by David Plante
To listen to Dee talk about her past is to be entertained by a whole life, at least in her telling, of entertainment. Just this: when young, living in Paris, she became infatuated with a man from Oklahoma, a man whom she was warned against because he lived in a hotel known for – a nod of the head – men like that. Queer? Impossible! No man from Oklahoma could be queer! She invited him for supper, calculated the drink to get him drunk but not too drunk, but drunk enough that – oh dear! – he missed the last Métro back to his hotel, so he’d have to spend the night.
A long walk with Anthony Page through Hyde Park, he telling me about directing in the presence of Samuel Beckett at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. About directing, Anthony told me this:
‘The first thing is to know the text of the author you’re directing as well as you can. What the conscious structure of the piece is, how thoughts and lines connect with each other.
‘My ideal is that the actors should come knowing their lines when we start rehearsing. They will make any excuse to avoid this but it gives you the equivalent of at least ten days’ extra rehearsal when you have a month.
‘Noël Coward and my teacher Sandy Meisner both felt very strongly indeed about this. Meisner said that rehearsing without knowing your lines was like acting with a grand piano on your back and for me from the very beginning of rehearsal the actors should start working on their relationships with the other characters, their objectives and so forth. Very difficult if you’re reading or feeling for lines.
‘The director is largely responsible for the atmosphere at rehearsals and he needs daring actors who are in touch with their instincts. He needs to keep the objective balance and structure of the play in his mind, at the same time encouraging fun and freedom and improvisation. Unintellectual instincts are often what make the most magical side of a production. This freedom should be retained right through the run of the play.
‘I hate productions which are too choreographed, self-conscious – too obviously directed. Better by far if the direction is invisible, unnoticed – and if the action seems every time to be happening for the first time ever before the audience’s eyes.
‘If a play has been rehearsed and its foundations laid in this way it can continue to develop and to grow in truth and strength for the whole run. Once it’s in front of an audience, who reveal new things to the actors, the job of the director is rather like gardening. New growths spring up – often by instinct – and may need to be watered – by making the actors aware of them. Also inevitably there are weeds, temptations to cheapen, which must be got rid of.
‘Ideally a director should visit a production – at least for part of the performance – every two weeks or so. And give notes to the cast. Probably written down. Actors often aren’t too happy with notes once a play has opened and if they can read them it gives them a chance to ponder, and try them out and not to forget them, if they agree with them.’
Nikos and I have seen such extraordinary productions in the theatre, most notably the plays of D. H. Lawrence, and among these the Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, with its scene of the widow washing the dead body of her husband, killed in a mine, and keening over his body. I thought: yes, for all that D. H. Lawrence intended too much in his writing – what his friend Bertrand Russell condemned as a philosophy of ‘blood-consciousness’ that led straight to Auschwitz, and that Virginia Woolf derided, too, as philosophy, which she did not want in a novel (she wanted ‘no preaching: things in themselves: the sentence in itself beautiful . . .’) – for all that D. H. Lawrence intended in his writing, the unintended, beyond his philosophy, has more of a soul than any of his contemporaries, especially the Bloomsbury writers, and especially Virginia Woolf, could ever have been capable of expanding upon in their writing.
To Stephen and Stevie Buckley to supper at the long, wide refectory table from King’s College, Cambridge, from when Stephen was artist in residence there. The architect Max Gordon was at the table, and Stephenie and Roxy, and Suzi. Nikos talked of some good reviews I’ve had. I said, ‘Nikos tells me I have become terribly immodest.’ No one said anything, not even Nikos. I said, ‘Well, I see no one is denying that I am.’ They all laughed. Stephen said, ‘You can always count on your friends.’
Suzi sat next to me at the end of the table. She asked me, ‘Do you believe in God?’ ‘No,’ I said. She said, ‘I find it difficult to understand how anyone cannot believe in God.’ I said, ‘I find it difficult to believe how anyone can.’
A little while later, Stephen described how he, as a student, was visited regularly by a ghost which stood silently by his bed.
Suzi asked, ‘How did it manifest itself ?’
‘By its silent presence.’
‘Was it a man or a woman?’
Stephen said, ‘I couldn’t tell.’
I am amazed when I find close friends believe in what I find unbelievable. It makes those friends, whom I consider familiar, to be totally unfamiliar, and more interesting than before.
We drove Max to his flat in Mayfair.
He talked about Jennifer Bartlett. ‘She’s really a dumb artist. She knows nothing about technique. In fact, she’s an appalling technician. When she succeeds technically, it’s by sheer accident. But she has something that goes beyond technique, and when she’s able to realize that her work is sensational.’
From the time I last saw them until recently, Maggie D. and Michael H. have married, but they still live separately.
The sitting room of Maggie’s terrace house in Hampstead has large, deep armchairs and a sofa, and the wallpaper is a dark red William Morris pattern with simplified, overlapping leaves or feathers, I can’t recall which, though I do like to get the details right. At the other end of the room was a guitar on the floor leaning against a wall, and a black, perhaps lacquered grand piano painted with Chinese scenes about its curved body, a glass of bluebells on it, and beyond it glass doors out to what looked an overgrown garden whose large-leafed plants pressed against the lower panes. On a wall across from the piano are bookshelves, floor to ceiling, but books were strewn about everywhere. Once again, I try to see such details as referring to something more.
We talked about London.
I said I never feel that, in the multi-roomed houses of London, I understand what all the furniture, the pictures, the books, the bibelots, the teapot and cups and saucers mean. My incomprehension makes me feel I’m not in London.
Maggie said, ‘But I don’t feel I’m inside either. I’m not from London, I’m from Yorkshire, and that makes me a foreigner in London. I didn’t know anyone here until I came, after I graduated from Cambridge. I certainly didn’t know any writers. I was the first writer I’d ever met.’ She spoke calmly, sitting straight, her hands, palms down, on her knees, her fingers straight. She asked Michael, ‘You don’t feel you’re a part of London, either, do you?’
Rising from a slouch, he said, ‘No, no. I’m hardly English. My father was half Irish and my mother Swedish. And I grew up everywhere. I recall a time when I was a boy waking up in a wet, cold place, and not knowing where I was, and being told I was in Vienna.’
‘Why Vienna?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure why. My parents divorced and remarried again and again, and I’d spend time with my father and my stepmothers and with my mother and stepfathers in different places. One stepfather was Hungarian, another French. I was all over the place. The closest I got to proper English life was when I stayed with my grandparents, my father’s parents, in the country here. When I came to London, finally, I felt I didn’t know anyone. I still feel I don’t, really.’
Brushing her bobbed hair back over an ear, Maggie said quietly, ‘Your childhood was a muddle.’
‘Yes, a muddle.’
Michael’s face looks as if he usually wears spectacles that he at some point in contemplating the world he took off, and he wonders where he has put them. ‘It may have been Venice,’ he said, ‘the cold, wet place I woke up in.’
I said, ‘I’m
very surprised. I thought you’d both feel very much at home in London.’
‘No, no,’ Maggie said.
And I said, ‘Well, if you two don’t feel at home in London, what can I feel?’
While Maggie prepared a hollandaise sauce in the kitchen, Michael and I had gin and tonics in the sitting room.
He said, ‘They’re very demanding, the people I write biographies about.’
‘Because they demand you get in the whole world each one lived in?’
‘The whole world.’
‘But writing biography is like writing fiction, isn’t it?’ I asked. ‘Trying to realize characters, trying to realize the worlds of the characters, which, after all, exist in the writing.’
‘If only one didn’t have to verify all the facts,’ Michael answered.
In a shiny apron, Maggie appeared to say lunch (or did she say ‘luncheon’?) was ready – steamed salmon and boiled potatoes and the bright hollandaise sauce. Michael opened a bottle of white wine. The table was set near windows, the outside plants pressing against the panes.
Again, we talked about London, or I wanted to talk about London, as I always do. We talked mainly about writers from the past, and the talk gave way to Bloomsbury and the survivors, such as Henrietta Garnett, the grandniece of Virginia Woolf, who had just published a novel – which, in fact, Henrietta had shown me and which she wanted to call Catherine’s Bidet, but published is called, I think, Family Skeletons, and this made me feel I may be a little more involved in London than Maggie and Michael.
Then talk about recycling of rubbish, which we were all for, and as anyone with any common sense would be for. I suddenly looked at Maggie and, as if an insight had come to me about her, I said, ‘You appear to be, but you’re not at all commonsensical, are you?’ She has a way of jerking back her head so her hair, with long bangs, swings forward about her cheeks. She said, ‘No, I’m not. How did you guess?’
As we were leaving to go to Michael’s apartment, he and Maggie with bags and books, she asked him, ‘Do you have chapter sixteen?’ He opened his red plastic carrier bag and answered, ‘Yes.’ ‘Whose chapter sixteen?’ I asked. ‘Michael’s,’ Maggie said. ‘He keeps a copy of everything he writes on top of my wardrobe for safekeeping. I don’t keep a copy of what I write, the typescript is all it is.’
Michael’s apartment is in Ladbroke Grove, where, Maggie said, the air is less salubrious than in Hampstead. She said this in such a careful way, her chin jutted out, I thought she was being ironical, but wasn’t sure.
Michael’s wide sitting room is muted yellow, and three busts – of Augustus John, Lytton Strachey, and Bernard Shaw – all larger than life, keep strange company with one another, all looking away from one another. Everything neat, the books if not placed in their proper places on shelves stacked in piles.
When I thought of asking them why they live separately, I thought, no, don’t, and I felt I had been long enough in London to know what to ask and what not to ask. Asking would have been like asking them to justify their marital relationship, and to ask anyone to justify his or her life is never, ever done. But I did say that, given all relationships are necessary but impossible, it is a very sensible arrangement, thinking to myself at the same time that, as the English would of course say to themselves about the arrangement, it was really too peculiar.
Maggie smiled, and with a fine irony said, ‘Very sensible.’
Tea in Michael’s garden, and talk about Margaret Thatcher and the threat to freedom of expression, which should be considered violations of human rights. And the absurdity of her claiming that Socialism is dead! Maggie said this is her basic belief: that the State is responsible for the ill, the old, the out of work and poor, and students, and, yes, we pay our taxes for this responsibility of the State. But Thatcherite Britain couldn’t last, Michael said, which he thought is already beginning to crack. Looking at the ground, Maggie said, ‘I’m not so sure.’ Michael raised his hands and said, ‘Of course, I don’t know.’
Maggie, in a canvas chair, dropped her wooden clogs and folded her legs under her, and the long afternoon light shone on her smooth face. Contradicting what they had said when I first came about not feeling they are part of London, we talked of people we know, people we meet over and over again in different contexts, at concerts or plays or openings of exhibitions or book-launch parties or dinner or drinks parties, and I felt that particular charm of being with friends with whom idle talk about other friends, or even talk about flowers, can seem the most intimate talk you’ve ever known.
Michael told a story about being driven by Charlotte Bonham Carter in her motor car, she often swerving to drive on the left side of the road.
I recognize this about Nikos: though he is constitutionally incapable of apologizing, as if it is a deep Greek trait never to blame oneself but always another, when he knows he has been unfair to me by blaming me for, oh, never mind what, he will press his forehead against mine for a long while and smile, and I always smile in return.
Stephen Buckley’s wife, Stevie, was among a number to hold a jumble sale of whatever they no longer wanted but thought could be interesting to others – old tea caddies, stoneware bottles, crocheted antimacassars – the sale organized in the loft-like post-industrial space overlooking the Thames, near Tower Bridge, where some artists have their studios. We added to Stevie’s stall whatever we no longer wanted, whatever was now irrelevant to our lives together, and among these were the sailor’s trousers dyed bright yellow that I once bought for Nikos on a Saturday afternoon on the King’s Road, then when the King’s Road was as if a road into a world in which people dressed for a different world and, too, fell in love and had sex in a different world. Though I had bought the trousers for Nikos, he’d never worn them. In the loft saw a boy, the son of an artist and his wife, study the yellow trousers with an attentiveness that could only have been inspired by fantasy, though his fantasy was all his. I said to Nikos, ‘Give him the trousers, just give them to him,’ and Nikos was amused to give them to the boy, who took them away to wear in whatever he fancied his world to be.
Francis told us he has a new friend he wants us to meet. His name is John, John Edwards, and he runs a pub in the East End. On a Sunday morning, Nikos and I drove Francis there. John has black curly hair and wore a smart grey-flannel suit. Nikos and I were in jeans. We had drinks in the saloon, where young men were playing snooker. John’s boyfriend Philip was among them. A pretty, blond young man with pimples along his jaw, he couldn’t go more than a mile from the pub, as he’d been convicted of a crime and was awaiting sentencing. After some drinks, we all went to another pub, which closed while we were there, but we stayed on behind the locked doors and met a number of middle-aged Cockney queens and their boyfriends. They and John and Philip and Francis and Nikos and I, about twelve of us, went out for late lunch at a Chinese restaurant, all of us about a large round table. One bleached-blond queen said to Francis, ‘So you paint pictures, do you, Francis? Excuse my ignorance, but what kind of pictures do you paint?’ This was all said in East End Cockney. Francis said, ‘Well, it’s difficult to say.’ ‘Like, do you paint landscapes or people?’ ‘Sometimes landscapes, sometimes people.’ ‘Do you paint pictures of dogs, Francis?’ someone else asked; ‘I like pictures of dogs myself.’ ‘I used to paint dogs years ago. I don’t any more.’ ‘What do you do with your paintings, then? Do you show them on the railings along the park in Bayswater? I seen paintings, on a Sunday, all along the railings.’ Francis, laughing, said, ‘I haven’t come to that yet. I might soon.’ John said, ‘His paintings are fucking awful. He can’t even draw as good as that Piss-casso, and fucking awful he was, too.’ ‘Right,’ Francis said, ‘I can’t.’ John said, ‘Ask him to paint a picture of you, it don’t look anything like you, all a mess.’ ‘That’s right,’ Francis said, ‘I couldn’t do a portrait that looks like anyone to save my life.’
In the car, riding back through the East End, Francis said, ‘I feel an idiot among them. I fe
el they know so much more than I do.’
‘What?’ Nikos asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Francis answered.
Nikos, not feeling well – which is rare of him – stayed home from work. In the afternoon I asked him if he was better, and he said, ‘Yes, because you’ve taken care of me.’ This surprised and pleased me because he usually doesn’t like being cared for
After her death, Francis wanted to talk to me about Sonia. I went to his mews flat in Reece Mews about midday. He said he wasn’t working for a few days. We drank three or four of what he called Dead Dogs, I think. I asked him if Sonia had ever attacked him, as she had attacked almost everyone. He thought for a long time. There is something comical about him when he is thoughtful: his expression is almost a parody of thoughtfulness, one eye low, the other high. He is looking more and more like one of his paintings.
He said, ‘I don’t know, really. I think it may be because I was introduced to Sonia by the art collector Peter Watson, whom she was desperately in love with. Of course, he was queer. He was a marvelously good-looking man, and intelligent, and rich. He had all the qualities Sonia needed in a man to fall in love with him, especially his being queer.’ Francis said this with a barking laugh. ‘Perhaps she never attacked me because she associated me with Peter in some way, and she would never attack Peter.’
‘I wonder,’ I said; ‘I suspect she never attacked you because she was frightened of you.’
‘Frightened of me? Why?’
‘Because Sonia was frightened of people – or at least was in awe of people – whom she thought had succeeded totally in their creativity. She believed you have.’