Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  Stephen gave me a first edition of E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey, published almost a hundred years ago. Stephen thinks the novel Forster’s best. Reading it, I did not think so, but in it I found a vision entirely that of Forster, and whenever I came across sentences and paragraphs and passages that seemed to me original to Forster I copied them out, rearranged them and created in fragments a whole that is distinct from the novel itself as a whole. What the passages reveal is a very British – even more, Northern European – idealization of classical Greece.

  He looked at the face, which was frank, proud, and beautiful, if truth is beauty . . . Certain figures of the Greeks, to whom we continually return, suggested him a little. One expected nothing of him – no purity of phrase nor swift-edged thought. Yet the conviction grew that he had been back somewhere – back to some table of the gods, spread in a field where there was no noise, and that he belonged for ever to the guests with whom he had eaten.

  Ansell said, with irritation, ‘But what can you expect from a person who’s eternally beautiful?’

  Rickie thought, ‘Do such things actually happen?’ . . . Was Love a column of fire? Was he a torrent of song?

  He said again that nothing beautiful was ever to be regretted.

  ‘You’re cracked on beauty,’ she whispered – they were still inside the church. ‘Do hurry up and write something.’

  ‘Something beautiful?’

  ‘I believe you can. Take care that you don’t waste your life.’

  He revisited Cambridge, and his name was a grey ghost over the door.

  Ansell was at Sawston to assure himself of his friend’s grave. With quiet eyes he had intended to view the sods, with unfaltering fingers to inscribe the epitaph. Love remained.

  Let us love one another. Let our children, physical and spiritual, love one another. It is all that we can do. Perhaps the earth will neglect our love. Perhaps she will confirm it, and suffer some rallying point, spire, mound, for the new generation to cherish.

  Everything David Hockney does seems an occasion for celebration, as his arrival in Victoria Station on the boat train from Southampton, where he’d arrived from New York by ship, with an American boyfriend, an art student he had met in America, Peter Schlesinger. I joined some of David’s friends, including Ossie and Celia, to celebrate the arrival. David stepped off the train smiling a broad smile, and then Peter Schlesinger stepped off, as if in a daze, his blond-brown hair swinging over his forehead, walking away from us with a slow swagger to his hips and shoulders as if, curiously, he was alone. I suppose I might have gone off with them all, an animated entourage around David and Peter, but I held back, feeling that I didn’t really belong among them, envious of them for a levity I wouldn’t be able to sustain among them. It happens that, as much as I want to be light spirited, a sudden heaviness will come over me and lower me, and I will feel I am pretending to be light spirited, so it is better for me to withdraw.

  We went to a poetry reading, among the poets Adrian Mitchell who seemed to sing out, as a refrain to a long poem, ‘To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies about Vietnam)’. There are many poetry readings in London.

  I recall a poem by Spike Hawkins was read:

  Pig, sit still in the strainer,

  I must have my pig tea.

  Stephen came to lunch, just the two of us. He brought a big bunch of asparagus, which he loves; I cooked it and we ate it with butter and lemon, the game pie and salad, and wine. We talked about the English class system and the American class system.

  I said I didn’t know if it is a matter of class, but certain English I’ve met seem to have the ability to loathe a person and be kind at the same time. He said that Annie Fleming, the wife of Ian Fleming and a grand hostess, would invite people to dinner whom she hated, and be very kind to them. I said I wondered if Natasha had this ability, and he responded, ‘Oh no, not at all.’

  He said she annoys him when she will say ‘chimneypiece,’ which is not of her class, instead of ‘mantelpiece.’

  About the American class system, he said it depended on where in America you are.

  I said I know where I am there.

  If to be English, or even to be British, is to be aware of where one is in a class system – a system that some people I’ve met say no longer exists, as does the editor Caro Hobhouse, for example, who, being a Hobhouse, should know – the system in no way exists among the people I know in London. Whatever the originating class of the people we meet at dinner parties, drinks parties, book launches, in the foyer of Covent Garden, at these occasions they appear to me so interconnected with one another that they form a class that I think of as London.

  I met Stephen at Liverpool Street Station, and we trained up to Cambridge. On the way, he read and corrected proofs of his book about the young rebels. From the Cambridge train station, we took a taxi to King’s and to Mark’s rooms.

  Mark had a little sherry party before lunch, and a few undergraduates came, all with very long hair and all terrifyingly intelligent. They seemed to talk of nothing but pop music and violence. One student, with whom I sat on the floor, said he sometimes hoped the war in Vietnam would become another world war, because he believed that only violence could produce synthesis. I said I thought he was being very selfish. What an incredible level of intellectualization and inexperience they live on.

  After lunch in a pub Stephen and I went to visit E. M. Forster.

  When Stephen first suggested that Nikos and I meet Forster, Nikos had been against it, insisting we would be visiting a literary monument, not a person, and Nikos especially objected to my wanting to take flowers. Stephen tried to arrange a meeting with Forster through Joe Ackerley, and when Nikos saw all the wheels put into motion he said he’d come also. But then we got a letter from Forster – actually written by Joe Ackerley and signed by Forster – saying he was ill and would be going to Coventry (to his former friend’s house, Stephen said, a policeman, now married), so we didn’t go up to Cambridge. We had lunch with Joe Ackerley at Chez Victor. He appeared thin and wan, and as he was hard of hearing it was difficult to talk with him; in any case, he didn’t seem very interested in us, even bored. He asked a waiter about a dog the restaurant used to keep as a mascot, and he was told by the waiter the dog had died. (Talking, finally, to Forster, I mentioned Joe Ackerley, and said how sad I thought it was that he should dedicate his posthumous book to his dog Tulip. Forster said, ‘Oh, Joe used often to bore me with his dogs.’) I sensed Ackerley had become, I thought, intentionally indifferent when Nikos and I said we wanted to meet Forster; I saw him viewing us as two crude opportunists, especially when Nikos said he had heard Forster had lots of Cavafy papers, which might have sounded as if Nikos wanted to see them. Joe said he didn’t know about any Cavafy papers, and, leaving the restaurant with us, said that Forster was accessible and liked the company of young people, but he obviously left the going to us. He went to a Japanese film. Shortly after, he died. So we didn’t go to King’s College, Cambridge to meet Forster, and, hearing that he had become senile, we decided we shouldn’t go.

  But then Mark, as artist in residence at King’s, said he saw Forster daily, and he was very well and clear headed. Nikos couldn’t come on the day Stephen was free to go, and, in any case, wouldn’t have come, because he thought I wanted to meet Forster only to be able to say I met him.

  How did he know that for years and years I have blazoned across my mind the admonition from Blaise Pascal, ‘Curiosité n’est que vanité le plus souvent, on ne veut savoir que pour en parler, autrement on ne voyagerait pas sur la mer pour ne jamais en rien dire et pour le seul plaisir de voir, sans espérance d’en jamais communiquer,’ making me feel guilty of the sin of pride for voyaging on the sea only later to write about it?

  I told myself, no, I had a legitimate reason for meeting E. M. Forster: his famous epigraph to Howards End ‘Only Connect’ seemed to me more than a moral imperative, it seemed the very reason for my wanting to see him, to, however briefly, co
nnect with him. So, as if justification were needed, I was justifying meeting him by referring to one of his most famous epigrams.

  I knew that Stephen had read E. M. Forster’s unpublished novel about male lovers, which I’d heard about, as literary gossip, in New York, as if knowledge about it were knowledge about some secret homosexual world only a few people were allowed into. On the train, I asked Stephen, ‘What is the novel like?’ imagining I now would be allowed into that closed world, as closed as the Cambridge Apostles I’d read about. Stephen frowned and said the novel, Maurice, didn’t quite come off, and he wondered if it should ever be published. This was the first criticism I had ever heard about E. M. Forster, whom Stephen called Morgan, and I took it to be the criticism, not of outside gossip, but of inside knowledge.

  Stephen knocked on Forster’s door and a delicate voice said come in. He, short and bent, was in his shirtsleeves. ‘I’ve just seen the doctor,’ he said, ‘I’ve just seen the doctor.’ ‘Are you well?’ Stephen asked. ‘Oh, indeed, indeed.’ Stephen introduced us, and when I shook his hand I imagined shaking hands, as if all their handshakes remained like hundreds of invisible hands about his, with Virginia Woolf, with Maynard Keynes, with Lytton Strachey, with all of Bloomsbury – and, extending even more out into the world, with Constantine Cavafy in Alexandria. He went into his bedroom to put on his jacket and on the way out shut the door of his bathroom, where I saw a long, claw-footed Victorian tub that listed. We sat before his fireplace, above which were oil paintings and, I gathered, family photographs. The furniture was all Victorian, rather old-maidenish, with knitted arm covers on the chairs. High bookcases, with big yellow and brown books, lined the walls one after another like large rectangular librarians standing at attention. I think the wallpaper was of yellow flowers. One of the oil paintings, all in vivid yellow, red, green, was of King’s chapel done by an undergraduate, another a mountain scene by Roger Fry, and on a wall between the bedroom and the bathroom was a reproduction of Picasso’s young man leading a horse. Forster had had painted the bottom panes of the windows so he wouldn’t have to see the ugly modern building, the Keynes Building, across the way.

  He paused for long periods between sentences, and seemed always to repeat what he said twice.

  But when we talked about the military dictatorship in Greece – I saying I had hoped to go to Greece with my partner, Nikos, who was Greek, but as he couldn’t go neither could I – he said, ‘Yes, I understand. But one recalls instances in Greece that were beautiful even though the country, even then, was imbedded in muck. Somehow one’s dearest memories are of events that, if one saw them in a greater context, were always imbedded in muck.’

  Stephen joked about Mount Athos, the Greek peninsula of all-male monasteries where, supposedly, not even hens are allowed. Forster said he’d once been on a boat that was on an excursion to Mount Athos. ‘The men got off , ’ he said quietly, ‘but I stayed on board with the ladies.’

  After a silence, we talked about Mark’s paintings, which Forster said he viewed with compassion, but not much understanding.

  After twenty minutes, Stephen said he had to get back to London, so we left. Mark drove us to the station, and on the way Stephen said, ‘There was a lot of Forster in that remark about one’s dearest memories always being imbedded in muck.’ ‘Oh?’ I asked. ‘His insistence on the muddle and confusion enclosing personal moments of vision,’ Stephen said. At the station, he said there was no reason why I should go back to London with him, and Mark said I could stay with him in his rooms. I thought: Nikos won’t mind. We left Stephen off and I returned to King’s with Mark.

  I rang Nikos, who didn’t mind, but told me to spend the night.

  Mark signed me in for dinner at High Table (how strange, I thought, that Forster’s name should be matter-of-factly written in among the others), and we went back to Mark’s rooms, where more undergraduates came in and talked about pop music, about which Mark appears to know everything. He played records.

  Before dinner, he took me into the combination room for sherry. On the red walls were portraits of Bloomsbury people, such as Rupert Brooke, which I had seen in reproductions in books about Bloomsbury. The fellows appeared in their gowns hanging half off their shoulders. It was amusing to see Forster come in wearing his gown, smiling generally at everyone but not talking to anyone, and moving about quickly as he got his glass of sherry and went to the back of the room and sat in an armchair by himself. Mark introduced me to the provost, who asked me to follow him into dinner, where I sat at his left. The provost asked me what I do, and when I said I’m a novelist he said, ‘Do you know we have Morgan Forster sitting at our table?’ ‘Oh, indeed, indeed,’ I said. I saw Forster, toward the end of the table, eating with quick movements and looking up and only smiling at anyone who spoke to him. His moustache was short and stiff.

  In the hall, the undergraduates, with trays, were sitting down to or getting up from their meals. The provost told me that the undergraduates had decided that they no longer wanted formal meals with the fellows, but to eat off trays. Therefore, the High Table had been moved from the far end of hall to the end near the combination room, so the fellows would no longer process through the students to the far end. And, again because of student protest, High Table was no longer on a platform, but, like all the tables the undergraduates ate at, was set on the stone floor.

  After dinner, Mark said we should go back into the combination room. Forster was sitting alone, drinking coffee. Mark asked if we could sit with him, and he said, Oh, it’d be his pleasure, it’d be his pleasure. We talked about student demonstrations, about the war in Vietnam, more about the dictatorship in Greece.

  And then, as if I must take advantage of this moment for some knowledge that no one would know but I because I would be the first person E. M. Forster told, I said, ‘You met Cavafy,’ but he only answered, ‘Yes, I did, I did.’

  I had to be content with the thought: though he would not remember me, I would remember him, and I had connected.

  Mark asked him if he wanted to come to a Guy Fawkes party. At first he said yes, but then, as the energy visibly drained from him, he said he thought he’d perhaps better go to bed.

  I left him thinking how utterly unmysterious he is. It seemed to me that he must be aware that he is the greatest living writer, and that there had to be a mystery in his being that, but he seemed not to be at all aware, and not once referred to his books. He’s a few weeks away from being ninety.

  The Guy Fawkes party was given in a small Victorian row house by two male friends. There were about fifty people, of all ages and, evidently, sexes. They, as mixed as they were, moved about among one another with great ease and cheerfulness. At one point the lights were extinguished, one of the hosts put on a record of the Fire Music from The Ring, drew back two curtains, opened French doors onto a balcony overlooking a back garden, and announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the fireworks!’ From the garden, Catherine Wheels, Roman candles, flares, high-rising rockets, all in great gushes and geysers, kept people on the balcony and upstairs windows for about an hour. Then a fire was lit in the garden, and people upstairs threw books down into the flames. Someone said, ‘But you’re burning Patrick White. You can’t burn Patrick White.’ After, there was a buffet of curry.

  I fell a little bit in love with an undergraduate who kept refilling my plate.

  At around one-thirty in the morning, Mark and I went back to King’s and watched a bit of the American elections live on television, then went to bed, he upstairs in his bedroom, I on a sofa in the downstairs sitting room. I did think: if Nikos had once had sex with Mark, why shouldn’t I? I jerked off into a handkerchief, which, in the morning, I stuffed into a pocket of my trousers. Not thinking it showed any evidence of what I’d used it for, I took it out in Mark’s presence to blow my nose, and he, no doubt seeing that the handkerchief was stiff in a way it shouldn’t have been, smiled, but said nothing. I’ve never mentioned to him his affair, however brief, with Nikos.


  Stephen often asks me about this diary, as if he wants to be reassured I am keeping it. I feel I don’t put everything in that I should or, perhaps, that he would want me to. After I came home from an afternoon with him, during which he had said something about Auden or Isherwood, I thought I ought to record his comments in my diary, but, thinking further of it, I decided it was wrong of me to record the comments, as, Stephen apart, their relevance was not to Auden or Isherwood, but to me as the diarist. For so many years before I came to London, I kept my diary recording relationships within my family and close friends, people who were relevant and important to me. But Auden, Isherwood, Forster, however often I might meet them, are not my friends, and everything I record about them can only be of an almost irrelevant literary interest – the very interest Nikos so derides and tries to break in me. But, even so, given that I am a writer, how can I not write about them? And now I regret not having recorded what Stephen told me, which I’ve forgotten.

  As for Stephen in himself, I sometimes wonder if he wants me to write in my diary events in his life that he himself would not write in his – as his telling me, with glee in the telling, that years ago he was in Switzerland and had sex with a young man in a bush, after which he gave the young man a huge Swiss note, but the young man thought this too much, so he gave Stephen change. Stephen was bright red with laughter.

  Some time after Nikos and I began to live together, he showed me a poem he had written before we met, called ‘To a Friend Who Regretted Leaving Three Days Later,’ a title that suggested more to me than I wanted to know, dedicated to someone named Toer Van Schayk.

  He is, Nikos said, a Dutch ballet dancer and choreographer.