Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  At one point in Kensington Church Street we stepped out of the march to go into a pub for beers, and through the high windows of the pub we could see the banners go by. It was a bright, hot day.

  We rejoined the march, which turned into Kensington Gardens and from there into Hyde Park, where we marched along curving paths, and at the curves were able to see, ahead and behind, the marchers with their banners, and the march appeared endless; it was as though we were looking at a distant march under the great green plane trees, and it was with a sense of wonderful unity that I realized that we were in a long, long march of demonstrators that reached so far ahead there was no seeing to the beginning and so far behind that there was no seeing to the end.

  Demonstrators were also coming into the park from Hyde Park Corner and from Oxford Street. Our Western contingent along with the converging Northern and Southern contingents advanced towards a massive crowd in the middle of the park, all gathered about a platform and a number of huge megaphones high on a derrick. We didn’t stay for the speeches.

  A youth was arrested for igniting a smoke bomb, a harmless bomb that released a cloud of bright orange smoke. Five policemen took him away, two grasping his arms, all of them smiling. The boy, half the size of the smallest constable, looked down, frowning.

  I thought, as we marched: this demonstration would not be allowed in Russia.

  There were about a quarter of a million people.

  Joe and Jos and Roxy came to the flat for lunch.

  I drove Stephen and Natasha ( just back from the South of France) to dinner at the Glenconners’. I sat between Natasha and Lord Esher, with whom I had a very interesting talk about ‘half-truths’ in writing and autobiography. He was wearing an ugly, green and red knit tie (a New Yorker, a stickler for what is and what is not done, once told me that one never wears a knitted tie in the evening, a fact of sartorial knowledge that the American would assume an Englishman must of course be fully aware of ); and it came to me that he was not so much wearing that tie as wearing a tie, and it didn’t matter what it looked like.

  While he has been away, I’ve had disturbing dreams of Nikos abandoning me.

  Stephen, laughing as he spoke, said he is very keen on hearing what Nikos has to say about Russia. ‘We should devise a chart,’ he said, ‘with on one side the insights into Russia by Thatcher, Reagan, Brezhnev and on the other side Nikos’ insights, and then calculate which side wins.’

  Nikos has come back from Russia with many Communist badges on his lapels.

  James Joll told him that he is the last of the Romantic Communists.

  Nikos retorted: James did not understand what Communism meant in Greece after the defeat of the ideology in the Civil War, for Communism meant equality and justice for all people, meant the fulfillment of a promised Republic.

  James nodded.

  Nikos and I talked about the U.S.S.R. and the U.S., I complaining that, whereas he protests violently against the U.S. suppressions in the world he doesn’t about the suppressions of the U.S.S.R.

  He said, ‘The two cases are utterly different.’

  ‘They may be. I’m talking about what you feel towards Russia and America.’

  He said, ‘I loathe Russian suppression – of course I do – and you know that I love America. But I’ll tell you: in my heart I believe that Russia is on the side of life and America is on the side of death.’

  I sat back, silent, and I suddenly thought: is he right?

  Getting into bed with Nikos, I said to him, ‘You know, I don’t believe I give you any joy.’

  ‘Sachlamares!’ he said, meaning, ‘What rubbish!’

  Both Stephen and I were surprised when, at supper, Nikos said about Russia: ‘No one calls Leningrad Leningrad, but Saint Petersburg. The country is ready for another revolution.’

  I always feel, in a social situation with Natasha, that she thinks my presence is a presumption on my part, as though I have somehow ingratiated myself into a world in which I do not belong. Stephen has told me that the only reason why Natasha has accepted us is because so many people she knows have accepted us. Elizabeth Glenconner, he says, particularly loves Nikos, doesn’t stop talking of Nikos before Natasha, as if to let Natasha know that if she, Natasha, can’t ever feel close to him, she, Elizabeth, does, and what else can Natasha do but sit at the same table with Nikos – and, by extension, with me? If I were a different kind of writer, I’d have presented to me the makings of a comedy of manners.

  Stephen rang me to say he’d written a long account in his diary about a luncheon he’d recently had with John Lehmann; he wanted me to read it and invited me to lunch to do so. It is very funny and, I hope, indicative of the diary Stephen says he has been keeping religiously. What he wrote about John Lehmann has the quality of humor Stephen has in conversation but not in his writing, the quality in which resides, W. H. Auden said, Stephen’s genius.

  At the opening of an exhibition of Adrian Stokes’ paintings at the Serpentine Gallery, I met Natasha, and together we walked to the Royal College of Art, where she teaches, I think, aspects of music. She said, ‘Let’s sit on a bench for a while and have a little gossip,’ so we sat by a group of school children playing ball in Hyde Park, and chatted.

  As we were standing together on a corner in Notting Hill Gate by a red postbox, Philip Roth and I were talking when an Englishman I knew came towards us in the crowd, and I wanted him to see me talking with Philip Roth, but he didn’t see us, and walked past.

  When Philip is keen on whatever he is talking about, his nostrils contract. He stops talking, and his eyebrows, too, contract. I always take the first step to get us walking again. As we walk, he talks, and often stops, and he talks much more than I do, and much more intensely.

  The last time we met at the restaurant, he talked of ‘real stuff ’ in writing, and gave me this, written on a torn sheet of paper, to think about:

  You must so change that in broad daylight you could crouch down in the middle of the street and, without embarrassment, undo your trousers, and evacuate.

  I forget where the quotation comes from – I think from some nineteenth-century author.

  Philip added: ‘The emphasis is on the word could. Not that you would, because you wouldn’t, but you should be capable of doing it.’

  We went to his studio, a simple room in a white stucco town house, with a large electric typewriter on a desk and a huge wastepaper basket on the floor by the desk, the basket filled with discarded pages.

  Philip said, ‘Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the real world as it is now. I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole. You do the same.’

  I said that I want to write about the moment I’m living in, as I do in my diary. In my fiction, I’m still an adolescent, learning about a world that’s now no longer the world I live in.

  We went on to a nearby restaurant, Monsieur Thompson’s, with white tablecloths and white napkins peaked on white plates.

  Philip asked me if I often think of death.

  ‘For some reason,’ I said, ‘I’m reassured by death. I guess the reason is that death can’t be faked.’

  This startled him. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘you can’t be reassured by that.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be.’

  His hand to his chin, he appeared to study me for a long while, then, with a quiet seriousness I have got used to in him, he said, ‘Yet I’m sure of the final doom. The nuclear holocaust is well on its way.’

  ‘And that reassures my dark soul.’

  He dropped his hand from his chin as if with impatience with me, and brusquely asked, ‘What is your dark soul?’

  ‘Of course it must never happen, but that it could happen reassures me in my sense that what is true is that everything is fated for destruction and that there is nothing we can do about it all happening.’

  Again, he stared at me. ‘There is a devil, isn’t there?’ he said.

  I laughed.

  ‘Now I’ve becom
e rather dark myself , ’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Can you write when you’re in a dark state?’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  ‘I can’t. I have to be in a lively state.’

  We mixed up sexual obsession in our talk about doom. I said I am less and less obsessed, and this is a relief. He said, ‘I’ll be as obsessed when I’m eighty exactly as I was when I was eighteen.’

  I visited Tony Tanner in his rooms at King’s Cambridge. He asked me to attend a seminar he was to give on George Santayana. The Last Puritan meant a lot to me when I read it as a teenager, so I felt drawn to a seminar about his work, but, at the seminar table with the graduates, I realized that what I knew about Santayana (that he was homosexual, that he died cared for by Blue Nuns in Rome during the time of Mussolini, that he was Spanish but never repudiated Franco) would be irrelevant to the more elevated vision of the philosophy of Santayana that was the subject of the seminar. The moment I try to expound upon a philosophy, I’m lost, and in no coherent way can I articulate the vision. (Nikos can.) So I have to bring myself down from the high level of philosophy to the low level of sex, place, nationality, politics. I resent this deeply, because, oh, what I long to write is PHILOSOPHY. I said nothing during the seminar.

  Back in Tony’s room, he told me that he had tried to kill himself. He had made a terrible mistake leaving King’s to go to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and King’s had him back. Drink ruined his nervous system so he walked with two sticks. But he always appears dapper, usually with a black polo shirt and a tweed jacket, and he was, as always, affable.

  ‘Read this,’ he said, and handed me, open to the page, Winnie-the-Pooh, and after I read about Eeyore’s gratitude at being given a deflated balloon, Tony asked me, ‘Whom does that remind you of ?’ and I said immediately, ‘Frank!’ and we doubled up with laughter. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we love Frank,’ and I said, ‘Of course,’ but we couldn’t stop laughing.

  Paris

  We are in Paris, Hotel de Suède, with Julia. We’ve come to see the Chardin exhibition in the Grand Palais. The walls of the hotel room are pale grey, and the carpet is soft, pale grey. I am lying on one of the two single beds, the silky spread rumpled at the foot, and I am covered by a loose blanket and a sheet. When I lie back fully my head lolls on the bolster and the large, square pillow and I look through the net curtains of the double windows at the soft, grey rain falling. Lolling, I am attentive to all the most delicate details in the room.

  From down a passage beyond the other bed comes the sound of splashing water. Those sounds of Nikos splashing water against himself in the bath fills me with great contentment.

  Later –

  Nikos came in from the bath and sat next to me on the edge of my bed, so I moved to let him lean back against the same pillow and bolster I rested on, and he looked with me out of the window where the rain was falling more fully.

  I said, ‘What a dreary morning.’

  ‘Is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘You mean, outside?’

  ‘I mean outside.’

  ‘It’s not so bad inside.’

  And one of those times occurred as if different from anything else we’d ever known, together or apart.

  Heavy rain was hitting the windows, and through it the light from outside became stippled with fine shadows in the room, and gently swaying vertical stripes appeared on the grey walls.

  I ordered two cafés complets, and, each of us in a bathrobe, we sat on delicate chairs with rattan seats and backs at a delicate table with a marble top.

  ‘Give me your cup,’ he said. I did, and he poured into it steaming coffee from a tall white porcelain pot with a little bouquet of flowers on its side. The white cup, so fine the coffee showed through, was also decorated by a tiny bouquet of flowers. I took the cup back from him and added, from a heavy silvery jug, a dollop of milk that almost remained intact until, with a silvery spoon, he stirred it round and the black coffee turned dark brown. I said, ‘I think I’ll take sugar,’ and Nikos handed me the two-handled basin, also heavy and silvery, from which I lifted a cube with the small tongs and dropped it, with a splash, into my cup, and then, saying, ‘I’ll take two,’ I dropped in another cube and stirred the coffee and milk and dissolving sugar into a liquor that became rich enough to ripple thickly about the spoon, and, sipping it, I said, ‘Oh yes,’ and Nikos smiled.

  There were croissants, warm and wrapped in a large, bright white napkin in a silver basket, and rolls of butter on crushed ice and little jars of jam, each one of which Nikos picked up to study – fraises, abricots, myrtilles – choosing, finally, the strawberry. I watched Nikos put the napkin, pleated and standing upright on his plate, to the side and pick up a croissant and pull it apart, the thin, flaky, tawny crust separating to reveal a pale, elastic interior, and, placing one-half of the croissant on his plate, he used the butter knife to take up a whole roll of butter, scored and dotted with water, to transfer it to the edge of the white plate, and then, with his shining knife, he spread the butter onto half the warm croissant, after which he used the tip of his knife to scoop up one whole but almost liquid strawberry to smear it into the melting butter. As he brought the confection to his open mouth, he looked up at me smiling at him.

  When we met Julia in the foyer to go to the exhibition, she said that in the morning she had looked out of her window into the rain and seen a body in a body bag being taken out of the hotel into a waiting van, the back doors open.

  Philip said to me, ‘You’re not taking care of yourself, David. You should join a club and go every morning for an hour’s exercise. You’re too young and good looking not to take care of yourself. And you should go to a hair clinic to get some treatment to keep your hair from falling out. It’s too late for me, but not for you.’ He went on and on. I said, ‘All right, all right,’ thinking that of course I wouldn’t do anything of the sort.

  Nikos’ interest in aesthetics makes me interested, so I find myself wondering, Well, what does constitute a work of art? Self-containment, and within the self-containment proportion and balance?

  We went to Paris for a grand exhibition of the paintings of Chardin. How beautiful the still lifes, in which the perspectives are all at different angles, and the whole so proportioned and balanced.

  Even though John Golding claims Cubism to be a radical shift from Renaissance perspective, studying an Analytic Cubist painting by Picasso, I see it as self-contained, proportion and balance delicately, exquisitely sustained.

  And then, at an exhibition of the works of Marcel Duchamp at the Tate, I stare at a miscellany of odd objects in a glass case, and I think, Well, out go self-containment, balance and proportion.

  Michael Craig-Martin, teaching at Goldsmiths, told me that he had a Japanese student whose work consisted of his burning lumps of Styrofoam with a hot poker, and when Michael, not knowing what else to say, commented, ‘It’s very ugly,’ the student responded, ‘Yes, yes, very ugly,’ and Michael went on to the next student.

  He says there is no definition, none, to what is or is not art.

  Perhaps there is an aesthetic for the unformed in art rather than the formed.

  Karsten Schubert, gallery owner, says there is no way that one can relate the work of Andy Warhol to that of, say, Chardin, no way.

  Lunch with Philip at Monsieur Thompson’s. I had given him my story, ‘Paris, 1959,’ published in the New Yorker, to read and, if he wished, to comment on. He said it’s the best writing I’ve done and he also said, ‘You’re an odd bird, Plante, a really odd bird. I’m not saying you write oddly, I’m saying you’re odd, and that’s why your writing is odd.’

  I said, ‘Your praising my writing terrifies me.’

  ‘Why? Because you feel you’ve got to start taking yourself seriously as a writer?’

  ‘If, five years ago, I fantasized about a respected writer praising my writing, I can’t imagine I would have considered you as a possibility
. Our writing is so essentially different from each other.’

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘But whereas you think you’re a dreamy writer and I’m a realistic writer concerned with the hard facts of life, the opposite is true: I’m the dreamy writer who’s always trying to invent a world in which all my dreams will be fulfilled. My writing doesn’t come from my life. I make up everything.’

  ‘And I’m a realist?’

  ‘Yes, you are. Goddamn it, you are. You’re tougher than I am.’

  We talked about many subjects, always autobiographically.

  He said, ‘To be an American simply requires one to be obsessed with finding out what an American is,’ and he described how he, from his childhood, felt he was a foreigner in America wondering what America was, and then he realized that this very condition made him an American.

  I told him that Antonia Fraser once told me that she plays a game to herself whenever she is with you and her husband Harold Pinter: she tries to guess which of the men will be the first to use the word ‘Jew,’ and within how many minutes of their meeting.

  Philip asked me, ‘How long do you give me?’

  ‘Before you say anything else when we meet, even hello, you say, “Jew.”’

  He tilted his head back and laughed.

  I said, ‘You can question what it is to be an American Jew because there are enough American Jews to give you an American identity. Try questioning yourself as a Franco-American. We have no American identity at all. How many Franco-Americans do you know, and what do you imagine can be their identity in America?’