by David Plante
And it comes to me, belatedly because it did not come to me at the time, to wonder what Osip and Lili Brik thought of my relationship with Stephen Spender, Stephen and I perhaps to them a strange couple who, especially for Soviets, could only have come from a world so foreign to them that they must have wondered at it.
A cultural difference between Nikos and me, which difference makes him always more attractive to me. As a provincial American who grew up in a small, isolated, French-speaking parish in Yankee New England, I held and still do hold celebrated writers in some awe, and that awe is certainly a dimension in my friendship with Stephen Spender, for often I step back from our friendship and see him as a celebrated poet who is a friend. Nikos, a Greek born and brought up in a cosmopolitan family in which some of his relatives are themselves celebrated writers (among others, his aunt Tato, a novelist) and who know celebrated writers, seems to take for granted the celebrated writers in London as if he were simply transferring his familiarity with Athenian writers to familiarity with writers here. He sees Stephen as a friend who writes poetry.
And as for my awe of publishers, I once saw a commissioning editor in a publishing house as having the power to determine my life. And now Nikos is such a publisher. But, as he explains, in Athens it is no very great distinction to publish a novel or a collection of poems, as there are many publishing houses which, in the old way of publishing houses, have their own bookshops, and more often than not the writer will pay for the publishing of his or her work. Publishing a novel or collection of poems may add something to one’s life, though, really, one’s life is determined somewhere else, mostly by one’s family, for whom publishing a novel or a collection of poems is simply a part of the family culture. Nikos is so unassuming in his position as a publisher, I sometimes wonder if he is at all aware of his power, as if to be a publisher in London were to him to have no more determining power than a publisher would have in Athens. When I visit him in the Penguin offices, I am very impressed by how matter-of-factly he appears to take to dictating to his secretary, to talking business on the telephone, to having his own personal cup for coffee on his desk.
No doubt aspiring British editors are resentful that Nikos, not British, should have such a powerful position as editor.
Nikos as poetry editor with Borges.
In Nikos’ presence, though I can’t recall where and to whom, I said that I don’t understand how anyone can say, ‘I like him’ or ‘I dislike her,’ nor do I understand how anyone can say about a country, ‘I like Italy’ or ‘I dislike France,’ people and countries too large and complex in character to have any opinions about them. Some time later, again I can’t recall where or to whom, I heard Nikos say he didn’t understand how anyone can say about another, ‘I like him’ or ‘I dislike her,’ or about a country, ‘I like Italy’ or ‘I dislike France,’ and I suddenly felt in our relationship a transference that would have him repeat what I had told him as though the thought had come from him. In what other many, many ways does this transference occur, from me to him, and, more importantly to me, him to me? I find myself saying to another, ‘We went to France for a weekend,’ and it is with great pleasure that I hear him say to the other, ‘We went to an exhibition of Courbet at the Grand Palais.’
At a dinner party, a guest said she had been to Paris for the Courbet exhibition and came away not liking Courbet. Nikos sat up straight and said, ‘You can’t say that, you can’t say you don’t like Courbet.’ The guest, a woman, said, ‘But I have the right to my opinion,’ and placed a hand about her throat. Nikos said, ‘No, you don’t, you don’t have the right to an opinion about Courbet.’
Nikos was among many people at a meeting in the Friends’ Meeting House in Marylebone Road to speak against the dictatorship in Greece. The house was packed. He started by saying that when he was in school, at Athens College, he was threatened with expulsion for reading poems by the Greek Communist poet Ritsos and playing a Soviet oratorio by Shostakovich at an event organized by a cultural society which he was president of. He said ‘ah’ a lot while he spoke.
He told me that while at Athens College he had in fact been a member of the Communist Party, which was outlawed by the government. He would risk getting up during the night from his bed in the dormitory of the boarding school and go down to an office for which he, then president of the student council, had keys and where he would mimeograph propaganda, then, with the sheets hidden on him, would on a free evening go to cinemas in Athens and throw the sheets from balconies into the audience. It was dangerous to do, but he was never caught.
Nikos knows of the horrors of Communism in Soviet Russia. I would never ask him to justify his belief in Communism, the meaning of which is deep in his Greek history, but which meaning is in my American history anathema.
Stephen telephoned from Paris. He is staying in a hotel on the rue des Ecoles. He said that last night around three o’clock students overturned cars and set them on fire just outside his hotel window and bombs were thrown. He has been out on the streets himself, on the side of the students. One asked him if he was Herbert Marcuse, and he was very pleased, but had to say no. Demonstrations of students and workers go on day and night: speeches, marches, riots.
An uncle of Nikos, Stavros Stangos, has left Greece to live in London. He is, Nikos tells me, a well-known journalist, Leftist. He came with his wife for a meal and talked of how he used to go into the poor areas of Athens to recruit people into the Communist Party, dangerous. He talked of the defeat of the Communist Party during the Civil War, which he fought in, and which Nikos, younger, remembers. I feel that what the Greeks I have met most have to bear is the defeat of their social ideology.
Greek friends of Nikos, also having managed to get out, visit, and some stay with us for a few days until they are able to settle. Nikos and they talk in Greek, the only word comprehensible to me being ‘catastrophe’.
The great Greek actress Aspasia Papathanasiou has come to London, and Nikos visits her. She is an ardent Communist. She gave a reading of Yannis Ritsos’ ‘Epitaphios’ at a poetry reading in the Festival Hall, a lament on the death of a young Communist soldier during the Civil War, and in her declamation was the tragic voice of Greece.
W. H. Auden read on this occasion. He kept looking at his watch when other poets read. Later, he said he disapproved of Papathanasiou’s recitation: one does not weep when reciting a poem.
It is strange to meet people who are exiled, people who talk of prison and torture. Though I hear about ‘catastrophe’ in the personal terms of people I meet through Nikos, I can’t see anyone truly suffering the ‘catastrophe,’ certainly can’t see anyone in prison and tortured, as if suffering is far beyond this or that single person but is some vastly impersonal suffering. I wonder if this has to do with the impression I retain of World War II – only an impression, because I was a little boy – of suffering on such a scale that it is difficult to reduce the suffering to someone I could possibly know, or even meet.
How my mind makes tangential connections as I write, tangents always occurring to me to draw me away from now to then, until now and then become so connected I don’t make a distinction between the two. So a dinner party occurs to me, given by Nikos and me, at which Frank and Anita Kermode came with the Italian writer Luigi Meneghello and his wife Katia, on whose forearm I noted a blue, tattooed number from when she was a prisoner in Auschwitz.
Nikos told me that, after years of youthful taking for granted the Parthenon on the Acropolis, one day he looked up at the temple on the rock and the meaning came to him overwhelmingly. I can only guess what that historical meaning was – is – to him, a Greek.
A Romanian friend, Roxanne, whose aristocratic family in Romania lost everything to Communism, and who has shown us letters from her mother that have obviously been censored with faint pencil marks underlining sentences before they were allowed to be sent, admonished Nikos that he should be grateful that Greece has been kept free of Communism. Nikos closed his eyes and lowere
d his head.
How can I not feel in him the defeat of his ideology?
Nikos asked Roxanne if her family were Greek Phanariots from Constantinople sent to Romania by the Sultan to govern the country.
Yes, she said, four hundred years ago.
On the crowded 137 bus from Marble Arch, alone, I stood next to a young man and as the bus moved we were jostled against each other, and each time we were jostled against each other we looked at each other in the eyes. That sense came over me as of there being no two other people in the world but the two of us, we at a centre and nothing around the centre. He must have felt the same, because when I got off the bus at Prince of Wales Drive he did too, and we walked together along the drive, hardly talking, but he came with me up to the flat and we made love. I did not learn his name.
When Nikos came home I told him, and he exclaimed, ‘Not in our bed!’
I saw Öçi alone. He said, ‘I am not an envious person, but I admit to you that I’m envious of your relationship with Nikos.’
James Joll, historian of anarchism, and John Golding, historian of art and also a painter, live in Prince of Wales Drive. (Francis Bacon lived here once, and the woman he often paints, Henrietta Moraes, still does, the windows of her flat all year long decorated with Christmas lights.) Nikos and I were invited by John and James for a drinks party.
At the drinks party were Richard and Mary Day Wollheim. Richard is a philosopher of aesthetics, Mary Day a ceramicist of elegant pots. Richard talked of people he knows, always with a look on his face of the improbability of knowing such people, half frowning and half smiling, and making ambiguous gestures with his fingers. There was the story of the couple who, when travelling by ship from New York to Southampton, took a stateroom apart from their own for their parrot. The man will say to his wife that he cannot sit at the opera surrounded by others, so she, with the money, will buy a block of tickets, and an hour before the performance he will say he is too tired to go.
Richard and Mary Day were with Sylvia Guirey, who was once a lady friend of Richard, and is now a friend of both Richard and Mary Day.
She is in some way a descendant of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the poet and librettist for Richard Strauss, and is more immediately connected to the American Astors. Inspired by Richard, she left her past life to lead a more imaginative, creative life in the present. She is a painter.
Because married to a Circassian prince, she is a princess. Mary Day said, ‘Anyone from Circassia with a pair of boots is a prince.’ Her husband the prince lives in Ireland.
From John Golding’s book, Cubism, the first line: ‘Cubism was perhaps the most important and certainly the most complete and radical artistic revolution since the Renaissance.’
Nikos has commissioned John Golding to write a short essay on Cubism for an anthology he is editing, Concepts of Modern Art.
Not I, but Nikos was invited by Stephen to the Neal Street Restaurant, a new restaurant that is meant to attract interesting people, with W. H. Auden and Cyril Connolly and Pauline de Rothschild. Nikos wore a brown overcoat and Connolly said to him, ‘Brave of you to wear brown in town,’ which Nikos didn’t understand was not done in London, but which amused him (I would have thought, Oh, I should have known, and clearly I don’t know). He said Connolly ordered a partridge, which bled when he cut into it, so he sent it back, and when the bird came back burnt black, Nikos saw Connolly staring at it with tears running down his cheeks. Stephen laughed. Pauline de Rothschild ate only one pear. W. H. Auden was silent.
When Nikos is with Greeks, the sexual leanings of someone not known will be questioned, and one of them, leaning his head a little to the side, will say, as if the expression has to be in French, ‘Il est un peu comme ça.’
The Greek novelist Costas Tachtsis is staying with us. Nikos suggested to Penguin Books that the novel by Costas, The Third Wedding, be translated into English and published, as a way of Penguin making a positive statement about Greek culture during a time when culture in Greece means nothing more than propaganda. Was Costas happy with the translation and the publication? Is Costas ever happy about anything? I arrived back home a little late to find Costas, sitting at the top of the steps to the landing outside our front door, keening, ‘Ach, ach, ach!’ Alarmed, I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ and he, throwing his arms up and raising his chin, cried out, ‘My book! My book! They’ve destroyed my book!’ He disapproved of the translation.
Praising the book, Nikos is amused by the transposition of the raving Greek female characters from raving Greek male friends.
Costas travels with a special trunk of women’s clothes, not fashionable frocks, but dowdy tweed skirts and cardigans and heavy stockings, which he dresses into to – as he says – faire le trottoir along Queensway in Bayswater. He plucks his beard so he doesn’t have a stubble. The men he picks up, he insists, never know that he is a man, but a woman who excuses herself from not having frontal sex because she is having her period, but is happy with backside sex. Costas earns his money, not from his books, but as a transvestite prostitute.
Johnny Craxton invited the three of us to a drinks party in the large house he lives in, Kidderpore Avenue, where, it seems, many people live and where large drinks parties are given. ( Johnny’s father, Harold, is famous as a coach to pianists. I once heard him say that when he was a young musician in a group of musicians, they would, when invited to play at an event at a country house, be told by the chief butler to use the servants’ back entrance.) Stephen Spender was at the drinks party, and while he and I stood apart without understanding, Costas raved, as one of his female characters raves, all in Greek, which Nikos and Johnny understood and listened to without expression. Later, Nikos told me that Costas was raving about Stephen – how, in the crudest way possible in Greek, he had fucked Stephen, who, now, didn’t recognize him. Knowing Costas, Nikos said, he dismissed Costas’ raving against Stephen as resentment that Stephen didn’t recognize him as Greece’s greatest living novelist.
I have helped Costas refine the English in his own translation of a short story, and was struck by the image of a man’s large red cock as if the large red cock of a blank wall.
As for everything connecting, how can I not put in here this? Edna O’Brien invited Nikos and me to dinner with the Australian novelist Patrick White and his Greek partner Manoly Lascaris. I asked him, being Greek, if he knew of a Greek writer named Costas Tachtsis? and he, scowling, said, Yes, he once knew Tachtsis, who for a while lived in Australia. Did he? I asked. All Lascaris said was, Yes, he did, and I knew not to ask more.
As poetry editor, Nikos has many poets wanting his attention, poets who send him or arrange to meet him to give him the kinds of publications that originated in America, the mimeographed typed text stapled together. One is The New British Poetry. Nikos and I are archivists, and I suppose we do think that whatever is of interest now will be of even more interest in the future, including the names of the New British Poets: Allen Barry, Don Bodie, Alan Brownjohn, Jim Burns, Dave Cunliffe, Paul Evans, Roy Fisher, S. A. Gooch, Harry Guest, Lee Harwood, L. M. Herrickson, Douglas Hill, Pete Hoida, Anselm Hollo, Michael Horovitz, Alan Jackson, Peter Jay, David Kerrison, Adrian Mitchell, Tina Morris, Neil Oram, Ignu Ramus, Jeremy Robson, Michael Shayer, Steve Sneyd, Chris Torrance, Gael Turnbull, Ian Vine, Michael Wilkin, W. E. Wyatt.
Some of these poets Nikos has published: Alan Brownjohn, Harry Guest, Anselm Hollo, Michael Horovitz, Adrian Mitchell, and a poet he especially admires, Lee Harwood, whose love poetry has great tenderness, and who earns his money, Nikos said, as a bus conductor collecting fares in Brighton.
Asked to contribute a one-line poem to an anthology, Roy Rogers, Nikos asked me to help, and I suggested:
( )
which Nikos submitted.
A group of American poets came to London to give a reading and invited Nikos, who asked me to go along with him, in a small hall, which I remember as black with a spotlight on the narrow stage. The poets were Aram Saroyan, Patti Smith, and Andre
w Wylie.
They all appeared to form a cult, a New York esoteric club. Patti Smith had long black hair and Andrew Wylie wore a beret and dark spectacles, and Aram Saroyan appeared even weirder than they for wearing rather college-like button-down collar and chinos. They gave Nikos collections of poems in small booklets, published by Telegraph Books, one of the booklets photographs of scars instead of poems put together by Brigid Polk, one of the Andy Warhol people.
A poem by Gerard Malanga, one of the Warhol people:
My dreams come true
Even the bad ones
A poem by Aram Saroyan:
HAPPY!!!
INSTANT!
A poem by Andrew Wylie:
I fuck
your
ass
you suck
my cock
To his amusement, the writer on art, Marco Livingston, told me that when Nikos visited him in Oxford to discuss a book, Nikos, noting on a shelf a long playing recording of Patti Smith singing, said he hadn’t been aware that she is a singer as well as a poet. Though he couldn’t see how he could publish her poems – which, come to think of it, read as if the lyrics of songs – Nikos was impressed by how original she was in herself, and he liked her.
Mark Lancaster gave to Nikos a recording of songs by Janis Joplin, and after he played one song he put the recording aside, but he kept up his interest in Janis Joplin in herself as a renegade.