by David Plante
And how he believes that there is no reason why anyone else should not love life.
Interesting about David is, though he has the reputation of being something of a pop star, his tastes in literature and in music and in art are far from what the world would expect those of a pop star to be: Proust, Wagner, and I heard him say that the greatest work of art is the Fra Angelico frescos of the Annunciations in the monks’ cells in San Marco in Florence.
In Carnaby Street, looking in shop windows at blown-up cut-outs of almost naked sexy young men among fancy clothes, I’m at first pleasantly surprised at the eroticism displayed so frankly, and then I think, But why hasn’t such eroticism always been on frank display? as if any opposition to such a display of sex suddenly becomes so obsolete I can’t understand why it ever was in force.
Nikos said that the Soviet ambassador approves of Carnaby Street because it is essentially inspired by the young proletariat.
It comes to me almost as a recollection from a long time ago because I can’t recall who the girl was I was with, nor where the lawn was that we were lounging on, nor why she suggested that we drop acid. She said, ‘It has to be in the country, in the midst of nature.’ I said, ‘Yes,’ outwardly agreeing with everything in general, as Nikos tells me I do, as a way of inwardly not agreeing to anything in particular. I was alone with her. I wonder now if the appeal of the agreement with her was that it excluded Nikos, for I would never ever take drugs of any kind with him, and I wouldn’t, I know, not because I would separate myself off from him but because he would separate himself off from me, and this would enrage me, as it does when, rarely, he does smoke dope. Dope may be familiar to him as a Greek, for whom the hashish dens in the port of Piraeus are a part of Greek subculture, more than as a Londoner for whom the subculture of hashish is a fashion. He has no right – I give him no right – to enter so exclusively into himself that I do not exist for him. (And yet, friends are impressed at how we, at drinks parties, each go off to speak to different people, an indication of the respect we have for the independence we have for each other; an independence we do respect even when alone together, Nikos in his study and I in mine.) Am I being introspective, which I studiously do not want to do in this? I think I’m not so much introspecting into myself as introspecting into Nikos’ self, in which I imagine him wishing, at least from time to time, for total independence from me. I will not try to introspect into my noncommittal agreement to drop acid, apart from Nikos, with the girl on the lawn.
When I returned home, Nikos, preparing supper, asked me, annoyed, ‘Where have you been? I was worried,’ and this reassured me totally in him, a reassurance that it excluded any introspection.
I want to be free of introspection.
Stephen asked me to lunch with him at his club, the Garrick. I had never before been in a gentleman’s club. He told me to wear a tie. I always wear a tie. In the dining room of the club, Stephen said, pointing with two fingers at a table across from us, ‘There’s Benjamin Britten.’ Against the light from a window, I saw a man with dense curly grey hair talking with someone at his table. Stephen kept looking toward him, but Britten never looked our way. As we were leaving the club, Stephen said, having, it seemed, thought a lot about it, ‘I don’t think he’s ever liked me.’
Later, Stephen told me he had been reprimanded by the club because I, as his guest, had stood on a rug guests are not allowed to stand on.
‘Your life is interesting to you and to me,’ Nikos said, ‘but don’t presume that it is interesting to anyone else.’
I’m told that Nikos and I live in a world beyond which we can’t see the outside objections to two men in love. No doubt, but I can’t imagine any reason for objecting to it. Do we ever think that the police may suddenly break into our flat and arrest us for the criminal activity of making love?
And the London world we live in is made up of many, many such criminals as we are.
We never think of the sexes of people we entertain in our flat.
Patrick came to dinner. I never know if he is being ironical or not, in such a grand way that he raises his chin and smiles and looks down at me from his high height with half-shut eyes, his lids fluttering, holding out the scarf from about his neck and letting it drop so it seems to float around him, and drawling, ‘Darling.’
During the meal, he said something from his height that made me think that before Nikos met me he and Patrick had an affair, or something like an affair. I laughed, again not sure if Patrick was joking or not, but then I became very upset. I thought Patrick, skinny and lanky, was not attractive, and I was offended that Nikos would have found him attractive. After Patrick left, Nikos sensed I was upset, and when we were in bed together he asked me why. I couldn’t tell him I was offended in my sexual pride by his having had sex with someone I thought sexually unattractive – but I said enough, finally, for him to tell me I understand nothing about sexual attraction, which is attraction, not, as he seems to think I think, towards a whole generalization of people, but towards a particular person, love making a conversation – the most intimate possible – between two people.
When I saw on Nikos’ desk an address book, I picked it up to look through it. We are totally open to each other, so that I not only don’t mind Nikos opening my post, I want him to open my post. I found that Nikos came to London with addresses and telephone numbers given to him by the Greek Surrealist poet Nanos Valaoritis, who had lived in London and made friends among the English poets. I saw, among other names, that of Stephen Spender.
Again, I have never asked him about his first meeting with Stephen, have never asked him about his relationship with Stephen. I have simply assumed that it was a loving relationship that has developed into a loving relationship between Stephen and Nikos and me as a couple. But there is a deeper reason why I don’t want to know: that Stephen is so much older than Nikos, the sex between them sex I myself would draw away from with a shudder. And Stephen is so big! I am young, and in my youth my sexual attraction is to those as young as I am. Nikos is young, and, oh yes, he is attracted to me, as I am to him, but he allows that older men are attracted to younger, and that the younger have no reason to shudder at this attraction. Does this have to do with Nikos being Greek, and I, in my not even thinking of sex with an older man, an American of – what? – puritan principles, in the sense that puritan principles are self-righteous, self-regarding, even self-loathing if they are not self-righteous and self-regarding? In no way as promiscuous as I was in New York, Nikos has revealed to me his past sexual activities in Athens, which seem to have involved more loving emotion than sexual urgency (no pornographic impulses in him); Nikos is to me free of puritan principles, but the freedom makes him very vulnerable to tender emotions. These tender emotions I have to say I had never experienced before I met Nikos, who, in the enthrallment of love, cannot be but tender.
I recall a conversation Nikos once had with another Greek: it gives so much pleasure to an older man to have the pleasure of a younger, and it requires so little effort on the part of the younger.
And this: in a just-opened so-novel sex shop in Soho with the art historian Robert Rosenblum and his wife the artist Jane Kaplowitz, Nikos picked up an enormous dildo and laughed, and Bob and Jane laughed, because, after all, the urges of sex are not to be taken seriously, and do not command sexual pride. I take sex too seriously, and my sexual pride – that is, that I should only be known to love someone, such as Nikos, whom the world would admire me and even be jealous of me for – makes me a prude about sex, and embarrassed in a way Nikos isn’t, so, in the sex shop, I had to force myself to laugh, and wished Nikos wouldn’t joke about the grotesque dildo, though I could see, when he looked at me, that he was joking, with the slight mischievousness that makes his eyes shine, because he knew his joking embarrassed me.
When we were alone, he said, ‘You didn’t like my doing that.’ And I, ‘What do you think I am, a prude? Of course I didn’t mind.’
He said, ‘You’re funny abo
ut sex.’
‘You’re funnier,’ I said.
Bob Rosenblum has given female names to all his male friends: Nikos’ name is Phaedra and mine is Faith.
Trying to learn Greek, which becomes more and more difficult as I try, I think how strange it is that I should be so close to someone whose native language I don’t know. When I hear him speaking over the telephone to a Greek friend, I recognize words but not enough to know what this important conversation is about – especially the word ‘catastrophi!’ – important because it is in a language I don’t understand. Do I think that he tells others in Greek what he wouldn’t tell me? No, I don’t, I’m not jealous of what he keeps to himself in his language. Or am I?
I’m very interested in reading his poems – written some in English, which he gives to me to read and which always impress me for the way he can make an idea appear to be as sensitive as the touch of a fingertip, and some in Greek, which he doesn’t give me because I can’t read them but which, I know, he wouldn’t mind my reading – though, finding a poem in Greek exposed on his desk when he was out, I became determined to read it, to enter into his language, and I stopped on:
which words I did not understand at first reading, but which suddenly revealed themselves as:
BEAUTIFUL BOY
and, yes, for a moment I was jealous of whoever that beautiful boy was, hidden away in Nikos’ poem in Greek, even if that beautiful boy existed only in the poem. I was suddenly jealous of Nikos for being Greek, for being able to claim a sensibility, a sensitivity, that allowed and still allows boys to be beautiful, that allowed and still allows the sensible, the sensitive appreciation of beauty.
There is so much to write about this: Nikos as Greek.
He smiles at my speaking whatever Greek I know, and tells me that I get the genders – of which there are three in Greek, masculine, feminine, neuter – all mixed up.
I call Nikos , my Love.
I think back at my fantasies of Greece before I met Nikos, fantasies that go as far back as myself as a pubescent boy looking through the Encyclopaedia Britannica that my father, always aspiring for a higher education than his eighth-grade parochial school education, had bought from a door-to-door salesman, an encyclopedia that offered me a world view, which world view I found more arresting in the photographs than in the text, a world view that suddenly focused on photographs of ancient Greek statues when I turned the page and they appeared, statues of naked gods. (Stephen told me that as a boy his first sexual arousal came with studying, under a magnifying glass, Greek postage stamps with statues of nude gods.) I had never seen any depiction of nudity, and though I was sexually aroused, I was aroused by Greek nudity, which was the nudity of gods, which was idealized nudity, which made arousal god-like, idealized. And so, whenever I encountered, in whatever form, some reference to Greece – always ancient Greece – the reference was to the Greece of Greek gods, was an idealized Greece. Reading the orations of Pericles (one of the few books we had in our house, kept on glass-fronted shelves above a drop-leaf desk) I felt rise in me the idealizing devotion to the great patriot, the hero, the god-like. Studying photographs of Greece in a large picture book, I was, yes, aroused by the vision of asphodel in a stony field illuminated by the essential light of Greece.
And so the fantasies of an idealized Greece in all the Western world, with varying attempts to realize the idealization.
Leaving for New York, Mark asked us to care for his cat, a Burmese named Jasmine, which Nikos loves more than he loves me.
Johnny Craxton did a drawing of Jasmine:
The cat fixes us more than ever in our lives together: a pet to take care of.
After Mark left, I, feeling that there was more than friendship between him and Nikos, asked him if he and Mark had been lovers, and he asked, ‘Would you be hurt if I said yes? He loved me.’ And that Mark had loved Nikos made me think: yes, of course he did.
At times, usually at a meal, when Stephen and Nikos and I are together, I listen to them talk, say, about Russia and America. I note how Stephen, who so likes to speculate about international affairs and will make references to what someone told him when he was in Washington, will try to be deliberate in his speculation, and how Nikos will seem to be impatient with Stephen’s deliberations and will suddenly make a statement that totally undoes those deliberations, an impertinent statement such as, ‘You believe what you heard in Washington? Why not Moscow?’ and Stephen will frown and blink and seem to wonder if Nikos may not be right.
Nikos once said to me, ‘I should be elected President of the United States,’ and when I told him he couldn’t as it is in the American Constitution that all presidents must be born within the United States, he said, ‘The Constitution should be changed,’ and then laughed that beguiling laugh that makes me laugh.
Mario Dubsky, who paints large abstractions with heavy brushstrokes, gave a party for a houseful of friends on Guy Fawkes night, and in his garden set aflame odd pieces of furniture, including a bedstead, the roaring fire terrifying. Many people gathered round, illuminated by the flames they stared into, people I can now consider friends, all of us as if in flames.
I noted the painter Maggi Hambling, her necklace of brass bullets glistening in the flames, she staring out with narrowed eyes.
Also there, the artist and set and costume designer Yolanda Sonnabend, with long black hair that she keeps shaking back, and wearing large bracelets that move up and down her slender arms as she gestures. She is a close friend of Maggi, as is Antoinette Godkin, who works for an art dealer, whose beauty appears accented by a bright beauty spot on a cheek. The three seem to be the goddesses of some esoteric rite that is exclusively female, and one does not ask what goes on in the rite.
And, yes, I have to include Helen McEachrane, very beautiful and also mysterious, as I’m not sure where she is from or what she does, but, wherever she is from and whatever she does, she moves with style, always dressed as if in veils that move about her as she moves.
It sometimes happens that when I am speaking to Stephen over the telephone, he will suddenly ask, ‘Natasha, Natasha?’ and I will hear the click of a telephone receiver put down, Natasha having listened over another telephone. That Natasha, whom I have not met, should be a presence looming in my friendship with Stephen is very strange to me, and makes me wonder if Nikos and I loom in any way in her relationship with Stephen.
When I told him this, he laughed. He said that he had been talking over the telephone with his brother Humphrey, Humphrey in a telephone box from where he exclaimed that Stephen should see the beauty of a young man passing outside, and Stephen heard the tell-tale click of the receiver of the other telephone and knew that Natasha had been listening. Why Stephen laughed I don’t know, though perhaps I do, in a way: to keep Natasha alerted to his sexuality without admitting it to her, to make her wonder. This seems to please him.
Now I find that Öçi is having an affair with Mario, with whom Keith had an affair. Do I, in a way, feel left out of these criss-crossing sexual affairs, which I only hear about incidentally, by living with Nikos, with whom I have more than an affair? Perhaps, at moments, I do, but only at moments, when, at a gallery opening, I talk to someone in the crowd whom I think sexy. But I know from New York about affairs, and it is always a relief to go home with Nikos and go to bed with him.
What is the desire – the felt need – to have lived Nikos’ life with him, to have always been there with him? Is it possessiveness that makes me want to have been with him when he was eight and his father died on the day the Nazis left Athens; when, to his total bemusement, a man next to him in a cinema undid his flies and masturbated him, his first sexual experience; when he was a student at Athens College and secretly mimeographed Communist propaganda; when he was in America and for a summer worked in a meat-packing factory; when he scrubbed floors in the army; when he was rejected by a lover on holiday with him on the island of Poros? So many events, so many, and I want to have been there, just to have been there. I
s this love? Is it love to want to be with him when he dies, and close his eyes?
When Stephen, at dinner in our flat, said he had to go to the South of France, though he didn’t want to, to get trees planted in the garden of his and his wife Natasha’s house there, Nikos said, ‘Why don’t you ask David to come with you?’ This seemed to puzzle Stephen for a moment, but after that moment his face became animated and he said, his head thrust forward and his eyes wide, ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’
Paris
In Victoria Station, as soon as we sat in our seats on the train, Stephen jumped up and went across the aisle to speak to two men who were already seated. They were Francis Bacon and his friend George Dyer, also going to Paris. Bacon will have an opening at the Galerie Maeght, and said Stephen and I must come, which meant Stephen would have to postpone our going to the South of France to plant the trees in his and Natasha’s garden, but Stephen appeared very excited, blinking his eyes a lot, and said we’d love to come to the opening. And as it turned out we were all staying at the same hotel in Paris, the Quai Voltaire, where I am now, looking out at the Seine, green-grey, as I write at a little French table sitting on a little French chair, the kind of table and chair I imagine Stephen, who is so big, would break just by writing a letter here.