Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  More and more, Nikos’ memories become mine. I feel I was with him when he was a child and his family during the summer they moved from Athens to what was then the countryside in Kifisia and he was allowed one white balloon to play with. I think his memories have become more important to me than my own because I imagine I can possess them in a way I can’t possess my own, he someone I view from the outside, and so, outside of me, viewed by me as more contained in himself than the uncontainable thoughts and feelings that I have inside of me. Yes, I would have to be him to make all the connections among the memories he recalls for them to be mine, all his memories beyond me. Still I go on to record his memories, and perhaps one day the complex context of all my own massively possessive feelings and thoughts about him will go and he will remain, himself, apart from me in this writing, on his own.

  Stephen gave me a copy of his short stories and novella, The Burning Cactus, which he asked me to ‘edit.’ I took him at his word, and did just that, limiting myself to one story, ‘The Dead Island,’ in which I crossed out lines and whole paragraphs to tighten the text, and what I mostly crossed out were metaphors and similes:

  The sea was silent and brittle like smashed glass. The water looked so clear that it seemed like varnish adding colour and translucency to shoals of darting fish . . . She paused in her walk and listened closely to the birds’ song bursting from the packed bushes, like white satin streamers against the corkscrewing cypresses . . .

  It seems to me that Stephen relies on metaphors and similes to nail down impressions he is otherwise unsure of nailing, as if the simple The sea was silent . . . or She saw through the clear sea water shoals of darting fish . . . or She paused in her walk and listened to the birds’ song in the cypresses . . . do not flash in the mind with the vividness metaphors and similes should give them. I want to say to him that it is not that I don’t believe in the vivifying effects of metaphors and similes, but that I believe they are such mysterious workings of the imagination that they are miracles, and so should be used with all the respect miracles demand, perhaps one a book, and used as the key to unlock and reveal the meaning of the book. (As Frank does when he uses ‘a ghost of a cup of tea’ to unlock and reveal an inner meaning of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, and I wonder if this image of a ‘ghost of a cup of tea’ is what Frank would consider a ‘shrine of the single sense’ in which an ‘immediate interpretation’ is sustained for as long as any interpretation can be sustained.) I didn’t go on about the deepening doubt I have that literature is too dependent on metaphor and simile, as if uncertain about anything but the use of imagery to sustain itself. I gave the book to Stephen and he thanked me, but he has not mentioned it to me. He did, however, tell Nikos that he was impressed by what I had done, and Nikos passed this on to me, and, oddly, I was embarrassed and would have preferred Stephen not telling Nikos, who he knew would tell me. But perhaps Stephen, too, was embarrassed that I should edit his stories.

  I recall David Sylvester coming to dinner, where, as usual, he pushed back his chair to think about something that had been said, to think a long while. He said, ‘I’m trying to think . . .’ and everyone else at the table stopped to listen, and after a very long pause David said, ‘I’m trying to think why . . .’ and there was another long pause before David said, ‘I’m trying to think why Cimabue is a greater artist than Fragonard.’

  Nikos is more interested in writing poetry than being an editor, which poetry he allows only me to read. In his poetry the most abstract ideas are plangent, as in this, in which not one image occurs, but which expands into a sensitive plangent sense within the idea:

  THE DEFINITION OF GOOD

  Stripped finally of the ‘bare essentials’

  he had achieved a ‘luminous simplicity’.

  Removing one by one the layers of all that was ‘superfluous’,

  down to the ‘hard core’,

  divested of all ‘attributes’,

  aspiring to a ‘simple idea’,

  he strived to ‘re-define reality’.

  Simplification, his aim, was a mere pose, we said.

  Therefore, we concluded, he lied.

  And yet, to him his pose was how he saw himself.

  This was how he was . . .

  He saw himself engrossed in, obsessed even

  by the ‘process of simplification’, or ‘self-simplification’.

  What did this ‘mean’? What did it mean to him, to us?

  To him it meant arriving, through this process,

  at some simple ‘truth’, a ‘unit’

  that could not possibly be simplified any further.

  But this was vague – or so it seemed to us.

  To us, ‘simplification’ meant, really, a dangerous, a suspect

  obsessive drive to ‘reduce’ things, himself,

  to what we called, in a derogatory sense, ‘over-simplification’.

  That is, to us it meant, again, lying of sorts. To him?

  The fact is he believed in this ‘good’, whereas we didn’t.

  We neither ‘believed’ nor understood what ‘good’ means.

  Though it is impossible to ring Lucian Freud – contact with him can only be made through his solicitor – he often rings Nikos at home, at any hour, to insist, say, that there be no page numbers wherever a reproduction of his work appears. Nikos asks how a reference could then be made to a specific work, but Freud remains adamant, so there are no page numbers where his works are reproduced.

  Stephen Spender calls Freud evil, and recounts the story of a book dummy that they once did together, Stephen writing and Freud drawing, which Stephen had but which Freud stole. He is also known to lie, and worse. Does he think that after his death none of this will be revealed? Better, I think, to reveal all when alive.

  Costas Tachtsis, Nikos has heard, was murdered in Athens, where he had had more of a money-making career among certain men than he did as a writer among readers. Fed up with how little his novel The Third Wedding was selling, he went out into the street and sold copies as a hawker. It was known that he kept a diary, recording the names of the men who came to his flat, but the only object stolen from his flat was the diary. The rumour, Nikos was told, is that his murderer has found pre-planned refuge in a monastery on Mount Athos, the Greek peninsula of monasteries where no women are allowed. Eulogizing him on his death, Melina Mercouri, now minister for culture, made a statement about Costas, that he was the best Greek novelist after Kazantzakis.

  No doubt partly to get into her good graces, which I am eager to do, and also because I find her fascinating, I offered Natasha to help her in her garden in Loudon Road, which help she accepted. But first lunch, where she told me a lot about her youth, much of which she had told me when we were in the South of France. Her mother, Ray Litvin, is alive still, and I gather lives in a flat whose rent is paid for by Stephen. I may get the sequence somewhat wrong, but the episodes from Natasha’s life stand out. She had told me that she was illegitimate, the daughter of a music critic. She was sent as a baby to a home where she was restricted to a high chair, and all she could say when her mother visited her with a friend was ‘Gwen, down, down,’ referring to herself as Gwen; this alarmed her mother’s friend, who suggested that Natasha be put in fostering care in a working-class family, where the mother, however strict, used to hold Natasha on her lap and close to her, the only reason, Natasha said with a short laugh, she is in any way sane. There was no recrimination in what she recounted, but everything sustained on a level of fact, and I wondered why she was telling me such intimate facts. Unknown to her, her father did arrange for Natasha to have what she called her other family, upper-middle class and wealthy, where she would spend periods and where she was encouraged in her gift of playing the piano. Her mother, an actress, became deaf, and blamed Natasha, whom she brought home – I think to a flat in Primrose Hill – and at eleven years old her mother instructed her to take a number such and such a bus and get off at such and such a stop and ring the bell at such
and such an address, and the man who would answer would be her father, from whom she must ask for £15. Natasha did, and her father almost immediately engaged her in talk about music, which led to Natasha playing the piano for him. Whether or not she was given £15, I’m not sure Natasha said. Living with her mother, with no money, Natasha would sometimes go out on a walk for hours, distracted, then would look about with the realization that she had no idea where she was, but would then have to walk back. (This distraction, a sudden blankness, often comes over Natasha’s face, even while she is talking, as if a sudden shock occurs to her.) She managed to continue with her piano, and at sixteen won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. Years later, she found herself in a train compartment with Sybil Thorndike, and mentioned that her birth had caused her mother to go deaf and therefore ruin her career as an actress, and Sybil Thorndike said, ‘But, Natasha, your mother was always deaf.’

  In her late age, Natasha’s mother has taken to painting, as instructed by Maggi Hambling; the garden shed is filled with her paintings.

  Stephen, it seems, just about tolerates her.

  Out in the front garden, I mostly dug and pulled up long tangled roots, while Natasha appeared not quite to know why she was there, but watched me.

  She said, suddenly: when she opens a drawer and finds a photograph of a young man she does not know, obviously taken by Stephen, her heart crashes to her feet; but then she closes the drawer, thinking, he is not doing it to hurt her.

  About W. H. Auden, Natasha told me she once confronted him with the moral problem of his sexuality and his calling himself an Anglican, to which he replied, ‘I sin. There it is, I’m a sinner.’

  A description:

  Nikos and I on the Spanish island of Minorca for a summer holiday – the sun so bright it appeared to be black, but bright black as in a bright night, and the moonlit night appeared to shine with the blue light of day, and there was a sense of such freedom in the strangeness of it all.

  Dry stalks of plants were covered with snails, and the stone walls along burnt-out fields looked like walls of skulls, and in the burnt-out fields were rough cactus.

  Nikos took a film of me standing naked in the landscape.

  What could be more relevant to today than this?

  Do we learn with one part of us, feel angry with another, and desire the pleasures of eating and sex with another? Or do we employ our mind as a whole when our energies are employed in any of these ways?

  Plato

  Sebastian Walker (Sebbie), who has begun publishing pre-literate books for children (I asked him, ‘Have you become a millionaire, Sebbie?’ to which he replied with half-closed bulging eyes, ‘Multi’), sponsored an evening of piano played by Alfred Brendel in the Middle Temple.

  Nikos declined the invitation.

  I went with Julia Hodgkin, she in a simple black evening frock and carrying a small black reticule covered with black sequins and I in black tie. The taxi driver, leaving us off, asked, ‘Important do this evening?’

  The Middle Temple has stone-paved passages with polished wood-paneled walls and portraits of men in old frames. Just within the entrance was a round table with cards with names written on them arranged in circles to indicate at what tables and in what rooms people would sit for supper, then down a wooden staircase with a thick wooden banister and a red runner patterned with large blue flowers out into a garden where men and women in evening dress were gathered along a stone parapet, a wide, deep lawn extending beyond the parapet. A waiter came to offer us flutes of champagne from a silver tray.

  I heard someone near by say, ‘Really, Sebbie only gives a do like this to be able to invite the royals.’

  ‘We’d better go up to the recital hall,’ Julia said. ‘The seats are unreserved.’

  The hall is large, with a groined ceiling and high, wood-paneled walls. Along a high shelf all round the hall are placed breastplates and helmets, and painted on every wooden panel is a coat of arms.

  Julia and I sat behind Stephen and Natasha Spender. I leaned forward to say hello to him, and he turned to me as if with a shock and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’

  I smiled.

  He said, ‘You’re wearing a clip-on bow tie.’

  I put a hand over my tie.

  Natasha didn’t turn to me.

  Alfred Brendel came in, sat at the grand piano, adjusted the height of the stool by turning knobs on either end, and then held his fingers over the keys for a moment before he struck the first chord. All the while he played, people in the audience coughed.

  Julia and I sat at a table among barristers and their wives. Napkins falling to the floor from laps, everyone rose when the royals, the Duke and Duchess of York, she at one table and he at another, got up. The Duchess, her eyes wide and staring apparently at nothing, walked through the standing guests, and, still apparently without seeing anything as she stared out, stopped for a second before a woman and smiled a smile that seemed to float out from her face and have nothing to do with her. The woman curtsied. Then, as soon as the royals had left, the guests dispersed, as if in a hurry to get away.

  I heard this conversation:

  ‘I was a long way from being seated at the best table.’

  ‘What was the best?’

  ‘With the Duchess.’

  ‘And the second best?’

  ‘With the Duke.’

  ‘I would put our table at, say, fifth best.’

  ‘Not too bad.’

  I did not see Stephen and Natasha leaving.

  Vera Russell asked Nikos to choose poems by Auden to be included in a large book of etchings by Henry Moore, and Vera arranged for Nikos to accompany Auden to Henry Moore’s estate. Entering, all Auden said was, ‘You must be a millionaire,’ and lit up a cigarette, then, as if to himself, wondered why poets are not millionaires, and then consoled himself with the thought that when an artist does go into a slump he never rises from the slump, as though poets never go into slumps from which they never rise. What this had to do with Henry Moore, who clearly is not in a slump, Nikos had no idea, nor, he thought, did Henry Moore, who simply stared at Auden smoking his cigarette, his large, deeply wrinkled jaw thrust out, the bangs of his hair falling over his deeply wrinkled forehead. He showed no interest in Henry Moore’s work, nor in the book. He was mostly silent at the meal of ribs of beef, which he ate, grease dripping down his chin, ‘ravenously’ Nikos said, after which he said, ‘Well, I prefer mutton.’ Nikos was very amused by this, and admiring of the total self-containment of Auden, as total as a monument so aware of its own monumentality that it is indifferent to spectators. Yet, perhaps because he was somewhat aware of his duties as a guest, he did talk, in his monotoned, gravelly voice, not so much to communicate as to express his many opinions about his many subjects, everyone else simply listening, as of course one does simply listen when a monument speaks.

  Nikos told me he recounted to Stephen the visit and Auden’s behavior, and Stephen, opening and closing his lips as if to suppress a smile and frowning a little, appeared to be thinking, More evidence of the personal monstrousness of Auden.

  Marina Warner is often a guest at Sebbie’s. She is an editor for Vogue magazine, or so I imagine, as her elegance makes her appear to be familiar with that world; but, too, when I hear her talking so knowledgeably with Dawn Ades about art history, also at Sebbie’s, I imagine that the academic world is where she most fits in. Perhaps she lives one world within the other. She wears her spectacles at the tip of her nose.

  Nikos was the first to publish Dawn, her book Photomontage.

  We see a lot of Francis, who invited us to the Colony Room, which he calls Muriel’s because it is run by Muriel Belcher, a close friend whom he paints. Up a flight of old stairs, the walls painted dark green where the plaster hasn’t fallen away, we went into a small room with a filthy gray carpet, dirty pale-green walls, empty bottles under the chairs, and on the floor a large tin tub filled with ice and green bottles. The first time we went there, a mirrore
d door at the other side of the room opened and in came a man with loosely curled hair, spectacles, and a black-and-gold scarf about his neck. He was supporting an old woman in a lank gray dress. The man helped the woman to a stool at the end of the bar, near the entrance, and Francis introduced Nikos and me to her, Muriel, and to the man, Ian Board. Muriel’s hair was long and thin and pulled tight over her skull so her scalp showed. Her face was long, wrinkled, slack; her mouth was always open, and her teeth made me think of her skull. Her gums were bleeding so she held a handkerchief to her mouth. She didn’t look at us so much as tilt her head and throw an approximate glance at us. Francis said, ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ We said yes. Francis ordered champagne from the barman, whom he introduced us to. His name was David. Then Francis introduced us to the pianist, a young handsome man named Felicity, then Francis ordered a brandy-and-soda for Felicity from David. Francis, Muriel, Ian, Nikos and I talked about sex. Francis said, ‘I hate sex in the morning.’ ‘When do you like it?’ I asked. He said, ‘Between three and four in the afternoon, with sunlight blazing through the windows.’ I said, ‘Nikos and I like it any time.’ Muriel tapped me across the cheek with the back of a twisted hand and said, ‘You old cunt.’ Nikos said, ‘You tell him.’ Ian said to Nikos and me, ‘You should come often, darlings.’