by David Plante
I fantasize myself, say, at High Table at King’s College Cambridge, with Maynard Keynes presiding, I at one side of him and at the other Rupert Brooke; and after there would be wine in Maynard Keynes’ rooms with Dadie Rylands and Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, talking about – well, talking about everyone that they knew, talking about them, however critically, with a sense that they made up a world. And they did make up a world, and they knew that the world was English. And they all slept with one another!
But, I have to remind myself, this is my overwhelming fantasy, and I have no idea if it has anything at all to do with England.
When we were lying together in the sun on the rocks by the sea, Nikos again told me that whatever happens between us depends on our being totally honest with one another. Even if I thought him ugly, I must tell him. No, I said, I didn’t find him ugly.
Is it because I’m in Europe that I am so aware of World War II, and, behind that war, World War I, called the Great War? Our landlady, a delicate and dignified woman of extreme courtesy, on brief visits tells us of her driving a lorry during the last war, and I am aware that the wars did not take place ‘over there,’ but here, here, around me.
While alone here in our home in Wyndham Place, I filled a little notebook with what I can only think of as obscenities, all as if released from having been kept back during my life in New York, released now here in London, gross obscenities. I showed the notebook to Nikos, whose only comment was that the writing itself was good – was, because I then blackened the pages with black ink so that the text can’t be read. And so, I think, I have blackened out my life in New York.
My life in London –
About Greece –
Nikos has a curious Greek national sense of connection with Prince Philip, whose mother Princess Alice lives in Athens, a nun. After Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire, the only person willing to take on the role of king, as at that time the titular head of any European state had to be, was a young royal from Bohemia, Otho. Princess Alice is by marriage connected to the lineage, and so, Nikos says, is Prince Philip. There are stories about her having hid Jews, and of having set up soup kitchens and having served the food to starving people, during the Nazi occupation of Athens. Apparently, she lives in a modest flat, and whether or not she has contact with her son or her daughter-in-law the Queen, very few people would know.
So I learn about Greece –
Nikos tells me there is no Greek aristocracy, which distinguishes the country from generations of European aristocracy. There are no medieval castles or Renaissance villas, for all the while Europe was evolving from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, Greece was occupied by the Ottoman Empire. No Greek aristocracy developed around Otho or any subsequent king. The Greek royal family, Nikos said, speak German to one another.
Nikos has taught me to write the name Greece in Greek letters, which letters stand above the country’s history like a temple:
I haven’t kept this diary in some weeks, during which I think I went through the most emotionally violent time of my life.
Nikos introduced me to acupuncture, which had been introduced to him by the painter Johnny Craxton, for Nikos’ migraines; as he found it helped him, he thought the same would help me with what a doctor in New York had suggested was a duodenal ulcer, due, no doubt, to my failed life in New York, a failure that was entirely my own fault, for in New York I had behaved badly, very badly.
The acupuncturist, Indian, Singha, had his surgery in the sitting room of a semi-detached house in Hendon, and I was very skeptical the first time I went as I lay on a trolley and heard pop music from the kitchen, where I presumed his wife was. But I allowed Singha to insert fine needles between my toes and fingers, after which he left me and I had the vivid sense of falling within myself. The sessions over the weeks become confused. I remember his pressing his hands on my chest, over and over, more and more emphatically, until I was breathing in and out in spasms, and I suddenly shouted for my mother and sobbed. He covered me with a blanket and left me until I again felt as if I was falling.
On the bus back to Nikos, I sensed the darkness of my New York – say, my American darkness – open up beneath me dangerously. At home, a deep tiredness came over me after the meal Nikos prepared, as I wasn’t able to move, and he helped me to bed, where I slept for over twenty-four hours. The darkness deepened. On the weekends, Nikos and I would go for a walk in Hyde Park, where it seemed to me my very body was straining to go in many different directions at once, each direction to one of the many young men in the park who attracted me, and if I hadn’t been with Nikos I would have tried to go in all the directions – as I had tried to do in New York. The fact is, I had come to Europe to be promiscuous, even more promiscuous than I had been in New York, as if in my fantasy Europe offered more sexual promiscuity than America, even New York, because in Europe I would be totally free and not think of being faithful to a relationship. Nikos would say, ‘Breathe in, now breathe out,’ which I would do, and then – what I longed for – back home for our afternoon nap, where the greatest reassurance beyond sex was falling asleep with Nikos.
The most shocking reaction to the acupuncture didn’t occur at Singha’s surgery, but back home, where, again, Nikos prepared a meal after which I became immobile, he more or less carrying me to our bed where I fell and suddenly twitched violently, then more and more violently, and I began to make hissing sounds through my bared teeth and then, with clenched fist, to make stabbing gestures. Worried, Nikos rang Singha, who told him to let me be, I would be all right; and I knew I would be, as I was able to look down at myself from a distance and tell myself that I could stop the fit if I wanted to, but, here, safe with Nikos, I could let the fit take its course. It lasted the night, Nikos sitting on the side of the bed. In the morning, I found that the palms of both hands were bleeding from my fingernails. I was in bed for three days, Nikos, before work and after, having to help me to the toilet.
When, back with Singha, I recounted what had happened to me, he appeared not at all surprised, and I thought, well, perhaps it was nothing to be surprised about, but when I left him, walking along Hendon Way, the sunlight slanting through the unpainted pickets of a tall fence, I all at once knew that there was nothing to worry about, that everything would be all right, and a lightness of spirit came to me.
Strange, it is as though I didn’t go through all the above, as though it happened to someone else I hardly know.
But how can I not think but that Nikos has cured me of an illness I arrived in London with?
Nikos told me he had, before he met me, invited a French boy to stay with him in his flat, Alain, and because Alain, coming to London from Paris, was counting on staying Nikos couldn’t tell him no. Nikos showed me Alain’s letters, in which he wrote, ‘I am quite the little homosexual.’ Nikos said, ‘He isn’t. He’s joking. He wrote this, flirting, just because he wants to stay in my flat.’ Now Alain is staying in the flat with Nikos and me, and he sleeps on the sofa in the sitting room while Nikos and I sleep in the bedroom. He is seventeen.
Our first drinks party together, the wine and the spirits Nikos bought cheaply from the Greek Embassy for entertaining. Because I was drunk, the only person I recall enough to distinguish him was a very tall, broad, bald-headed man, whose skull appears to be close to the skin, John Lehmann, who is a poet and who was a publisher and who worked with Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. No doubt I distinguish him because he seemed to distinguish me from the others, and, before leaving, asked me to ‘swiggle’ (I think that’s what he said) my name and telephone number on a piece of paper. When he saw the number is the same as that of Nikos, he smiled and said, ‘You live together,’ and I, ‘We do,’ and he left.
After the drinks party, Nikos and Johnny Craxton and Alain and I went out to a restaurant, and I found I was as bored as Alain because of the talk between Nikos and Craxton about people in London we didn’t know. Nikos and Craxton, smoking cigars at the end of the meal, a
ppeared to be settled in for hours, especially when they talked to each other in Greek, and I did feel, somewhat, that I was the boyfriend, as in the periphery as Alain, both of us silent.
Johnny mentioned Lucian Freud, and I, always curious (and perhaps more than curious, possessive of a world I don’t know), asked if he knew Lucian Freud, and he said, simply, that he and Lucian Freud once had studios in the same house, and I had the sense he didn’t want to say more. But now I make a connection between Johnny Craxton and Lucian Freud, and I wonder what other connections are to be made. Connections criss-cross, invisibly, though the air of London.
It would be disingenuous of me to write that I am not aware of all the connections, all, I imagine, finally connecting into a London world.
Johnny has a house in Chania, Crete, and paints scenes of the Greek countryside of goats eating figs from gnarled trees and young men playing backgammon at coffee-house tables.
Stephen Spender is back in London. Nikos wanted to see him on his own before he introduces him to me. They had lunch together in a restaurant, then came to the flat, where I was waiting with Alain. Nikos came in with Spender, who seemed to pay more attention to Alain than to me. I remarked that Spender is very tall, with very large hands and feet. He made a date with Alain for tea before he left. Nikos went with him to the entry passage to the street door, from where I heard Spender say, ‘He’s very nice.’ I supposed he was talking about me, but maybe he was talking about Alain.
Nikos asked me if I liked him, and I said yes. ‘I’m glad,’ Nikos said, ‘I was anxious that you and he wouldn’t like one another, or that Stephen would be upset by your living with me.’
Nikos took Alain and me to dinner that evening, and back at the flat Alain again slept on the sofa while Nikos and I slept together in the bedroom.
I wonder what Alain makes of us sleeping together, and, he must hear, making love together. He simply smiles a large, clear, young smile.
What worlds within worlds am I living in?
I didn’t come directly from New York to London, but from New York went to Boston, wanting to get away from New York, but I left Boston soon after to come to London for the same reason that I had left New York: not sexual promiscuity, but sexual unfaithfulness, the two different, for sexual promiscuity is in itself irrelevant to relationships, and sexual unfaithfulness is the cause of great pain in relationships. Well, perhaps the two overlap more than not.
Helen, my faithful friend beyond sex, is visiting from Boston. We went to Hampstead Heath. After a terrible automobile accident, she limps along with a cane (in England, a stick). We walked up and down muddy paths through over-grown, wet woods, and I got lost. We wandered for over an hour, until I realized I must find the way back toward Hampstead Underground Station, as I was to have lunch with Nikos and Spender, and the time was getting late. I thought the way must be in this direction, and Helen followed me. We came out into an open space where I was able to see, in the blue, hazy distance, hills and more woods. I said, no, we must go in that direction, and we entered the woods again. Almost two hours passed. We came on no one to ask directions from. I got into a panic. I didn’t want to miss Spender, and I realized just how much I wanted to see him, as though so much depended on it, as though he would think I didn’t want to see him if I didn’t appear and he, then, would not want to see me again. And Nikos would be worried, as he always is if I’m late. I became impatient with Helen, my old, dear friend, but the more impatient I became I suppressed the impatience with courteousness, even if this meant missing Spender. I finally found our way out, Helen more relieved than I. When I got back to Wyndham Place, Spender was leaving, and, out of breath, I apologized. He smiled, and it occurred to me that I shouldn’t have panicked, that we’d see one another again.
He seems to leave his white hair uncombed.
Helen and I went with the artist Patrick Procktor to Regent’s Park to lie on the grass, where Patrick did a sketch of me. With a high tone that may or may not have been ironical, he said something like, ‘I’m so glad Nikos now has you as his friend.’ After we left him, Helen asked me, ‘What did he mean by friend? Is that an English expression for something?’ I, embarrassed, said, ‘I haven’t been in England long enough to know.’ I have a life in England I wouldn’t admit having in America.
Patrick as an artist seems to me to be between two totally different worlds – one of languorous and druggy young men lounging on sofas and the other of Chinese Revolutionary Guards demonstrating for the Cultural Revolution of Mao – and I can’t see any meeting of the two, for I doubt that Chinese Revolutionary Guards lounge about on sofas amid flowers and smoking hashish and reading the Little Red Book in quite the same revolutionary spirit as the young people Patrick depicts in aquatints, though I suppose there is a revolution occurring in both worlds. Is Patrick being ironical, as he is about everything?
He is a friend of Nikos from before Nikos and I met, and, as with so many of Nikos’ friends from before, I have no idea how they came to be friends, and I am, I admit, jealous of his relationships that had to have excluded me before I met Nikos, an impossible jealousy. So, I don’t want to know what Nikos’ relationships were, not even, or especially not, with Stephen Spender. I want to think Patrick’s friendship with Nikos began with my friendship with Nikos, want to think that all of Nikos’ past friendships in London have begun with my meeting him. Even Nikos’ love for Stephen.
Stephen Spender telephoned. I answered. He said how happy he was that Nikos should have such a nice friend. Stuttering a little, I thanked him a little formally, though I tried not to be formal. I can’t yet call him Stephen. I said I thought it was unfair that I should know so much about him from his books and he so little about me, and perhaps he could get to know me without any books. He said he would like that. After, I wondered if I had sounded presumptuous.
Öçi came for drinks, and immediately he and Nikos connected by way of the names of people they know, or know of, in Greece, or names of Greeks they know, or know of, who live in London. Öçi wore a shirt made of white, diaphanous, finely pleated material, cinched in at his waist by a heavy belt made of big blue beads. I noted how large his nose is, with large pores. Nikos wore a brown cardigan, his white shirt open at the collar. His features are refined.
Patrick, dressed in tight purple velvet trousers, a loose shirt and a silk scarf about his neck, is very tall and lanky. The different parts of his body – head, arms, long torso, pelvis, legs – appear tenuously connected, so when he moves his body moves in different, swaying directions, as if he were slowly dancing, a cigarette poised in three fingers, the little finger held out.
He lives in a walkup in Manchester Street, Marylebone, decorated with Oriental-like cushions and rugs, a multi-coloured glass lamp hanging down in the midst.
David Hockney is painting a portrait of Patrick in his, Patrick’s, flat, which I went round with Stephen Spender to see. Stephen and I often meet as if we had all the free time in the world, though Stephen will then say he feels guilty and should be at home writing; as long as I’m with him, I feel I am learning something about London. The large Hockney painting was in Patrick’s sitting room. When I said how beautifully painted the basket is, Patrick, with a laugh close to a snort, asked, ‘Which basket, darling?’ and I noted the bulge in the crotch of his tight trousers.
He proposed doing a watercolour of Stephen and me, on his sofa. ‘Get closer, darlings,’ he said, and Stephen put an arm about me and I leaned against him. The portrait of Stephen is very good, precise, and Stephen’s red socks and shiny black shoes are deftly painted; I, however, have a flat, grey face and a vacuous smile and most of my body is left blank. Patrick gave the picture to me.
Stephen asked me not to let his wife Natasha know about the picture.
I said, ‘How could I let her know? I’ve never met her.’
He looked puzzled, as if this had not occurred to him.
He said, ‘It’s a bore, Natasha not wanting to meet you and Nikos.’
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Ah, Nikos and me, Nikos and me, known as a couple more than we would be known singly.
Are we known as a couple whom Stephen dotes on? And how is this known by Natasha? If Stephen doesn’t tell her, who does?
Stephen asked Nikos and me to lunch to meet Christopher Isherwood at Chez Victor, a restaurant writers have been going to for a long while. Isherwood, with his hair cut very short at the neck so his thin nape is almost bare but kept in long bangs over his forehead, looks like an aged little boy. He and Stephen giggled a lot, often at jokes Isherwood made about Stephen, the jokes all about Stephen’s boyfriends in Berlin and how one cost Stephen an expensive suit, another an expensive meal. But whereas Isherwood seemed to make fun of Stephen, which Stephen enjoyed, or appeared to enjoy, Stephen didn’t make fun of Isherwood.
Isherwood didn’t pay much attention to Nikos and me, though perhaps he did by thinking his making fun of Stephen would entertain us.
When he left, to go on to someone he let us know was very grand, a movie star, Stephen said that Isherwood has never been interested in his friends.
A lazy Sunday lunch with Patrick. He said he had seen Alain, who has returned to Paris, and Alain had told him that Stephen made a pass at him when they were together for tea.
Patrick put Alain in a painting, among many young men all standing about as in a large room.
He did pencil drawings, one of me lying on the floor and reading the Sunday newspaper.
One of Nikos and me lying on the floor together.
Stephen is angry that Patrick has been telling people that he made a pass at Alain. His large face appeared to become larger the redder it got. He said, ‘I didn’t.’