by David Plante
Nikos and I left with Tony Tanner to have lunch. We talked a little about British writers today. I asked, ‘Is there a British writer today who is great enough to be given, after his or her death, a memorial slab in Poets’ Corner?’ ‘No,’ Tony said, ‘no, no.’
I once thought that Henry James had a secret, the secret of being an American, which was to be a Yankee American, which I am not. If my sense of Henry James having a secret went, everything would go. And it did go. The straining consciousness of James – straining in the very elaboration of the writing for the totally inclusive ‘everything’ – seems to me the possession of a man who always feared that ‘everything’ was a horrifying ‘nothing’.
It was in rereading a commonplace book, from those years back when I strained for the realization of ‘everything’ and copied down passages from Henry James’ autobiographical books – not his novels, for his autobiographical books brought him closer to me as a person – A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, The Middle Years – and rereading the passages revived in me a sense of – what? – a sense, of course, of ‘everything.’
‘. . . the wonder of consciousness in everything . . .’
‘. . . It was big to me, big to me with the breath of great vague connections . . .’
‘. . . an air of possibilities that were none the less vivid for being quite indefinite . . .’
‘. . . my vision loses itself withal in vaster connections . . .’
‘. . . who should say now what a world one mightn’t read into it? . . .’
‘. . . the far-off hum of a thousand possibilities . . .’
‘. . . in the beauty of the whole thing, again, I lose myself . . .’
Reading a long, long passage of Henry James, I from time to time forget – I am, by the elaborations detached from – what the often repeated word ‘it’ refers to, so ‘it’ becomes ‘big, big with the breath of vast vague connections,’ and ‘it’ becomes ‘everything,’ ‘everything’ sensed as if as a pulse in the very consciousness of the universe. All his life, I imagine, Henry James expected ‘it’ to be revealed to him.
Auden invited Nikos and me to have lunch at Chez Victor. He held the menu wide open before him and, reading it, said, ‘The tomato soup looks good,’ and Nikos and I knew we should order the tomato soup. Then he said, ‘The cold chicken and salad looks good,’ and again Nikos and I knew we must order the cold chicken and salad. The point of the lunch was for Auden to give Nikos a sheaf of poems by Chester Kallman for Nikos to consider publishing.
After our luncheon, Auden looked tired, but when I said something about a nap, he said, ‘Mother wouldn’t allow it.’
Later, Nikos said he was very moved by Auden asking him to consider Kallman’s poems, moved and embarrassed, because he could not see that it was possible to publish them.
Stephen rang to say that Wystan has left. He was staying at the Spenders’, and Stephen is relieved that he has left; he drinks immense quantities, smokes so the whole house stinks, never washes, goes to bed at 9:30. Stephen said Lizzie always wants her bedroom fumigated after Auden has used it.
Stephen said that once, when Auden was staying at Loudon Road, Natasha rang him up to say she would be late, and would he put the chicken in the oven? Auden did – he simply put it in the oven, didn’t put it in a pan, didn’t turn the heat on.
For the past weekend, Nikos has been in Manchester with Mark Lancaster and Richard Morphet, Assistant Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery; they were invited to judge the Northern Young Contemporaries Exhibition. So I slept alone, and slept very badly. The award went to Stephen Buckley.
Richard’s enthusiasms for British art make me enthusiastic, so when he, in an excited voice, talks of an artist I’ve never heard of – such as the mystic Cecil Collins – I want to find out about the artist. He and his wife Sally invited us to lunch with the widow of Cecil Collins, who wore a mink hat, and talked of her life with Collins, when the kitchen was a gas ring on the landing.
Stephen has a painting by Collins, which, Stephen said, was painted to depict him, Stephen, as a holy fool, a painting especially meaningful to Stephen.
Mark Lancaster picked me up in his car, in a row in the back seat three sisters close together – Henrietta and Amaryllis and Fanny Garnett, all, I think, the daughters of Angelica Bell, the daughter of Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf, as Mark, who is inspired in his painting by Bloomsbury, had explained to me. He had also explained that Henrietta was married to Burgo Partridge, the son of Frances and Ralph Partridge, with whom – Ralph, that is – Lytton Strachey had been in love. And to complicate it all, Ralph Partridge, before Frances, had been in love with Dora Carrington, who, out of her impossible love for Lytton Strachey, killed herself. Burgo Partridge died just a few years ago. I may have got this all wrong. Mark took us all to a queer club, which, in the early afternoon, was empty except for us. Mark and I sat at a table and watched the three sisters, all in long dresses with embroidery across the bodices and even longer scarves, dance together, their clothes swinging.
Days later, Mark rang me to tell me that Amaryllis drowned herself in the Thames.
Stephen is finishing his book on the students, The Year of the Young Rebels. He said he is giving a lot of thought to the construction, which he thinks of as musical. ‘Not that anyone will know.’ We sometimes meet, after he picks up the neat chapters from his typist, at the National Gallery. He gave me two typed chapters. I found them, I’m afraid, rather dull. I said, ‘I’m a little disappointed that you didn’t put more of yourself in.’
‘I didn’t want to,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to make it refer to me.’
He rings up almost every morning. The conversation is something like this:
‘How are you?’
‘Very well. And you?’
‘Oh, very well.’
‘Are you working hard?’
‘Yes, very hard. And you?’
‘Very hard.’
‘How’s Lizzie?’
‘How are the cats?’
He said that Natasha will be going to France for a week, which means he’ll be completely free and won’t have to think up excuses when he sees us. He’ll come to dinner on Saturday, and we all plan on going up to Cambridge on Tuesday to see Mark, now artist in residence at King’s, and, I hope, E. M. Forster.
Mark is fascinated by Bloomsbury and once introduced us to Angelica Garnett, who wears a colourful bandana tied tightly about her head, always appears distracted, as though by some shock. She asked us to supper. When I asked her about Amaryllis, she said she hasn’t been a good mother. She seems to live within her own world, painting her charming, Bloomsbury paintings with cross-hatchings and playing her cello. She invited Nikos and me to stay at Charleston – where she more or less grew up not knowing that her father, a constant presence, was Duncan Grant – but she warned us that the roof leaked, and Nikos, as much as he likes Angelica, didn’t fancy sleeping under a leaking roof. I imagine Charleston as filled with sunlight and flowers in vases and all the furniture painted in different colours, the walls painted too, always with cross-hatchings, and Vanessa Bell in one room painting, and Duncan Grant in another room painting, and Angelica, a little girl, talking with Virginia Woolf in the garden – about what?
I find I still fantasize about Bloomsbury, which fantasy I suspect will change during my life in London. But I am in the thrall of Mrs. Dalloway arranging a large bouquet of flowers in a vase; and Mrs. Ramsay reading and Lily Briscoe painting at an easel; and Percival listening to the sea waves with a shell to an ear. And characters from another writer appear. On a little pool made by rainwater, naked, splashing one another, are Mr. Beebe, George and Freddy. One of the trees is a wych-elm, and by it sits Helen Schlegel, writing a letter and hearing someone sneezing, ‘a-tissue, a-tissue.’ And somewhere beyond the trees, in an open space, a cricket match is being played.
It is as though I am nostalgic for a world that I in no way lived in except
in the novels set in that world. Sentimental of me!
Nikos has no interest in Bloomsbury at all, and if he were to ask me what my fantasy is I wouldn’t be able to say, wouldn’t even be able to say what the word ‘Bloomsbury’ represents to me.
At the luncheon with Connolly and Auden, at one point everyone got involved in the discussion Nikos and Auden were having about happiness, and everyone, unable to say who was an example of a really happy person, agreed that Sonia Orwell was the unhappiest.
I saw her at an immense party (there must have been more than a thousand people) for an immense poet (Adrian Henri) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. She grabbed me by the sleeve and we talked, wandering through the gallery, and only half looking at the Apollinaire exhibition, for about an hour. She is still beautiful, though rather dry and puffy around the eyes. Stephen says she used to be known as the most beautiful girl in London, the Venus of Euston Road, because she posed for the painters of the Euston Road School, which included Stephen for a short while. She laughs hysterically, is always running her fingers through her hair and pulling it, and she speaks so rapidly it’s difficult to follow her.
( John Lehmann said, narrowing his steel-blue eyes, ‘You know, old man, everyone says that her marriage to Orwell was a mariage blanc.’)
Nikos told me of a dinner he had at Sonia’s house before he met me – she, he, Johnny Craxton, her ex-husband Michael Pitt-Rivers from whom she had just got divorced, and Michael Pitt-Rivers’ boyfriend. Nikos said it was the most unbearable dinner party he had ever been at. Sonia up till then had been rather seductively interested in Nikos, but after this dinner party she simply cut him whenever she saw him.
I recall a New Year’s party at the Craxtons’. As Nikos and I entered, Sonia rushed out from another room, kissed me and fussed over me, speaking in very rapid French, but Nikos, standing right beside me, she refused to see. Johnny came and tried to get her to acknowledge Nikos, but she kept talking to me as if I were alone, and I stupidly did nothing but smile a fixed smile at her; she grabbed my sleeve and dragged me into the room where she had been, saying, still in French, that I must help her, that I, knowing about things French (which is hardly true), would understand. A young cousin of Johnny, previously married to a queer, had been talking all evening with a nice, very straight man who, though he showed signs of interest, didn’t seem likely to go so far as to ask her for a date. I was to flirt with the cousin (Sonia confessed later she found the cousin ‘rather tiresome’), so that the nice straight man would, through jealousy of me, ask her for a date. We all sat together. I didn’t say a word. Sonia spoke without stopping. She said, ‘They took away the drinking laws, everyone became an alcoholic; they took away the gambling laws, everyone became a gambler; now they’re taking away the laws against homosexuality, and everyone is becoming queer.’ Then she jumped up, grabbed me by the hand and pulled me out of the room, saying, ‘Did you hear? Did you hear? He made a date with her!’ I hadn’t heard.
Last night at the ICA she and Nikos greeted one another perfunctorily and coldly. She invited me to dinner but not Nikos, and I said I couldn’t go.
Stephen said she’s well known for breaking up couples, especially homosexual couples.
At the party I spoke to, it seems, hundreds of people: David Hockney, Alan Ross, Patrick Procktor, Mark Lancaster, Ted Lucie-Smith, Stephen Buckley.
Alan Ross is the editor of the London Magazine, for which he asked Nikos to write a ‘Letter to Athens’. Nikos wrote of his involvement, when he lived in Athens, with an avant-garde magazine, Pali, that tried to bring new inspiration into Greek letters, badly, Nikos said, needed.
I learn from Nikos the names of Greek writers I had not known, not only contemporary, but from the past, and outstanding poets they are: Andreas Kalvos, Dionysios Solomos, Kostis Palamas, Angelos Sikelianos. And though I had read the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, it is with Nikos that I feel I am in the world of Cavafy, for the evocation of sensuality, Nikos’ delicate sensuality, and the evocation of history, Nikos’ Greek history. I live with Nikos in a Greek world within the outer world of London.
.
Together, we translated an erotic novella by the poet Andreas Embirikos, Voyage of a Balloon, which Alan Ross has published. It is a Surrealist novel, as there is, Nikos said, a deep Surrealist unconscious in Greeks.
My cousin Bryan came to stay with us. He left the States in protest against American forces fighting in Vietnam. I found out for him the address of an organization for young Americans in London who are resisting being drafted into the war. He went and when he came back said the people he spoke to were limp and altogether pathetic. He returned to the States to join the military.
Do I ever think of becoming British?
I have, in a way, a claim to be a part of British history, for my father, born in Canada, in the French-speaking village of Saint Barthélemy in the Province of Quebec, was born a subject of King George V. At the age of two he was taken in the arms of his mother across the border by train between Canada and the United States – no Ellis Island initiation into a different world, no passports, but a relocation from one part of North America into another. His father was a carpenter. They settled in a French-speaking parish in Providence, Rhode Island, where my father grew up as within a palisaded fortress against the Yankee outside world, and he lived as a subject of King George V in that palisaded fortress until, at the age of twenty-one, he and his father became citizens of the United States. I doubt his mother – my illiterate grandmother, who never left the fortress – ever did become a citizen.
I recall visiting my grandmother – whom I called Mémère – and sitting with her in her kitchen with my father and younger brother, he and I standing still on either side of our father as he spoke to his mother in French, she hardly responding, and most of the time all of us silent, as if the silence was communication enough.
We were taken to dinner by the poet Ted Lucie-Smith at an Indian restaurant. Stephen had wanted to have dinner with us that evening, and we asked Ted if he could come along. Ted said he’d be honored to have Stephen. Adrian Henri was also there.
At dinner, Ted spoke endlessly about his poetry, and though the poet Adrian Henri tried to be funny and sometimes was, the talk always came back to Ted’s poetry. He sat, fat and motionless, presiding at the top of the table, his bulging eyes fixed, his smooth face fixed, and only his mouth moving. I could sense Stephen closing in more and more. He left immediately after dinner, and Nikos and I, going out to the street to say good night to him, watched him walk away, a huge figure in a raincoat, listing a little as he walked as if he were not quite sure where he was going. He rang the next morning to say he had become depressed at dinner, where he had felt too much self-importance was given to being a poet.
He came to dinner at our flat last night. He had a basket of bottles of wine and was in very good spirits. Stephen Buckley came too. Stephen B. made Stephen S. giggle, Stephen B. lightly irreverent towards Stephen S., which Stephen S. apparently enjoys.
This is totally true of Stephen S.: that he is supportive of the young.
Stephen Buckley often comes from Newcastle to stay the night in our spare room. We have just a little more money than he, as a student, has, so we find it a little presumptuous of him to say at dinner with us, ‘What, liver again?’ He said to us, ‘I don’t at all think of you as a homosexual couple, but just as Nikos and David.’ As beautiful as he is, he likes, I think, to be admired by homosexuals, but has his lady friends of potent, if difficult, character. He flirts with Stephen Spender, and always makes him giggle.
Nikos and I now have a representative collection of Stephen B.’s work: heavy, the layered colours rich and sometimes brutal, the canvas often cut up into strips and interwoven to deepen the primacy of the materials, pictures that, for all the references to other artists, exist in themselves so emphatically that these non-figurative pictures are not abstractions, but have a thick, dense presence that makes the room they hang in appear abstract
. They have spirited humour and, too, irony, which are Stephen’s spirited humour and irony. He will say about a work, ‘Oh, just torn-up bits of canvas,’ and sniff, and then smile in such a way that belies what he said. He never ever talks abstractly about art, but instead will go on about the London bus routes.
A book launch for Cyril Connolly’s collection of reviews, The Evening Colonnade. I wondered who arranged for Nikos and me to be invited, though Nikos said he wouldn’t come – Sonia, near the entrance, who was very friendly and told me she thought I would be amused to be there. Stephen was not there. I saw Cyril Connolly talking to an elderly, refined-looking man wearing a white Stetson hat and white bandana tied about his neck, and, excited, I went to Connolly to tell him some gossip that I had had from Stephen which I assumed would impress him for my being close enough to Stephen that he would confide in me: a big row in the Spender family. Connolly simply stared at me, as did the man in the white Stetson, who, when Connolly introduced me to him – Cecil Beaton – turned away with a frown of, who is this presumptuous young man? Well, I thought, I’ve made a fool of myself, and so there goes Cecil Beaton.
