by David Plante
She says, ‘I want my life to mean something.’
I am with her often, and we talk.
She is teaching me Greek.
Francis, with George, invited us and Stephen to dinner at the White Tower, which he chose because Nikos is Greek. I wanted so much for Nikos to like Francis and George. I am never sure that he will like the people I do. He tells me I like everybody, and expect everybody to like me. Francis was very lively, passing out pound notes to anyone who served us, even if it was just to refill our glasses with wine, and sometimes held out pound notes to people passing as if they were serving us. George smiled a contented smile, as if pleased that Francis was with people with whom he was being so spontaneously lively.
Francis said, when Stephen asked him, that he doesn’t see Lucian Freud any more.
George said, ‘Lucian borrowed too much money from Francis that he gambled and lost and never paid back. I told Francis, “Enough, Francis, enough of that.” ’
Francis laughed.
There was talk about Henry Moore, and Francis, laughing, said that Moore’s drawings were knitting, just knitting. Nikos, who, I knew, could have easily disagreed with Francis in a way neither Stephen or I would dare to, said, ‘That’s it, they’re just knitting.’ After, Nikos and I walked home. He didn’t say anything. I asked, ‘Didn’t you like Francis?’ He said, ‘I’m thinking.’ We walked on. He said, ‘He doesn’t take anything for granted, anything at all. He’s totally original. I think he is amazing.’
Keswick, Cumberland
I don’t like being away from Nikos. I really am anxious all the while. I had thought it would be nice to get away with Maria, who said we should simply take the next train from Euston Station that was leaving after we got there, which seemed an exciting idea. But I think of Nikos all the time and want to be with him. There were moments on the train when I felt I wanted to turn right back to him. I used to enjoy travelling, but I don’t now, perhaps because I feel being with Nikos is as far as I could ever hope to travel. Perhaps there’s a horror in all this that I feel: we’re so entangled with each other, and though the entanglement is freedom for me, I can’t begin to imagine how horrible it would be if Nikos felt limited by it. I think, sometimes, I do limit Nikos, and he resents it. But I know that he frees me, in the largest sense, and I can only hope I do the same for him, in some sense.
The next train leaving Euston was to the Lake District. It took about six and a half hours, with two changes. The trip was pleasant, but towards the end when it got dark and we were told that most hotels would be closed, we had a moment of panic. But we found a hotel easily, in the center of Keswick, where I am now in bed in my room. We took a walk, but it was too dark to see anything. We talked. Nikos would not be very tolerant of our philosophical discussions about life and death, but I am enough like Maria that we get a lot from them, and sometimes she does say remarkable things.
I wish I could get the train ride in: at first leaving London, buildings grey, then green and dun-colored fields with placid cows, then it clouded over and drizzled, and as darkness came so did fog, and I felt rather sleepy so dozed a little and woke to find we were in the midst of very high, bald hills, the darkness a kind of blue-black light that made everything gleam, and then it got too dark to see anything, and going through a valley, where the train stations were illuminated by one weak lantern hung on a branch or the picket of a fence, I had the feeling that the train had left the earth and was rattling through the dark sky, and that all the very distant, very pale lights were stars in that sky. I then felt a horrible anxious-making desolation come over me. I really don’t have any other stability but Nikos.
It’s early, around 9:00, but we both wanted to sleep. Because of the cold damp, the bed has an electric blanket.
Bowness-on-Windermere
After breakfast, we came by bus to Friar’s Crag on Derwent Water, where we are now. We’re sitting, completely by ourselves, on a rock thrust out into the lake. There are dark islands, and behind them vague mountains covered in mist. In the foreground are pine branches. It is very, very quiet, the quiet that Maria calls ‘silence that goes beyond silence.’ But I’ve started to notice matchsticks and bits of paper and rubbish on the ground around us. I think we’ll go.
Later. We’re in Bowness-on-Windermere, in a lovely hotel right on Lake Windermere. There’s a large party on downstairs, and I can hear voices and music from my room.
As we’re here off-season, the rates are very reasonable, and we are indulging ourselves in ordering tea from room service and having tea together in Maria’s room by the electric fire.
She says, ‘It’s a funny thing, this earth we walk on,’ or ‘It’s a funny thing, hurrying and worrying about life,’ or ‘It’s a funny thing, life,’ and while she smiles, her large, dark eyes, surrounded by dark rings, are very sad.
Maria said she woke this morning feeling better than she has in months.
In the lounge after dinner yesterday, she told me just a little about her ‘school’ – or rather suggested something about it by asking me if I had ever stood up among people I didn’t know and told them honestly everything I have ever done in all my life, however bad? I said no. She said, ‘It’s the hardest thing to do.’
London
Back home with Nikos, who I know is the centre of my life.
He is the centre, and about him are the now many friends we refer our lives together out to, all these friends aspects of life in London, where we are extended into a world.
Yet, do we – no, do I, for Nikos is not interested – know anything about what is meant to be the class system of Britain? Here, I belong to no class, or imagine that I don’t. Nor does Nikos belong.
I guess the real invention in keeping a diary is the way it is written, so allow myself to think back, inventively, at the time Nikos and I were in Venice, our first trip abroad together after we met, on our way to Yugoslavia. We were there for the festival of the Redentore, and, sitting on the steps of the Salute, we watched the fireworks in the warm, clear night, starting with a shocking bang that made the night itself seem to shake, and then, over and over, great balls of red, silver, gold rose into the sky and, one after another, exploded into red, silver, gold suns that held themselves still for a moment then, from flashing cores, were shattered into bright sparks that fell, slowly and silently, down, down, down, and disappeared into the darkness that appeared to be as deep as it was high. We were witnessing the beginning and the end of the universe.
Stephen asked me if I would write a letter to Natasha to reassure her that she would have approved of my having gone to the South of France with Stephen, which Stephen told me she had known nothing about (and I more than suspected that Mary McCarthy, who had invited Stephen and me to dinner, cancelled after having spoken to Natasha over the telephone, Mary McCarthy referring to me and surprising Natasha that Stephen was not alone, upsetting her very much).
I wrote her this letter, hoping to humour her, hoping to impress on her that I am, oh, charmingly innocent. But I haven’t sent the letter, and think I’d better not. That I started the letter addressing her as Dearest Natasha shows that I was writing to a fantasy person I’ve not met, and am rather frightened of meeting.
Dearest Natasha,
When Stephen said he had to go to the South of France to plant trees, I thought he’d been invited by some state cultural institution, perhaps within the realm of André Malraux as Minister of Culture, to participate in a ceremony of tree planting. He said this as if looking into the far distance at a scene of himself throwing earth into the hole around the base of a tree held by an official, and he frowned. He said, ‘I’m going alone.’ Nikos said, ‘Why don’t you have David go with you?’ Stephen smiled and said he’d like that, and I had the image of myself standing behind him, feeling awkward and at the same time proud to be there, as he gave a little speech after the tree was planted.
It was only when we were on our way to Saint Rémy that I realized he was meant to plant trees
– or what he called trees – in your garden. He said something like, ‘My God, I forgot Natasha’s plans for what we should plant where.’ I was relieved that what I’d imagined a public ceremony would be private – because planting a tree must be, I felt, something of a ceremony of some kind, even if private. When we arrived at the house, Stephen, looking through folded papers that he took from all his pockets so there was a stack of them, with unused postage stamps, spectacles, pound and franc and even lire notes, and old, cancelled airplane tickets among them, he found the plans, but as clear as they were, we, not quite gardeners, prepared more for the ceremony of planting rather than the practicalities, and couldn’t quite match up the sketch of the garden it would be with the garden as it was. We stood in the wind, your careful plans flapping. The light was very clear on the foothills of the Alpilles along the horizon.
Monsieur M., the French gardener, came and helped us. He wore a sagging blue overall and thick black shoes, and he listened to Stephen as if torn between his duty to do what Stephen told him what you wanted him to do and the need to tell Stephen what to do. He took the plan and turned it to the right way up, and indicated where the holes for the bushes, not trees, were to be planted in a row to form a protected walk that was to be covered in gravel. Now, the walk was uneven and weedy. Monsieur M. said he would deliver the plants.
They arrived – twigs with earth-filled pouches about the roots – and the next morning, a cold November morning, Stephen and I went out after breakfast to dig holes for them. I still felt I was about to perform a ceremony, and I thought that, as ceremonies are meant to be effortless, digging holes would be effortless. The ground was frozen, and I had to use a pick-axe to break it up, and then each time I shoved the spade into the loosened earth it struck a stone. Stephen would shovel out the earth, then I would, each in turn, and when the hole was about a foot deep Stephen would say, ‘I think that’s deep enough, don’t you?’ He or I would go for a twig, undo the pouch, and one of us would hold the plant, its roots sticking out, upright in the hole while the other replaced the earth and stones, and we’d both, each on a side, stomp. The freezing air was electric, and that electricity seemed to be the source of the constant, bright white, almost blinding light. That morning, we dug three holes and stomped three plants into them.
Monsieur M. appeared, and, examining our work, looked, again, anxious. He obviously wanted to tell us we weren’t doing the work quite as it should have been done, but he was too respectful of our efforts to. His dark eyes were filmed with tears, though the tears were probably caused by the cold wind that made the twigs stomped into the earth sway.
Monsieur M. said that the earth was too frozen in fact for digging properly, and that we must not derange ourselves with trying to plant now. He would deal with that when the weather was better. Stephen and I went to lunch at a restaurant in Arles, one of those restaurants with dark wood wainscoting and where the steaming soup tureen was put on the table with an old, dented ladle. The wine was in a carafe.
I think we had some sense of celebrating our accomplishment, even though, as Stephen has told me, we planted the wrong coloured flowering bushes in the wrong place.
I haven’t sent this to Natasha because, she not having met me, she most likely would think I am patronizing her, trying to make her feel that she must find Stephen’s and my planting plants in her garden funny, and as funny excusable. But I like the details in the description.
Öçi tells me that I have such interesting friends, which surprises me, as I always assumed his friends, for simply being his friends, were more interesting than any I could have.
He asks me about America, in particular about New York, where he wants to go, and where I do not want to return to.
It reassures me that Nikos reads my diary, which he says he likes to read to find out what we’ve been doing in this record of our lives together. I do not hold back from writing whatever I want, which allowance he not so much gives me as never questions.
This comes to me as something of a surprise: that there is no fantasy in my relationship with Nikos, in our love for each other.
Walking along Piccadilly, Maria and I saw on the newspapers being sold at little newspaper stands the headlines about the military coup in Greece by some colonels. She laughed both sadly and nervously.
Because I have no experience of an American national political catastrophe, I cannot imagine the effect of one, and I am unable to make the connection between Nikos and Maria, whom I know, and the catastrophe of a dictatorship in Greece, about which I know only by what I am told by Nikos. I’m unable to make a connection between him and modern Greek history, he having lived that history and I not. It is a history of many catastrophes, and therefore Nikos’ so-often-used word ‘catastrophe’ for missing a bus, or breaking a glass, or forgetting where his spectacles were last put down. How can I know what it means to a Greek to have the country dictated to by petty colonels, and especially what it means to Nikos, working at the Greek Embassy, and, too, what it means to us together?
Some men, including Sonia Orwell’s ex-husband Michael Pitt-Rivers, were arrested and imprisoned for homosexual activity; so many people objected to the unfairness of these convictions that the Wolfenden Committee was set up to study the law that gave rise to them, and its report recommended decriminalizing homosexual relations among consenting adults. Years after, years since the report was published, a bill has been passed in Parliament, and Nikos and I are no longer criminals. We never felt we were.
The military dictatorship in Greece made it politically and morally impossible for Nikos to continue to work at the Embassy, so he quit.
He had no money, but I had $3000 savings. We moved to a top-floor flat in Battersea, in Overstrand Mansions on Prince of Wales Drive, London S.W.11, overlooking the large, dense green trees of Battersea Park. The flat, with slanted ceilings because we are under the roof, has three small rooms off a corridor, which we painted all white.
Johnny Craxton gave us some furniture, some beautiful chairs and an antique chest of drawers, and the rest we bought at a huge second-hand furniture warehouse in Peckham Rye.
As Nikos says, we are creating our lives together.
My desk cost two pounds ten shillings. I’ve begun to write reports for different publishers, to translate technical books from French, and to write fiction.
Many of Nikos’ friends from Athens have come to London in exile, and we often have them staying with us.
Through Stephen, Nikos had a few interviews with publishers. Charles Monteith at Faber & Faber told him that he should start out by getting a job in a bookshop. Nikos said, ‘I didn’t do all that graduate work in philosophy at Harvard in order to become a sales clerk in a bookshop.’ Patrick introduced him to Anthony Blond, who was publishing guidebooks about the night life of capital cities called London Spy or Paris Spy or New York Spy and asked Nikos to do Athens Spy, but Nikos said he was not interested in the night life of Athens, where, in any case, he would not go. John Lehmann invited Nikos to lunch but had no advice.
Nikos said, ‘Well, they must think I’m asking for a lot – not being English, my first language being Greek, and having no experience in publishing.’
I looked for a job teaching English to the children of families at the American army base at Ruislip, but many other young Americans wanting to live in London without work permits were also trying to get jobs there.
Then Nikos, at a drinks party, met an editor at Penguin Books, Tony Richardson, who was leaving Penguin and said there was a job going there, and why didn’t Nikos apply? He went for an interview with Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books. The position left vacant by Tony Richardson was to be editor for poetry, art and architecture, cinema, theatre, and town planning, and Nikos got the job. He started working as an editor at Penguin Books.
He recounted to me a long walk he had with Tony Richardson, who, very ill, perhaps fatally, had to take long walks for whatever medication he was on to circulate throughout his body. H
e told Nikos that the only appreciation he has in art, music, literature is for the greats: Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. Recounting this to me, Nikos, as he does when he is very moved, raised his arms and lowered them, and said nothing. Tony Richardson died soon after Nikos took over his position at Penguin Books.
Nikos was granted resident status by the Home Office.
With Stephen guaranteeing me, I have also become a resident.
We see a lot of Stephen, who, when he first came to our Battersea flat for dinner, said it was just the kind of place he’d always wanted to live in.
All this is just summary, as I write only occasionally in my diary.
I have been reading Victor Shklovsky, who, with his friend Osip Brik, was one of the founders of Russian Formalism, and who wrote:
Sometimes books are not written; they emerge, they happen.
And suddenly, thinking of having met Osip Brik and his historical involvement with Russian Formalism, there comes to me the small shock of having met Lili Brik whose photograph by Rodchenko was used in perhaps the most famous Soviet poster, that of a woman wearing a bandana, an open hand to the side of her mouth, shouting out the good news of Communism!
And because of the way I like connecting people I’ve met with people they have met, as if these greater connections expand my world into that greater world, a strained sense of possessiveness comes to me with the thought that when I shook hands with the Briks I shook hands with the Russians they often had to their flat in the 1920s, including Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Yuri Tynyanov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and who knows how many others?