by David Plante
I think of these people as having lived through brutal history, and to say to them how horrible it was makes them react, if not with a severe stare, with counter-stories of joyful times at the worst of times among families and friends, so that when there were curfews they would hold dances all night long, in which couples would meet and fall in love and eventually marry.
I asked a friend of Nikos why there is no Greek mafia, and he said because no two Greeks can agree enough to form a mafia.
Another Greek said, ‘But there is a mafia – it is called Greek Government Ministers.’
What does Greece mean to Nikos? The country means more to him than any other, and I know that whatever he says that rejects his country is in proportion to the meaning it has for him. And I have learned this: if I say something disparaging about Greece, repeating something he has said, he will stop me with, ‘What do you know about Greece?’
What does Nikos being Greek mean to me?
Do I look in him for some Greekness that antedates my knowing him, some past fantasy of Greece inspired, say, by reading Plato’s Symposium, so that I fantasize his participating in that fantasy? The fantasy is there, but, in my close relationship with him, I am able to look over his shoulder at the symposium of ancient Greek literature with more of a direct view into it than ever before. Past Nikos, I see beyond Aristotle, beyond Plato, into the Pre-Socratics, who have become more and more interesting to me, as if I were seeing into them the very origins of my own thoughts and feelings, as, in essential ways, I am, and the essential way is to believe that the origin of the concept of the ONE is as central to me as it was to those ancient philosophers.
How essential to me this:
All things come out of the one, and the one out of all things.
Heraclitus
As for what Nikos reveals of Greece – within his history of living through the German Occupation and the Civil War, I think of his more personal history on the island of Poros, where he was abandoned by a lover, and where he sat on rocks by the sea, the wind-wafted scent of blossoming lemon trees from the mainland his consolation. In him, I sense the consolations of Greece are made so very poignant against the losses.
A sponsor for anti-dictatorship action in London invited Nikos to an event in someone’s flat in North London to raise money, and I went along. Melina Mercouri was there, in the midst, dressed in a blouse and slacks and sitting cross-legged on the floor, her hair a mass of long dangling blonde curls. All I remember of the evening was being introduced to her and she looking up at me with large eyes and her wide smile and saying, in a low, slow, seductive voice, ‘I love Americans.’
At a drinks party given by John Lehmann, I met his sister Rosamond, who, large and with bright white hair, appeared to me to be a moon goddess. When I said I’d just come back to London from Lucca, she asked, as if there could be no other place to stay there, had I stayed with John Fleming and Hugh Honour? Yes, I had. ‘Then you must be very privileged,’ she said, ‘because I’ve never been invited.’
John’s sister Beatrix was also there, but every time I found myself, moving among the guests, facing her, she turned away, and I wondered if she took me for a boyfriend of John whom she disapproved of, not, perhaps, because I was her brother’s boyfriend, but because she assumed I was his boyfriend only for the privilege of meeting her, the actress Beatrix Lehmann, at a drinks party where she would be present.
As if to educate me about Stephen, John said to me, ‘Our Stephen is very good at intuiting, and all his best writing comes from his intuition, but he’s hopeless when he tries to reason a situation or problem out logically.’
I want to get this in: John once said that on a visit to Greece he had had a boy with a perfect ancient Greek profile, and I was reminded of what Nikos once said about Northern Europeans fantasizing about Greek boys.
And I’m reminded of this line from Stephen’s poem ‘The Funeral’:
The decline of a culture
Mourned by scholars who dream of the ghosts of Greek boys.
Nikos does have one Greek friend, whom he seems more to tolerate than like – Rea Seferiadi, by marriage a (I think) sister-in-law of the poet George Seferis, shortened from Seferiadis. Nikos is not a great admirer of Seferiadis’ poetry and derides him for deriding Cavafy’s poetry as a pedestal without a statue. Also, Nikos thinks it morally weak of Seferis to have made, after a long period of silence, a weak statement against the dictatorship – calling it an ‘anomaly’ – to save his face among those opposed, especially non-Greeks outside of Greece who oppose (Greeks are more attentive to opinion from outside of Greece than from within, and wait for a writer to be praised by non-Greeks before they themselves praise him); whereas the poet Ritsos has been sent to a concentration camp on an island for being, as a Communist sympathizer, opposed to the dictatorship. But to get back to Rea, who speaks with a very upper-class English accent, and who gives the impression of knowing just what is going on in the royal family, such as the Queen will abdicate to give over her position to her son Charles, said with such authority that I thought she must know, until Nikos told me not to believe anything she says. She is a compact woman who wears plain close-fitting dresses with a pearl necklace, her hair dyed black, her large eyes black. We were invited to her flat where, in her sitting room, she made pronouncements about world news with such authority that she might have been connected at least to the ambassadors of all the most powerful countries, from whom she gets the news. Pointing to a little painting by the French painter Hélion of lips, she said, ‘Those are my lips,’ and this made me imagine her connections to the whole of the French art world. Her husband, whose first name I can’t recall, said nothing; he works in the City, but in what capacity I don’t know. Nikos makes fun of Rea, and when I asked him why he is friendly with her and her husband, he said, ‘They suffered the Catastrophe,’ and I had a sense of how those dispossessed people do form almost a racial group, even to intermarrying.
Natasha away, Stephen invited Nikos and me to a dinner party, where, Stephen told us, the other guests to arrive were Julian Huxley and his wife. Clearly, Stephen was excited to make this introduction to someone we should have known about, but whose name for me only conjured up a vague sense of a British dynastic family of many distinguished members, Aldous Huxley only one of them. Nikos of course knew who Julian Huxley is, and was able to ask him about animal charities, to which Nikos gives a lot of money, harking back to when Huxley was a zoologist and his great concern the wellbeing of animals. I had no idea what to talk about with Julian Huxley. After the dinner party, when Nikos and I helped with the washing up, as we always do, Stephen seemed annoyed with me for not having responded, as Nikos had, to meeting Julian Huxley, and all I could think of to do was shrug, which made Stephen press his lips together and turn away, and I worried that he thought I was ungrateful for the privilege when I was simply embarrassed. Yes, I should have known who Julian Huxley is – should have known his history.
The leaves are falling from the trees in Battersea Park. The sunlight is bright, the sky absolutely clear. There is a smell through the open window over my desk of burning leaves.
I can do so much. I know it, I know it.
And yet, if I were to step back into myself, which I keep myself from doing to be more outward than inward, I would ask myself, How do you know you will? and I would step back out of myself and insist, I will.
Stephen invited me to lunch at the Lyons’ Corner House in Piccadilly with Elizabeth Glenconner.
With amusement, Elizabeth remembered Nikos offering her a pink gin when she came to his flat for drinks, this before Nikos and I met; the amusement was that Nikos, a Greek, should offer her a drink that was once so fashionably English, and now so out of fashion.
Stephen and Elizabeth talked about many people I don’t know and couldn’t place in the English world, though I listened with attention to try to make connections among them all – among all the Tennants, of which there seem to be a very complicated number, s
tarting with Elizabeth’s husband Christopher Tennant, Lord Glenconner – but the connections are too complicated for me.
When I said this to Elizabeth, she smiled and said, with a slight drawl, ‘It’s all very simple, really.’
They talked about someone named Anne, but I thought it would be impolite to ask who Anne was, but Stephen informed me, ‘You’ve met Anne, Anne Wollheim, Elizabeth’s sister,’ which did not seem simple to me, because I have met Anne, the former wife of the philosopher Richard Wollheim, he now married to Mary Day Wollheim. Here I am, trying to interconnect people I’ve met. Anne Wollheim has twins, Rupert and Bruno, by Richard Wollheim, and two daughters by a former husband, Philip Toynbee, Polly and Josephine Toynbee. Josephine has a child, Pip, by a Mexican lover, a boy of great charm, who especially loves the art historian Ben Nicolson whom he greets with, ‘Ben!’ at a dinner party at Anne’s that Nikos and I are also invited to, where Pip runs to Ben for Ben, laughing his gurgling laugh, to take him in his arms. How sort all this out in a diary? And how sort out Elizabeth’s family with her husband Christopher? Leave it for now, to be sorted out later, if there is a later.
I can’t recall why, but Stephen said to Elizabeth that he is ‘dead middle class,’ which I took him to mean that Elizabeth wasn’t, and I was impressed for I had not thought of Stephen as belonging to any class, had never before heard anyone define his or her class to another.
She asked Stephen about Natasha, and I felt that for her at least there exists a world in which everyone totally, if somewhat vaguely, accepts everyone else without question, perhaps even me. Her eyes seemed to be always slightly out of focus.
She went off to a Greek lesson, as she and her husband have built a house on Corfu and will move there.
This was said with no reference to the dictatorship. When I told Nikos this, he simply said he loves Elizabeth, and I felt in that, not an excuse, but some kind of acceptance that belies Nikos’ principles, which are in fact much more complicated by his history lived in the particular than I know the abstract puritan principles of my history to be.
Stephen asked Nikos and me to the Garrick Club for lunch with Cyril Connolly and W. H. Auden. Cyril Connolly wants one of the kittens born from Nikos’ cat Jasmine, but when Nikos said they cost twelve guineas each he became thoughtful and said that a cat in his garden would upset the birds and destroy the balance of nature. Nikos spoke at length to Auden, who was very spirited and obviously liked talking with Nikos. While we others listened – and I had the impression that whenever Auden spoke Stephen and even Connolly simply listened to him – he and Nikos talked about personal happiness. Nikos wasn’t going to simply listen, but had a two-way conversation with Auden, who said, when Nikos asked him, that he thought he was happy.
Part of the conversation was about the next Professor of Poetry at Oxford; Stephen, Auden, Connolly all supported Roy Fuller. At one point, Cyril Connolly asked Auden:
‘Is that person who kicks over a little stone in Letter from Iceland a real person?’
‘Yes.’
‘May I ask who?’
‘Robert Medley.’
Connolly’s review in the next Observer included this information:
For sheer pleasure, the ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ from Letters from Iceland (1937) with its mixture of candid autobiography, journalism and genius is unbeatable – and witty as well. Who cannot thrill even now to his admission:
One afternoon in March at half past three
When walking in a ploughed field with a friend;
Kicking a little stone he turned to me
And said, ‘Tell me, do you write poetry?’
I never had, and said so, but I knew
That very moment what I wished to do.
The friend was the painter Robert Medley.
There was speculation about the relationship between T. S. Eliot and Jean Verdenal, to whom Eliot dedicated Prufrock and Other Observations, and what the love was that Eliot had for him, Connolly quoting from the epigraph amor ch’a te mi scalda.
Coming out of the club, Auden took somebody’s big black bowler hat from a hook and put it over his head. It dropped down over his eyes, and all one could see of his face was a great mass of broken wrinkles, and in the midst of the wrinkles a smile.
Connolly left us, and then Nikos to go to the publishing house, and I followed Stephen who followed Auden to the department store Simpson’s in the Strand, where in the shoe department Auden bought a pair of carpet slippers, as, he said, his corns make wearing shoes too painful. The salesman at first was at best deferential, but then recognized Auden and was reverential. Auden wore the new slippers and left the old behind, and, again, Stephen followed him, and I followed Stephen down to the Piccadilly Underground Station.
Auden called the round station the Fairy Circle, and when I asked what that meant, he answered, as though a mother instructing a son in the facts of life, that this is where gentlemen pick up young men in need of financial help. He said, ‘The arrangement is simple: you need sex and they need money,’ and that, coming from him, sounded reasonable. Stephen said nothing. A man, recognizing Auden, went to him to ask if he would sign a book, and Auden said, ‘But I don’t sign books I didn’t write.’ I felt oh, that I belonged to a little inner circle of people among whom one is famous, and if anyone looked at me as belonging to the little circle he or she might wonder who I was to belong to it.
As we were about to part to go in different directions, W. H. Auden invited me to stay with him when I next go to New York, and this made me think, Well, he likes me enough to invite me to stay with him. When I told Nikos this, he said, ‘You think it’s because he likes you that he invited you to stay with him?’ I thought, for a flashing moment, to be able to say I stayed with W. H. Auden in New York might, just might, be worth whatever reason he has for inviting me!
Later, as if to warn me, Stephen told me that Auden’s house in Saint Mark’s Place in New York is as messy as the way Auden packs a suitcase: he simply loads all the clothes he needs onto a table, places the suitcase on the floor at the end of the table and then shoves all the clothes off the end of the table into the suitcase then closes it.
And a little revulsion at the possibility of eating there came to me when Stephen said that Auden’s lover Chester Kallman makes the chocolate pudding in the bathroom washbasin.
And I’m reminded by my using ‘washbasin’ of the time I said ‘bathroom sink’ in the presence of Sonia, who stopped me with ‘washbasin.’
In a taxi, as if being in a taxi together allowed such an intimacy, Stephen told me that when he and Natasha were in Germany after the war, on a train, she proposed that they exchange their pounds on the black market, but Stephen said, no, at the official rate; Natasha insisted, and he insisted, her insistence driven to such an extreme that she threatened to throw herself off the train if he didn’t agree with her.
He said to me, ‘She is that willful.’
When I asked, ‘Does she do that often?’ he looked out the window of the taxi and didn’t answer.
Thomas Hardy, in Life’s Little Ironies, writes about London: ‘There are worlds within worlds in the great city.’
I sent £5 to Frank Kermode as a contribution to the memorial slab to commemorate Henry James in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, and I was invited to the service. Nikos was invited by Stephen. We met by the Great West Door, where we were presented white tickets. Robert and Caroline Lowell came behind us, but because they didn’t have tickets they were told to wait. Everyone was treated brusquely, which I tried to take as a formality. Nikos and I were separated, he to sit on one side of the nave, I on the other, next to Tony Tanner. The Lowells, finally admitted, sat next to me, he in rumpled suit and perhaps the last of the truly Yankee writers, and Caroline kept biting her nails. Tony and I joked, identifying people passing to go to their seats: C. P. Snow, Anthony Powell, Victor Pritchett.
The psalms from which the James took the titles The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bo
wl were read, then Ralph Richardson read a passage from Portrait of a Lady, after which Tony leaned towards me and said, ‘Henry James isn’t getting a memorial slab in Westminster Abbey for that.’ The dean and various prelates in red soutanes or academics in black gowns processed down the aisle, followed by Leon Edel and Stephen and a professor from the Sorbonne, and James’ great-great-nephew, Alexander, carrying a laurel wreath, all wearing red carnations on their lapels. They disappeared into Poets’ Corner, so we had to imagine Henry James’ great-great-nephew unveiling the slab and placing the wreath. Then we heard, amplified over loudspeakers, Stephen give a short address in which he said that James was aware of the class struggle, or at least of the bankruptcy of the middle and upper classes. The Professor from the Sorbonne claimed, in French, that James was a French writer. The procession filed back down the aisle, and I heard, ‘Pray for the soul of Henry James,’ and for the first time I was moved. Edel started with a eulogy on the name Henry James: both given names, both democratic, and yet both the names of kings. More prayers, the organ played, and I met Nikos and we presented pink tickets to get into the Jerusalem Room for sherry. Nikos asked me, ‘Weren’t you moved?’ I said, ‘A little, but not really.’ ‘You weren’t? Henry James means so much to you. I was. I had tears in my eyes. I couldn’t keep myself from weeping when I saw Henry James’ great-great-nephew, such a beautiful young man, carrying the laurel wreath down the aisle. And all the old English writers, sitting in the stalls, watching him.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and felt ashamed that I hadn’t been more moved.
Seeing Henry James’ great-great-nephew standing alone – which is an English habit I have often noted when the guest of honour is often left alone as if it would be considered a presumption to engage with him or her – Nikos and I went to speak with him, Alexander James, Jr., who was twenty-six. His charcoal-grey suit from the 1950s was, he said, borrowed, as he didn’t own one. With it, he wore a white shirt with a button-down collar and a thin dark tie. His long hair was parted in the middle and combed back over his ears, and he had what I thought of as the pure features of a Yankee – a strong forehead, nose, jaw and neck – and pale but intense eyes. A great-grandson of William James, he was studying, appropriately, to become a clinical psychologist. He loved to garden. He said, quietly, ‘I’m not at all used to the kind of attention I’m getting here.’ Nikos stared and stared at him.
