by David Plante
It is because of Nikos that I began to use English expressions. Nikos is not American, and he does not have the American suspicion that Americans who speak in foreign ways must be phony (such an American expression that: phony), which suspicion Americans visiting from America have about Americans living here, perhaps because Americans have retained from American independence a way of speaking that sets them off from the English, and, moreover, sets them off from any Americans at the time of independence who, with pretentious foppish superiority, continued to use the King’s English. I know now that my self-consciousness was American enough that to shift prepositions from ‘a quarter of three’ to ‘a quarter to three,’ or from ‘living on a street’ to ‘living in a street,’ or to pronounce ‘alou- mi-num’ as ‘al-you-minium,’ or to call ‘a flashlight’ ‘an electric torch,’ was to risk being a phony. Not only is Nikos not American, his accent is not American, so he is free of any American telling him to speak like an American. He is free to choose to speak another language in any way he likes. With him I’m freed of so much of the American self-consciousness imposed on me by America that for too long has condemned me as phony. I use the English expressions he uses.
He has a delicate and precise way of speaking.
Sunday, and Nikos has gone to visit his cousin Maria at Friern Barnet. He has been away about two hours. I’ve been writing, but suddenly a feeling comes over me that he has been away for an intolerable period. I want him to be here. I feel unreserved love for him. I want to write this in here because I realize as I’ve never realized before how much I love him.
During the Nazi occupation of Athens, an aunt and uncle of Nikos hid a Jewish family in their apartment, but when the occupation ended the Jewish family refused to leave, so Nikos, visiting his aunt and uncle, would see figures passing behind semi-transparent sliding doors, the Jewish family so settled in that the aunt and uncle left the flat to them and moved elsewhere. Telling this, Nikos laughs, and my historical awareness now includes something that I would not have imagined because I was not there to have experienced the occupation and the aftermath.
And Nikos does say that he was happiest in his extended family, including the maid, when all lived together in one apartment during the Nazi occupation. He remembers bean soup, mock coffee infused from carob pods, overcoats made from blankets.
As if he were still a pubescent boy, Nikos has wet dreams while asleep; they wake me up but he goes on sleeping, but if he wakes he will say, sleepily, that he was dreaming of someone from his boarding school in Athens.
I thought of Nikos’ interest in Giambattista Vico’s investigation into the history of language as our richest history when I heard him discuss with his cousin, from Athens visiting London, the use of the word ‘moro’ in Greek – the cousin insisting it comes from the Italian ‘amore,’ and Nikos that the word is Turkish. This linguistic Turkish residue acknowledged by Nikos surprised me, as he always refers to Constantinople, not Istanbul, as the capital city his mother comes from.
Also, he says his knowledge of the purist language Katharevousa, which was meant to purify the Demotic Greek language of all Turkish expressions after Greek independence from Turkey, is in fact shaky, so that he had to ask his cousin to write a letter in Katharevousa for the historian Steven Runciman to send, I think, to the Patriarch in Constantinople in thanksgiving for some accolade. I rather doubt Steven, who claims to be a polyglot, knows even Demotic Greek, for when Nikos speaks to him in Greek he simply opens his hands as in a gesture of acceptance, and smiles.
But there is a big difference between speaking a language and reading it. Steven recalled his approaching the formidable historian of the ancient world, J. B. Bury, when he walked each afternoon along the bank of the Cam in Cambridge (his wife kept students away from him), and Steven revealed to him that he was interested in Byzantium, to which Bury reacted by asking Steven if he could read Russian, and, given that he could, he would be able to read Bulgarian, and should go to the library to look up a certain Bulgarian historian. Steven can read Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Greek, and no doubt the more esoteric languages.
About Nikos’ cousin visiting from Athens – I would have thought that, under the dictatorship, Greece would be a closed country, no one allowed in and no one allowed out, but in fact there is a lot of toing and froing. Those who leave and don’t return are those opposed, and I imagine those who are there and opposed hide their opposition, though Nikos tells me that many opposed are arrested and tortured. He learns about this by visiting Greeks in exile, among them the actress Aspasia Papathanaseou, in long night sessions in flats I can’t picture, except as dim and filled with smoke. But he in no way disparages those people in Greece who keep their mouths shut and get on with their lives as of course has happened over and over in Greece for centuries.
I recall the wonderfully witty writer Edith Templeton saying about life in Communist Czechoslovakia, ‘You keep your mouth shut and you can have a very good life,’ including special retreats for writers and extra square meters of living space for their flats.
Because he knew I was interested and he wasn’t, Nikos suggested that I go visit the Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant to pick up the uncollected poetry by Paul Roche, close friend of Grant and often his model, to give to Nikos for him to consider the poetry for publication by Penguin. (‘No chance,’ Nikos said.) Duncan Grant, lively and sweet tempered, reminded me in his openness and matter-of-factness of his contemporary Forster. His little basement flat in Park Square West was stuffed, in an almost Oriental way, with ceramics and bits of mosaics and embroidered pillows and, of course, pictures both propped up on furniture and hanging all over the walls. As he was showing me the pictures, only a few by him, others by Vanessa Bell and minor French artists, another guest arrived, also American, and also called David. We all sat, and Paul Roche gave me and this other David tea in two-handled cups.
I didn’t like this other David. He must have known Duncan Grant well, as he called him by his first name, and, lounging back among embroidered pillows, asked Duncan Grant – no, didn’t ask him, but, with what I felt an ostentatious over-familiarity, entered into Duncan Grant’s life with the presumption of knowing everything about it all by saying something like, ‘Duncan, you really were mischievous, you know, you and Virginia and Virginia’s brother Adrian.’ As presumptuous as I thought this, Duncan Grant responded gleefully. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘the Dreadnought hoax.’ His lashless pink eyes blinking, he told a story, with long pauses, of a hoax that Virginia Woolf (then Stephen), her brother Adrian and others played on the British Navy: disguised as Abyssinian Princes they were welcomed aboard one of HM’s ships, treated with great deference and unsuspecting interest, even when their beards began to come off in the wind. I didn’t know this story, which I would have known only by having read about it, but didn’t know it had been accounted for in any book, so I imagined I was hearing something that could only be known uniquely from Duncan Grant, and this of course gave me a sense of privilege. But the reaction of the other David, with overly demonstrative laughter and interjections of ‘Duncan, you devil you,’ which Duncan Grant appeared to love, made me feel embarrassed for my sense of privilege. There was no way I could compete with this other David for the attention of Duncan Grant, and I didn’t want to compete; and if I was aware of being envious of him for his flamboyant intimacy with Grant (which Paul Roche, perhaps seeing how much Duncan Grant enjoyed it, deferred to), I was more aware of myself as being all too similar to this other David and liking myself even less than I liked him. He took over, offered to heat up water for more tea, kept asking Grant to tell stories, all the while reminding Duncan Grant what a fantastic life he’s led. I left.
On the tube on my way home, I thought: there is enough Bloomsbury left for someone to feel a part of it in its residue. After all, Ben Nicolson is a friend, and his Christmas dinners in a Greek restaurant in Soho, with Julia Strachey and various other Bloomsbury descendants, might have been like an occasion of fifty
or sixty years ago. And Angelica Garnett is a friend. There are many people I’ve met who are doorways through which I could step into the company of so many more people to meet whom I have heard or even read about – such as Mary Hutchinson, born in 1889, whom I did meet with Stephen at Chez Victor, and who couldn’t have more credentials for belonging to Bloomsbury, her cousin Lytton Strachey, her lover Clive Bell when he was married to Vanessa Bell, the mother of Angelica whose father was not Clive Bell but Duncan Grant, all of which Stephen told me before I met Mary Hutchinson at lunch, and, also, that Mary Hutchinson was the character in T. S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party who keeps forgetting her umbrella – but I tell myself to stop at the doorway, because I wouldn’t go in to know these people for themselves but for me to say, having entered through the open doorway and come out, oh you have to know whom I’ve met! I understand so clearly now what Nikos accused me of in wanting to meet E. M. Forster: I saw him as a monument I had wanted to visit to be able, after, to tell people – oh, friends in America – I have, amazingly!, met E. M. Forster. But how can I not step through the doorway opened to me and not come out and try to account for those whom I met inside, the account I of course hope to be read by someone who wasn’t there at the right time at the right place at the open doorway?
When Nikos tells me I am deep down a negative person, he senses something in me that I too sense is true, but any investigation of why would be endless. Still, yes, it is true that I feel the world is one of moral and spiritual darkness, and stories of the horrors of Greece, and, too, the world wars, confirm for me that moral and spiritual darkness in the darkness of world history. It is as if the outer world darkness relieves me of any inner darkness, and, instead of indulging in personal darkness, I am indulging in the darkness of the world – for the darkness of the world is not my fault, is not darkness I have to blame myself for, but is the fault of history, and history is to be blamed.
Then Nikos tells me a funny story about how, during the German Occupation, his family kept a turkey on the balcony, but the turkey one day flapped its ineffectual wings and instead of flying fell down to the street, where a man, amazed that a turkey should fall from the sky at his feet, ran off with it. And of course I laugh, and now think that, really, I must free myself of wanting to hear the dark stories, as the bright stories do belie the dark, even in history.
I visited Henrietta Garnett in hospital. She told me about her attempted suicide, speaking in a low voice but enunciating every word very carefully with large, beautiful lips. Her large, wide eyes in her thin face were shining. She laughed, a slight laugh that was hardly more than a breath, from time to time. She had wanted to throw herself off from the whispering gallery in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, but arrived too late, the gallery now shut. She then drove around London looking for a place high enough for her to jump from, and decided, finally, on a room high up in a hotel that she thought would do. She jumped from the window, but didn’t kill herself; and though she couldn’t move, she was aware of people walking past her, imagining, she thought, she was drunk. Hearing Henrietta moan, someone stopped.
Robert Medley came to dinner. I mentioned how sweet I thought Forster was. He said, ‘Don’t be fooled, my dear. He liked to give the impression that he was sweet and gentle, but he had claws tucked away in his soft paws and could and did use them. He could be a real bitch.’
Robert also said something about having been given some very early poems by Auden which always went to pieces in his pocket. I said, ‘I didn’t know you were an old friend of Auden.’ ‘You didn’t? My dear, we were more than friends.’ And then I recalled the reference to Robert in Letter from Iceland. But I also recalled that when I saw Wystan and Robert together at John Lehmann’s, Wystan hadn’t said a word to him. I mentioned this to Robert, who said, ‘But Wystan’s a monster. Of course he wouldn’t speak to me now.’
Nikos has heard from his mother in Athens that Maria has died of cancer.
I went to her flat in Mortlake to sort out her belongings, but her two flatmates had already claimed most of them, one saying that Maria had promised her her record player, the other her easel and paints for painting, and both claimed her clothes. I didn’t argue. When I asked about the school Maria had been to, which Nikos and I are sure was the School of Economic Science as advertised in Underground stations, they wouldn’t say anything except, ‘Maria had to learn to deal with her problems herself.’
A ‘sense’ of meaning – this ‘sense’ is in my awareness of everything, cups and plates, tables and chairs, doors and rooms, houses, trees, clouds, sky, and, oh, people and their connections one to the other, everything, somehow, connecting beyond my ability to make connections. Is the ‘sense’ of meaning in this: that everything, in ways beyond me, does connect?
A dream about my parents. They had moved to a very damp and humid country, where they lived in a huge shed built on stilts. I went to visit them. There was a bamboo screen over the entrance to the shed, wavering in a breeze, and behind the screen I could make out two people sitting motionless side by side. I knew that the two people were my mother and father and that they had committed suicide. Frightened, I raised the curtain and went into the room. On their laps were newspapers and magazines they had been reading while waiting for the poison to take effect. Their faces were hideously distended and green, already rotting. All about was great stillness and silence. Then, suddenly, my father raised his arms laboriously toward me and opened his eyes, and my mother, with great difficulty, said, ‘Help us,’ and I woke up.
We look forward to a quiet but full winter – no dinner parties, at most relaxing Sunday-afternoon teas, writing during the day, in the evenings playing Scrabble. I feel well, and everything is promised.
It seems to me that I have lived for so many years – for as far back in my life as I can remember – for the day when I would be on my own, when I would travel, when I would write. Nothing really existed in the present – not even friendship – but in terms of that very dark future. Now, for the first time, but not with complete certainty, I am living in that future, and it is not dark, but bright. I know I could never be happier with anyone else but Nikos (given our differences, our uncertainties, our anxieties), I love London, and I feel, with a fullness that is so rare I doubt it at the same time, I feel in control; the world is whole and globed.
It occurred to me that Nikos and I never think about ‘bad sex’ or ‘boring sex’ or whatever that we hear other couples talk about, heterosexual and homosexual. We never talk about our relationship in terms of sex, and yet I’m sure that our relationship would change if we did not make love.
We spent a Saturday with a young friend of Nikos, Henry, tall and good looking. They had met at a drinks party given by the Moynihans, and Nikos sees him from time to time for lunch. Henry grew up in Canada, on a ranch, and used to ride his horse over the Canadian countryside. He is, Nikos said, pure, as a horse is pure. He is heterosexual. The three of us walked through Hyde Park, and I noticed that Nikos was lively because Henry was with him. We went to a tea shop, where Nikos sat next to Henry on a banquette behind the small table, and Nikos sometimes reached an arm to place it along the back of the banquette, almost on Henry’s shoulders. After Henry left, I told Nikos that it was evident his spirits were raised because of Henry. ‘Really?’ he asked. I answered, ‘Come on, you know his being with you pleases you very much, enlivens you, and that’s as it should be, because he’s young and beautiful, and, honestly, I’m moved that you should be so responsive, and I think, yes, Nikos is alive to youth and beauty.’ Nikos laughed.
More about Henry James. For so long, reading his novels in America, I imagined that his London was the true London, the London he not only accounted for in his novels but the London he dined out in, almost every evening of the year. I imagined he knew the lords and ladies, the dukes and duchesses, and, if princes and princesses, foreign ones (Italian) living in London. Certainly the London I am getting to know is not the London he knew, and his London, for so lo
ng, appeared to me the London that hovered above mine, and, up there, was inaccessible to me.
But the more I live in London the more I look at the London of Henry James as a fantasy – his fantasy! His novels are fairytales!
Andrew Lord makes ceramics, which are not to be used but are works of art, such as large, misshapen jugs with extravagant curlicue handles. I went with him to see a collection of Chinese porcelain. We were alone in a room, looking at delicate vases in an illuminated glass case, and I had such a sudden sense of Andrew’s body next to me I turned and put my arms around him. He laughed, a light, shy laugh, and his body seemed, abruptly, to elude me and I dropped my arms. We continued to study the porcelain. Other people I have spoken to about Andrew are also drawn to his physical presence, solid, and at the same time elusive. He wears jeans and tee-shirts, and his hair is crew cut. As powerfully present as he is, Andrew is elusive because his center seems somewhere outside himself, and he is himself drawn to it. That center, which obsesses him, is his work in ceramics. When I am with Andrew in his studio, I imagine he has no other life but there. I are not sure where he reads and listens to music and eats and sleeps and makes love.
I was late getting home, and Nikos was obviously upset when I told him whom I’d seen. ‘You can do what you want,’ he said. I said, ‘No, I can’t, and don’t want to. I don’t want to hurt you, so if my seeing Andrew upsets you, I won’t see him.’ ‘No, you must see him,’ he insisted; ‘it doesn’t hurt me, it simply proves to me what I’ve always known.’ ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘That you aren’t and never were attracted to me.’
I suddenly realized this about him: that he is always looking for proof of what he thinks is the truth that I don’t love him, that we are too different (he being Greek and I American) to understand each other, etc.
