by David Plante
Francis jerked round to me, his eyes wide. He said flatly, ‘I don’t think one can explain it.’
I knew that I was trying to push Francis into saying something that I wanted him to say but which I also knew he disdained, as he disdained all forms of the mysterious.
Nikos warned me. ‘Do you know what you’re asking of Francis?’
I took the risk and asked Francis, ‘Do you ever think that if one knew enough one might be able to explain the mystery of chance? And if one could explain would the mystery go and the work be destroyed?’
Francis pursed his lips. He could sometimes appear to be parodying the expression of deep thought. He asked me, ‘Are you asking me if I ever think I could destroy my work by knowing too much about what makes it?’
‘More than that. I wonder, have you ever wanted to explain what makes a painting work even though you knew the explanation would destroy it? I mean, do you ever worry that your work is too explicit in its meaning, not latent enough?’
Francis said, ‘I can’t wonder about that, because I know I would never be able to explain.’ He laughed.
I take in the names – Hobhouse, Trevelyan, Huxley, Strachey – as almost words for a certain British history, and for a while I think of myself, in my name David Plante, as without history, until it comes to me to recall the Christian names of my parents – my mother Albina, my father Anaclet – or of aunts and uncles – Aldea, Cyriac, Homer, even Napoléon – or the names of nuns who taught us in my parochial school – Mère Saint Félix de Valoix – and my history takes on a deep historical depth, as far back at least to French neo-classicism if not further back, that French history transposed in name only to French Canada, but then lost in my French parish in New England when transposed from French Canada, so, really, I am disconnected from the French history in which such names had meaning, a history totally disconnected from France within the world I live in, but mine only in my fantasy history.
The only person in Britain who is aware of my being a Franco-American, and who understands historically what the names I’ve listed above connote, is Steven Runciman, who has said to me, his voice rising in pitch, ‘North America should belong to you. You were dispossessed of what should be yours by the horrible William Pitt. And here you are, having made your home among the enemy.’
Thinking that we would introduce them, as if Nikos and I have taken on such a role in London that we can introduce people to one another whom we think would be of interest to one another, we invited Steven and Caro Hobhouse to dinner, and found it was as if they were relatives, knowing each other’s family so familiarly they may have been distant cousins. Nikos and I simply listened.
Caro said that one of the pleasures of family gatherings, which seem to occur with them all bouncing about together in a large bed, is to sort out just how they are related.
And I must put this in: we thought Steven would like to meet the writer on food Claudia Roden, whose history seems to be the history of the whole of the Middle East. We asked them to a restaurant, and in conversation Steven said that the most noble name in the world is Cohen, but it must be a Ha-Cohen, and Claudia, smiling the kind of sad smile she has as if aware of all the history from which she has emerged, said, ‘My grandfather was a Ha-Cohen.’ He was, chief rabbi in Aleppo, Syria.
My second novel, Slides, published, not to good notices.
Leave out my novels.
David Hockney drew the dust jacket for Slides, back and front, of delicate drawings of slides. He said that his assistant Mo, thinking they were in fact slides, tried to pick them up. In a bookshop, I found a copy of the novel, the dust jacket evidently stolen, the novel left behind.
Nikos told me that Miss Richards at their last session revealed to him that she was sorry to tell him she would be leaving England to go to live in Australia. If he was upset, he didn’t show it, but I was annoyed that she had – as I saw it – rejected him.
I said, ‘I never understood why you should have made yourself vulnerable in wanting to have analysis.’
He shrugged.
Could it be that I do not reach into him at the depth that is in him, a depth where I feel he is defeated, at the depth of his Greek history?
If I could revive him from that defeat, if I could!
I thought that in ending his analysis, Nikos would resume his life as before, but suddenly, when we were together on a Sunday night in our bed, the bedside light still lit, he said, aggressively, ‘You never cared about my analysis, never now care how much I suffer the end of it.’
I said, ‘When I suffer anxiety, you tell me it’s nonsense, that I’m being self-indulgent.’
‘You are,’ he said.
‘I am, and you’ve taught me that I am.’
I could see that his eyes were open and that he was listening intently to me.
‘You taught me to see that my inner darkness means nothing because it refers only to me, and I just think of what is outside me, the darkness outside me. In a way, you’ve made me a good Communist, more aware of historical darkness than personal darkness. And now you tell me you have this inner darkness, which is yours alone, and you expect me to cater to all the aggression that results from it just because it’s yours. No, I won’t. I’m entirely supportive of you—’
He stopped me. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not.’
‘How can you say that? I am. I know I am. I’m as supportive of you as you are of me, which is, I know, total. But to be total doesn’t mean to indulge you. And you know the difference. You have made me see the difference. You have no reason to be suffering.’
He said, quietly, ‘Let’s go to sleep,’ and he reached out to shut off the light at his side of the bed, and when the room was dark he turned to me and put an arm over me and fell asleep.
For the Easter Resurrection services, we went to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Ennismore Gardens, as we’ve been before. Nikos does not want to go to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow Road, he doesn’t say why, but I sense in him the resentment of someone from a refugee family who never felt at home among Athenians, and in historical fact were never made to feel at home, even to having their own cemetery, the Second Cemetery, where Nikos’ father is buried, all of them remaining among themselves as refugees, Constantinopoli, who call Istanbul Constantinople.
But, if Nikos feels there is some distance kept from him as a refugee by Athenian Greeks who form the closed provincial world around the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow Road, he keeps a much greater distance because he, as a refugee, feels he is superior to them. The refugee Greeks were – they are – superior, as made evident when, at the time of the Catastrophe, they had to move from Turkey to Greece and transformed provincial Athens into a cosmopolitan city with their much more evolved culture. The Greeks of the diaspora, the ‘Oriental’ Greeks, have much more knowledge of bureaucracy in business transactions for having worked in the bureaucratic class of Byzantium from long before Byzantium fell to the Turks, and, after the fall, for having functioned as tax collectors for the Sultans. This position of power and money allowed them to send their sons and daughters to be educated in Paris, Berlin, London, and so be much more in contact with Western Europe than the Athenian Greeks. Nikos tells me his mother, until she had to leave Constantinople, would never have considered even visiting the dusty, not Greek but, she said, Albanian town of Athens.
Distancing himself from the Greeks he feels superior to, Nikos for some years chose to go for the Easter Resurrection service to the Russian Cathedral. At these services, I liked carrying a lit candle and, after the archbishop shouted out, ‘Christos anesti,’ shouting out ‘Alithos anesti’ along with Nikos, those Greek words within a Russian liturgy resounding within Russian history, which multiple historical resonances I know Nikos enjoys as much as I do, perhaps he even more than I do.
(And here I make a connection with going with Nikos to the Christmas midnight Mass at the Roman Brompton Road Oratory and, standing behind a porphyry pillar because the churc
h was too packed for us to have a view of the altar, I heard Latin being chanted, and, too, the Greek Kyrie Eleison, and with the smell of incense I felt I could be in ancient Rome. Too many connections, too many, and how can I deal with them except to let them occur?)
In the Russian Orthodox Cathedral, with our candles not yet lit for the Resurrection, we were standing near a young woman who stared up at the dome, her eyes concentrating as if at something she fixed on there, and suddenly she began to scream, a high, piercing scream, and a woman on the other side of her from us took her in her arms until she was quiet. The ceremony was being broadcast throughout the Soviet Union, so those devout there would have heard the scream and wondered what it was about. Nikos said we should leave. Back home, we set the table for the mageritza (that special Easter soup traditionally made from sheep’s innards, but which Nikos, having become a vegetarian, made from vegetable stock and lots of onions and dill) and tsoureki (the Easter brioche with hard-boiled red eggs baked in it, bought the day before from a Greek bakery near the Greek Orthodox Cathedral, which we walked to, passing a house with a blue plaque on it commemorating Constantine Cavafy, who had lived there, and, and and – Where was I? Back home with Nikos for our Easter supper, the radio turned on low to a broadcast of the Mass and the chant still going on in the Russian Cathedral, and we heard the scream again and shortly after the siren of an ambulance, and Nikos turned the radio off, and we ate in silence.
Our rows. Almost all have to do with Nikos’ need for order. I’m orderly too, but Nikos’ need for order is far in excess of mine. He complains if, in the bathroom, I leave soap in the soap dish that becomes slimy, if in flossing my teeth I speckle the mirror, if I squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, if I do not lower the seat of the toilet bowl, if I do not hang the bath mat over the rim of the tub, if I do not turn on or off the light by the little wooden knob at the end of the cord but by the cord, if, if, if, oh, if I replace the roll of loo paper so that it rolls outwardly rather than, as he insisted, inwardly, against the wall.
Nikos listened when Steven Runciman told him that he has been in ducal houses, even princely houses, where the loo paper is always rolled outwardly, then said he always rolled the loo paper inwardly.
When I told Dee Wells, the wife of A. J. Ayer, about the rules in the bathroom, she exclaimed, ‘Nikos is so anal-retentive, it’s a wonder he needs a loo.’
Stephen has told us that what made it possible for us to live together domestically is that we were both orderly, which he is not, Natasha having to accept the way he simply lets his overcoat fall off from him onto the floor of the entry hall. Yes, I am orderly, but not to the extent that the socks have to be lined up in the drawer. I try to be amused by Nikos’ fastidiousness, but when I shout that I will not have our lives reduced to the minutiae of order, he shouts back, ‘I will not live in bedlam,’ and I’m not amused.
And he never, ever apologizes, as if constitutionally incapable of apology.
When I arrived in Church Row, Ann told me that Adrian is dying of cancer of the brain.
I didn’t make any pottery, but went directly to his study to see him. He stood, we embraced, and though he was weak he refused to sit. His skin looked gray and matt. Ann had warned me that he had very little concentration, but he seemed pleased to see me, however embarrassed he also seemed to be about his state. Finally, he sat at his desk, and for some reason laughed, in a totally expressionless way. Ann put a cup of tea on his desk, but he simply looked at it and said he wouldn’t have any. He wouldn’t because he couldn’t lift the cup and he didn’t want to ask for help. Ann held the cup up for him to drink. Again, he laughed, but again without expression. After he finished his tea, we talked a little. He said, ‘I feel very calm.’ Then he said he would like to be alone.
When I returned some ten days later, I found Adrian painting while Ann made a pot on her wheel. A large, loose, but finished painting was propped against the fireplace, and when I saw it I said, ‘It’s so beautiful.’ He laughed, now expressing warmth and a curious detachment. Adrian has the ability to be both warm and detached at once, in the same way, I suppose, one can be both pleased by praise and indifferent to it. He immediately said, ‘You must have it.’ I said I couldn’t. He said I must. I looked towards Ann, who said, yes, I must have it.
This was the first of the series he started after he was given painkillers – pills that, he said, also made him ‘very happy.’
He was, however, more confused than ever, and at moments he knew this. He said, ‘I’m not really normal, you know.’
I took the painting away. It is of a cup and saucer and bottles as if almost dissolved in the loose, lyrical brushstrokes, brushstrokes so lightly applied that they appear to have been painted on air.
On my next visit, while Ann and I potted to Greek bouzouki music Adrian painted in his studio at the top of the house. I went up. He was hardly able to support the brush. He was painting bottles, and he wanted them arranged in a certain way, but as he wasn’t able to articulate his directives I couldn’t understand how he wanted me to arrange the bottles. He’d point with his brush and say something unintelligible, and I, feeling that I should be able to understand, would place a bottle upright, or on its side, but the arrangement was never what he wanted. I said, Just say yes if I do the right thing, no if I do the wrong thing, but this didn’t work any better. He became impatient, and said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Then he seemed to become resigned. He’d gone far from seeing objects in terms of his ideas of them; in the last paintings – there were eleven of them – he had to take objects as they were, beyond his control in every other way but to paint them.
Do I understand Adrian’s writing? I find it difficult to penetrate through the dazzle of his metaphors and similes, and find I have, not an understanding, but a ‘sense’ of his vision. I like to think he uses the dazzle of his imagery, his metaphors and similes deliberately as one with the expression of his vision, not so much to understand a work of art but to have the most vivid ‘sense’ of it.
No doubt I’m reading myself into Adrian’s writing.
And so, too, the writing of Richard Wollheim – after reading his Art and its Objects I look at a work of art as if it expands and expands, not into an understanding of it, but into the ‘sense’ of it, to mark a difference between understanding the meaning of something, which is difficult for me, and having a ‘sense’ of the meaning of something, which is to me the most vivid appreciation of the something I can have.
I have a ‘sense’ of what you mean, I say to Nikos, when he explains a philosophical point about aesthetics, which was his subject when he was a student at Harvard.
Why does the recollection come to me of Nikos telling me of that time he was abandoned by a lover on the island of Poros and he sat by the sea with the scent of lemon blossoms wafting from the lemon groves on the distant mainland, the beauty of which was a consolation to him?
Nikos woke from a nightmare, shouting, and I woke. He said he dreamed that someone came into the room who was, he thought, me, and got into bed with him; he put his arms around the person and suddenly realized the person was not me, and this terrified him.
I recall that I was once amazed by Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and now wonder:
The sun was sinking. The hard stone of the day was cracked and light poured through its splinters. Red and gold shot through the waves, in rapid running arrows, feathered with darkness. Erratically rays of light flashed and wandered, like signals from shrunken islands, or darts shot through laurel groves by shameless, laughing boys. But the waves, as they neared the shore, were robbed of light, and fell in one long concussion, like a wall falling, a wall of grey stone, unpierced by any chink of light.
I wrote this in response:
She liked to use similes, and so she wrote of storm waves falling like walls, wall after wall crashing like the walls of a castle, the sunlight shot-arrows flashing through the air, and the seaweed sunken tattered robes, and the surf about the broken block
s of stone like clouds, clouds that come in to cover over the ruins and then go out to reveal the ruins, a reversed sky where the ruins float on ebbing and flowing clouds – And she paused to ask: Like and like and like and like? What is the likeness likeness likens itself to? And she put her pen down and closed her eyes.
Doubts about her use of metaphor and simile. Doubts about the use of metaphor and simile, which would never have occurred to Jane Austen as a way of enlivening writing which may otherwise be dead.
Stephen asked me if I would fetch the first edition of the two volumes of Du côté de chez Swann, left for him at reception at the Savoy Hotel by Pauline de Rothschild. I prepared myself to ask for a package left by ‘the Baroness Pauline de Rothschild,’ imagining that the receptionist would be in awe of me, he wondering who I was who was asking for a package left by the Baroness to be delivered to someone of the same world as she was. Of course he wasn’t in awe, and indifferently handed me the package. Still, I was in awe of myself, and sitting in the Underground train with the package on my knees, I imagined the others in the carriage would know, simply by looking at me, that the package contained first editions of Proust from the Baroness de Rothschild which I was passing on to Stephen Spender, I participating in both their worlds by my connecting the two as a delivery boy. That I was carrying Proust, as if he himself were contained in a little coffin on my lap and his ghost hovered around it, seemed to me to expand the world outwardly into a world of literature that would be my world when I wrote it all down in my diary, creating an aura in which the entry in my diary would be read as Proustian. So here it is – my little Proustian episode.
A visit to Ann Stokes, she too preoccupied with Adrian to work. He will suddenly think he needs cigarettes and then goes out to buy them, Ann directly behind him; he pays for the cigarettes with a comb, and Ann, without his noticing, pays with cash, then she follows him back to the house with his cigarettes, though he does not smoke. Her face red, Ann stared at me with large eyes and I stared back.