by David Plante
Today it is raining, so we’ve stayed in, reading and writing letters. The little whitewashed house on the high steep slope of the Ligurian coast is enveloped in cloud, pouring down over the mountain ridge above us; there is a smell of mint everywhere.
Stephen went from us to Paris to meet Natasha. His trip to Italy is a secret from her. He said, ‘She’s suffered so much from my friends in the past, I don’t want her to suffer any more.’ Another time, he said, ‘Natasha despises weak people. I’m weak. I don’t understand why she doesn’t despise me.’
While he was here, he and I took a long walk up the mountain. Stephen was filled with anecdotes. About John Lehmann: ‘Rosamond and Beatrix and John were waiting together as their mother was dying. After some time, John took out his watch and asked, “How long will this take? I have many things to do.”’ About Auden: ‘Wystan said he would write a poem for my birthday. I thought, How nice, a poem for my birthday. Then he said, “I didn’t have time to write a poem, so I sent a letter to the Guardian.” But the letter didn’t appear, and Wystan told me they must have lost it.’ Talking about poetry, he said, a very revealing thing about Auden’s poetry is that it completely lacks mystery. The same applies to Isherwood’s prose. He thought that mystery is what his own poetry is essentially about.
The day after Stephen and Anne left seemed vacant. I said to Nikos, ‘It is so mysterious when people leave: I can’t really imagine Stephen now on the same train on which we saw him off, settling into his compartment and reading his newspapers. Separation is incomprehensible.’
‘I hate it,’ Nikos said.
We go to the beach every morning and stay until the afternoon. At lunch time, the beach becomes almost deserted, and it is hot and absolutely still. The few people remaining lie motionless on the pebbles, and waves of heat rising about them distort them.
I am never bored with Nikos. Last night, we sang songs to one another that we made up. Mine was in French:
Sur la table,
dans un rayon de soleil,
se trouvent
un verre d’eau
et une pomme rouge.
His was in Italian, a tango:
Prosciutto e melone,
un po’ di provalone . . .
Zabaglione.
I thought, the other day, walking down the path to the beach with him: if ever I am unhappy in the future, I will have these days, these three years, with Nikos to look back to as proof that I can be happy. I’ll never be able to say that I wasn’t happy. I think of the change in my life from before I met him to being with him essential.
London
Back in London, where everything seems to be working for me. The short stories in Penguin Modern Stories One, with Jean Rhys, will be out soon, and two novels have been accepted by Macdonald. Of course I am pleased, and I tell everyone. But I find myself becoming depressed, and I don’t know why.
Nikos says to me, ‘Don’t disappoint me.’
Nikos likes to say we are both refugees.
My father was born in Canada, in the province of Quebec, and when he was two years old was taken by his parents across the border between the United States and Canada to Providence, Rhode Island, forced out of their home because they had been reduced to poverty by the English, who dispossessed them of their inheritance, for the French were the original settlers. So, in a sense, my father’s mother and father took refuge in the United States by settling anew in a Quebec French parish in Yankee New England, where the work allowed the refugees was in factories owned by the Yankees. I was born and brought up in that parish, and in all my youth I felt that we Québécois-Americans, we Franco-Americans, were a race apart.
Nikos has said he never felt he belonged in Greece, and I have never felt I belonged in the United States. To be, as I am, a Franco-American, meaning a French-Québécois-American, is to be no one in America, because we have no identity there, none. Nikos’ identity, even to his singular accent from beyond mainland Greece, was at best marginalized as a refugee.
We grew up, in our different worlds, fantasizing about a world outside which we could belong to, and that world is, if not England, and even more if not Britain, London.
I must put in that Nikos and I met the old writer Raymond Mortimer at the writer Raleigh Trevelyan’s flat (and of course I’m aware of the name Trevelyan as having a long British history), and all I can recall of Raymond Mortimer is his saying he had met ‘a charming blackamoor,’ this said with a knowing smile, he obviously knowing that he was affecting the offensive ‘blackamoor’ as justified by the history of the world from centuries past.
Whenever Nikos and I are out in a crowded street and an old person carrying a suitcase appears, Nikos says, ‘I can’t bear it,’ and I see tears rise into his eyes.
John Pope-Hennessy had a brother, an historian, known most notably for his book on the slave trade between Africa and the Americas, in which the more horrifying aspects are detailed. I visited James Pope-Hennessy in his flat above a pub in Ladbroke Grove, he thin and pale and gracious, the other guests a languid young man who never rose from the armchair under which cushion he seemed to have been born and which he did not have the strength to rise from, and a vigorous furnace stoker from the Battersea Power Station. Everyone was very friendly.
James, a masochist, was found tied up and murdered by an overly inspired sadist. John described going to the morgue to identify the corpse of his brother, his face with a dissolute, almost evil expression.
Still, John had a Roman Catholic Mass said for him. The Mass revealed to me for the first time that John himself was a Catholic, but I did not know if practicing. When I told Sonia Orwell that John Pope-Hennessy was a Catholic, she shouted, ‘How can he be?’ as if his being a Catholic were an outrage.
John went to Florence where an exhibition of great medieval silver chasses helped him to recover from the death of his brother.
Stephen invited Nikos and me to have lunch with Auden at the Garrick. Auden looks older than what I remembered, and more slovenly.
I notice, whenever I’m with Stephen and Auden, Stephen becomes very quiet and reserved, as if in recognition of Auden’s superiority; he never disagrees with him, and when, a few days after our lunch at the Garrick, Auden came to dinner and Nikos argued with him about the Vietnam War (Auden is for withdrawal, but is sure this will cause chaos in South Vietnam) Stephen seemed to slip into a position that was almost reactionary in his seeming, a bit embarrassed, to support Auden.
He and Auden were coming to dinner on an evening when John Lehmann had invited Nikos and me to drinks. There didn’t appear to be any reason why we shouldn’t go to John’s and hurry back to give Stephen and Auden dinner. An hour or two before we were to go to John’s, he rang up:
‘Look, old boy, Auden is coming for drinks also, but has to leave early because he and Stephen have been invited to dinner. So why don’t you and Nikos come early, fifteen minutes or so, to meet him.’
I paused. ‘But, John, he’s having dinner with us.’
‘Is he? Isn’t that amusing? Stephen didn’t mention a word of that.’
‘Well, I wonder why.’
‘You know Stephen.’
Nikos and I did go early. There were John, Robert Medley, Auden and Stephen. Auden said little. Later, in the taxi, he complained that when one’s invited for drinks, there should be proper drinks, and not just champagne. Stephen had sent us a cheque to buy a big bottle of vodka for him, and when he got to our flat he made himself a huge Manhattan, took off his slippers, sat, came to the dinner table in his stocking feet, and talked the whole evening – that is, until 10:00, when, way past his bed time, he told Stephen they had to go. We’d asked John Golding and James Joll also.
Because Nikos and I are foreigners and don’t really know the accords of who likes whom or the discords of who dislikes whom, and, too, because we don’t think in terms of liking or disliking (or as foreigners don’t have the social confidence to be able to), we’re happy when, on having different people to supper, we
find that among them one of them is very fond of another and both are happy to be brought together unexpectedly, or we’re disconcerted when one of them very much dislikes another, and the consequences of that have led to some disastrous supper parties, as when someone was so insulting to another the only accord I could think of to bring everyone together was for everyone to sing ‘Jerusalem,’ after which, at 9:30, everyone left. We’ve been told, because our ignorance must be generally known, by a friend not to be invited with another friend, and so we learn about accords and discords, without quite knowing why so-and-so doesn’t want to be invited with so-and-so.
It does surprise me when I am enthusiastic about meeting someone – and Nikos, too, who will say about someone recently met, ‘She’s wonderful!’ – I find someone else I am also enthusiastic about knowing will say, ‘I don’t like her,’ or even, ‘How can you be friends with her?’ leaving me to wonder which of the friends I should be more friendly with, and leaving Nikos to laugh a light laugh.
James and John had not met Auden, so Nikos and I thought they would be pleased.
Stephen had said, the best for Auden would be grilled chops and root vegetables, no salad, no pudding, but cheese for after. Wanting to do something special, I prepared what I found in a cookbook to be called something like Hamine Eggs, eggs boiled in onion skins for an hour or so, with mayonnaise for first, which Auden so liked he asked for the recipe and said he would tell Chester to make them.
James Joll said that he recently told the critic George Steiner that he would never speak to him again after Steiner wrote in an article what James thought unjust, but, as it was a rainy night, he offered Steiner a ride to his house, where he left him off with a final goodbye.
Auden seemed not to hear.
Auden appeared not to be interested in anyone, and I tried to rouse his interest by asking James if he had to do a lot of research as he was writing Europe since 1870. He said, ‘No, I’ve done the research,’ so the history of that period was now of an interconnected world revolving in his head, a world that to me occurs in disconnected flashes that have no chronology, none, that I can put together.
Auden did look at James for a moment, as though his attention held for a moment in which he wondered who James is, but he quickly lost interest.
Throughout the evening at supper with Stephen and Auden, John and James, it seems, said very little, but then who can say much when Auden says everything?
John Golding did say he thought that though Picasso has illustrated books he has never read a book in his life.
Stephen says Auden, in conversation, is like a great big bus with a very determined route, and either you get on and listen without talking, or you jump off. There’s very little communication with him. And yet, he was very open to having anyone board him as a bus, was very relaxed, said how nice he thought our flat is, how good the food, and he was, in the way a great big red bus can be, very amiable.
I wonder if Stephen has ever admitted in print, or even in conversation, that his friend W. H. Auden is a very great poet.
Thinking about history –
History for me is always a surprise as to what happened to the past in relation to what is happening now, though I am acutely aware that what is happening now is in direct relation to what happened in long past battles, though I cannot remember dates, who fought whom, and why the battle determined the fate of the world I live in. I defer to historians for keeping the history of the world together.
But in his introduction, James does write: ‘Episodes which seemed immensely important at the time sink into insignificance in the wider view. This is especially true of the history in the last twenty-five years. Since the end of World War I it is hard to decide what is important and what is ephemeral in our history. Down to the end of World War II we at least know, when writing history, what was going to happen. For the more recent past we do not know the outcome of historical events in which we are still personally involved.’
What to make of this, which I take to be entirely English only, I suppose, because it took place in England, or, more specifically, in London? Nikos and I were invited by Robert Medley to a drinks party, and there he, left aged by the recent death of a lover with whom he lived and whom he cared for over many years, introduced us to a slim young man with bleached-blond hair, and we imagined him to be Robert’s young lover, given the way Robert laid a loose arm about the young man’s shoulders. There were many black people there, and the music was reggae, and the young bleached-blond man danced with a young black woman, and the way they danced, and the way they held each other even when they were not dancing, made me wonder what possible relationship Robert could have with the young man.
Maggi Hambling, whom we see from time to time, was there, standing apart, smoking a rolled-up cigarette, with narrowed eyes looking upon all the proceedings.
She said she often goes to a bar in Battersea Park Road, just behind where we live, and suggested we go with her one evening, and Nikos, who likes her a lot, said yes, yes, and so I said, yes, yes.
Stephen is away, teaching at the University of Connecticut.
John Lehmann is at the University of Texas.
At a party for the writer Jessica Mitford, I spoke to Sonia, who looked older and had put on a stone if not more, and who seemed a little cool perhaps because I hadn’t seen her in a while because of her treatment of Nikos.
Sonia said, looking past me, ‘There is Natasha,’ and I turned and saw a tall, striking-looking woman with a broad, blonde Russian face talking to a man. I suddenly became very uncertain of myself, and squeamish. I wondered if I should go and introduce myself to her, because, after all, she would know who I was from my having gone to the South of France to help Stephen plant trees in the garden of their house, and I decided, yes, I must. The man she was talking to had hair like white plucked chicken feathers and very yellow teeth, the painter Julian Trevelyan. When I introduced myself to Natasha Spender, she appeared not to have heard of me. She talked on with Julian Trevelyan, and I just stood by, smiling stupidly, and commenting on what she said, ‘How nice,’ as if I were in fact participating in the talk.
The fact was that I knew about everything she mentioned: Stephen in America, the birth of Matthew and Maro’s daughter Saskia, Lizzie, that the house in Loudon Road needs rewiring, that the garden of the house in the South of France is coming on, that Stephen was going to get the English Chair at University College – though, as this hasn’t yet been revealed, Natasha hinted at it by saying, ‘We’re hoping this will be my husband’s last extended trip abroad. It’s time he put on his carpet slippers and settled.’ She spoke with great articulation, her lips forming the words almost exaggeratedly. But I couldn’t let on that I knew about Stephen getting the Chair. As friendly as I am with Stephen, with whom I talk very intimately, he as much about Natasha as I about Nikos, I am a total stranger to Natasha. I couldn’t possibly say, ‘Stephen rang up from Connecticut last week to say hello.’
I couldn’t see myself as I listened to Natasha speak, my awareness of myself a kind of blur out at a distance from myself, that distant blur suddenly referring back to me only for a second when I raised a hand to touch my nose and realized that it was in fact my hand, but, standing before Natasha and listening to her, I thought that she saw that my hands, my face, my body were all mine, and that she must be judging me for the way she saw me. What did she see?
(I suppose the attraction of looking at photographs – or, more, of film – from a party after the event is to see oneself as others saw one, and perhaps to think: really, that’s me?)
Natasha seemed not to be seeing me at all, and I turned away from her after a while and let her go on speaking to Julian Trevelyan and spoke to someone else.
Later, I talked to Sonia, who said she had wondered if Natasha and I would meet and speak to each other.
‘Oh, we did,’ I said.
‘Yes, I saw you. You seemed to be chatting away intimately.’
‘No, not at all. She
talked with Julian Trevelyan, and all I said from time to time was, “How lovely.”’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s too stupid. And all for nothing. My relationship with Stephen is so innocent.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it isn’t. It isn’t innocent. Nothing involving feelings is innocent.’
‘Perhaps you’re right.’
I sent Sonia my novel, The Ghost of Henry James, and she sent me a sweet letter thanking me for it.
We went to the bar, Sporters, in Battersea Park Road with Maggi H., she dressed in khaki. There was an all-women band playing extravagantly, the drummer wearing a jacket covered in blue sequins that flashed as she swung her arms.
Maggi told us that once when she was in the bar, in came a group of men in drag as women, and some of them chatted her up and asked her if she’d like to go to a T.V. party, and Maggi, wondering what kind of party there could possibly be of men in drag watching the television, but, curious, said she’d love to go. She was taken in a lorry, the driver having to hike up his/her dress to drive, to Clapham Common, where more and more men in drag collected. Maggi asked, ‘Where’s the television?’ and at her question the room became silent and she suddenly knew that T.V. did not mean watching television, and that the men in drag suddenly knew she was a woman, and that if she didn’t get out of there as quickly as she could she’d be raped.
In the bar, Nikos appeared excited to be in an extravagant world of working-class people who, within their world, allowed themselves freedoms that were theirs entirely, a world I felt he genuinely admired, but one he could never ever be a part of.
To celebrate the publication of my novel, The Ghost of Henry James, Nikos invited some friends to the only truly Greek restaurant in London, in a mews off Queensway, where I drank and drank and drank and smashed the glasses on the floor. Back home, I was sick in the toilet bowl, Nikos standing above me, and between bouts of vomiting I said, ‘I’m so happy, I’m so happy,’ and Nikos laughed and put his hands on my shoulders.
