Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  Back from America, Stephen recounted how, when asked if he knew of any good new literary magazines in the States, he was amused to answer, ‘Yes, Fuck You.’ He laughed his high laugh, his shoulders shaking. He gave us some copies, rough paper, roughly printed, stapled, rough drawings in the Egyptian erotic style, the editorial page called EJACULATIONS FROM THE EDITOR, with exhortations IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION, FREEDOM FOR HALLUCINOGENS, GROPE FOR PEACE, DISOBEY!, GOD THROUGH CANNABIS, KEEP HUMPING, MUSHROOMS, RESISTANCE AGAINST GOON SQUADS, and entries by Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Peter Orlovsky, LeRoi Jones, Robert Duncan, William Burroughs, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, John Wieners, Norman Mailer. One issue has a long poem by W. H. Auden, ‘A Platonic Blow’, which, with many rhymes internal and external admired by Nikos, such as:

  It was a spring day, a day, a day for a lay when the air

  Smelled like a locker-room, a day to blow or get blown,

  describes a blow job that is not Platonic. Stephen said Auden does not deny he wrote the poem, but is annoyed that it was stolen from his desk.

  Stephen asked for the issue with the Auden poem back.

  Though Nikos Georgiadis and my Nikos are Greeks, I note the difference between them when we visit Georgiadis in his flat/studio, where, with the theatricality of a set designer, he puts on display evidence of the different cultures within Greek history noted by, say, Herodotus and his travels throughout the then known world: large picture books on Palmyra, the ruins of Carthage, Thracian gold; swaths of embroidered cloth with Eastern patterns; ancient clay vases and glass vials and alabaster cups; and, surmounting all, the cover of an Egyptian mummy with large staring eyes. My Nikos would consider all this as merely picturesque, and I remark that the only Greek artifact we have in our home is a komboloi of large blue beads given to Nikos by someone from Greece.

  We went with Nikos Georgiadis to an art film at the Curzon Street cinema. After, in the men’s room, I, turning away from the urinal, saw Rudolf Nureyev peeing in the next urinal. Outside, I joined both the Nikoses on the pavement, and when I mentioned that I had just peed next to Rudolf Nureyev, Georgiadis, instead of leaving us, talked about the film until Nureyev came out and, seeing Georgiadis, joined us. Georgiadis had designed the set for the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet in which Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn starred. He didn’t introduce Nikos and me to Nureyev, and we all went our separate ways. Nikos said that Georgiadis had intentionally waited for Nureyev to come out and speak to him as a way of letting us know he knows Nureyev, and, too, that Georgiadis was letting us know that his friendship with Nureyev was exclusive of us. The next day Georgiadis rang to apologize – Nureyev had rung him to complain that he, Georgiadis, hadn’t introduced us.

  I thought, just as well, really, just as well, I sensing that Rudolf Nureyev could be a threat to Nikos and me.

  Sonia’s house in South Kensington has polished parquet floors and bright rugs and small, round tables with long and delicately curved legs and, always, vases of flowers on the tables, and books. There are, around the sitting room, shelves and shelves of books, for Sonia is a great reader. The fire in the fireplace might be lit. The air in her house appears filled with reflected light from polished surfaces, from crystal, from mirrors even on grim, gray days. There are drinks in the sitting room, then dinner in her basement dining room where the table is set with a starched white cloth and starched white napkins and gleaming china and glasses and silver, at the center a small bunch of pretty flowers. She wants everything to be pretty. The meals she prepares are mostly French, as are the wines she has opened and put on the buffet to breathe. A Francophile, she says the French enjoyed life more than the English, and, at the end of a meal, instead of asking everyone to go upstairs to the sitting room for coffee, she keeps her friends around the table for the coffee and more wine and talk, as she says is done in France.

  She is always exhausted, as her dinner parties require of her a great effort, a duty even, and after having made the effort, performed the duty, as if to confirm that the things of this life matter because there is no other life, she hardly eats what she has prepared, but sits a little removed from the table and drinks and smokes as her friends eat, and as the evening deepens she takes a more and more commanding view of her friends, all of whom she devotes herself to. And it usually happens, when everyone is sitting about the table long past coffee but with smudged glasses of wine, that there occurs in Sonia’s devotion, which is like a great cloud that envelopes everyone, a sudden shock of thunder and lightning. She attacks a friend for something he – always, as far as I knew, he – said.

  At a dinner party, she suddenly attacked a friend, in the context of a conversation about the Nazi concentration camps, for the friend expressing horror at them. There was, she would insist, no expression of the horror of the camps that was equal to what they had been. She recounted having been to, I think, Belsen with her friend Marguerite Duras and her rage when Duras expressed horror, Sonia answering Duras’ horror with, ‘What did you imagine it would have been like? What?’ To Sonia, the extermination camps were so indicative of the fact of human baseness, she took them as a given: of course people would exterminate other people, for whatever reason, of course. She even became angry at her Jewish friends for any bewilderment they might have had about why the camps: they, above all, should know why, which is the baseness of humanity. When Sonia read the unpublished memoir of a former inmate of a detention, not an extermination, camp which he was trying to get published, she said, ‘He was in a very minor concentration camp.’ Friends took this as a parody of Sonia’s snobbism – and she is, she herself admits, an intellectual snob, perhaps instilled in her by the Sacred Heart nuns, also intellectual snobs: if you read about the French philosopher Jacques Lacan in the review section of newspapers, you soon met him at Sonia’s house – but her denouncing the former inmate of what Sonia called a minor camp for presuming to use his experiences there to promote the publication of his memoirs, which Sonia found badly written, showed the depth of her basic conviction that everyone really is vain, that vanity really is everything. Beyond stating the starkest facts, you cannot not express any feelings about horror that are not expressions of basic vanity, and the more emotional the expressed feelings the more filled with vanity.

  I admire her, I admire her even when, drunk, her denunciation becomes relentless. ‘How could you say that? How could you? How?’ You draw back into silence, and the other guests try to change the subject, but Sonia keeps after you: ‘How could you have said that?’

  I never mind Sonia denouncing me at one of her dinner parties, not only because I know she will telephone the next morning to apologize and to invite me again, but because I believe that she has the right to, believe that in her rejecting a faith that tried to destroy her in the name of trying to save her she has earned the right to denounce hypocrisies, has learned that all expressions of feeling are in an essential way hypocritical. It reassures me for my hypocritical, because false, expressions of emotion to be denounced by Sonia.

  Nikos is aware of these false expressions of feeling from me, but is gentler than Sonia in making me aware of them.

  Francis Bacon gave Sonia a painting of a head, done in savage brushstrokes, which hangs in a gold frame to the side of Sonia’s sitting-room fireplace. He is often at her dinner parties. When I, drunk, asked him, as I often asked him, if he had ever had any religious feelings, he, also drunk, said, as he always said to my question, ‘Never, never, never, never, never, never, never.’ But Bacon was a cynic, and Sonia not. Sonia came over to Francis and me and asked what we were talking about. Francis said to her, ‘David asked me if I’ve ever had any religious feelings.’ Sonia frowned one of her severe frowns at me and said, ‘You couldn’t have.’ I said, trying to justify myself, which was always a mistake with Sonia, ‘I just wanted to know if Francis ever in the past believed in God.’ ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course he didn’t,’ Sonia, angry at me for my presumption, answered.

  I
had already set myself up to be denounced by Sonia that evening, so when I said, drinking more wine at the table and more drunk than before, that I wondered if, even for an irreligious writer, it was possible to write a really deep book that wasn’t religious, she denounced me for not being a deep writer – she repeated, ‘You can’t be a deep writer if you say that. No one who says what you’ve said can be a deep writer’ – because, she said, religion in a novel, in any work of art, made the work obvious, made the work banal and pretentious. ‘I know you’re right,’ I said, ‘I know,’ and I had that curious, slightly thrilling sense of having said what I’d said just to get Sonia to react as she did. Maybe I risked bringing up religion with Sonia so she would reproach me for bringing it up. I was drawn to Sonia partly because she reassured me in my being lapsed, and I sometimes made provocative statements about religion that I knew she’d condemn me for, because her reaction, which I could count on, reassured me all the more about my being lapsed, and, more, the very attention she gave me by condemning me reassured me. I almost felt rejected by her when she desisted.

  She said, ‘Hrumph,’ and, as if to make up for turning her attention away from me, asked me to open more bottles of wine, which were on the buffet. I did, with pleasure. Wine was essential. Food was essential. Dinner parties were essential. And in fact this evening, maybe because of Francis whom she was intimidated by, she didn’t attack anyone else after she had attacked me, and certainly not Francis, and the party was altogether as pretty as the flowers at the center of the table.

  She invited me to tea, maybe to reassure me after having attacked me at her dinner party. I found that when I was alone with her she would get onto a subject – almost always a friend – and talk and talk about that friend as if the talk itself would sort that person, who badly needed to be sorted, out. Most often when I tried to add to the sorting out, she would say, ‘You don’t understand.’ This afternoon, a grim winter afternoon with her sitting room warm with a fire and bright with all the lamps lit, the person was the writer Rosamond Lehmann, whom I told Sonia I had met. I described Rosamond Lehmann, tall and big-boned with a very white face and long, white hair, as looking like a moon goddess, which I’d thought original of me, but which made Sonia frown severely at me as if for trying to be colourfully original. I should have known by that frown not to continue to talk about Rosamond Lehmann, whom Sonia evidently disapproved of, but whom she nevertheless felt compelled to sort out. I said I wondered if what explained Rosamond Lehmann, whom I didn’t know at all well, was her belief in the ghost of her dead daughter appearing to her, which she’d written about in her book The Swan in the Evening. Sonia frowned even more severely.

  ‘You read that book?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ I answered.

  ‘How could you have? You don’t believe in ghosts, a stupid, childish, self-indulgent belief, so why should you indulge someone else’s belief in ghosts? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I wanted to find about what she had to say.’

  ‘About a ghost appearing to her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That interests you?’

  ‘Well, yes, it interests me, in a way.’

  ‘How could it? How could you be interested in anything so stupid, childish, self-indulgent?’

  ‘I guess it is stupid, childish, self-indulgent.’

  Sonia lit a cigarette and shook her hair back and stared at me with narrowed, blood-shot, angry eyes and said in a low, hard voice, ‘It is.’

  While she talked, the smoke of her many cigarettes making the air dull, I had one of those moments of wanting to die. I told myself I must not indulge myself in it any more than Sonia would indulge me in it. But I wasn’t able to concentrate on what Sonia said. I wanted to be as hard on myself for the longings that occurred to me as I thought Sonia would have been had she known about them, longings the very fact of their occurring she would have considered only as evidence of my weakness, of my inability to finally and forever deny them. And she would have considered any expression of my longing to be in a world where I would no longer have to endure the agony of the longings as nothing more than an expression of my vanity, because, again and yet again, there was no other world.

  As soon as I was out in the street, I saw through the windows, over which she hadn’t drawn the curtains, the lights in the sitting room go off abruptly.

  Among the British writers whose work I read, Rosalind Belben has the most distinctive style, the writing in itself in tension with the literal, a tension that causes in the literal the sense of something much more vibrant in the literal than the literal. There are other British writers whose styles try for the more than the literal, writers whose work the writer Giles Gordon has brought together in an anthology called Beyond the Words: Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Elspeth Davie, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Gabriel Josipovici, Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Maggie Ross, and Giles himself. And he asked me to be among them.

  A description:

  Nikos and I in Rome, where he had never been, the city, in my recollection, all flesh pinks and tans, great phalluses chalked on the walls, and the sound of water running. The presence, in museums, in public squares, in niches, of marble and of bronze, of statues glorying in their nakedness, in their sexuality, even the statues of emperors fitted with armour that, formed in the musculature of naked chests, appeared to expose their bodies beneath. The languorous nudi of Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel, surrounded by phallic acorns, seeming to bulge out from the painted fresco, and the floating angels in the paintings of Caravaggio seeming ready to fall into one’s arms. We stopped along the Tiber to look across at the Castel Sant’Angelo, and Nikos, pressed against a wall, said, ‘I have an erection.’

  Sonia, alone, to supper, which we ate in the kitchen. There were two bottles of wine on the table. She studied them for a while, then asked if we would mind if she paid to have a third bottle. ‘Three bottles of wine are reassuring.’ We didn’t accept money from her, but I went out for a third bottle of what is called plonk.

  I returned home from an evening at a dinner party Nikos had declined going to, saying he needed a quiet evening at home, but he was not at home. He came shortly after to say that Nikos Georgiadis had rung him and invited him to a party with Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, both of whom Nikos had talked to animatedly. When Nikos told me, I became jealous of him, and he laughed.

  The newspapers have been filled with the story that cannabis was found by the police in Francis’ flat. Francis, who declares he doesn’t smoke because of the asthma that he’s suffered from all his life and that kept him out of the military during World War II, has accused George of planting the cannabis and alerting the police. There’s been a court case, in which the police had to admit that information about the presence of the drug came from George. Francis was acquitted.

  This afternoon, I was on a bus crossing Chelsea Bridge in the rain, and I saw, from an upper-deck window, George, out in the rain, walking along the pedestrian way of the bridge. The Thames was dark gray beyond him. His hands were in the pockets of his raincoat, but his head was bare and water was running off his hair.

  Auden came to dinner with Stephen of course. We also invited Johnny Craxton and his new friend, a bricklayer who was very warm and personable, and whom I thought Wystan liked, but when I asked Stephen later if he had Stephen said he hadn’t, because ‘he wasn’t a looker, wasn’t bright, didn’t have anything to make Wystan interested.’ ‘That’s monstrous,’ I said. Stephen answered, ‘I think Wystan is becoming more and more of a monster.’

  When he arrived, he was obviously in a sullen mood – so far to come, all the stairs up to our flat – but we gave him lots to drink (actually, Nikos made a mistake in mixing the Manhattans, putting three parts vermouth to one part vodka instead of the opposite, but Wystan didn’t seem to notice this), made him the absolute center of attention, to the point where I felt we were ignoring Stephen, Johnny and the bricklayer, and gave him a very good meal, all of which revived him, and he began to tell jo
kes, laugh, give his calculated opinions on anything that was mentioned: cigarette lighters, cars, South Africa, recruiting students into the military on university campuses, which he approves of because that ensures educated people in the military.

  He told Nikos that Greece, in all its history, was best under the Turks, because it was at its most efficient under the Turks. But Nikos told him that was ridiculous, and he smiled at Nikos for a moment as if amazed that someone was telling him he was ridiculous, then as if with the appreciation of someone telling him just that.

  When Auden said that he thought Cavafy’s erotic poems – not his historical poems – camp, Nikos said they have to be read in Greek, which Auden can’t read.

  Auden said something disparaging about Samuel Beckett getting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nikos said, ‘Who else is there?’ Auden shook his head so all the sagging wrinkles shook and said, ‘There’s me.’

  What upset me most about what he said was, in giving a sermon on hell (he said he is very fond of giving sermons, and confessed, in a game he proposed in which everyone was to say what he had most wanted to be if he hadn’t been what he was now, that he had wanted to be a bishop), that each man creates the hell he deserves, so that if a drug addict can’t break his addiction it’s his own fault and he should use a little extra will power to get himself out of his situation. I am making him out to be more simple-minded about this than he was, but the startling fact about him was that he did insist that everyone was always responsible for his actions. I said, ‘But sometimes one simply doesn’t have the will power to be responsible.’ He didn’t listen. To make the point, he told us of a servant he had once had, a young Spaniard, who stole some money from him, and, Wystan said, ‘Of course I fired him.’ I got angry, thinking, and you didn’t for a moment consider that he might have needed the money, or that you had been paying him so little he had to steal?