I had a little of my own" - and frank in his account of the gradual disintegration of the relationship. Cooper treated the young man as little more than a catamite - a bit of smooth, so to speak, who could be frequently taken, but never taken seriously; when in company Richardson ventured a critical opinion, Cooper would shoot him a withering look, as if to say, "Aren't we getting a little above ourselves, my dear?"
At last Richardson broke free and went to America, where he found his spiritual home, as well as a new love, the writer and Lieder-singer Robert Rushmore, whom Cooper nicknamed "Filth". The end was nigh. There were alarms and terrible excursions still to come, however. Returned to the chateau, Richardson tried to sever the cords that bound him to Cooper. Thinking he was almost free, one day he was summoned to the local hospital. Cooper, prowling Nimes in search of some rough trade, had picked up an Algerian, who tried to rob him, and then slashed his belly with a knife, "once vertically, twice horizontally, cicatrizing him with an emblematic Crois de Lorraine." Afterwards, the doughty Cooper would joke: "Faute de mieux, I've become a Gauliste."
The Sorceror's Apprentice is much more than a settling of old scores. Richardson pulls no punches in his portrait of Douglas Cooper, but the style of the book is so limpid and the tone so light that the strongest feeling the reader carries away is envy of those marvellous 12 years of travel, exquisite food, endlessly entertaining conversation and, above all, aesthetic bliss. The price of all this was high, but as Richardson has it:
. . . Douglas would play on my compassion, alternating cajolery with brute force, psychic cunning with infantile bellowing. The tension was often excruciating, but the Tolstoyan bond that developed between us - a bond forged out of a passionately shared experience of works of art - made it all worthwhile.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times