by David Plante
Nikos likes renegades.
As for their music – as driven as it is, Nikos says there is hardly any invention in it, and invention is what Nikos is acutely attentive to in any art; their music relies on an obvious beat and does little to develop the beat, does little, if anything, to invent on the beat.
That is, when he is attentive to the music. When recorded rock music is played at a party, he likes the background beat; and though he is not at all a good dancer – at best, he sways back and forth – he likes to see me dance, which I do to the driven beat, and he stands back and smiles, and I like to think I am dancing to make him smile.
About Bach, and especially Glenn Gould playing Bach, Nikos will from time to time cry out, ‘It’s so inventive!’ and suddenly Bach becomes his music, and I think of Bach, who lived within the conventions of his time, as one of the most original people who ever lived.
Nikos has learned that a close friend of his in Athens has been arrested, George Kavounidis.
From time to time Nikos has mentioned this George Kavounidis, who was a diplomat in some South-east Asian country from where he brought back to Athens two miniature gazelles in his diplomatic luggage, one of which died of suffocation and the other Nikos described sliding about the shiny parquet floors of Kavounidis’ flat. My sense from what Nikos has said of Kavounidis is that it was through him that Nikos was able to enter into the world of diplomats and then within that world on to London, and my greater sense is that Kavounidis had an entourage of young men whom he helped, for whatever personal satisfaction. What interested me is the notion of diplomats once forming, in Greece, not only a world of people engaged in politics, but of people noted for their culture. So, the poet George Seferis used his diplomatic postings to further his career outside Greece, and so, too, Nikos, posted in London, used his post in the Press Office of the Greek Embassy to establish himself in London. About George Kavounidis – who, from what Nikos says, was a social figure in Athens – I imagined him to be in a nineteenth-century, or even traditionally older, Athenian social world in which diplomats were invited to formal occasions, and Nikos, a sortable young man as Sonia would say, was invited by Kavounidis to come with him. Nikos will say he hated such occasions in Athens, but I am struck by the formal attire he brought to London from Athens: his – as he calls it – ‘smoking’ (what I call tuxedo), cummerbund, shiny black pumps with little tassels, an overcoat with a velvet collar, a white silk scarf, in case his posting in London required him to attend a formal event, for if Nikos does enter into such a social event he behaves accordingly. That Kavounidis’ entourage of young men was homosexual was known and, as if this was a tradition among diplomats and their entourages in that social world, accepted.
That now is past history, the colonels as dictators, Nikos said, totally uncultured, crude, stupid.
New galleries keep opening. Garage is a venue for exhibitions of art and of readings of poetry founded by Tony Stokes. Everyone is in love with Tony, including Nikos. Tony flirts with Nikos, and Nikos flirts back. Tony organized at Garage an exhibition of the works of Jennifer Bartlett and Joel Shapiro.
Tony is married to Teresa Gleadowe, who works for the Arts Council. She sometimes cares for our cats when we are away, Jasmine and, now, Mustafa. The cats are known to be very neurotic, especially the female Jasmine, who, jealous of other females, hisses at women, so Teresa had to lock her in the bathroom.
I think more of Nikos’ social life in Athens, as when he told me that, to be relieved of military duty by his commanding officer on New Year’s Eve, he gave him a gift of a pair of expensive leather gloves and so was free to go to an all-night party with gambling, and I wondered if such a relief by an officer of a soldier for a pair of expensive gloves was indicative of a world that has had its precedents in many many years of past military social history. I imagine that Athens, being provincial and yet, because provincial, alert to what cultured Athenians imagined to be happening in the capital cities, preserved social ways that no longer existed in Berlin, Paris, London.
At Garage, Nikos organized a reading by Kenward Elmslie, whose poems Nikos published, and I remember the beautiful, resonant lines:
Madonna, Madonna
read in a dry voice.
Is there in his poetry a movement away from any explicit or even implied meaning, to a lively, slap-happy activity of the mind?
The sluggish choreography of shadows bumping,
burping and bloating, hunching and gnarling,
has the marijuana tempo of sex sometimes.
Kenward wears on a thin chain about his neck a locket with a black and white photograph of Joe Brainard, Kenward told me when I asked, touching the little round cut-out photograph.
Joe Brainard does drawings based on ordinary objects, a lot on comic strips, such as on the comic heroine Nancy.
Joe Brainard has written a book, I Remember, which consists of one-line recollections that bring back to me so many similar recollections:
I remember my mother’s sticking toothpicks into cakes to see if they were done or not.
I remember Dole pineapple rings on a bed of lettuce with cottage cheese on top and sometimes a cherry on top of that.
I remember continuing my return address on envelopes to include ‘The Earth’ and ‘The Universe.’
The poet Harold Norse is in London, having come from living for some time in Athens, where there is what he calls a ‘scene’ despite the colonels. Nikos has published him in the series Penguin Modern Poets, along with Charles Bukowski (whose poems are brutal, filled with booze and whores and death, and who sends Nikos long, long, typed letters that read as if spilling over the edges of the pages with beer) and Philip Lamantia (the American Surrealist poet admired by André Breton who writes such wonderful lines as ‘The mermaids have come to the desert’), poets Harold recommended to Nikos.
No doubt Harold brings with him a world, the, say, Beat world of America, inhabited by Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and William Burroughs, but I’m not sure I’m so very interested in that world to hear about it from someone who himself inhabits it. No, I’m wrong – I do find the world fascinating, but the truth is I am so jealous of it the only way I can deal with it is to tell myself I am not interested. But I also have to admit that in the person of Harold, whom I don’t in himself find very interesting, the ‘scene’ does contract from fantasy into the ego of a man Nikos and I find more and more difficult to indulge, as he seems to want more than we can give.
Yet, Harold’s poems are so much about egolessness, expounding on mantras and karma and nirvana and the cosmos and the Hub of the Fiery Force.
I like this couplet he wrote: ‘Comme c’est beau / de chier dans l’eau.’
He told us this story: having met W. H. Auden at some literary event in New York, Auden invited Harold to Saint Mark’s Place, but somehow Chester Kallman thought the invitation was meant for him and he appeared first at the door of Auden, who, opening the door, said, ‘Wrong blond,’ for, improbable as it seems, Harold was blond, as I suppose Kallman was. Harold told this story with such animated resentment at having been outdone by Kallman, and with such insistence at getting the facts right, that I have forgotten why Kallman rang Auden’s bell instead of Harold. Auden must have taken to Kallman enough because Kallman stayed on.
The police rang Nikos to say someone named David Gascoyne, who claimed to be a poet, had asked Nikos to be called, as David Gascoyne had been arrested for trying to get to the Queen in Buckingham Palace to inform her that her life was in danger from someone wanting to kill her. Nikos went to the police station in support of Gascoyne. Nikos believes Gascoyne to be a major poet, a true Surrealist, as the English cannot be, and a Surrealist, inspired by the French, who transformed himself into a poet of some of the most movingly vulnerable spiritual poems in modern English, which, too, put him apart from the other living English poets. From Farewell Chorus:
‘The silence after the viaticum.’ So silent is the ray
Of naked radianc
e that lights our actual scene,
Leading the gaze into those nameless and unknown
Extremes of our existence where fear’s armour falls away
And lamentation and defeat and pain
Are all transfigured by acceptance; where men see
The tragic splendor of their final destiny.
This poem is dated New Year, 1940.
I also think that David Gascoyne has written the most heart-wrenching poems about World War II, as in these simple lines:
Go to sleep. Put out
That light! The War is over now. It’s late.
Why don’t those people go to bed?
And this makes me wonder what the generation of David Gascoyne, which of course includes Stephen Spender, for whom World War II is a lived experience, can make of England now, in which it seems that that war, or any war, is so distant in time that Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War! comes as shock from a past that the present needs to be reminded of. Perhaps David Gascoyne, in his madness, still lives the horrors of the war.
Does Stephen? Stephen seems to live more in the present, to be amused by the style of the present, as when he showed us a new greatcoat he had had tailored especially for him by the fashionable Mr. Fish, a long, wide greatcoat with wide lapels, mauve. He laughed with pleasure when he showed it off to us.
Which reminds me – reminds me, too, of so much I don’t put into this diary, as though I think of so much as insignificant, whereas it may all be wonderfully significant if this diary is ever read, as it were, historically – that Nikos bought me a greatcoat (as Stephen calls an overcoat) designed by Ossie Clark, a pink and grey tweed, which I wear with the awareness that I am wearing an Ossie Clark greatcoat that others would recognize as by Ossie Clark, making me, oh, in style!
How I enjoy Stephen’s levity, the somewhat guilty pleasure he takes in a fancy greatcoat, in fancy restaurants, in friends, in giggling at stories he tells about himself and others – guilty because I sense in him that he feels he doesn’t really deserve such pleasures but that they are generous gifts to him from a world he is bemused by – and how I am always aware of a weight in him that that levity has to sustain.
I read his poems about grief, and especially the grief of his war poems, and often enough have the sense in him of that grief when, at the news of yet another wartime horror in Vietnam, he will press his lips together and stare out and shake his head a little, and I think of his writing about:
That wreath of incommunicable grief
Which is all mystery or nothing.
It seems to me that so much history is in the ‘insignificant’ particulars, and that in a hundred years’ time these very details will say more about the past than generalizations.
How did Nikos learn about contemporary British poetry? How did he know of F. T. Prince, whom he published, and whose The Tears of a Muse in America I read as a hymn to America. I think that if Henry James had been a poet he would have written such a poem:
here resolutions bristle,
For the cause seems to shine out at me from the moment
I grant him all the mind I can; when I in short
Impute to him an intemperate spirit . . .
. . . It comes to me afresh,
There glimmers out of it upon me that I want
Nothing of it to come at once. It glimmers,
It glimmers from the question, of how, how shall it fall
The moment of the simple sight?
Thinking of ‘insignificant’ details – they come to me, one after another, and I’m not able to place them, but when each appears it brings with it, as if momentarily filling out the darkness, a whole world evoked by the detail. So this: hanging from a long, twisted flex over the high headboard of a bed, a light switch which is turned on or off by pressing a button. A tray on an unmade bed with a small coffee pot on it and cups with the dregs of coffee and plates with the crumbs of rolls and the unfolded wrapping of butter and little empty jars of jam. Two towels hanging over the rim of an old, claw-footed bathtub, the floor small black and white tiles.
When I described to Julia Hodgkin the light switch at the end of a flex, she said, ‘You’ve brought back my entire childhood,’ and I was amazed that a detail that meant something to me was so meaningful to her.
Harry Fainlight, whose poems Nikos has been urging him to be published, came over. Though Nikos has great patience for him, thinking him a more than worthy poet, I find him too mentally shattered, I suppose by drugs, to make any sense of what he says. (Too, I’m frightened of drugs – hallucinogenics – for the disarray they would cause in what I feel my already disarrayed mind.) Harry gives Nikos poems to be published, then takes them away, and Nikos doesn’t press him. He had come to give Nikos his poems but he left with them.
We do have a chapbook collection, Sussicran, Narcissus spelt backwards, published by Turret Press under Ted Lucie-Smith, and these lines from a poem about lying in bed with a stranger after sex struck me:
Thrown by the pattern of holes in the top
Of an old-fashioned paraffin stove, a magic
Cathedral window glows on the ceiling.
Nikos and I had a paraffin stove when we first moved into Overstrand Mansions, as we couldn’t afford central heating.
What the derivation is I don’t know, but the word ‘gay’ has come to mean being sexually attracted to one’s own sex. Frank Kermode’s colleague at University College London, Keith Walker, said he thought a lot about what people who are attracted to the opposite sex should be called, and came up with ‘glums.’
Stephen is teaching at the University, but feels he is doing so badly he wants to go into the loos and write on the walls SPENDER MUST GO!
Often, looking at Nikos sitting across the room from me, he reading, it comes to me, as with a little flash, to wonder what was it like to have a German officer billeted in his family house? What was it like to see a German soldier shoot a little boy for stealing a potato? What was it like to hear a man with a wheelbarrow calling out, each morning, for those who died of starvation because of the German occupation? What was it like to live in a country where torturers wiped their bloody hands on a schoolroom wall? And to live through the German occupation only to have civil war replace the occupation and having to hide under the dining-room table when the nearby airport was bombed? And to be taken out to Communist rallies by the maid, who, when no one in the family could kill a dearly bought chicken, said, ‘Kill a chicken? I kill men every night’? In him, in his history, I am aware of World War II.
The dead, starved to death by the Nazi occupation, being taken to a mass grave outside of Athens.
Kenward Elmslie publishes a literary magazine, Z, another Z added with each magazine, and in ZZZZ is a draft of Nikos’ ‘Pure Reason’.
Stephen, Keith Milow, Nikos and I spent an afternoon together. Keith took photographs:
Stephen says Keith looks like a mischievous fawn.
Always in a suit and tie, his rigidly parted hair combed flat against his small, round skull with a lot of water, his slightly Asian eyes bulging behind his pink-rimmed spectacles as if to look in all directions at once (his paternal grandmother was in part Malaccan), John Pope-Hennessy’s body appears too constricted to contain a soul. Too intellectually brilliant for any shadows in him, the impression he gives is of a man totally self-confident in his intelligence and knowledge and worldliness, all of which precludes any need for more than what he already has himself, and least of all any need for belief in God.
Asked at an airport check-in if he had packed his own bags, he answered, in his high pitch, ‘Of course not!’
Though he always wears a tie, the collars of his shirts appear always to be wrinkled.
From time to time we meet for lunch (I imagine he would say, ‘luncheon’) in an Italian restaurant in Soho called Bianchi’s, where on a shelf are novels written by people who frequent the restaurant, among them the novels of Iris Murdoch.
Christmas time, on my way to
have lunch with him, I stopped in a shop and bought a little carved rhinoceros, Indian, for tuppence, which I gave to him. He studied it carefully, said, in his high-pitched voice that was close to being a squeal, ‘Very nice,’ and put it into a side pocket.
We talked about a series of books published by Penguin Books, called Style and Civilization. Nikos is the editor. Pope-Hennessy (can I possibly call him John?) said, ‘I don’t like the word “style.”’ I didn’t know what he meant, and I never do dare ask him what he means – not because I think he would be offended by my asking (it is hardly possible to offend him), but because I feel that if I asked him what he means he would have had every right to ask me what I mean, and for me to try to get into such a conversation with John about style would expose my cultural limitations and pretensions. I like John, I like being with him a lot, and not only because in my deference to him I would learn so much from him, but because he seems to respect my ignorance. With him, it is better to ask, ‘Who was Giovanni di Paolo?’ than to suggest any insights into the artist’s work.
We talked about mutual friends. He was amused to hear funny stories about these friends, none art historians, anecdotes that made him laugh a high, abrupt laugh that brought his voice up to a level I had thought impossible for a human.
If he doesn’t like someone, he will say, looking down, his heavily lidded eyes half closed, ‘I don’t like him,’ and then look up and away as if the person, who seemed to have been standing before him in judgment, suddenly ceases to exist. He particularly dislikes most art historians.
