by David Plante
I said, ‘The relationship between the de Rothschilds and Russia must be very close for them to think of renting a mansion there.’
Stephen frowned and shook his head with disapproval. He said, ‘Imagine, the de Rothschilds renting a mansion in the Soviet Union.’
The train is passing through rolling countryside, with ploughed fields.
We are still on the train. We left Paris at 9:15 a.m. and will arrive at Avignon at 4:30 p.m. The countryside gets more and more dramatic.
Stephen is reading, and while he’s been reading I’ve been thinking about him and what he is doing for Nikos and me: he has opened a whole world to us. He and I were talking about Nikos, as he says we always do, and he said, ‘I wish that when I was your age I had had what you have now with Nikos.’ I said, ‘But, Stephen, you are giving us both what you didn’t have at our age.’ I feel he has given Nikos and me a world in which our relationship can expand and expand, so that in discovering the world he has opened to us we are discovering one another.
But it had shocked me a little after I talked to Nikos by telephone from our Paris hotel room to feel a small flash of jealousy from Stephen, jealousy maybe not because he loves Nikos and I have him or Nikos loves me and he has me, but jealousy because we have each other. He laughs that I want to talk about Nikos so much, that I’m always writing letters to Nikos, but maybe I am exaggerating our relationship to keep him at a distance from me while I’m with him. Maybe I want to keep reminding him: I’m Nikos’, and I can’t be anyone else’s.
The country is all round, stark hills. We’ll hire a car in Avignon and drive to Stephen’s house, outside Maussane. I am anxious to start digging.
When Stephen asked me if I’m writing a letter to Nikos, I said yes, and he asked if he could add to it. I gave him a blank page from the block of paper I’m writing on.
Dearest Nikos,
We are in the train on the way to Avignon, and David has been writing a letter to you. He will have told you all the news fit to print like the New York Times. David is still all in one piece and very helpful. Maybe he got a bit spoiled in Paris but that was only two days, and the digging will doubtless correct any bad results from Paris. The only qualification of this is that Francis Bacon may decide to join us. But we’d have to dig anyway. We are going to christen all the trees. Nikos will be an almond tree (or would you prefer fig?). Perhaps an oleander would be best of all. We think of you all the time and never talk of anyone or anything else. All my love always, dearest Nikos, Stephen
Mausanne
There is no electricity in the house, so Stephen and I use oil lamps.
I got up at dawn today and went out to dig. I dug two holes before breakfast. It’s cold, and a strong wind is blowing. The air is brilliantly pure and, just as Van Gogh described the country to his brother in his letters, seems to magnify the colors. After breakfast, I dug thirteen holes. Workmen arrived to put up a fence, and I felt, oh, so authoritative telling them what to do.
Now I’m resting. Stephen and I share his large upstairs room, with a bed at either end. He has lent me Van Gogh’s letters, so I can see Provence as Van Gogh saw it. Stephen has gone to Arles to see a lawyer, I think, on business that annoys him to have to do. As it annoys him to have to get through to Malraux in Paris to ask him to help get electricity to the house, which he said Natasha insisted he do.
Last night at dinner, Stephen and I again spoke about Nikos, and again he told me how fortunate I am. I have become close to him. I told him I’m sure I’ve become a different person since I met Nikos, more sure of myself, confident of things developing naturally without my having to force them. Stephen agreed that he was sure I had changed. My separation from Nikos has made me realize this very much, and it is Stephen who has given me the perspective to see Nikos and me together and how being with Nikos has changed me. What he says about us is always so right.
We talked about the stories I gave him. He said he liked them, but there are certain things I must be careful about. I must not write carelessly (which I do now and then), and I must read each story over and over, twenty and thirty times, until I have a definite sense of each one. He said he sensed a lot was in the stories, but what’s in them is never fully expressed. Then he said, ‘Be sane.’ I was struck, and not sure I understood. He told me not to worry about making my stories imaginative as there’s enough imagination in me that will come out. He said, ‘Don’t try to be mad, you’re mad enough.’ He told me not to be hysterical, because the hysteria always seems unmotivated and therefore boring. And then he said I must listen for my own voice. He asked me, ‘Do you know what I mean?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘but I wonder if my voice is locked in and I am locked in with it, and I do nothing but listen to it but can’t make it heard.’ ‘That may be your greatest danger,’ he said.
I know what we can get Stephen for Christmas: a briefcase.
I brought all three of Nikos’ letters, all arrived at the same time, to Avignon and read them sitting in the square. Stephen had dropped me off for a couple of hours while he went to arrange for the delivery of the trees for which I have dug the holes. I think Nikos is lonely and depressed, and I want to go back to him. I want to tell him: you don’t write rubbish in your letters, and you especially don’t write anything I shouldn’t, as you say, concern myself with. Your wanting to do something with your life concerns me greatly, as I assume what I do with my life concerns you. You are right to tell me you feel that I want you to remain in the position of a clerk in the Greek Embassy for my security, and you are not perverse in suspecting this in me. You will always have to fight against my wanting you to be the one with the solid job, the regular income, the one in whom I find security. You must demand security from me.
While I was in Avignon, I went to the Popes’ Palace, with huge, draughty halls, great flights of stairs, narrow and high corridors, all in stone, grey, whitish, clay-color, and crumbling everywhere. After wandering around in the cold, I found the papal chapel warm with sunlight flooding through the windows. The chapel is huge and absolutely stark, and echoes in such a way that when you let out a faint shout it is like striking an immense tuning fork.
Back in the house, Stephen gave me a letter Nikos sent to him:
November 18, 1966
My dearest Stephen,
Thank you so much for taking David with you to France. I am sure that it will be very good for him for his health, and good for him to meet interesting people and to be with you in the country which I imagine being so beautiful. I wish I could have come with you but I do not resent not being able to come. On the contrary, I think that I am with you through David. You are both marvellously good to me always. Sometimes I doubt that I deserve it. I hope with all my heart that everything will go well in France and that you will love David as much as I do. I am sure that you will create a beautiful love-garden that will, perhaps, remain in history as the most beautiful love-garden in the south of France, made by the last great English romantic, the last New England idealist, both inspired by the last Greek before Greece sinks like the Atlantis.
I will be thinking of you both and imagining you planting, talking, reading, writing and being happy.
All my love,
Nikos
Reading this letter, I thought, but the garden is Natasha’s!
,
We are on the train, in a compartment, Stephen, Francis, George and I, all headed back to Paris.
Though I can hardly understand what George says, I know he likes me as much as I like him, so I smile at whatever he says, and that’s understanding enough between us. We will see them both in London. Francis has already suggested that we all go to a Greek restaurant together. You see, I’ve talked about you to them too!
They arrived Saturday afternoon, and that evening we had dinner together in the restaurant of their hotel and talked about the Picasso exhibition. Francis said he can’t admire the man enough, but when I said, ‘I see your work, the studies for heads, come right out of Picasso,’ he l
ooked at me with one fixed eye while the other eye seemed to drift off to the side and I felt he was, with a slight frown, thinking of how to take what I said, then he simply smiled and said nothing. I thought, though, that I should be careful of what I say to him, especially about his own work.
Francis said he had gone with Mary McCarthy to see the paintings of owls, which were dreadful, so dreadful he couldn’t believe she had any appreciation of art, any at all. He laughed.
We all talked about different people, such as Sonia, but also many people in London I don’t know who appear to make up a world.
George told us about his world – about being in borstal and later in prison. Everyone listened to him attentively, especially Francis, as if he had never heard George talk about his time incarcerated, and the talk appeared to excite him.
When Stephen and I got back to his house and his big room, he said to me, his hand on my head, ‘I hope you won’t be spoiled by all the people you’re meeting.’
Feeling suddenly self-conscious, I said, ‘I hope not.’
He put his hand on my head and turned it a little from side to side to look at my face carefully, then he laughed and said, ‘You look like a young French priest that older women fall in love with,’ and I was relieved he was joking.
I changed into my pajamas and got into my bed at my end of the room and Stephen said to me, ‘Sleep well, David.’ I thought, I do love him, and how can I let him know I love him without making love with him? I fell asleep before he got into his bed.
Sunday morning, he, Francis and George and I went, Stephen driving, to Montmajour, where we took photographs.
Then we went on to Arles, where we stopped for a long time in the Roman amphitheater, Stephen and Francis talking about Shakespeare, especially Macbeth, about which Francis had strong if simple views as a tragedy, and Stephen, I noticed, agreed with everything Francis said, even, as if with excited enthusiasm, affirmed what Francis said. When Francis, as if a little impatient with Stephen’s agreeing with him, said, ‘But what do I know?’ Stephen frowned and shut up. We took more photographs in the amphitheater.
We went to Tarascon, where we ate a bad meal. Stephen seemed embarrassed by the meal, as if he were responsible for it, but Francis and George seemed not to care, with a lightness that made me think they didn’t care much about anything. Stephen whispered to me that we were lucky that Francis and George were in very good moods.
There appeared to be a lightness to Francis’ very body, the way he moved in sudden, quick ways, as if he were weightless and attached to the ground by a string, and only a string, and the string jerked him into walking and sometimes gesturing, his arms held out, laughing his abrupt laugh. George, who never laughed or smiled much, always appeared very fixed to the ground.
In the evening, we had dinner in the restaurant of Francis’ and George’s hotel with the prefect of Maussane and his wife, whom André Malraux, an acquaintance of Stephen from a long way back, had telephoned from Paris to tell him that electricity must be brought to the Spender house. And the painters Rodrigo and Anne Moynihan, who live part of the year in the South of France, also came to the dinner.
George, who sat next to me, told me, or I think he told me, how much he loves Francis. He put his arm over my shoulder to tell me this again and again.
Alone with Stephen in the house, I felt as he walked about in the light of the oil lamps that his loneliness was as big as he is. I said goodnight and went to bed before he did.
The next morning, Monday, I dug a little until the men from whom Stephen had ordered the trees arrived and said that they would have dug the holes, and, seeing the holes I’d dug, obviously thought they’d have to improve on them.
Stephen and I picked up Francis and George at their hotel and went to Aix, where we had a great lunch, saw a little Rembrandt self-portrait Francis admired for the way the face so obviously emerges from paint.
On the way back from Aix, we passed an accident at a crossroads where a big truck load of pigs had smashed into a tree, and the roads were littered with dead, bloody pigs. Francis, his eyes wide and head turning in all directions, got very animated by the sight as we drove past.
He said, ‘It’s so beautiful.’
At Maussane we again had dinner in the hotel restaurant.
Before we left Avignon this morning, we took lots and lots of photographs in an automatic booth in the train station. Francis said he uses them to paint from, especially if they’re blurred or contorted in some way, so we all tried to make ourselves as blurred and contorted as possible. Francis took a bunch, Stephen did, and I have some. The best ones are of Stephen when he is not blurred or contorted. He looks marvelous, monumental, with a beauty only very few older people come into, I think.
In our compartment, which for hours we had to ourselves, the talk was very intimate, about guilt and love and sex and homosexuality.
Francis said a lesbian can pretend to be heterosexual just by lying there, but a homosexual man can’t pretend to be heterosexual with a woman.
We’ve passed out of the sunlight of Provence into a grey fog. Stephen, Francis, George are sleeping. A Frenchman has come into our compartment, and, seeing me write this letter, has just said, ‘Les lettres d’amour ne sont jamais terminées.’ I wonder how he knew.
Stephen wants to add to this letter.
Dearest Nikos,
When I first met you I couldn’t have imagined that anything so wonderful would happen as you and David finding one another – still less that if it did I could be so with you both. I am very glad this has happened.
Always with my love,
Stephen
David doesn’t do anything but write letters to you.
Paris
We are back in the Quai Voltaire, though we have decided to leave tonight rather than tomorrow. Mary McCarthy had invited us when we were last in Paris to dinner this evening, but when Stephen telephoned her to confirm she said something had come up and she couldn’t have us. It occurred to me that she is a friend of Natasha and maybe, thinking about it, decided she shouldn’t invite Stephen and me to her home. God knows what everyone thinks of my relationship with Stephen, even though he makes a point of telling everyone it is not sexual.
Last night, after we got back to Paris, Stephen, Francis, George and I had dinner in a restaurant, and for the first time I saw Francis in terms of his pictures. He got drunk, drunker and drunker, and kept repeating over and over that people are horrible, life is horrible, that everyone is scum. George, also drunk, didn’t appear to be hearing. Stephen and I listened, and were defenseless. When Francis started to denounce Christianity, citing Macbeth as the most profoundly atheistic work ever, Stephen said he thought he was Christian at least in believing we must all help one another.
Francis, his lower lip stuck out and his smooth jowls bulging, fixed on him, and then he said, ‘Practically, do you help others?’
‘No,’ Stephen said, ‘I don’t, and I certainly wouldn’t give everything I have away to the poor, but still I believe I should.’
Francis stared at Stephen for a longer time, his lower lip stuck out more, as if, frowning deeply, he were considering deeply. He said, in a harsh voice, ‘Rubbish.’
I thought, Well, of course he’s right, but then I suddenly became upset, partly, I think, because he was attacking Stephen, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I could have sided with Stephen, I guess, but I didn’t, because I knew that Francis was right.
When Stephen and I got back to our hotel room, I all at once began to weep.
Stephen asked, ‘Is it because of what Francis said?’
I said I didn’t know.
Stephen said I should consider that Francis’ paintings are just a part of life – as the war in Vietnam and all viciousness were parts of life – but that there are other parts to life, parts that Francis himself is aware of and enjoys, such as landscapes and intelligence and friendship. Hadn’t I seen this side of Francis in Provence? Stephen said, ‘Y
ou saw the best of Francis when he and George were with us in Provence.’
This morning, the four of us met again to go once more to the Picasso exhibition to see what we hadn’t been able to see the first time, but maybe we had seen too much that first time (also Picasso, Picasso, Picasso is everywhere in Paris) because we came out feeling less than enthusiastic. Or could this have been because of Francis, who, after he started out by saying everything was marvelous, stopped saying it, but began to frown, his lower lip stuck out? Stephen has bought Nikos the catalogue as a gift.
We all had lunch with Mary McCarthy in a restaurant. Francis said he thought the paintings of the owls were marvelous. She smiled her hard smile.
Stephen and I went to look at some art galleries, then came back to the hotel to rest, and decided we would leave tonight.
So I will wake Nikos up in the morning and get into bed with him.
London
Nikos’ cousin Maria is staying with us for a while before she moves into a flat in Mortlake with two other girls, all of them going to a mysterious ‘school’ Maria talks about cryptically. She is a dark young woman with large dark eyes made all the larger by large dark circles around them. Because she is so secretive about her school, Nikos and I wonder if it is the school of Scientology or Economic Science, which, along with schools of Indian meditation, are advertised on posters in the Underground stations. Nikos has no tolerance for such places, but he is very tolerant of Maria, who is herself so tolerant, as if some deep sadness in her has made her so deeply tolerant. Her laughter is very sad.
Like Nikos, she won’t go back to live in Greece, but has decided to make England her home. In Athens, she said, she was talked badly about because she wore a skirt and blouse to a wedding. She wants to paint, to write poetry, to wear what she wants.
