Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  . . . maybe a new Kimon will arrive one day, secretly led / by the same eagle, and he’ll dig and find our iron spear point, / rusty, and that too almost disintegrated, and he might go / to Athens and carry it in procession of mourning or triumph / with music and with wreaths.

  Perhaps in response to the dictatorship in Greece, Nikos tells me about ancient Greek history as if he himself is renewing it, as when he told me that the leader of the Athenea, the yearly festival of Athens, was a young man especially chosen for his beauty, who for a year was not allowed to touch metal, and in a pure white robe led the procession up the massively cobbled way and up into the Acropolis and into the Parthenon.

  How could I not see Nikos as the leader of the procession?

  And how could this not bring tears to my eyes?

  Strangely, this comes to me: that the only ‘impure’ part of Nikos’ life I can think of, which he was forced into, was his time in the military when he had to wear a uniform and was made to shoot a rifle and use a bayonet.

  Michael Craig-Martin has had an exhibition that consisted entirely of an ordinary glass of water on a high glass shelf, the glass itself the idea one would have of an ordinary glass. The glass of water on the glass shelf is high up on a blood-red wall, the whole length of Waddington Gallery. But, as an accompanying card informed, printed in red on white pasteboard, the glass of water is no longer a glass of water but an oak tree.

  Michael was brought up a Catholic, which he has, as I have, rejected, but what else but his religion informs the miracle of the transubstantiation of the glass of water into an oak tree?

  But, more than our shared Catholic pasts, I have my own view of Michael’s work – which he seems to respect but not to be convinced by – in our both having been taught by Jesuits. I went to Jesuit Boston College and was taught Scholastic epistemology, which discipline has remained with me as my essential sense in my own apprehension of the world. I like to think that Michael was just long enough at the Jesuit university of Fordham to have been inspired by some idea of Scholastic epistemology, and to be intrigued by the mental process by which a specific object such as a glass of water is held in a state of momentary suspension before it is judged as this or that glass of water, so that in that state of suspension, of apprehension, the water glass becomes an oak tree.

  We’ve become regular guests at the Queen Anne house of Adrian and Ann Stokes in Hampstead, with sherry first in the sitting room hung with a large nude by William Coldstream, and considered by Adrian a major work. Dinner downstairs in the basement, by the Aga, the table laid with Ann’s pottery, with large ceramic animals as centrepieces.

  Adrian especially warm towards Nikos, whom he embraces whenever we arrive, Nikos appearing to revive in Adrian a youthful erotic attraction to someone as attractive as Nikos.

  As for worlds revolving around Adrian – think of Ezra Pound, think of Osbert Sitwell, think of all the Saint Ives artists including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and . . .

  And Adrian knew D. H. Lawrence, whom he visited when Lawrence lived in Italy, in the Villa Mirenda – not only knew Lawrence, but delivered Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Lawrence’s Italian publisher Orioli, no doubt reading that novel on the train!

  Nikos is very impressed that Adrian was analyzed by Melanie Klein, and thinks that the great disappointment in Adrian’s life is that analysis could not cure his daughter Ariadne of schizophrenia.

  R. B. Kitaj is painting an almost life-size portrait of Nikos.

  R.B. and his wife Sandra come to meals, or we go to them. At their large round dining table there are always interesting people to meet, as if R.B. (Nikos calls him Ron, but he prefers R.B. or, simply, Kitaj) sees his friends as references to the richness of culture as he sees the figures in his paintings as referring, too, to the richness of culture.

  His library, with high shelves of books, forms part of his studio, there where a punching bag hangs, and I easily imagine Kitaj punching the bag when he gets frustrated at a painting not going well.

  He can have a mad look.

  There are so many references in his paintings. In the branches of a tree hung what looked like red ribbon, and I asked him what it referred to. He said, off-handedly, ‘I just wanted a bit of red there,’ which impressed me, for I sometimes think that Kitaj will sacrifice composition to the references.

  At the large round table in the basement kitchen, Nikos and I have met the very old American painter Raphael Soyers and his wife. R.B. is keen on artists of the 1940s Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, all figurative artists, as R.B. is trying to promote figures in paintings as opposed to abstraction.

  Other people we’ve met at their dinners:

  The painter Avigdor Arikha and his wife Anne.

  The film maker Kenneth Anger, whose Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome I’d seen years before. As good looking as he was, I was frightened of him because I’d heard he was under a satanic bond to kill someone.

  The poet Robert Duncan, whose portrait Kitaj has drawn and who clearly has exhausted both Kitaj and Sandra by his relentlessly inventive talk, as he exhausted Nikos and me when he came to supper, theorizing about, say, Gertrude Stein in terms of the inner tensions in her work, his mind, it seems, filled with inner tensions that flash out in different directions while one tries to make the connections among all the flashes. His lover Jess Collins sat back. Robert gave us some of his books of poems, with photomontages by Jess. So we are building up a collection of signed books given to us.

  Also at Kitaj and Sandra’s, we met a coroner, who said that there was nothing more beautiful than the naked chest of a dead young man.

  When you meet someone at Kitaj and Sandra’s, you feel the person must be rather esoteric to be of interest to them, and, in meeting this esoteric person, you hope you are rather esoteric too.

  Kitaj, an American, wants to belong to what he calls the London School of Painters, wants, I think, to become as much a part of the art world of London as Whistler and Sargent were.

  He is close to David Hockney, with whom he appeared on the front cover of the New Review, both of them naked, arms across shoulders.

  Sandra asked to paint my portrait – in the nude, if I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. Then she suggested I come again and pose with another male model, very sexy, both of us nude. ‘And you never know what will happen.’

  She and R.B. go to Amsterdam to the live sex shows and afterwards clap.

  Kitaj likes to go to the airport and take the next flight out to wherever, the last time to Athens, where he went to a whorehouse and waited until a large woman came out and, raising her arms high, shouted, ‘America!’ He tells this story before Sandra, who laughs, I think a strained laugh.

  Their understanding is: never with friends.

  Sandra is very beautiful, with a wide white smile.

  I have no idea what it is in me that responds so with the love of details, so that, on a walk in the Wiltshire countryside, Nikos and I spending a weekend with Joe and Jos Tilson, I, after the visit and back in London, can remember almost nothing of the conversation, but remember details of the countryside, and in accounting for as many details as I can remember I feel that the visit is now fixed on a walk through an arboretum with the sunlight level through the tall, thin, straight poplar trees, the branches high up so the trunks are bare, the sunlight and shadows appearing to multiply the tree trunks, so I am in an imaginary wood; and, too, I am imagining the bracken on either side of the path, bent, bright green, thinly serrated fronds; as I am imagining the mushrooms in open spaces among the bracken, imagining a brown beer bottle, an old shoe, a tin, the details all together demanding that I make something more of them than what they are, this something more my love of them.

  And at the same time I am accounting for the details as I imagine them – because, of course, they are no longer what they were – a sense of such tediousness comes over me in the effort of the accounting
that I think, oh, let them all go, it would be a relief to let them all go, let my possessive love of them go. And I think of writing without any details, writing in some way that frees me of this possessiveness. Or not writing at all.

  Nikos admonishes me: ‘Enjoy the event in itself, don’t try to possess it, because you falsify it by elaborating on it.’

  And I try, I try, I do try not to try to account for all the details of a dinner party on a dining-room table – the large round pan of paella with black mussels and shrimps and red peppers imbedded in the saffron-yellow rice; try not to retain the details of a view from the window of a country pub – hollyhocks in the garden of the public house, seen through a many-paned window, bicycles leaning against a garden shed; try not to possess the details of a parade of cavalry passing – they in tight, dark blue uniforms with yellow braid and a red stripe down the side of the trousers, and dark blue casques with cockades of white plums, riding horses in parade with silver cannon on large black wheels. I try not to, as much as I honestly do find it a bore to look and then record, but I fail.

  I’ve been making pottery at Ann Stokes’ two afternoons a week, listening, as if in sympathy with the Greeks, to Greek bouzouki music. (Nikos is indifferent to bouzouki, as he is indifferent to anything he deems folklore. He is keen on Ann’s pottery, of which he has bought stacks of plates, cups and saucers, bowls at her annual pottery sale, and she has given us vessels copied from ancient Greek types. When Ann made, in ceramics, a Free Greece medallion, and gave it to Nikos, he was very touched.) Adrian paints up at the top of the house in his studio, and comes down at tea time and we all have tea. I made a version of a Minoan storage jug, about three feet high.

  Natasha saw it during one of Ann’s pottery sales and wanted to buy it for the garden of their house in the South of France, to go at the end of a cypress avenue. I gave it to her. We were talking very easily with one another and tensed up, both of us, only when Stephen came to find out what we were talking about.

  Sometimes I wonder who, really, are our close friends? and answer myself, the people I write about in my diary, and these include our friend Stephenie Bergman.

  Stef lived for a while in Soho, her lover a man whose business was making pornographic films. When he died, Stef did what he had requested be done with his ashes: strew them in the gutters of Soho.

  Stef is a ceramicist, and works in the pottery of Ann Stokes. We have some of her pots, collected by many people.

  After one of her supper parties, she wheeled in from another room a large ceramic lorry loaded with oranges.

  Her great friend is Roxy Beaujolais.

  After an event in London we’d attended together, they, Stef driving, said they’d take me home. We crossed Battersea Bridge, in the middle a stand where hot dogs and drinks are sold and always surrounded by bikers in black leather jackets and their big black motorcycles. Stef said to Roxy or Roxy to Stef, ‘Let’s get rid of David and come back here for some fun.’

  Roxy is a publican, and is the best-connected person I know in London, from politicians to City gents to artists.

  She likes to wear her dress with the top slung low to expose her beautiful shoulders.

  Nikos makes no generalizations about poets, but sees each in his or her self, and as an editor he remains open to whatever world they may come from. So, he has published in one volume of Penguin Modern Poets John Heath-Stubbs and F. T. Prince and Stephen Spender, and in another Geoffrey Grigson and Edwin Muir and Adrian Stokes.

  He is especially moved by Adrian’s poem ‘Schizophrenic Girl’, about his daughter Ariadne, his beautiful unbending daughter, who keeps at bay the horror of her nothingness.

  At the Stokes’ house, she would sometimes come into the room where I was alone working on a pot, and she would simply stand against a wall and stare. Once she undressed and stood naked, and I went on working until Ann came in and took her out. Another time she dropped a torn bit of paper on the floor near me and left and I picked up the paper and read, in upper-case letters, MUDDLE HEADED. She has been accepted into a home run by nuns, where she will spend her life.

  I’m sometimes surprised by the independent intellectual life Nikos has. His main interest is in aesthetics, which was his graduate concentration at Harvard University. Hearing him talk to Adrian Stokes or Richard Wollheim about aesthetics, it occurs to me that they are all within a sphere of interest that is theirs, and into which I can’t enter. I am always very pleased that Nikos should be within that sphere, partly because I admire his superior knowledge and intelligence, and also because, as we are a couple, his superior knowledge and intelligence reflect back on me as if I were someone who would be equal to him in conversation with Adrian and Richard, while, on the other side of the sitting room, I am talking to Ann or Day about pottery. But I do hear enough of their conversation to recognize that the main topic with Adrian and Richard has to do with the psychoanalytic interpretation of aesthetics, a subject, I feel, that is very much within the circle of philosophers and psychoanalysts referred to in their conversations, such as Donald Winnicott and, most meaningfully, Melanie Klein.

  Adrian had analysis with Melanie Klein.

  I know of Nikos’ interest, but I was surprised when, one evening on his return from work, he asked me what I thought of his starting Kleinian analysis.

  I didn’t know what that meant.

  It was the most rigorous form of analysis, starting as far back as the good or bad breast.

  This seemed to me to have nothing to do with our relationship, so I said I thought if he wanted to go into that analysis, he should. I imagined it had to do with some deep – the deepest – appreciation of the aesthetic. Nikos has collected a significant library about aesthetics, and I imagined his wanting to go under analysis was a more profound investigation into the state of mind when we think of something as beautiful. He inspired me with the acute sense of beauty – in his poetry, and also, when we were together on, say, an Underground train and he would whisper about a woman standing at the other end, ‘How beautiful she is!’ someone whose looks I would have not noted at all – and I believed I would, on his enhancement of his sense of the beautiful by analysis, find my sense also enhanced.

  Through Richard, he was able to have a meeting with Hanna Segal, the custodian of the analytical approach of Melanie Klein. When he came back from the meeting, he told me that she had asked him basic questions – what kind of homosexual was he? promiscuous, in that he went cottaging (a term neither he nor I had heard of, but that means having sex in public loos, as Hanna Segal had had to explain to Nikos), or monogamous? He told her about us, and she said that if he were to enter into analysis he might find that his relationship with me would change fundamentally, and that he should discuss this possibility with me.

  What did I think?

  As he asked me this not long ago, I have to ask myself: what do I think? I’m not sure I think anything. Is it because I feel so secure in our relationship that I don’t feel any threat in his talking about our relationship with someone who sees it as if apart from us? I see our relationship from within, and to me the view is steady.

  I told him to start analysis.

  Bruce Chatwin needs to give the impression that he knows everything, needs to be able to tell you, when you stop with him at an antique-shop window off Bond Street, what factory the tea pot came from, and its date. And I’m envious of him because he does seem to know everything – my envy, again, of those who are able to make connections that I’m not able to make.

  He invited me to lunch in his new flat in Belgravia. I praised it to him, but thought to myself: it is really very, very tiny. The only object he had hanging on his severe walls was a highly lacquered yin-and-yang disk from a Japanese temple. On a table he had a small collection of objects: a fragment from Persopolis, an Eskimo toggle, a pre-Colombian bit of polished black stone.

  As Howard Hodgkin, one of Bruce’s closest friends, says, ‘Bruce is both mad and a snob about objects.’

  Th
e bathroom is very small. I said I love big bathrooms, with large baths, where I do a lot of writing in my head. ‘Baths!’ Bruce exclaimed. ‘Oh, no, no baths! I hate bathing!’ He shook his head. ‘No, no.’

  He placed the food we were to have on the small table – duck breasts and wild rice and a bottle of good wine – and, talking, not about baths which didn’t interest him, but about writing, which did interest him, he sat and served himself first, then, still talking, touched the serving dishes with his fingertips to indicate that I should go ahead and serve myself. I was still standing.

  In a high voice, speaking as if at a pitch against universal ignorance, Bruce said, ‘The fact is that no one has ever understood what Hemingway was trying to do in In our Time. I ask you, has anyone ever asked why he called the vignettes that appear between the stories chapters? The book has to be seen not as a collection but as a whole, and it is, I’m convinced, a Cubist work of fiction.’

  I sat and served myself and said that was fascinating.

  Bruce ate quickly and went on talking, his voice rising higher and higher in excited pitch. His talk about Hemingway was fascinating.

  He asked me if I’d like fresh fig, with a tone that I felt suggested he’d prefer me to say no, thank you. I said yes.

  After lunch, he prepared for me a large, brown nut, a silver rim about the opening, filled with maté tea to be sipped through a silver straw with a little silver strainer at the bottom so the powdered tea wouldn’t be sucked up, and then he occupied himself, it seemed to me with business: a letter he signed and folded and put into an envelope addressed, I saw because he did hold it so I could see it, to William Shawn of the New Yorker. He showed me a photograph of himself at his most stunningly beautiful, in sandals and a straw hat, and said, ‘A photograph of the author.’ He showed me an Italian edition of one of his books, of which he read a paragraph. It only occurred to me later that Bruce had left the letter, the photograph, the book about to impress.