by David Plante
On the mattress on the floor were Stephen, Nikos and Roc, reclining and laughing. John asked me if I thought Stephen would write a poem for Philip to give to him in prison – John can’t write at all – to tell Philip how much he loves him, and I said I’d ask Stephen, and did, but Stephen appeared very puzzled, as if he didn’t understand the request, or perhaps he didn’t want to write the poem. He said to John, ‘I’d love to, I really would, but it takes a very long time to write a poem.’ ‘I understand,’ John said.
Then a door opened and a girl came in. Her hair was bunched up at the top of her head and fell in front of her face; her black eyes, through the hair, appeared startled. Seeing her, Stephen said, ‘I must go.’
John, Nikos, Roc, I pulled him up onto his feet; he was unsteady, and I worried that he might fall back. Roc showed us all out. On the street, Stephen asked, ‘Who was that ugly girl? She ruined everything.’ Nikos said, ‘Pity her if she’s Roc’s girlfriend.’ John kissed us, over and over, and left us to go to clubs.
On our way to Loudoun Road to leave Stephen off, we were stopped in Portland Place by a policeman who held out a hand. There were many policemen about. The one who stopped us looked in, then waved us on, and I said, ‘I guess we look proper.’ I imagined the policeman thought Stephen looked like a minister of some kind. Stephen kept repeating, ‘How strange it’s been. How strange.’
Another Easter, and we wondered where we would go for the service, and decided on the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Saint Mary of Debre Tsion in Battersea, where we went with Doris Saatchi, now divorced from Charles Saatchi. We had to take off our shoes and place them in large pigeonholes, and as the nave was filled we climbed up to a gallery to look down at the service of priests in white and gold robes chanting and acolytes beating drums, one acolyte carrying a large white umbrella with a long fringe about the edge. The congregation, almost all in white, stood to pray with their hands held out. First the men advanced for communion, each given a little cloth with which to wipe his mouth and then throw onto a growing pile; then the women. Near us in the gallery was a man, who appeared to be English, dressed as a woman in a long, sleeveless shift and golden bracelets on his bare arms, he talking animatedly with Ethiopians around him. Nikos was disappointed because there was no moment of resurrection, which we had all imagined would happen with the loud beating of drums but didn’t, and people began to leave before the Mass finished, and we left too. The three of us went to our flat for the traditional Greek Easter supper, which, however, was out of the cultural context that used to give it meaning.
What was most strange about the service was that it did not seem strange at all, not even the presence in the church of the man dressed as a woman.
More and more, I like to think that keeping a diary has to do, not with the writer, but within the historical time that the diary is written. And if there should be any deep structure to that time, the structure would be in the diary. A diary, which is supposed to be the most personal of all forms of literary expression, really is the most impersonal, having to do not so much with the writer but the times in which the writer lives.
In London and staying with us, John and Hugh invited us to meet Douglas Cooper. John likes to give us a little biography of people he thinks we’d find interesting, or, perhaps, who’d find us interesting, and told us that Douglas Cooper is a close friend of Picasso and a collector of his works which hang in his grand chateau in France, and who, during the war, was particularly adept at interrogating young German soldiers, terrifying them with his command of German, so that Nikos and I were prepared for the entrance of a large man with a large-brimmed Texan hat coming towards the restaurant table and more or less shouting, in what sounded like a Texan accent, that paintings by Picasso had been stolen from his chateau, but had been found in Switzerland.
He took no interest at all in Nikos and me, which we thought just as well.
Nikos did not mention that he publishes the books of John Rewald.
After Cooper left, John and Hugh said there was some suspicion that the paintings were not stolen but spirited away to get them into Switzerland and out from under a French ruling that they must remain in France.
We had not seen Patrick Procktor for a while, then, out doing Saturday shopping, came across him in carpet slippers walking his dachshund and looking very thin and wan. He asked us to join him in a pub, and though Nikos was reluctant I agreed and at the pub realized that Patrick was already drunk. He spoke nasally, sometimes snorting with brief snorts of laughter, his head held high enough to look down at us.
He seemed to sum up his life by recounting the meals he and his son Christopher have every day, grilled sausages, and I saw a grill dripping with grease. When I asked him what he is working on, he raised his head even higher and swung it away and looked into the distance, and I knew he has stopped painting. Nikos wanted to leave, and I thought that this would most likely be the last time we saw Patrick.
Steven Runciman to supper, always with eggs from his hens from his castle in Scotland, and always with amazing anecdotes.
I can’t resist including some of his anecdotes:
‘Virginia Woolf never forgave Ottoline Morrell for not introducing her to her half-brother the Duke of Portland, because Virginia aspired to know the royals. Virginia Woolf dressed out of the acting box.’
‘My father was a friend of Maynard Keynes, who introduced me into the fringes of Bloomsbury. Lytton Strachey, of whom I was very fond, was very kind and very entertaining to the callow undergraduate I then was, at Trinity, though I knew more people at King’s. I met Lady Ottoline Morrell when we were doing a cure together for rheumatism at Tunbridge Wells. She had her Thursday-afternoon tea parties to which guests had to be specially invited, but I could come any Thursday as long as I let her know beforehand. This was in case she was away, or in case something else had come up, and that was fair enough, I thought. At her tea parties, one met every sort of person. There I met and disliked Yeats. Ottoline thought it would be lovely for the poet of Byzantium to talk to the student of Byzantium, but Yeats didn’t think that was at all lovely. He didn’t want to talk to anyone who knew about Byzantium. Sturge Moore, one of whose poems, “The Gazelles,” appears often in anthologies, haunted Ottoline’s. He was a brother of G. E. Moore, the philosopher, but, unlike his brother, had a slightly common voice. He was terribly jealous of Yeats, because he knew he would never achieve his eminence. Sitting next to me at Ottoline’s, he kept saying to me, “That man Yeats, why does he put so much gold in his poetry? You can’t read a line of Yeats without there being gold in it. You go and ask him why he puts so much gold in his poetry.” I was nagged into moving over to Yeats and getting the conversation around to gold. Yeats looked at me coldly and said, “Gold is beauty.”’
Lockerbie, Scotland
But how can I leave Steven with so little to account for such a presence in our lives? Again and again, I’m overwhelmed in this diary with what I want to account for and what it would take me volumes and volumes to account for.
Steven has allowed me to write a profile of him for the New Yorker, and I’ve stayed at Elshieshields for some days. When I was not recording him with a microphone, I would, each evening, write out what I remembered of our conversations.
Steven does not allow anyone into his kitchen but himself, not even his staff to do the washing-up, as he thought anyone but himself would chip his china. He does the cooking while I wait in the dining room, in the basement of the castle. The plate before me was illustrated, in sepia, with a scene of a Jesuit in a canoe, two Indians paddling him through rapids. I didn’t presume to go for the bowls of soup that appeared on the shelf of the hatch to the kitchen, not sure what was right and what not, but waited until Steven came out of the kitchen and himself brought the bowls of soup to the table. Before placing the bowl on the plate set before me, Steven said, ‘I chose that with its scene specifically to refer to your ancestry.’
He said, ‘I have told you that you are, in Britain, among the enemy
. You are aware, are you not, that you will join the enemy by becoming British? Do think carefully before you do.’
‘That has occurred to me.’
‘On several counts – the British enemy for dispossessing you of La Nouvelle France, which in war they won, and for going to war with your American colonials to stop the American Revolution, which war they lost. But, being French of a long and, I dare say, distinguished American history, perhaps you don’t quite think of the British colonials as your ancestors.’
‘No, I never did quite think of the colonials as my ancestors. In my French-Canadian-American parochial school in New England, an attempt was made to integrate us into Yankee America by emphasizing the role played by Lafayette in the American Revolution, but I was never really proud of Lafayette as one of us, representing us. He was an honorary Yankee.’
‘Whom do you honour in your history?’
‘No one, no one I can think of.’
‘Would your parents have had a sense of their history? Would they have known about the defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec by the British, a turning-point in North American history? If the French under Montcalm had succeeded in repulsing the British under Wolfe, the British colonials would not have assumed the security they needed to expand into French territory, and La Nouvelle France would still claim most of the continent. I do enjoy speculating about what would have happened in history if wars had been won by the opposing forces. Alas, I must stick to the facts.’
‘My parents wouldn’t have known about the Plains of Abraham. Their sense of history was very limited, and perhaps went no further back than to their own parents and their emigration from farms in French Canada to work in the textile mills of Yankee New England.’
‘They wouldn’t have known about the Jesuits and the Indians?’
‘Only in that my father was a quarter-breed Blackfoot Indian, his grandmother lost, as it were, in the forests of North America along with the Jesuits who braved rapids to reach them to convert them. I was brought up with almost no sense of my own native history.’
Steven suddenly said, ‘I see you eyeing the bottle of wine.’
‘I did happen to glance at it.’
‘Wine is not drunk with the soup.’
‘I admit that I do have a lot to learn.’
‘If you were familiar to the household, you would be allowed to add a dash of sherry to your soup, but I think that would be too familiar of you as a guest.’
‘I wouldn’t dare.’
Steven took the soup bowls into the kitchen, and I waited, studying the scene on the plate of my ancestry, and a deep loneliness in my isolation surrounded me like the shadows that encircled the dimly lit room.
The panel to the hatch rose, and there appeared on the shelf an elaborate tureen.
‘What,’ Steven asked, lifting the cover of the tureen to reveal kedgeree, ‘do you know of the battle of Ain Jalud?’
‘I wouldn’t try to fake even guessing.’
‘The most important battle in the Western world, and you know nothing of it?’
‘You won’t tell me?’
‘I am ashamed of you for not knowing, but you must learn, as you say. The battle of Ain Jalud occurred September 2, 1260, between the Muslim Marmelukes of Egypt and the Mongols under the Christian general Kitbuqa. Had the Mongols won, Islam might have crumbled in the whole Turkish Crescent and possibly the Turks might have become Christian. As it was, the Muslims won and punished the native Christians for their friendship with the Mongols. And the Mongols in the Near East eventually turned Muslim.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Again, my failing as a proper historian – I speculate too much on what might have happened if, the if always suggesting a fantasy of an entirely different world.’
‘You fantasize about history?’
‘About a world that might have been, yes, I do.’
‘A better world?’
‘A different world.’
‘Different in what way? More to your liking?’
‘As much as I must stick to the facts, I am all too human in wanting a world more to my liking.’
‘Which would be?’
‘Dear boy, you do have an American way of asking questions that are too personal. If you are to become truly British, you must understand that we British do not indulge in the personal, which is of little interest even to oneself. What is of interest I leave for you to find out.’
‘Manners?’ I asked.
‘Well, you are astute.’
‘I can claim to have been brought up to be polite, to hold the door open for women, to stand when a woman enters the room, to walk along the outside of the pavement if I am escorting a woman. But this is rudimentary.’
‘You have been brought up well, and have the basics. As for British manners, you have more to learn. Where, for example, would you place the pudding – “pudding” being an acceptable term except for fruit salad – fork and spoon?’
‘At the sides, always at the sides,’ I said, seeing where they were placed at either side of his plate.
‘What about fish knives and forks?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I was once in Bucharest with my mother at the Jockey Club there – we were on a cruise in the family yacht – and we heard a woman at the other side of the dining room shout out, “Take this fish knife and fork away. What do you think I am?” We never had them at home. In later life, I was given a set as a gift, and gave them away, but, on reconsidering, I thought that after all they are rather useful, so I bought a set. One must adapt to the changes – we are no longer in an era when knife boys must clean the knives of those who could not afford silver, distinguishing, all too undemocratically, the lower classes from the upper. Fish knives and forks are a sign of a democratic spirit, in a rather conservative way.’
‘What about placement cards?’
‘Perfectly acceptable, but the full title must be written, and they must never be the vulgar stand-up kind, but must lie flat on the plate.’
‘Finger bowls?’
‘Also perfectly acceptable, except when you have royalty.’
‘Why?’
‘The royal would be offended if someone passed a glass over the fingerbowl, reminding him or her of Bonnie Prince Charlie having to cross the water to escape death. I must say, I was once derided by Lady Holmes for being such a stickler about not having finger bowls when royals come to a meal, she insisting that it would do simply to put one’s hand over the bowl when raising one’s glass.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
Steven thought. ‘Odd, I must say, that the British should have put up a statue of George Washington in Trafalgar Square – a traitor.’
The next day, in his drawing room, I recorded Steven talking.
Propped in a corner were a Regency table harp, a Javanese one-stringed instrument, and a nose flute from Borneo, and a hubble-bubble, a water pipe of green glass with simple flowers painted on it.
I asked Steven about the hubble-bubble.
‘Do you really want to hear?’ He seemed a little annoyed.
‘Please.’
The September sunlight on the lawn, seen through glass doors, was low and long. Steven sat at the edge of his chair, his thin legs turned to the side, as if the room did not have enough space for him. He didn’t look at me, but at the walls of the room, and he smoked a cigarillo.
He started with a faint growl.
From the recording:
‘When I was in Istanbul, in 1942, to teach Byzantine history at the university, I was allotted a handsome young lady to be my translator and assistant. Her family, the Karaçalaris, had been old-established tobacco magnates in Kavala when it was Turkish. She was related, in the female line, to the founder of the line of the Egyptian khedives. Some generations before, a husband and wife – ancestors of those tobacco people in Kavala – had an only daughter, admirably well endowed financially but not physically, and when she was married off to
the son of a neighboring tobacco king and he unveiled her he couldn’t face it, so an Albanian adventurer, having heard the story, went to the father and said, “It’s a good dowry, I’ll take her on,” and he did, and they were the parents of Muhammad Ali, the first khedive of Egypt. For a time, the Egyptian government kept up the house where he was born in Kavala. Kavala, as you must know, was transferred earlier from the Turks to the Greeks, and all the Turks had to leave. The Karaçalaris family in Kavala had always rather despised their relatives in Egypt. Muhammad Ali had assigned them large lands in Egypt, but they had never bothered to go to Egypt or do anything about the land. It was only at the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece, in 1922, that the Kavala cousins remembered their rich cousins in Egypt. But it was too late. Everything had gone by default. They had to go to Istanbul.’
I tried to keep my mind fixed on Steven’s words, which rose in pitch, so at sudden moments I heard only the rising pitch, and I must fix my mind on the words.
‘My assistant’s uncle was a great friend of Atatürk. Atatürk came to the house once while she was studying, and he asked her what she was studying, and she said, “Old Hittite.” Atatürk wanted to prove the Turks Hittites. He said, “It’s just like old Turkish, isn’t it?” She said, “No, it’s more like old Armenian.” The family were aghast. Atatürk giggled and said, “You know, sometimes I think I’ll have to prove the Armenians Turkish.” She was a bright girl. She was married to His Highness the Çelebi Effendi. Of course, he wasn’t allowed to use his title in Turkey, but he was the hereditary head of the whirling dervishes – the Mevlevi dervishes – descended in a direct male line from the founder, the great philosopher Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi. Before the sultanate was abolished, in 1922, the whirling dervishes had a great many establishments all over Turkey, and, indeed, the hereditary head was one of the chief people in the Ottoman regime. He had to gird the Sultan with the sword of Islam, even though the Mevlevi dervishes were considered a little heretical, a little bit too tolerant, by strict Islamic standards. Then, with the revolution, Atatürk secularized and annexed all the Mevlevi establishments in Turkey and banned the use of titles. So the Çelebi Effendi moved to Syria and settled in Aleppo, where he still had his tekke, or monastery. Just before the Second World War, the Turks managed to force the French, who were then in charge of Syria, to yield the province around Antioch to Turkey. The Syrians were furious, and turned out all Turkish citizens living in Syria, including the Çelebi Effendi. He had to go back to Turkey and live there as a private citizen. He was out of touch with all his remaining establishments in Syria and Aleppo, and, of course, the war made him even more out of touch.’