Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  Some time later, Toer Van Schayk, in London, rang wanting to see Nikos. Nikos told me to come along, my jealousy softened by my curiosity, and we met Toer Van Schayk in a simple cafeteria. I had come thinking that if he had found Nikos attractive, he would find me attractive also. I found him attractive, a slim, elegant man, whose demeanour was self-contained and modest. He could speak Greek, which he had learned living as a local on the island of Paros, where he would enter the ancient Parian marble quarry for marble and carry out lumps to carve them into heads he would then leave about the countryside. He and Nikos spoke Greek while I listened, and the more they spoke the more stiff I became, my arms crossed, until Nikos and Toer sensed my disapproval and spoke in English, though Toer still concentrated on Nikos. He evidently did not find me attractive. My jealousy became stark, and I leaned towards them and stuck out my chin to interrupt them and said to Nikos I had to go, and if he wanted to stay that was up to him. This surprised Nikos. He knew from the past that he could, in my presence, turn his attention to someone else without intending me to feel he was being inattentive to me, he knowing that I would of course understand that he was meeting someone he hadn’t seen in a long while who meant something special to him, and in the past I had understood and had deferred, especially when a Greek refugee comes to our flat for supper. But now, not looking at Toer but at Nikos, I stood, and Nikos stood, and turning away I didn’t say goodbye to Toer Van Schayk.

  Nikos was silent on the way home, and, at home, asked me, ‘Why were you so unkind to Toer? He is a pure person, and I loved and love him.’

  Stephen came to dinner a few nights ago with Patrick and Patrick’s new, beautiful friend Gervase. Stephen spoke about his friendship with Christopher Isherwood when they were in their early twenties, when they didn’t know anyone famous. He said, ‘I’m sure I did more sincere work then, when I was twenty-three, when I didn’t know anyone famous, than the work I did after I began to meet famous people.’ We discussed successful people – that is, people who could confidently enjoy the fact that they are successes, such as E. M. Forster, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon. Patrick and Nikos said no one should allow himself to think he’s a success. Stephen said, ‘Well, I know I’m not a success.’

  After dinner, Patrick made a reefer and passed it around. I didn’t take any, nor did Gervase, who sat quietly still all evening, but Stephen and Nikos did, Nikos staring me straight in the eyes as he took deep puffs, and I went into a funk. I don’t know why the very subject of hashish causes all kinds of jealousies, anxieties, depressions in me, but it does. Nikos says it is because I want to be in control, and hashish puts him beyond my control.

  I mentioned to John Lehmann that I was looking for a job, as I’d run out of money. He asked me if I wanted to be his secretary a couple of mornings a week, sorting out papers, typing, answering business letters, and I said yes. He invited me to lunch in his flat to talk about what I would do. I went reluctantly. At lunch, he asked, slitting his eyes and leaning over the table toward me, ‘Tell me, old boy, just what is your relationship with Stephen?’

  When I next saw Stephen, I told him I saw John, but not why, and I said, ‘He really is unpleasant, isn’t he?’ I said this because I knew Stephen wanted to hear me say it.

  Nikos, at lunch alone with Stephen, told him that I was going to work for John, and Stephen rang me up. He said, ‘Nikos told me you’re going to work for John.’

  I said, ‘I don’t really want to. What do you think?’

  ‘Well,’ Stephen said, ‘I suppose it’d be silly if you turned him down.’

  We talked about it for a long while, and I decided: ‘I won’t work for him.’

  Stephen said, ‘Well, perhaps I’m being unjust, but I would prefer it if you didn’t. When I heard you were going to, I thought: I won’t see David any longer. It’s the first bad thought I’ve had about you.’

  ‘I don’t want you to have any bad thoughts about me,’ I answered.

  When, a couple of weeks later, Nikos and I saw John Lehmann again, he asked, ‘When are you going to start working for me?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’ll have to now.’ He said, ‘I didn’t think you would.’

  John has the vulgar habit, on greeting Nikos and me, of kissing us on the mouth and jutting his tongue between our lips. Nikos, in front of him, wipes his mouth, but I am too intimidated by John to do anything but smile a weak smile.

  Stephen, I think, creates guilt, both in others and in himself. We were going to the Italian Cultural Institute on Belgrave Square, as he had to copy down some Italian translations of English poems for a lecture he was to give in Rome. On the way, we passed Magoushe Gorky’s house, and Stephen said, ‘We mustn’t let Magoushe see us. She’ll tell Natasha we’re together.’ Magoushe is the mother-in-law-to-be of Stephen’s son Matthew. After we left the Italian Institute, going back to his car, Stephen said, ‘Let’s go to Magoushe’s and have tea.’

  ‘But, Stephen, you didn’t want her to see us together,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ he answered. ‘It’s a great bore, Natasha’s disapproval of you and Nikos.’

  We went and had tea, and were welcomed. Magoushe and Maro, with whom Matthew has been living for years, were writing out invitations to the wedding. There was a lot of talk about who was Hon. and who not, and what titles people had. In came three women, a mother and two daughters, with the names Chloe, Clare, Chlochlo, though I was not able to sort out who was called what, all Peploes, who appeared to me to be mythological creatures. Leaving them all, Stephen paused in the street and said, ‘I hope Magoushe doesn’t tell Natasha we went to tea.’

  With a single tulip, I visited David Hockney, who was surrounded by what I took to be dealers who so closed in on him all I could do was hand him the tulip and say hello. I wandered about among other visitors and noted in the middle of a room a double bed, unmade, and by the bed on the floor a large jar, the cover off, of Vaseline.

  To my surprise, Stephen suggested we make a television script of Henry James’ story ‘The Author of Beltraffio,’ in which a wife allows their son to die, so outraged she is by her husband having published a novel that she finds morally corrupt. That Stephen chose this story can only make me wonder what the significance of it is to him as a writer, and to him and Natasha as husband and wife. To what degree does Stephen feel that he has had to censor himself in his writing, not wanting to upset Natasha in revenge against what he would like to write? And to what degree does Stephen feel he, married to Natasha, should have the freedom to write what he wants? And write about what? Sex? I can write about sex because of the freedom the world more and more allows. Stephen is still in another, a residual world in which to write about sex is not allowed, and that other, residual world censors him, that other, residual world in which he places Natasha as a guard against the moral corruption of unlawful sex. I think: Stephen may feel that to write about sex is to break free from that other world, is to break free from Natasha as the guardian of that world. But isn’t there, within their relationship as husband and wife, something more binding that holds them together, and isn’t that something the source of some of Stephen’s best and most moving poems, the love poems about Natasha? I am gathering together an image of Natasha that, from Stephen’s telling me about her, is complex, as are his feelings towards her. It would be too easy to simplify Natasha as a willful woman who will get her way, or to simplify Stephen’s relationship with her as subservient to her will, which he resents but cannot escape. Of course, I do wonder why he wants to do the adaptation of ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ with me. Anyway, what I cannot understand is that sex should have been, in a world not so very far removed from the world in which Nikos and I love each other, considered morally corrupting.

  I like to think that Nikos and I together belong to three nations – both of us British, both of us Greeks, both of us Americans. What the cross-overs from country into country could mean I can only wonder.

  I met Stephen at the Tate, where we we
nt quickly through the de Kooning exhibition, with those large women with large staring eyes and large teeth and short legs sticking out from under voluminously painted skirts, who made Stephen giggle; then we got into a taxi as he had to go pick up plane tickets for Israel (he and Natasha are going for two weeks) and then in the same taxi went on to his publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, where he was to correct the proofs of his book about the students. He wanted me to come in the taxi with him as he said that would be the only time he had to be with me.

  I didn’t mention that John Lehmann was coming to dinner, as I know he doesn’t like Nikos or me to see John. But Stephen rang up while John was here. He rang, just before he had to get ready to leave for Israel the next morning, to give me a sentence for a blurb I’m writing for the Edward Upward novel In the Thirties. I was sure Stephen could hear John’s voice and laughter, perhaps made loud because John knew Stephen was on the phone. After I wrote down the sentence, I said, ‘John Lehmann is here.’ I sensed Stephen’s disappointment. He said, ‘Well, I hope you don’t prepare him as magnificent a meal as you prepare for me when I come.’ ‘Not nearly as magnificent,’ I said, and he laughed, but I felt vaguely guilty.

  I don’t at all understand Stephen’s relationship with John Lehmann. I sense Stephen has more resentment toward John than John toward him, if John has any resentment toward Stephen. In fact, I think John is rather large about Stephen, and though he’ll say such things as ‘Oh Stephen, thy name is naïveté,’ there doesn’t seem to be any bitterness in it. Stephen’s comments about John, however, are often bitter. He thinks John mean-spirited. Stephen once gave me the plot for a story: two well-known literary figures, who look somewhat alike, are often taken for one another at parties, and act the parts of one another, while in fact they despise each other. But, as big as they both are, Stephen doesn’t look at all like John. John looks sinister, his skull large and very near the surface, his eyes narrow and staring with fixed concentration, and Stephen looks the very opposite of sinister, always blinking as if innocently bemused.

  John brought a bottle of Osbert Sitwell’s wine when he came to dinner last night: Vini Chianti Montegufoni, proprietà Sir Barone Osbert Sitwell.

  He said that if one asks for a lavatory in the castle, one is shown the way by a servant along many passageways to a room with a chamber pot – a story I have heard from someone else, but can’t recall from whom.

  We could hardly understand Stephen when he rang for the background noise of music and talk at the wedding reception of his son Matthew and now his daughter-in-law Maro. Stephen, sentimental about how Nikos and I love each other, sounded drunk, and Nikos and I were embarrassed for him.

  Because Nikos couldn’t come, I tried to excuse myself from going to lunch at John Lehmann’s house in the country, Lake Cottage, near the town of Three Bridges, and over the telephone said I was waiting for an important call that I had to stay in London for, but he insisted: he had prepared lunch for me. The lunch consisted of a slice of meat pie with the endless egg in it, frozen peas, and a puddle of instant potatoes. John showed me a collection of photographs of young men taken just before the war, mostly in and about Vienna: blond, thin, fresh, smiling, all lovers. One was wearing the uniform of a Nazi air force man. John said, ‘These aren’t all of them, duckie; there were lots more.’ Perhaps I’m making him sound crude. He wasn’t, or if he was the crudeness is held within a tremendous, even ponderous structure of English graciousness.

  He let me look through his library, all smelling of damp, of the books he published, of an extraordinary high quality. Everyone says he is a much better editor than poet.

  In the entrance hall of the cottage is a large round table decorated by Denton Welch, whose delicate novels I have admired with the admiration of someone who thinks, falsely, that the admiration is unique to oneself, though in fact the admiration is of a cult. But his presence suddenly appeared unique to me, long after his death, in the solid table painted in bright red and green and yellow.

  The more I get to know Greeks, the more I think they are people who do not make moral judgments, but who, living the facts of history, have a very deep, unspoken, instinctive moral sense which they live by historically, and which is very accommodating of human failings. It comes to me more and more forcefully that Greece is not a country of puritan principles, unlike America, but a country deeply layered with the facts of its history that belie making judgments raised up on unaccommodating high principles.

  A Greek friend of Nikos, who, as Nikos did, worked in the Greek Embassy in London but left and is now stranded because he can’t return to Athens, is staying with us for a few days. He laughed saying that all Greeks are guilty, all, of complicity in deals, which are kept secret. ‘Greece,’ he said, ‘is run on don’t tell, don’t tell, keep it a secret, because if you tell you bring on the evil eye.’ What surprises me is that Greeks will admit this with a laugh, and then make a gesture of disgust and turn away as if from all of Greece.

  But if ever I, enas xenos, a stranger, ever repeat what a Greek – even Nikos – has said to me about Greece, the look I will get – and, in the case of Nikos, the reprimand that I’m not Greek and don’t know about Greece – shuts me up.

  For all of that, I have fallen in love with a country I don’t know.

  Stephen came to supper, then the next day rang to say that when he arrived back to Loudon Road, where he lives, he found a taxi, its door open, waiting, and, inside, Natasha, with Sonia attending, packing to leave because she knew he had been with us. Sonia left and he calmed Natasha.

  Perhaps I concentrate too closely on Stephen and Natasha in this diary, leaving other people we see outside, but it is as if I see them more and more as within a narrative that keeps me attentive because Nikos and I are in it.

  We could of course tell Stephen that we think it best for Natasha and his relationship with her that we don’t see him, but we won’t do that.

  Maro Gorky, as if to find out who Nikos and I are, came to visit, and informed me, as with delight, that Nikos is a C.I.A. agent. I thought: well, at least they – she, Matthew, Magoushe, and, too, the Peploes, Clare and Chloe and Chlochlo, all that world – are all talking about Nikos.

  Nikos told me that, before he met me, the Italian writer Niccolò Tucci had stayed with him, having had to escape from the Peploes because of their pet snake. I imagine them, mother and two daughters, with names all beginning with C, in an apartment that could be anywhere in the world, in which they, in long loose frocks and barefoot, and speaking many languages, wander from room to room, with no other reason for being who they are but that they have a pet snake, which is all I know about them.

  Tucci came to a meal, an elegant, multi-cultured man who seems to use three or four languages in every sentence. He has just published a novel, called Before my Time.

  I was born before my time. When my time came, the place was occupied by someone else; all the good things of life for which I was now fit had suddenly become unfit. It was always too early or too late.

  When Anne Graham-Bell, who is a presence in the literary world of London and who wants to bring accord to all the world, arranged for Nikos to have lunch with her and the mistress of Allen Lane at Bianchi’s restaurant, Nikos thought Tucci would charm them both and asked Anne to include him, and he did charm them both, so all Nikos needed to do was sit back. Later, Anne said to Nikos that she hoped that Tucci was discreet enough not to let on that he had had lunch with the mistress of Allen Lane, and Nikos assured her that Tucci had often had lunches and teas and drinks and dinner with the mistresses of powerful men, and knew about discretion.

  San Andrea di Rovereto di Chiavari

  We are again in San Andrea. Anne Graham-Bell is staying with us.

  She encourages me to write. Her devotion to literature is great, and will have her pestering agents and publishers to give the writers she is most devoted to the attention she believes they deserve. There is a story that a publisher, knowing that Anne could not be stopped by
his secretary from entering his office, hid away on the balcony. She writes articles warning reviewers that they must read the books they are reviewing through to the end, shocked as she is that reviewers don’t read books through to the end. The shock is registered in her round staring eyes and her mouth a little agape in her long face. She will suddenly become serious about the way the standards are being lost, that look of shock leaving her bemused at how this could happen.

  And of course I enjoy the connections she will refer to lightly, married to Graham-Bell who was one of the group of painters called the Euston Road School, among them Lawrence Gowing and William Coldstream and Rodrigo Moynihan and Adrian Stokes and, for a while, Stephen Spender; and, after Graham-Bell was killed in an airplane crash, Anne married Quentin Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf. She said about Virginia Woolf that she always appeared to be dressed in dusty curtains. Anne likes to joke that by marriage she is also related to Alexander Graham-Bell, the inventor of the telephone. She laughs a laugh of astonishment at all this happening to her, she, as she likes to say, a provincial girl from South Africa.

  All together, we take the bus to Chiavari to shop. In the market, she was very keen to buy a punnet of wild strawberries, for she must have wild strawberries, however much they cost.

  More than amused by her, Nikos and I love her for her enthusiasms.

  She was with us when Stephen came to visit us, he staying in a hotel. It embarrassed Nikos and me that Stephen paid little attention to her. We all had lunch in a restaurant in San Fruttuoso overlooking the Ligurian Sea.

  The photographs perhaps say more than I could.

  Stephen and Anne have gone.