Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  I said, ‘You know, when you asked Stephen to take me to the South of France with him shortly after you and I met – I’ve often wondered why you did that. Didn’t it occur to you that he might want to make love with me?’

  ‘I was sure of it.’

  ‘Then why did you send us off together?’

  ‘To prove that I was right.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That you would love him more than me – or, at least, that you and he have more in common than I have with either of you.’

  ‘But your experiment didn’t work. I didn’t make love with him. I’ve never felt I have more in common with Stephen than with you.’

  ‘That’s not true. You do – you do with all your English friends as well. It is purely a cultural thing. I don’t, as a Greek, belong here, and you as an American do. I know, in fact, that when we’re in company you’re often embarrassed by me.’

  ‘Embarrassed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sometimes, yes, when you become needlessly difficult and argumentative, as the other night at the Stokes’ when you told that woman she had no right to say she didn’t like Courbet.’

  ‘If you really loved me, you’d never be embarrassed by me. You’d agree with me that no one has a right to say he or she doesn’t like Courbet. You should agree with me, because I tell the truth.’

  I feel that Nikos and I are now within the globe of London, and within that globe are connected to friends within the globe.

  Melvyn Bragg’s novels about his native Cumbria are as rich as the earth he so earthily describes, such as a farmer’s heavy boots of leather encased in heavy boots of mud. He is usually a reticent person, but I feel he feels close to me, and talks freely. He told me about his first wife’s suicide. The last time I saw him, he said, ‘I want to write about a love affair. I want it to start as a happy, a magnificent love affair, and I want it to end a happy, a magnificent love affair.’

  His wife, Cate Haste, writes about how women have changed – in part have been changed and have changed themselves – since World War I, the book a testament to how World War I and World War II form a continuing consciousness for Europe.

  I saw Edna O’Brien, the novelist, at a party Sonia gave for her fellow novelist Vidia Naipaul. Edna asked me to sit with her on the same small armchair. ‘You won’t leave me, will you?’ she asked. ‘No,’ I said. She was wearing a fringe of jet beads across her forehead. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’m going to cry – because people are so cruel to one another, so dishonest, so inhuman.’ She did cry, great soft tears that dripped down her cheeks and collected under her nose.

  I once asked Ben Nicolson if there is anyone he can think of in London who has a salon, and after a long pause, his fingers to his chin, he said, ‘No,’ then after another long pause, he said, ‘Yes, Sonia Orwell.’

  As our circle of friends grows, Nikos and I are invited for weekends – to the house, formerly an old mill, of Howard and Julia Hodgkin, in a Wiltshire valley with a stream running through the valley and grazing sheep. From our room, in bed, we hear the sound of the voices of Howard and Julia in bed in their room talking, which go on, we think, past our falling asleep. In the morning, Howard brings us large, golden cups of tea while we are still in bed. The walls of the rooms are painted a pale green, what appears to be a Hodgkin colour.

  All together, we take walks in the countryside, often up to a hill where there was once a Roman villa, the tesserae of a mosaic still to be found on the ground.

  Some weekends, we are invited by Joe and Jos Tilson, in Wiltshire, where a number of British artists have moved to – including Hodgkin, Peter Blake, Dick Smith – Joe and Jos in a huge old rectory with grooves in the stone floor from the tea trolley passing from the kitchen into the sitting room. Joe is making ladders – not that one can use, but inspired by – and on each rung he burns words: YEW, MOTHER, WINTER, NIGHT, SWORD, SEED. Jos spins yarn from natural wool at a spinning wheel and knits beautiful rough jumpers, scarves, caps. Joe is very generous and gives us copies of his prints.

  On a weekend at the Tilsons’ with Frank and Julia Auerbach – rare, as Frank hardly leaves his studio – Frank did some etchings on a press that Joe had set up, one of Julia and one of Joe. He had not done etchings in years. He gave Nikos and me etchings, one of Julia and one of Joe.

  With money from an advance on a book, for £500 I bought, on Nikos’ urging, an etching by Lucian Freud of his mother.

  And Johnny Craxton gave us a painting of a Greek young man smoking a cigarette.

  We are building up our collection.

  Barry Flanagan, artist, will from time to time ring the bell and come up, though I’m never sure what our conversation is about. I asked him what he was doing, and he replied, ‘Dentures,’ paused and nodded as if to confirm what he had said, ‘yes, dentures,’ and I wondered if he was making dentures. ‘How is that?’ I asked, and he answered, ‘It’s like a double helix on either side of the Stone of Scone, and that’s no crucifixion,’ and, not ever understanding Barry, I took him literally. He gave us little pieces of stiffened burlap with what might be thin white plaster dripped on the burlap.

  Jan Hashey and Michael Craig-Martin, who live in Greenwich, organized a picnic on the Greenwich Common. Friends invited were asked to bring picnic food, which, on the blanket, did not appear to have the congruity of a picnic. Jan and Michael’s daughter Jessica, ten or so, was very impressed when David Hockney arrived with a crate of oranges. David wore a pale green suit and a red knitted tie. Barry and Sue Flanagan were there, he wearing his three-piece tweed suit and sandals without socks; when I asked him how he was, he said, ‘It’s all coming in through the toes,’ which Sue, smiling, clearly understood, and if their young daughters Samantha and Tara didn’t, they seemed to accept as a matter of fact that a father is not necessarily understood. Mark Lancaster arrived, apparently having come, as always, from an exclusive club he had access to, Stephen Buckley with him.

  Thinking about works of art: Jan – who, Michael said, was at Yale when he and Jennifer Bartlett and Richard Serra were there, and who was the best of them all – does drawings of domestic objects, such as a brown bowl, on two overlapping sheets of paper, a sheet of carbon paper between, so the top drawing is in full colour and the one under is a ghost of the bowl so the bowl becomes mysterious, and yet remains the depiction of a simple bowl, implying to me a lively irony that may be an irony that Jan herself enjoys – say, in ending a meal at her and Michael’s with simple frozen orange pops, which pops suggest all kinds of ironies about being original in the face of not being able to afford anything more elaborate than pops, and, too, about the pop culture we seem to live in, a culture Jan is vividly aware of. Jan certainly has style, and will appear wearing an Ossie Clark snakeskin bomber jacket or a Vidal Sassoon haircut, always appearing to be stylish within the wider awareness that style is in so many ways culture, and this makes me see Jan as more acutely aware of the culture I suppose I too live in but am in no way as aware of as she is. She makes me wish that I had more style, and that I could be as stylish as she is in serving frozen orange pops at the end of a carefully thought-out meal. And I must mention that the meal is served within, but not on, a Barry Flanagan tablecloth: a sheet of burlap from which all the rectangles at the place settings are cut out and folded back to expose the table top with the plates and glasses and knives and forks, all of which place settings would be covered if the cut-out flaps were folded down, and so the meal becomes something of a Barry Flanagan art work.

  One afternoon, Michael came round to our flat to show us his latest work: little ‘stories,’ as he called them, written on file cards, one sentence to a card, and each story has to do with a different way in which he saw himself and how he thought others saw him.

  How odd it is to see in public places works by artists one knows, or simply has met, such as the mosaics designed by Eduardo Paolozzi in the Tottenham Court tube station –

  And, to see, in an exhibition, a portr
ait by Lucian Freud of Kitty Godley, staring out with wide eyes and apparently strangling a cat she is unaware of – Kitty, the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, married to Wynne Godley, economist, who asked me if I thought it a good idea to buy an old, semi-ruined house in Italy, which Nikos and I did and then sold to great profit, almost as though we were speculators in property, so I said yes; but Wynne and Kitty seem to lose more and more money, moving from lesser and lesser houses, until they live in a workman’s cottage in the high street of a provincial town, and we have lost contact with them. I look at the portrait of Kitty with the wonder of knowing her and yet, in the portrait, of not knowing her at all, as if in the portrait Kitty has the most esoteric relationship with the Kitty we know.

  Dinner at Anne Wollheim’s, Nikos and me and Ben Nicolson.

  Ben said that Virginia Woolf would make fun of him whenever he was invited, by Royal Command, to Buckingham Palace: ‘Poor Ben, having to go to the Palace.’ He laughed his long nasal laugh.

  He told us this: as a boy he visited his grandmother who told him that his mother, Vita Sackville-West, was a raging lesbian and as for his father, Harold Nicolson, he was never out of bed with Raymond Mortimer, which information he thought about on his bicycle back to Knole, where he asked his mother if she was in fact a raging lesbian and as for his father was he never out of bed with Raymond Mortimer, to which they answered, simply, yes. Telling the story, Ben laughed a kind of deep gurgling laugh.

  Anne has a constant look of bemusement and will almost always make a comment about what she has said, ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ and run her tongue over her lips.

  She will suddenly, unexpectedly, reveal past friendships, such as Henry Green, whom she knew as Henry Yorke.

  She rang me to ask if I had rosary beads, as her former husband Philip Toynbee, living in a commune with his second wife Sally, had converted, or hoped to convert, to Catholicism, and he wanted rosary beads to say his prayers on. I do have a number of rosaries, placed without my knowing in my suitcase by my mother every time I visit and found on my return, and I offered her one, to be passed on to Philip Toynbee. She invited Nikos and me to dinner and I gave her the rosary. I didn’t know that Anne was brought up a Catholic, but when I expressed some hint of common interest, she laughed a light laugh and sniffed and said, ‘No, no.’

  After a supper party at Anne’s, I spoke with Alexi Russell, a former wife of John Russell, she leaning against a door jamb as if for support and I in front of her. In a low, rather sad voice, she said, ‘If you and Nikos live long enough together, you’ll find that what you now think of as detracting from love – age spots, wrinkles, all of that – will make you love each other more.’

  What came to me, forcefully, is this: that Nikos and I are in London loved as a loving couple.

  Anne had just bought an antique rug which Nikos got down on his hands and knees to examine. He said, ‘Anne, there’s a defect in your rug.’ She said, ‘Go home, Nikos, go home.’

  Ben Nicolson delights in telling stories, his delight making him seem to gurgle as he speaks. Here is one: J. P. Morgan had a very big nose, grotesquely big. A society lady invited him to dinner, and thought she would put her attractive daughter next to him to entertain him, but she warned her daughter not to stare at Mr. Morgan’s nose and in no way refer to noses. All during the meal, the lady was apprehensive about her daughter offending Mr. Morgan by referring to noses, all too possible because she was warned not to. But all went well, the lady congratulating her daughter. In the drawing room after, the lady, serving coffee, asked, ‘Mr. Morgan, how much sugar do you take in your nose?’ Ben laughed, his laughter even more of a gurgle.

  He said about his daughter Vanessa, ‘I will accept everything about her, but if I find she is uncivil I will come down on her –’ and here he slapped one palm against another hard – ‘like a ton of bricks.’ His wife, Luisa Vertova Nicolson, lives in Florence. What their relationship is I can only think of as incomprehensibly British.

  He seems to be in love with a young beautiful man with dense black curly hair called Simon, whose interest in art history Ben encourages.

  Ben’s great expertise is Caravaggio and his followers the Caravaggisti.

  I tell myself not to make comments, but simply describe, but how can I keep myself from noting that Ben is one of the most loveable men I have ever known?

  Among the people we meet at Anne Wollheim’s dinner parties are the art historian Francis Haskell and his Russian wife Larissa. He had been to Moscow and there visited Guy Burgess, who had escaped, or was allowed to escape, to Moscow after it was discovered he’d been a spy for the Russians. Frances said that Guy Burgess stood in the middle of his sitting room and looked up at the chandelier which he knew was bugged so everything he said would be heard, and he shouted, ‘I hate Russia.’

  As Francis and Larissa stay with John Fleming and Hugh Honour, Nikos and I were able to make a connection through them, even share in what it is like to stay in the Villa Marchio.

  Sylvia Guirey does paintings of many many dots on canvas. She gave me one, of many black dots, based, she told me, on an idea I gave her, so she has dedicated the work as from me.

  Nikos and I often go to her for her meals, cooked on a cooker with large iron burners in large copper pots and pans.

  She gave to Nikos a delightful spoof cookbook that she wrote, called La Cuisinière Provençale, based on a recipe for cooking sausages:

  She put in thyme, a bay leaf, pepper and celery salt.

  Couvez et laissez cuire . . .

  She found the corkscrew and opened a bottle of white wine. She poured some into the pan, stirring as it hissed all around the sausages and smelled bright and brown.

  She poured herself a glass of wine.

  The man came in.

  She poured him one too.

  He said he would read his newspaper. He read the financial page.

  She put the wine back in the refrigerator. She read the recipe again.

  Sylvia has a Philip Guston abstract painting.

  She likes to shop in a shop at the World’s End with a large clock in the window the hands of which go backwards very quickly. The shop seems to specialize in black leather skirts and black very high stiletto-heeled shoes.

  Minor, I suppose, but perhaps not, to note that when I used the word ‘drapes,’ Sylvia, as if she heard in that word all my American background, corrected me with ‘curtains,’ which I assumed to be what Americans of her background say.

  Francis King to supper with the writer Olivia Manning.

  In London, I see people in the context of their lives more than for the few hours we are together; so I see Olivia Manning within the context of her Balkan Trilogy, which I take to be autobiographical and, as autobiography, history, for in those three novels she recorded not only the displacement of the British in Romania, in Greece, in Egypt, in Palestine because of World War II, but the disassembling of the British Empire. She appears, in herself, to be displaced, dissatisfied, as though something were missing that would make her whole and that something whole, perhaps once imagined to be possible, is now known never to have been possible.

  Olivia is thin, almost gaunt, and she whines, as though inside her are taut fine wires through which she speaks.

  ‘What should I read?’ she asked with a whine. ‘I’ve read everything I want to read. I have nothing left to read.’

  Perhaps, she thought, she would write a book about cats; everyone loves cats.

  Francis sustained a sad smile.

  I remark, in the Trilogy, someone saying about another, ‘He rides the choo-choo.’

  At Anne Wollheim’s we met Ben Nicolson’s wife Luisa Vertova Nicolson, whom Anne seemed uncertain about, as if Luisa might suddenly say something outrageous. She did go on about Harold Acton and how Harold will not recognize the fact that he has a half-sister in Florence, though all of Florence knows that Harold’s father had a mistress with whom he had a daughter.

  I like the ‘all of Flor
ence,’ which seems to me a nineteenth-century term that really only applied to the English and American community there, with perhaps some Florentine aristocrats married into the community. I doubt that there was as much contact between that ‘all of Florence’ and the ‘all of Florence’ of the old Florentine families which Henry James fantasized about. There is no contact at all in the novels of E. M. Forster, his middle-class English very much a foreign community enclosed within itself in Florence, any contact with primitive sexual Italians as shocking as it is tempting, Forster’s fantasy.

  The fantasy of other countries!

  I once read Henry James’ comment: for an American all things foreign are sacred.

  Luisa said that Harold’s mother would not have anything to do with Florence, not after the way she was treated by the Fascists at the beginning of the war – imprisoned with prostitutes as an enemy alien – and in no way would the Uffizi get the Michelozzo painting of the Holy Family the museum wants. What Harold will do with La Pietra she didn’t know, but she did know that Oxford University had turned down the offer to inherit it.

  Nikos has translated poems by Yannis Ritsos to be published as a volume in the Penguin series of Modern European Poets. Ritsos, the winner of the Lenin Peace Prize for Literature and renowned in Russia, has been sent by the Greek dictators into internal exile, in a concentration camp on an island, where he continues to write, his poems now referring directly to ancient Greece. These poems move Nikos most:

  . . . the symposia of our philosophers have all vanished . . .

  Our paper and our books are burned, / the honour of our country lost.

  . . . a cloud at sunset, deep, violet, moving, behind the barbed wire . . .