by David Plante
Nikos, too, got angry. He said, ‘Of course you didn’t.’
I wonder why Nikos sided so quickly with Stephen against Alain.
Stephen will sometimes tell an anecdote about, say, Virginia Woolf – her telling him that a writer must not publish before the age of thirty – which I had read in his World within World, and I imagine him a mediator between myself and Virginia Woolf, whose advice Stephen no doubt thinks I should take.
When, I wonder, will I be able to write about an English character?
What I have understood about the English I meet is their suspicion of generalizations, of abstractions, so easy for an American. The American generalization about the English being reserved I’ve never in fact encountered. On a bus, I sat next to an elderly lady who told me, in a very matter-of-fact way, that she had just had a hysterectomy and this was the first time since her operation that she was out. ‘I’m well now,’ she said, ‘well and well out of it.’ I said, ‘Yes, I must say, you’re well out of it,’ and she looked at me as if pleasantly surprised by my agreeing with her and smiled.
Stephen often asks me if I keep a diary, and I said, yes, I do, because I feels he wants me to. Today we were wandering together through the dark, narrow stacks of the London Library, where the floors are like cast-iron grills you can see through to the floors below, he looking for a magazine he needed but which we couldn’t find. Stephen said, ‘You can put this in your diary.’ He couldn’t find the magazine, and said it didn’t matter. Leaving the library, we met Henry Reed, whom Stephen introduced me to, then Ruth Fainlight, whom Stephen also introduced me to. Henry Reed, Stephen told me, is a poet whose most famous poem is ‘Naming of Parts’, based on instructions given to soldiers about their rifles in World War II. About Ruth Fainlight, he said she is a poet and has a brother who is a poet, Harry Fainlight. Ruth Fainlight is married to the novelist Alan Sillitoe, whose novel The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner I had read. And so I begin to put things together, without really knowing, now, more than the names of writers. Then we walked to Cork Street, and we looked in all the galleries at what was showing. Stephen becomes especially animated when he meets someone he knows in a gallery, and, with a long, sideways undulation of his big body, he holds out a hand to me for me to come and be introduced.
Once, we were walking along Piccadilly and Stephen, spotting someone on the other side, ran across through the traffic to speak with him, an old man with bright white hair, wearing a bright blue jacket. Stephen waved to me to come, and he introduced me to Henry Moore.
I had this dream – that Nikos and I were sleeping together, as we in fact were, and that I was woken by someone out in Wyndham Place, calling for help. I also heard in the dream our landlady knocking on the door of the flat and saying, ‘Mr. Stangos, Mr. Stangos,’ to wake him, as I, too, tried to wake him by shaking him by the shoulder. But he wouldn’t wake, and all the while the voice was calling for help from the street. Then I was woken by Nikos saying, ‘Yes, what is it?’ and as soon as I woke I realized that the voice in my dream was me calling for help from the street, which Nikos had heard.
The King’s Road –
Along the King’s Road on Saturday afternoon, Nikos and I went from shop to shop where clothes hang on racks from high up to low down, clothes that I consider costumes and Nikos as ‘inventive’ (a word he likes to use, as he does ‘innovative’ and ‘original’). He was excited by a sailor’s trousers, with the buttoned panel in front rather than flies, dyed bright yellow – bright yellow and now liberated from all military discipline.
He held the waist of the trousers up to his waist so they hung down, and he laughed.
I was jealous of his excitement, which seemed to me promiscuous.
I said, ‘Come on, what would you do with a pair of yellow sailor’s trousers?’
He put the trousers back on a pile of old clothes that smelled as though they had been worn and he turned away.
And then I grandiloquently said I would buy him the bright yellow sailor’s trousers.
‘No, no,’ he said.
‘I want you to have them,’ I said.
There, here, my proof to him that I can be more expansively liberal than he is, here I am buying him a pair of bright yellow sailor’s trousers that once fit, with sensual tightness, the thighs of a fantasy sailor. How much more liberal can I be?
But since then Nikos has never worn the dyed yellow sailor’s trousers. I have.
I should keep a diary, Stephen has told me, for the sake of my writing, which writing I have, with Nikos’ insistence, been devoting myself to. Stephen said I should use my diary to write with clarity and definition. He recommended that I simply describe.
As an example, he gave me a copy of Joe Ackerley’s We Think the World of You, in which Ackerley had tipped in handwritten passages that he had had to censor from the book, about a love affair between an older man and a working-class boy, whose parents say about the man, ‘We think the world of you,’ but don’t approve of his relationship with their son. The writing is very clear.
But there is so much to describe –
Describe Patrick’s flat/studio, where Nikos and I were invited to tea before the big picture of demonstrating Chinese Revolutionary Guards he is working on. We had English tea, the cucumber sandwiches cut very thin.
He told us this story: he and Ossie Clark went to Harrods to buy scarves at the counter where ladies’ scarves were sold and where, prancing, they tried on different ones about their necks and looked at themselves in the mirror, and when Patrick asked the sales lady which one she thought suited him best, she said, ‘The green one, it’s more masculine.’ Patrick laughs, in bursts, through his nose.
Then David Hockney’s flat/studio in Powis Terrace to look at the etchings of naked boys he was doing to accompany poems by Cavafy translated by Nikos and Stephen, the etchings spread out on the floor with male physique magazines from California.
David gave to Nikos some etchings that he rejected from the book to be published. One etching is of a naked boy packing a suitcase and beside him another naked boy either taking off or putting on underpants. Another is of two naked boys standing side by side and looking at themselves in a mirror. Another is of what David imagines to have been Cavafy’s young, plump Egyptian Ptolemy with necklace and bracelet and painted fingernails.
Describe Mark Lancaster’s loft, where he lives and paints. Mark is suave. He goes to New York often, and has, near the Angel, a loft, like the lofts in New York converted from urban industrial buildings. He has a miniature Empire State Building. Taken as he is by American popular culture, he is doing some paintings inspired by the orange and blue of the highway restaurants Howard Johnson, but abstracted into geometrical shapes; as are his works based on the film Zapruder, an amateur film taken by a spectator of the assassination of President Kennedy, again abstracted into pale rectangles of green. There is an ineffability to his work, the abstract shapes appearing to float off the canvas. As if in passing, he mentions that he was in a film made by Andy Warhol called Couch, in which he makes love with another guy. He wants to go live in New York, and with him I wonder if it was a mistake to have left that city, if in New York the air itself is so charged with creativity just being there makes one creative, creative in the use of the colours of Howard Johnson highway restaurants.
Mark said this about a difference between New York and London – in New York if you praise a picture you’ve painted as great it is believed to be great and if you self-deprecate and say it’s nothing really it’s believed to be nothing, but in London if you say a picture you’ve painted is great, or even good, you’re considered pretentious and your picture not great or even good, but if you self-deprecate and say it’s nothing really your painting has to be, if not great, good.
Stephen Buckley comes for drinks with his friend Bryan Ferry, both of them at art school in Newcastle. Richard Hamilton is their teacher, as he was Mark’s. Hamilton is the British Pop artist, some of his works based on stills fro
m advertisements or films which he cuts out and arranges in collages, or which he uses as the under-structure for paintings, and I prefer the paintings for the wonder of the use of the beauty of the paint, missing as I do in Pop Art just that, the wonder of the use of the medium paint – as in the painting Stephen Buckley gave to Nikos and me, a finely fissured green wedge through which fissures a layer of yellow appears, the wedge upright against thickly painted brown.
He said, ‘I tried to paint the ugliest painting of the twentieth century.’
Nikos and I are starting to put together a collection of pictures given to us by the artists.
Such as by Keith Milow, who gave us a work which consists of a magazine picture of a building cut up into squares and arranged on a grid, and on each square a little patch of metallic powder held in place by a clear plastic sheet, the whole in a Perspex frame.
He said he worries about his work being too elegant.
It comes to me: Nikos and I live together as lovers, as everyone knows, and we seem to be accepted because it’s known that we are lovers.
In fact, we are, according to the law, criminals in our making love with each other, but it is as if the laws don’t apply.
It is as if all the conventions of sex and clothes and art and music and drink and drugs don’t apply here in London.
Mark came to dinner with Keith. They are having an affair that seems to be going badly, Keith saying to Mark, ‘I know you don’t fantasize about me when we have sex.’
How do we know so many artists?
It think it has to do with Stephen Spender’s dedication to all artists, whom he introduces to us.
I should write that there is an essential difference between Saturday in the King’s Road, which is a funfair, and Sunday on the King’s Road, which is totally shut down.
In Marylebone, where we live, the very air on Sunday appears to go still and silent. There is a chemist’s shop at Marble Arch that is open, but only for prescribed medications; a large grate shuts off the rest of the shop, and through the grate one sees rows of shampoo, deodorants, shaving cream, and even bags of sweets, all inaccessible. It is possible to buy lozenges for a sore throat at the counter.
Marylebone could be a provincial city within a metropolitan city. At our local greengrocer, I asked for green peppers and was told, oh, I’d have to go to Soho for that. I don’t dare ask for garlic.
We went to Johnny Craxton’s studio, the ground floor of a terrace house, the floors covered with sheets of plywood and the plywood covered with paint. Nikos told him to pay no attention to the bad reviews he was getting for a gallery exhibition of his work, too, the critics have written, picturesque. Johnny stuck out his lips so his moustache bristled.
Johnny told this story: he was spending the weekend at a country house, where the ladies left the men at the table for brandy and cigars, and where one of the men asked around, when was the last time any one of them had kissed a boy? The usual answer, at school, but Johnny, looking at his watch, said about an hour ago.
When I was alone with Nikos, he said that Greece, in the person of the Greek painter Ghika, has been a bad influence on Johnny. Ghika is derivative of Picasso, and Johnny is derivative of Ghika. But then, Nikos said, almost all European art of Johnny’s generation is derivative of Picasso.
There are the older artists whose work is derivative of Picasso and there are the younger artists whose work is derivative of Marcel Duchamp.
Nikos says that only the American Abstract Expressionists were capable of originality.
I saw in Oxford Street a man wearing a pinstripe suit, tight in the waist, and wearing a bowler hat and carrying a tightly furled umbrella, and I thought: but he must be in costume!
Patrick is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, and also one of the people who most denies his intelligence. Listening to him talk high camp, the camp raised so high most likely by hashish, it’s impossible to see him as the serious person who learned Russian in the Army, who translated hitherto untranslated Russian poets, who was among a group who walked from London to Moscow where they were allowed to demonstrate in Red Square against the atomic bomb, after which they were invited to tea with Mrs. Khrushchev. When he tells the story of the march – how the group would be picked up by a bus at night and brought to the nearest town, either back from where they’d come or forward to where they were headed, then brought back in the morning to where they had been picked up – it sounds as though no one, or at least not he, took the march seriously. As he tells the story, he plays languorously with the scarf about his neck.
His mother is often at his place, an elegant woman who, I think, runs a hotel in Brighton, and I cannot imagine what their relationship is or what she thinks of his friends, which, however, she seems to accept in an accepting English way. Is that English: not to question, but accept, the acceptance a vague cloud of unknowing that appears to float about some people’s heads, their eyes unfocused?
The vague cloud of unknowing. No one seems to know, quite, what the boundaries of London are, as if London were itself within a vague cloud of unknowing. I have seen a map which left the boundaries of London open, but the metropolis centered on Hyde Park Corner, in a large black dot. When you arrive from beyond London into London, you do not arrive in any station that is identified as London, but Victoria Station, Paddington Station, Liverpool Street Station. There is no ‘downtown’ London.
I once thought that the English were the most adroit at defining, but almost every question I ask appears met with that vague cloud of unknowing – of, say, bemusement, as if it had never occurred to the person asked that such a question need be asked. My reaction is to think: well, really, there is no need.
Patrick did a watercolour of Nikos and me in bed, Nikos half under the covers, I naked, bum up, on top of the covers, which Stephen commissioned from Patrick. It cost Stephen £40. Looking at it, he said he had a drawer in his desk that he kept locked and he would put it there for safe keeping.
‘I have to outlive Natasha,’ he said.
He never mentioned this watercolour again, and I never asked, and I wonder if he, thinking better of keeping it from Natasha, tore it up and threw it away.
Stephen urged me to read Joe Ackerley for clarity. Yes, but I feel Ackerley’s writing lacks tension, and in my own writing I want a low level of tension which I hope to get by bringing a slight degree of self-consciousness to the sentences, perhaps the self-consciousness of a light lyricism, enough to highlight them so that they suggest a little more than what they are literally, and therefore the low level of tension between the literal and the – what? – more than literal, whatever that more than literal could be. Stephen, noting this about my writing, said he was reminded of the self-conscious writing of Julien Green, the American writer who wrote in French, and I took this as a warning from him, but a warning I thought English, and in my writing I’m not English, but, oh, a Franco-American, whatever that means.
What it means, I suppose, is that, though French has become submerged beneath English, English nevertheless floats on that primary language, and I do write conscious that I am writing in English, and, conscious as I am, I become self-conscious, but try to use the self-consciousness to be creative in the writing, to be more than literal, to sustain the tension between the literal and that light lyricism.
One of David Hockney’s assistants is called Mo, who does stand-up cut-outs of animals and trees and flowers in vases from plywood. Nikos has known him since before he met me, and they have a warm relationship that I am left out of. Do I mind? I mind that Mo is one of David’s friends within what I think of as a magical circle and from within that circle he looks out at Nikos with fondness and not at me.
But, then, Mo was a friend of Nikos before Nikos met me, one of a number of friends of Nikos who used to meet in Nikos’ flat and smoke dope and recite poems and draw pictures. Nikos told me, recounting with excitement the event from before I met him, of getting high with friends and going off with them al
l to the Albert Hall for a famous poetry reading, Wholly Communion. Perhaps I am, as he tells me I am, envious of that circle of friends, and, envious, instead of joining in stand apart – stand apart from it mostly by my taking a stand against dope. Dope is a great unifier of friends, and I won’t be unified with Nikos’ friends from before he met me. Whatever friendships Nikos had from the past that were unified by dope, he has given up, no doubt reluctantly, because I won’t be unified. I have made Nikos lose friends.
David Hockney says about Mo that if he had a factory producing hundred-pound notes he’d lose money on it.
I am beginning to see the English as distinct from the Scots and the Welsh or even the people from Yorkshire, and certainly from the Northern Irish, and leave it – again – as a vague cloud of unknowing as to what Great Britain is. I wonder if any Brit would be able to tell me. I guess the United Kingdom has entirely to do with the Queen.
To be in London because I am in love – amazing!
David Hockney’s world –
He bought a gold lamé jacket and a gold lamé shopping bag to carry his shopping from the local supermarket, and with his hair bleached and his large round black spectacles, he has become an icon of the times, with photographers flashing photographs of him on his way back from the supermarket.
He said, in his matter-of-fact Yorkshire accent, ‘I know a bit of show business is important.’
Seeing the exquisitely drawn portraits David has done of Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Isaiah Berlin, Cecil Beaton, I of course wish I too were drawn by David to rise to the level of the celebrated.
And when I stand before his portrait of his friends Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, with their large white cat, I feel they are in a magical world that David has merely depicted them in, but which they do in fact live in. So it is a surprise to find myself, with Nikos, in the very room in which Celia and Ossie were situated to be painted and to find it as magical as it appears in the painting. David does create a magical world.