by David Plante
Of course I see him as a fantasy figure. He has inherited fantasy, without his having to supply one silver spoon to it, from his parents. Does Acton ever think he is living a fantasy? There have to be moments when he thought he did – as when, at Eton, he and his close friend Brian Howard, even more aesthetic than he, hired a room at the back of Dyson’s, a jeweller in the town, where they played records of Russian ballet music and danced together the parts they had seen Massine and Nijinsky, Karsavina and Tchernicheva dance at performances of the Ballets Russes. Or when, later at Oxford University, he went ‘tittupping’ along the High Street with a gray bowler and a tightly rolled umbrella, wearing, under a long, tubular, black velvet coat, silver, mauve or pink trousers that were so wide at the knees and ankles they looked like a pleated skirt, a style he invented which was copied by many others and was finally known to the outside world as Oxford bags.
Nikos stops me from even trying to act on fantasy.
We went into Florence, just Nikos and I, with a guidebook. Repairs to damage caused by the flood are going on everywhere, and a lot of places are closed. And yet it is remarkable how quickly and efficiently the rebuilding was done. Along the Arno, for instance, there are photographs outside a coffee bar that show the almost irreparable damage, but the bar is now bright and new. So Harold Acton was right. You can still see the high-water marks on the buildings.
As for what we saw in Florence – I used to think that art historians might have knowledge about works of art that I didn’t have, but I assumed, in my uneducated way, that if I didn’t have their knowledge I had a sensitivity to art that they didn’t have. I couldn’t have been more wrong. In these past days, hearing John and Hugh talk about art with the greatest of outward knowledge, I realize their inward sensitivity to the art is as great. What was most wonderful in what we saw were the frescos in San Marco by Fra Angelico, but for me to try to comment on them, or to try to comment on anything else we saw, would be to presume on knowledge and sensitivity I don’t have. So I’ll keep my appreciation to myself, as, I realize, I already keep any appreciation of books and music that presumes on commenting on them to myself. No comments, none, on Fra Angelico or Masaccio or Ghirlandaio or Donatello or Michelangelo or Cellini or Brunelleschi or –
I tell myself: forget what you think or even feel, and simply describe.
For example, the little devil’s head soldered to the barred window in Savonarola’s cell, perhaps to warn him of the dangers of looking out.
I look out of the little window above the table on the landing where I’m writing and see: a rising landscape of dark and light, green and yellow, and on the top of a hill a hamlet of stone houses with red tile roofs.
At dinner, then after with coffee in the sitting room, John and Hugh often recount stories about people they’ve known, or about people known by people they’ve known, and it is as if great bubbles rise from their mouths and expand and expand with the actions, words, interrelationships of such people as Berenson and his entourage, Percy and Sybil Lubbock, George Santayana, Howard Sturgis, Logan Pearsall Smith, E. M. Forster –
About Sybil Lubbock: Percy, her third husband, had built for her a villa in the most beautiful place possible, on a promontory in Lerici overlooking the Ligurian Sea, and brought her to see it for the first time on a moonlit night, she, however, simply saying she was very tired and must go to bed. The Italian navy was practicing maneuvers off the coast, shooting cannon, which noise annoyed Sybil, so she rang the admiralty and had it stopped. Coming down to breakfast, she said she hadn’t slept all night, reading Pico della Mirandola.
Hugh, who is the real raconteur, said that Percy Lubbock once told them he had told E. M. Forster, ‘Morgan, one day they’ll all see just how thin your books are,’ to which Forster replied, ‘I dare say they will.’
Lubbock’s stepdaughter, Iris Origo, came to him, more or less on his death bed, to tell him he had no more money, to which he replied, ‘Oh dear, I thought it would last at least another fortnight.’
I realize that here I am within a world of English expatriates (though John is Scots) who retain an Englishness that has gone in England, retained mostly in anecdotes about people once known but now dead, people who once did represent a world within the greater world of what was once the British Empire.
John and Hugh brought us to Pietra Santa to meet the wife of an art historian friend of theirs, the art historian Robert Goldwater, his wife Louise Bourgeois, who is a sculptor. We met her where she has her workshop – rather, a kind of open stall along a line of other stalls – and she showed us a sculpture that had just been finished, not by her but by one of the workmen, of what looked like a bunch of marble male erections stuck together, and while we all studied the sculpture I noted she seemed to study us with a wry smile. She brought us to another stall where the maquettes by Henry Moore are enlarged into monumental sculptures, and the man presiding, a large man called Agostinelli with a folded newspaper cap set firmly on his head, picked up a maquette and then showed us the monumental replica he was carving in marble. He said the final work is done in the light of a candle, which interested Hugh very much, as he said that Canova – Hugh’s book on whom is his lifetime’s work – did the same when refining the surface of his sculptures. Then we all went to the main piazza for coffee, and, I don’t know why, I wondered about the little figure of a Hawaiian girl in a hula skirt on the side of the little cups, perhaps because the figures appeared so culturally incongruous to having coffee with Madame Bourgeois in Pietra Santa. Robert Goldwater is a scholar on African sculptures and the director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, and the talk about him among Louise Bourgeois and John and Hugh seemed to open up another incongruous world about us about Africa. Nikos and I, within these worlds revolving around us in a café in Pietra Santa, were silent.
I asked John F. if he had asked Percy Lubbock what accent Henry James had, and John answered, yes, as a matter of fact he had, and Lubbock told him that James didn’t have an American accent, but neither did he have a British accent.
My fantasy of being a Jamesian character in Europe is over, and it didn’t take much, I see, to put an end to it – just being in a place I might have once imagined where a Jamesian character would have flourished. I realize I in fact have so little to do with being an American Jamesian character I could have only ever had a fantasy of what it was like to be one, because I, from a small, French-Québécois-speaking parish in Yankee New England, am American in a way no character in James is.
Yet, I sense some affinity with James as an American, if to be an American is, as James wrote, to be possessed and to possess one’s possession. Ezra Pound wrote about James that he knew the world is spherical, and his possession was to possess that spherical world, to possess it in his books and then let it go in his books. I tell myself: the letting it go is necessary for the world to be, on its own, round and whole.
What I most like here is the little chapel in the corner of the walled-in garden. I go in by way of the entrance at the back which opens up from the garden. It is small, damp, crumbling, with a few very dusty vestiges of its sanctity: grey and wet altar cloths, broken candlesticks, a crucifix with broken arms hanging loose from the nails in the hands, holy water fonts stuck in the wall and filled with rags, squares on the walls where pictures had hung. There are even two pews, with a very dusty wine bottle occupying one, having been there long enough for cobwebs to attach it to the seat. The stations of the cross – small, colored pictures in black frames – are still in place. I go in and I sit by the wine bottle and I close my eyes. Though I tell myself I am a total non-believer, with my eyes closed I know it is the religion I was born and brought up in that most deeply, most helplessly, makes me what I am, and this Henry James certainly knew nothing about.
While sitting there, a peasant woman came in from the front entrance opening from the dirt road to place a small bouquet of roses before a little shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mother.
John said the chapel is
still consecrated.
San Andrea di Rovereto di Chiavari
We have come to stay in a little house on the Ligurian coast for our summer holiday. The rent is five shillings a day. The house has two rooms downstairs and two up, and is in the midst of an olive grove. The steps up to the house from the street are crowded on one side with pots and old tins of flowering plants. Hydrangeas are in bloom.
The view from the house, high on the side of the coast, is a steep descent, thick with olive trees, down to a blue-green sea. On the right we can see all the way to the tip of Portofino and on the left to Sestri Levanti. At night fishing boats are like large lapping stars.
Nikos loves it here for its simplicity.
This occurs to me – I listen to him talk about politics, and I realize that before I met him I had none. I suppose I still have none, and have assumed his.
A few mornings ago I got up very early, went outside and sat on a step. A young woman, all round curves, passed me going down the stairs, having come from the olive grove behind, carrying a large, sloshing bucket of milk. She left a trail of splashed milk all the way down to the street.
After going down to the sea today by way of a narrow path through the lush vegetation, we took a nap. The room is all white, with a red tile floor, and very simple. We were covered with a stiff, almost canvas-like sheet that you get in cheap hotels in Europe, and the white afternoon light, so penetrating I imagined all the outside world was dissolved in it, burned about the edges of the closed shutter, and one long thin crack of light fell into the dim, hot, fly-buzzing room and across the sheet.
We are happy.
Trying to find short cuts to the sea, Nikos and I follow steep paths through olive groves, vineyards, and through woods. Just off one path we found a cement bunker from the war, like a huge, square eye closed to a slit and staring through the foliage out over the Tigullian Gulf. We found the entrance and went in. It smelled of shit. I, frightened, said we shouldn’t go in, but Nikos lit a newspaper he found on the ground and we went in, crouched. There were a series of cemented caves along each side. As we went deeper into the bunker we heard voices behind us, and quickly turned back to get out and met a group of boys with a flashlight coming in. When they saw us, they, more frightened than we were, scattered.
My sexual fantasies almost cease to exist while I am with Nikos. Certainly sex doesn’t obsess me as much as it did before I met him. But, then, so much in me has changed since I met him.
We met Stephen at the train station in Chiavari. He was wearing a shirt with the cuffs unbuttoned and dangling, and he looked very hot in the Italian heat, but we got him into a taxi and into the cool hills of San Andrea. He has come to join us for a few days. He is staying in a small hotel in the village, where he works during the day while Nikos and I go down to the beach. Every day we take the train to Chiavari, Nikos and I to shop for our meals – fish, vegetables, fruit, cheese – Stephen to buy the English newspapers, and we have meals, cooked by Nikos, in our small house. We are all three happy.
Stephen was filled with his experiences in Paris where he was during the student demonstrations. He let us read the first draft of chapters for a book, and he read out some of the students’ slogans he had copied from walls in the Latin Quarter:
Prenez vos désirs pour des réalités.
Toute vue des choses qui n’est pas étrange est fausse.
Plus je fais l’amour plus je fais la révolution, plus je fais la révolution plus je fais l’amour.
Stephen and I took a walk before he left, just the two of us. We found ourselves lost on the paths through the tangled woods, then came across a disused railway track and we followed that to a small house, maybe a signaling station for the railway, the windows of which were burnt-out holes and the roof falling in. We went inside. The floor was covered with bits of plaster fallen from the walls, stones and branches and garbage, and where the walls weren’t soot black from fires there were large pornographic drawings in charcoal. We went upstairs, where in one room all the walls were painted with murals, one of a woman in a green dress sitting in a chair, on either side of her a large red rooster, and near her and looking at her a smiling young man with horns and a garland of flowers about his head.
Stephen asked that his visit to us be kept a secret.
London
More and more, I wonder how it happened that Nikos and I are living together, the wonder, as wonder will do, making it all strange.
In homage to his beliefs, I suggested to Nikos that we go visit the tomb of Karl Marx in the Highgate Cemetery. He brought along a red rose which he placed at the foot of the huge granite plinth with the incised motto WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE, the massive bronze bust above. Nikos was silent, and I sensed in him his inability to articulate why a vision that should have brought equality and justice and peace to the world went so wrong, and it seemed to me an impertinence to say to him that the vision all went wrong because of human failings, a cliché. I am always aware, against my American simplifications, of Nikos’ own Greek awareness of complexities too great to react to with anything more than a pained look in his eyes, and silence.
A friend of Nikos, Ersi Hadgimihali, is in London from Athens, opposed to the dictatorship, but secretly.
She came to supper. A sophisticated, elderly woman, she recounted, in English, stories about escaping Nazi-occupied Greece to go by boat to Egypt, there where the Greek royal family were in exile. Before leaving for Egypt for the long night-time crossing, Ersi had bought a watch, for which her husband commended her as keeping time was important for the crossing; but he kept complaining that he should have the watch, really it was more important for him to have a watch than for her, and she, fed up, took the watch from her wrist and threw it overboard into the sea. She writes poetry and paints very primitive paintings in bright colours. She comes from a famous family, an aunt of hers commemorated by a bust on a plinth in a square in Athens, or so Nikos told me.
Nikos seems to know a cultured class of people in Athens.
He told me that Greeks with a surname beginning with Hadgi are descended from ancestors who were baptized in the Jordan, which made me wonder what connection there could possibly be in the use of the word among Muslims who once in a lifetime go on a pilgrimage called, I think, the Haj.
To see everything, every single event, every single word, every single thing, every single person in terms of history –
I waited for Nikos near the Greek Embassy in Brooke Street, just behind the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, as we had planned to meet there before joining the demonstration against the dictatorship in Greece. The only other people there on the pavement was an old woman in severe black mourning and a young man. Clearly, they wondered, as did I, where the demonstration was, and in my bad Greek I said I was waiting. The old woman asked me, in Greek, if I’m Anglos, and I answered, ‘Oxi, eimai Americanos,’ which made her draw back from me and spit at me, a great gob of her spit landing on one of my shoes. Never before had anyone spat on me, and that I was spat upon for being an American roused a rage in me. I wanted to tell the old woman that I was an exceptional American, not, as the Americans of the Embassy, supporting the dictatorship, but out to demonstrate against it. She, with the young man, his shoulders hunched over, left, and I, in my rage, thought of leaving also.
I walked out to Park Lane and saw the demonstration advancing, and waited until I saw Nikos in the midst, he talking animatedly with John Berger, whom he admires for his political vision, and whose book on the success and failure of Picasso Nikos had published at Penguin. I joined them, and in my continuing rage told Nikos about the insult and that I was not going to demonstrate, but would go home. He calmly said that the old woman was probably a Communist who had suffered terribly under the American Truman Doctrine which outlawed membership in the Communist Party as a capital punishment. So, I was seen as representative of the Truman Doctrine. Nikos introduced me to John Berger, and we marched on.
We passed the Greek Embassy,
where Nikos had once worked and where people he had known still worked. The curtains were drawn, as if the building was abandoned, but as we passed under the windows, jeering, a hand appeared from between closed curtains to give the march the finger.
Along the way, I noted Ersi Hadgimihali appear on a side street, half hidden by the corner of a building, the collar of her coat held up to hide her face.
The march ended in Trafalgar Square. There was a huge crowd, Melina Mercouri on a platform in the midst wearing her red blouse with, it appeared, nothing underneath, so that whenever she raised her arms high to shout out against the dictators the nipples of her breasts pressed through the cloth, and the crowd roared.
I hear Greeks, having got out of Greece, talk about their recollections of the German Occupation of Athens and then the Civil War, hear them describe how during the occupation people in the streets cried, ‘Pinow, pinow, pinow’ (‘I’m hungry, I’m hungry, I’m hungry’) and died there in the streets, so others walked over their bodies; hear them describe how, during the Civil War, unspeakable atrocities were committed on both sides; hear how, now, when a group of friends go to the house of a friend for a name-day celebration and find he does not appear they know he has been arrested and interrogated and most likely tortured by having the soles of his feet beaten so no scars are left – and I react with horror, but they look at me as if I haven’t in fact understood, as of course I haven’t because I haven’t lived through what they have. I asked Nikos’ cousin Stavros, who is severe, if my expressing horror was sentimental, and I was told, severely, yes, it was.
