by David Plante
On a Sunday afternoon, Nikos and I will amuse ourselves by lying on the floor next to each other and painting in watercolour.
One afternoon, we amused ourselves with this:
TITLES TO ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT NOVELS
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be gay.
Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house with a flat roof and a small chimney in the middle.
Call me Jezebel.
During the whole of a lively, bright and laughter-filled day in the spring of the year, I had been passing with a riotous group of joking friends, on horseback, through a colourful tract of country, and at length we found ourselves, as the sun shone at its fullest, in view of the slap-happy House of Usher.
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the afternoon hour of everyone dancing naked on the lawn.
All drinking families resemble one another, but each teetotal family is unhappy in its own way.
Longtemps je me suis couché très tard.
Once upon a time and a very bad time it was there was a lorry coming down the road and this lorry was coming down along the road and hit a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo and killed him.
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the whip herself.
Robert Cohn was once a drag queen in a bar in New Haven.
One may as well not begin.
John Ashbery, in London to give a reading in his flat but somehow resonant voice, came to supper with his past lover from Paris, the poet Pierre Martory. Nikos is the first publisher to publish Ashbery’s poetry in Great Britain.
John said he is working on a book to be a Henry James novel without characters or setting or plot, and this interested me, thinking everything Jamesian in the book must be all in the writing.
I never know if John is being wry or not, as when he said his mother rang him to tell him she was at an airport, and when he told her, no, she was in a home, she answered, yes, of course she knew that, she was in a home at the airport. He said he would never be explicit about sex in his poetry because his mother might be shocked, and did worry about having included in a poem something about a sexual act wiped up in a tissue and flushed down the toilet. I laugh, but he doesn’t laugh, and stares at me with a slight frown.
He gave us some long-playing records of a group of comedians, called the Firesign Theatre, which he said reaches an even funnier level with a bit of smoke. After John and Pierre left, Nikos and I listened to the Firesign Theatre, but I guess with smoke they would have elicited little more than chuckles. Perhaps I do wonder if I am missing a lot missing smoke.
I once said to Stephen, ‘I don’t understand the poetry of John Ashbery,’ and he, as he sometimes does as if to avoid making a comment, stepped sideways as if to go away, but he said, ‘Neither do I.’
Stephen gave us a set of Horizon magazine, reprinted and bound in volumes – rather, he gave the set to Nikos, with a dedication thanking Nikos for allowing him to ‘seduce’ me by taking me to France. I look through the contents pages of the issues of Horizon and think, with the wonder of it all, so many of the people listed we’ve met.
There’s Julia Strachey, whom we’ve visited in her walk-up flat in Percy Street, a small flat with slanting floors and slanting ceilings and, dominating, a large bronze bust by Stephen Tomlin. In her droll, laconic way, she complained of the rats pulling off her bedclothes, disturbing her sleep. There is a telephone service, DIAL A CHICKEN, but she prefers DIAL LIVER.
And there is Lawrence Gowing, who stutters so his saliva runs down his chin, which he wipes with his tie, a man of wonderful enthusiasms. When he became professor at the Slade, he, as an art work, had his female students outline his body as he lay naked on a sheet of plywood, spreadeagled, and, he said stuttering, ‘Some-some-some-sometimes they get-get-get-get my penis pointed and some-some-some-sometimes blunt.’ He and Julia Strachey were once married.
The interconnections among all the people we’ve met defeat me. I’ve read Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, laughing. Her wonderfully extravagant metaphors and similes: ‘Dolly’s white face, with its thick and heavily curled-back lips, above her black speckled wool frock, glimmered palely in front of the ferns, like a phosphorescent orchid blooming alone there in the twilit swamp.’ It was published by the Hogarth Press by Leonard and Virginia Woolf; and then The Man on the Pier, with a jacket design by Barbara Elizabeth Hepworth, published by John Lehmann.
Öçi has left for New York, where he intends to make his life.
Nikos is very rational, so when he engages in what I think of as the irrational, I baulk – as when he has a flu and he sets up on the bedside table a glass of water, a needle, a little heap of cloves and a candle in a candlestick that he lights to perform the ritual of: inserting a clove on the needle and holding it in the candle flame and reciting, ‘If David gave you the evil eye, may his eyes pop out’ (he having told me that only someone with blue eyes can give the evil eye, and not intentionally but unintentionally through someone else intending evil, so it would not be my fault if the evil eye were cast on him through me), and if the clove simply sizzles I have not given him the evil eye, that burnt clove then dropped into the glass of water, and then another clove on the needle is held in the flame with the names of everyone he can think of with blue eyes; but if the clove pops when my name is pronounced, I have given him the evil eye, and the spell is broken, after which the burnt clove-flavoured water is drunk. He laughs when I say no, no, I will not assist him, but then when, his face illuminated by the candle, I see him perform the ritual, a sense comes to me of a cultural loneliness in him that may go back for centuries and still isolates him in a belief that has nothing to do with the world he lives in, and I wonder how much from his ancestry does isolate him within some form of cultural loneliness that separates him from the world he lives in.
The ritual is called Moschokarfia, and it is unique to Greeks from Asia Minor.
Does he actually believe in the ritual? I once asked him if he believes in God, and he answered, ‘That is a question I never ask myself.’
He also told me that there is a special prayer, recognized by the Greek Orthodox Church, for breaking the spell of the evil eye.
John Ashbery has sent us a copy of the kind of publication that proliferates, mimeographed typewritten pages stapled together, this with a large black and white photograph of John on the cover, barefoot and walking near a seaside beach with bathers, the text called ‘The New Spirit’.
I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought
came to me that to leave all out, would be another, and truer way.
Reading, I found that, though I didn’t understand what the text was about, I became more and more engaged in the writing, and I was reminded of what John said when he came to supper, that he was trying to write a Jamesian text that left out everything James would have included, character, setting, plot, for the way the Jamesian prose in itself enchants. Even in reading a James novel it happens that I don’t know what is going on but I am sustained by the wonderfully elaborate and always inventive prose.
I’m reminded of what Gertrude Stein wrote about Henry James in What is English Literature:
In the meantime Henry James went on. He too needed the whole paragraph because he too was just there, but, and that is the thing to notice, his whole paragraph was detached what it said from what it did, what it was from what it held, and over it all something floated not floated away but floated, floated up there. You can see how that was not true of Swinburne and Browning and Meredith but that it was true of Henry James. And so it makes it that Henry James just went on doing what American literature has always done, the form was always the form of the contemporary English one, but the disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something was the American way. This brought about something that made ne
ither words exist for themselves, nor sentences, nor choosing, it created the need of paragraphing, and the whole paragraph having been being made the whole paragraph had rising from it off of it its meaning.
What rises from and floats above John’s poetry, it seems to me, is some sense of meaning without my knowing what the meaning is, but the sense engages me enough to make me wonder, that wonder in itself enough to keep me reading.
My impulse is to get everything in.
Lucca
We are staying with John Fleming and Hugh Honour in their house, the Villa Marchio, in the hills outside Lucca. As they are advisory editors for Penguin art books, including the series Style and Civilization, Nikos has come to discuss work with them, and I have come along.
We were given separate bedrooms, but decided, as we were alone in a wing of the house, to sleep together in his bed. We were woken this morning by the housekeeper, Gilda, carrying in a tray with breakfast, which we didn’t expect, and when she saw us both in the same bed she exclaimed, ‘Ai!’ and immediately withdrew. We found the tray on a table on the landing.
When I told John what had happened, he said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’
It is beautiful here.
The villa is eighteenth century, with mottled pink walls and green-shuttered windows and a double stone staircase up to the double doors into the main hall and wings on either side, built by local builders who perhaps didn’t work from an architect’s plan but their own idea of what a villa should be, and though the symmetry of the house is off it is balanced by two huge palm trees growing on either side of the double staircase. There are great terracotta pots with lemon trees leading to a loggia that overlooks a lotus pool, and the surrounding garden appears stuffed with flowers, vines, flowering trees, cypresses, all pressed together by the garden walls, in a corner of which is a chapel. There is a cantina, a long, dark-beamed hall filled with enormous tuns, demijohns, great green bottles, and very worn, wooden wine presses. John and Hugh have their own wine, olive oil, fruit, vegetables, cheese, eggs, poultry, nuts, berries. The land outside the wide gate to the garden slopes down to outbuildings and houses where peasants live and, beyond the buildings, to terraces planted partly with vines and partly with olive trees, then down steeply to dense, cool, very green woods and a small stream. All the valley is terraced with vines and olive trees, and here and there are pink stucco houses and blue-black cypress trees. Poppies are still blossoming, and yellow daisies, and lots and lots of tiny lavender flowers. John and Hugh have filled the villa itself with what they have no doubt been collecting for years: small bronzes, medallions on small round tables, huge parchment-covered books, paintings, chairs that look like large silver open shells, one shell the seat the other the back, not to be sat on, and in the sitting room there is a fresh bouquet of flowers picked by Hugh.
We were sitting under the loggia when Gilda appeared and said, sternly, ‘È pronto,’ meaning lunch was ready, and she served it in the dining room with a stern face. Nikos kept telling her how delicious the food was, and she did smile a little.
John and Hugh told us stories about Percy Lubbock, for whom they had been readers in his late years in Lerici when he was blind, and who, they said, would tell them stories about Henry James, one particular story about a painting that had been given to James. ‘What was I to do?’ Hugh said mimicking Percy Lubbock who had mimicked Henry James. ‘It was of a nudity!’
This afternoon, John and Hugh took Nikos and me into Lucca to see the town, and when we came back for tea under the loggia John brought me a beautiful first edition of Italian Hours so I could read what Henry James wrote about Lucca, and reading it while he and Hugh talked to Nikos about art historians I realized what the villa had inspired in me: what I imagined a nineteenth-century Jamesian appreciation of such a villa from all my reading of James. I know my appreciation is a fantasy, but I am possessive about the details of what I see here: the roses, the fireflies in the bushes, the smell of drying hay.
Hugh has a very distinct way of pronouncing various words – not ‘wisteria’ with the accent on the ‘ster,’ but ‘wis-te-ri-a,’ with the accent on the final ‘a,’ and as for place names, not ‘Calay’ for ‘Calais’ but ‘Caliss,’ and not ‘Marsay’ for ‘Marseilles’ but ‘Marcelles,’ and as for the city of Milan, he pronounces it, he said, as it scans in Shakespeare: ‘Mill-an,’ with an accent on the ‘Mill.’ And so arcane English pronunciations are preserved by an Englishman living in Italy, and who thinks of Britain, as he has said, as a small island off-shore from Continental Europe.
We slept separately last night, but this morning the breakfast tray was on the table on the landing, and we realized Gilda is allowing us to sleep however we choose.
And thinking of Jamesian fantasies –
John and Hugh took Nikos and me to meet Harold Acton in his villa just outside of and overlooking Florence, La Pietra. A cameriere in a white jacket showed us into a large, dim drawing room with sunlight showing through the closed shutters in slits onto the rich furniture and Oriental rugs. Acton, in a three-piece suit, was waiting for us, and offered us drinks, which the cameriere poured out. There was a smell of old wood smoke and parched roses. The gilt frames of the paintings glinted here and there, but the pictures themselves were shadowed. Acton seemed to be the very embodiment of the most extravagant fantasy any American could ever have of the cultured European. He was all Oriental politeness and good humor as, with a springing step, he showed us around the gardens, and at lunch in a restaurant in the country he continued to entertain, with lightly told but intimate stories about artists and writers, historians, antiquarians, about aristocrats and ambassadors and friends of de Gaulle.
He said that the damage caused by the flood in Florence is still being suffered by the working class and the peasants outside in the countryside. Shopkeepers were given money to repair their shops, money which came mostly from outside, as the Florentine upper classes did very little to help, so the shops are now bright and shiny for the tourists. But lots and lots of the money collected for the flood relief which first went to Rome remained in Rome and never got to Florence.
Back at the Villa Marchio, John and I sat together under the loggia and I listened to him talk about Acton, who, John said, has a music-hall comedian’s sense of timing, making hand gestures and rolling his eyes at the most effective moments, while he also keeps a respectable exterior. He might, for example, tell an anecdote about how uncomfortable life at the Sitwells’ was, as when his mother, on a visit, asked for a lavatory, and was taken down a long passage into Lady Ida’s bedroom, where she was given – here Acton would pause, then say the rest quickly, with the last word as if sung out on a high note – a chamber pot!
Nikos was not impressed by Harold Acton, whom he thinks of as trying to live a fantasy he imagines is not a fantasy. Acton, in any case, does not have the socialist credentials that would make Nikos respect him. I found him fascinating, to, I think, Nikos’ amusement.
I woke up from a very deep sleep, a sleep that, it seemed to me when I was fully awake, was composed of layers upon layers of impressions that have piled up over the few days we’ve been here, starting with leaving grey, dismal London, the plane ride to Pisa (the plane at moments seemed to stop, motionless, and float in the air), the arrival at the small airport, John and Hugh meeting us, the Italian advertising, the particular smell of an Italian farmacia we stopped in on the way to the villa, the Villa Marchio here, and especially Harold Acton’s villa La Pietra and its gardens, the blurred sense of cypress alleys, complicated box hedges, wisteria-covered arbors, statues tangled in the rich vegetation, fountains at the end of sudden vistas. I woke from all this after Nikos had left me, woke to the high, large, lumpy bed I was in with a headboard of wrought iron, to the stained whitewashed walls and ceiling, the huge wardrobe, the flies droning in the hot, still air, the painted plaster Madonna’s head above the bed, the open window framing palm fronds, the old tile floor, and everything appeared suddenly familiar.
After our visit to La Pietra, John handed me Harold Acton’s two autobiographical volumes, Memoirs of an Aesthete and More Memoirs of an Aesthete, and, yes, he became a fantasy figure to me, someone not only from another world but another century. My fantasy is of a world and a century of the salon, his villa itself a major salon, in which he could, just by pulling on a thread, pull together a whole tangle of interconnected aristocrats, politicians, artists and, too, homosexuals. If I were a minor Marcel Proust, what I could have made of it all!
He lived his youth, not only in terms of a villa with some sixty rooms with a grand staircase and huge tapestries and immense statues and fountains in the garden and thirty-five servants, but a style of life that allowed him to take it for granted that when he traveled he would stay in the best hotels, dine in the best restaurants, go to the best tailors. He could take it for granted that it was possible to meet anyone he wanted. When he was a boy, Serge Diaghilev and Léon Bakst, who were themselves fantasy figures to Acton, visited La Pietra. Of the older generation, he knew Bernard Berenson, Edith Wharton, Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde’s old friend Reggie Turner, D. H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, the Sitwells, Gertrude Stein, and of his generation pretty much everyone, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Diana Mosley, George Orwell, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly, Henry Green, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene. He could devote his life to the purely aesthetic pleasures, such as the ballet and poetry and rococo art, and he could decide, with no worry about how he would support himself, to be a writer.