by David Plante
When I was leaving, he gave me a copy of In our Time. He gave me a number of books, among them a collection of Ivan Bunin’s short stories, and The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa and edited by Ezra Pound. And when he, excited, recommended a book, I went out and found it: Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre.
His excitements inspire me, but, as usual, I’m not entirely convinced by them, because they seem to me impersonal, not personal, and somewhat affected.
So, for example, Bruce will ring, and I’ll ask, banally, ‘How are you?’, wanting to enter into some personal conversation with him, but he won’t answer, and instead say, ‘I think I’ve discovered where the socialist red flag comes from.’ He thinks he’s traced the flag to the bloody aprons of Argentinean butchers in an abattoir. I suggested he talk to James Joll about this, and he did, and James later told me that Bruce may have a point.
Whenever I hear that Bruce has had sex with some man, I wonder why I do not find him sexually attractive, as beautiful as he is. He appears to me too bright to have any sexuality, too impersonally bright, as if he doesn’t have a deep emotional life, or any great capacity to love. The falseness I feel about him may be the falseness of too much articulated brightness, which belies what to me is a deeper, more inarticulate sexuality. I imagine Bruce talking and talking and talking while making love, as if to make love making all articulation.
Still, I am envious of him for his ability to talk. Nikos does not at all understand this envy.
Nikos is disappointed that Hanna Segal will not take him on for analysis, but has recommended a Miss Richards, who has her office in a basement flat in Bayswater. Their first session, Nikos recounted a dream, and Miss Richards, he told me, said, ‘You’ve brought me a gift.’ Whatever Nikos thought, I thought this a presumption on the part of Miss Richards. Nikos tells me all his dreams.
Nikos is keen that I go on writing my diary, and I wonder if he thinks that I am preserving something that he wants me to preserve. As we have no secrets from each other – in fact, he reads all my post, as I read his – he will from time to time pick up the notebook in which I am currently writing and read. He says my diary makes him aware of what we are doing in a way he hadn’t been aware before. And he glosses corrections in the margins.
The flat has been filled all day with a succession of redolent smells: the Christmas tree which I brought in this morning, bunches of hyacinths and anemones and irises Nikos brought in, then the smells of cooking cranberries and fresh bread (Nikos makes bread every week) and mincemeat pies, and finally the smell of pine bath salts which spreads out on the heat and steam from the bathroom. All the smells combine in the awareness that this is my home.
Boxing Day
So many people over the past weekend –
Christmas Eve, Nikos and I went to church briefly, to the Brompton Oratory to light candles, then came back to the flat to have champagne and mince pies and open gifts.
Christmas Day, Richard and Mary Day Wollheim came, Adrian and Ann Stokes, Richard and Sally Morphet, Mark Lancaster, Barry and Sue Flanagan and their daughters Samantha and Tara, and Sylvia Guirey and her sons and daughter. Samantha played her viola. How did we all fit into our small flat?
Then in the evening Nikos and I went to Edna O’Brien’s. Sonia and Francis Bacon were there. Francis left early. Sonia stayed and got very drunk, so I thought I should take her home. Nikos was annoyed, and I told him to stay at the party, but he said he’d come with me. (Later, he said I’m a victim of women like Sonia who have made and are responsible for their own hideous lives.) In the taxi, she babbled, in a strident, accusing voice, about how violently unhappy Francis was, George dead only six weeks.
‘You don’t understand – none of you understands – what desperation is. You won’t help. You don’t know how to help. I could kill, kill, kill, kill you all for your lack of sensitivity. Francis is suffering. Do any of you care? Do any of you ring him up? Fuck all if you do.’
Nikos got very angry, but contained his anger.
The next time I saw Francis, I said how sorry I was about the death of George, and laughing a little from the side of his mouth Francis shrugged one shoulder.
Nikos gave me a printing press as a gift, and the first item I set and printed out, on rough brown paper, was an invitation to be sent out:
NIKOS STANGOS
READING
FROM A WORK IN PROGRESS: PURE REASON
YANNIS RITSOS: A TRANSLATION
THE POETRY SOCIETY
21 EARLS COURT SQ.
While he read from ‘Pure Reason’ in his light but precise voice, I had a sense of someone near and far, someone I know and don’t know, someone who loves me and someone for whom love is out there where love is a universal.
It is in being most abstract in his poems that he is most concrete, as if ideas for him have colour, shape, weight, can be seen and even smelled and touched; at the same time, they are ideas, and do not have colour, shape, weight, cannot be seen or smelled or touched. These antinomies – to use a word that Nikos likes to use himself – of the abstract and the concrete, the present and the absent, the defined and the indefinable, the invisible and the visible, create the ambiguity of both seeing and not seeing, smelling and not smelling, touching and not touching, knowing and not knowing, all at the same time.
John Golding, who came to the reading, said about Nikos’ poetry that it is ‘intellectually and emotionally plangent.’
When Steven Runciman taught at Trinity, Cambridge, his first student was Guy Burgess. In his early days, Burgess, though a bit grubby, was bright and had charm. As he got older, the charm got murkier, and after he became a Communist he never washed. ‘Everyone knew he was a Communist. All the young men were Communists. They didn’t sing too much about it, until the Spanish Civil War, but then people like Guy didn’t go off to fight in Spain. In any case, Russia wasn’t the enemy then. Russia was subversive, but Germany was the enemy. I rather mocked Guy’s Communism, and, as I hated societies, mocked the Apostles, who were a supposedly secret society at the University of Cambridge devoted to high-level talk. When they got into official positions, it was thought they’d converted. I asked Guy, after he got a position with the B.B.C., “What are you doing there? Surely your Communist principles . . .” Guy said, “It is all rather different now.”’ It was Burgess who, through machinations, got Steven his first job, in 1940, in the Ministry of Information. The Ministry needed someone to take over the section on Bulgaria, and Burgess knew that Steven read Bulgarian. Shortly afterwards, in the early summer of 1940, Steven was sent to be press attaché in Sofia. He stayed in Bulgaria until the Germans invaded, in 1941. From there to Egypt, Cairo, to organize news broadcasts in the various Balkan languages, Serbo-Croatian and Romanian, as well as Bulgarian. Then to Jerusalem, where he was a film censor for Palestine, which suited him well because there were hardly any films, so he studied religions. ‘Religion is a necessary part of the human condition, even if it is a wild anti-religion. I love the study of religion.’ At the time there was a détente between the Jews and the Arabs, and Steven used to invite professors of the Hebrew University to meet with Arab intellectuals, for some of the professors of the Hebrew University were deeply interested in Arabic studies. One Orientalist, Leo Mayer, was so highly respected by the Arabs that several learned Hebrew to attend his lectures. It was while he was in Jerusalem that the idea of writing the history of the Crusades came to him. ‘Unfortunately – or fortunately – for me, the President of Turkey, driving around the streets of Istanbul one day, saw a building he didn’t recognize, and asked what it was. Eventually, someone said he thought it was Byzantine, but no one was able to say more. He said angrily, “Do you mean to say that no one in this city knows anything about Byzantium? After all, it is a period in the history of our country.” Turning to the Minister of Education, he said, “Find me a Byzantine professor at once!” The Minister of Education went to see an old friend of mine, the histo
rian of the classical world Michael Grant, then head of the British Council in Turkey, who said they’d better get me. I received a letter from the Foreign Office instructing me to leave my present job in Jerusalem to go to Istanbul to be a professor. I lectured in English, but the seminars and examinations were in Turkish. If you house-keep in a country, you learn the language.’
Everyone in Istanbul was praying that Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, would not succeed in bringing Turkey into the war. When the Turks did enter, on the side of the Allies, it was quite clear how the war was going to end. ‘Everyone’s always suspected me, I find, of being a secret agent when I was in Turkey. Not a bit of it. I was a straightforward Turkish professor. The Turkish secret service was very good at spying. At one time, when I had hepatitis and was recovering at a resort, I talked often with a charming Turk of the secret police who was there and wanted to learn English. He had been in charge of looking after foreigners in Istanbul, and the things he told me about the private lives of my English friends were absolutely amazing – things I hadn’t realized. One had to be very careful. When the Italians caved in, they gave all their secret papers to the British, and in their list of British spies I was put at the top. Molto intelligente, molto pericoloso. One of my best tributes, and entirely false.’ The Turks were liberal about allowing foreigners to travel as long as they kept away from the military zones, so Steven was able to do most of the Crusader journey. During his holidays, he went to Syria. Because of the appalling climate in Istanbul, he had sciatica for months on end. When the British Council asked him if he would go to Athens to direct its organization, he said he would go for two years, since Athens had a marvellous climate for rheumatism.
A Sunday evening, we went to the Spenders’ in Loudoun Road for drinks. We were meant to give the impression, which Stephen had asked us to give, that we had never been in the house, which, however, we had been in when Natasha was away. Stephen appeared to be bigger than ever and spilled the wine as he poured it out, and he seemed very bored. Matthew and Maro and their little daughter Saskia, who only understands Italian, were there. Also Johnny Craxton. Natasha dashed about here and there, trying to be kind to Nikos and me as well as to the other guests, telling Stephen to refill glasses, asking Matthew and Maro to show us some of their paintings. She asked Nikos and me to stay on for sandwiches after everyone else had left, and we went down to the kitchen with her to help slice the turkey, butter the bread, get out plates. Nikos all the while, with pressing insistence, was saying how much he liked the house and asking about the paintings in the sitting room upstairs as if he hadn’t seen them before. Maro came down and with a kind of cackle said from the side of her mouth, ‘What’s this little intimate scene all about?’ Natasha, Nikos and I laughed, but a terrible boredom descended on me suddenly, and I knew I couldn’t any longer sustain any niceness, appreciation, talk, so I became silent and wanted to leave.
But Natasha wanted to talk to me about Sonia. She said that Sonia is helpless and hopeless, and Natasha wondered if it was part of her own neurosis to find herself more and more involved with people the more helpless and hopeless they become.
We were all invited to David Hockney’s flat in Powis Terrace for a late party. Stephen said he wouldn’t come. Natasha drove Nikos and me, and Johnny followed on his motorbike.
I felt old compared to everyone else at David’s – all young people bumping about – but Natasha didn’t seem to be aware that she was in any way different. While Nikos, who likes young people, bumped among them, Natasha and I stood apart and talked more about Sonia.
Natasha said, ‘Sonia has always been drawn to men who were in one way or another inaccessible – either inaccessibly married, or inaccessibly dying, or inaccessibly queer.’
I left Natasha to get a drink, then didn’t return to her, but spoke with Johnny, then to Mark Lancaster and to Keith Milow. I wandered around the flat and found Natasha sitting on the floor in the bedroom watching television. A young man was sitting on the bed, and I sat next to him. He seemed to be a young man only because he didn’t have any breasts, though his plump face was hairless and he had shaved his eyebrows and penciled on two long black lines and he wore mascara on his lashes. He told me that his friends are the Queen, the Queen Mother, who likes gin and tonic, and Pablo Picasso.
He said, ‘One of my closest friends is Sir Francis Rose. You know who he is, don’t you? The intimate friend of Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein, and Hitler.’
Natasha didn’t seem to pay any attention to him, but continued to watch television. After he left, she looked round at me and asked, ‘Who was she?’
I said, ‘It was a he.’
Having kept them all, an inveterate archivist, I have been going through masses of papers from as far back as my adolescence – such adolescent essays called IMPROMTUOUS (sic) THOUGHTS ON NOTHING – to insert them into the pages of a bulging notebook of my diary, as if to incorporate the long ago past into the present. My feeling is that I am taking my past before Nikos into my present time with Nikos, but he told me that I am jealous of his going into his past in his present with Miss Richards so I am bringing my past into my present.
But, wondering if Nikos talks to Miss Richards about our relationship, I was told by a friend who knows about Kleinian analysis that, as he is only months into his sessions, he has hardly approached the fact of being born.
On a bus home from a dinner party, Nikos said to me, ‘You talked too much this evening.’
‘Did I?’
‘You talked to try to get people there to like you. You want everyone to like you. They think you are trying to impress them.’
‘What about me am I trying to impress them with?’
‘You talked to be nice, too American-nice, saying over and over, “That’s so interesting, that’s fascinating, that’s wonderful,” so no one believed you.’
‘Do I do that with you?’
‘I make sure you don’t.’
‘You don’t indulge me.’
‘No, I don’t indulge you in that way.’
‘So, I don’t try to make you like me, but you do like me.’
He pressed his shoulder against mine and said, ‘With some reservations.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Why is it that Americans so want to be liked?’ he asked.
‘Am I so American?’
‘Aren’t you?’
Steven Runciman came to supper, as always with six eggs from his hens wrapped in newspaper.
Steven does not keep secret his grand life as an historian. He holds honorary degrees from the four oldest English universities, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, London, and from the two oldest Scottish universities, Saint Andrews and Glasgow, and in America his chief honour is to belong to the American Philosophical Society founded by Benjamin Franklin, and in Turkey he was President of the British Institute of Archeology in Ankara, and in Greece Foreign Fellow at the Academy of Athens, and he is an honorary member of the Academy of Palermo and a Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. He likes to say that when he is at a gala dinner, at, say, an embassy, he will, just by looking at the other guests, know where he will be seated. And he likes to refer to his ‘royal’ cousins on the Continent, whom he sometimes visits.
And, too, he will say he and George Orwell, then known as Eric Blair, were at Eton together, taught by Aldous Huxley.
He is not an Englishman – or, rather, Scot – who keeps to himself the people he knows and has known, but, with a display of amused wonder, his chin raised and with a vague smile, will recount how he played piano duets with the last Emperor of China, Henry Pu Yi.
Steven talking:
After he got his degree, in 1924, he stayed up in Cambridge to study with the older historian Bury, who never took on students but took on Steven because Steven was interested in Byzantium, which no proper historian at the time was interested in, assuming, as influenced by Gibbon, the one thousand years were years of Roman decadence. He came down with
flu, which led to pleurisy, and he was quite ill for a time. Doctors in those times used to say, ‘The boy should go on a long sea voyage.’ He told his parents he would go on such a voyage if he could go to China, so he went to China. He arrived in the middle of a civil war. Though he hoped to go straight to Peking, he had a high fever, and by the time he was well again the civil war had broken off connections. This meant he was stuck in Tianjin where Feng Yuxiang, the Christian warlord, was besieging the troops of Zhang Zuolin, the Manchu warlord.
(I have to break off here to insist that as Steven talks, he remembers the names of all the historical figures, and I stop him to ask him to spell the names, which he does as if annoyed.)
He was staying with the consul-general, a cousin, at the British Consulate. Tianjin was not an exciting town, just a port town without antiquities. The Chinese Emperor, Henry Pu Yi, aged about twenty, was living there in the Japanese garrison. One day, his Australian tutor came to see the consul-general about some matter, and when the tutor met Steven he asked him if he played the piano.
‘A little,’ Steven replied.
‘Oh, just a little is needed,’ the tutor said. ‘The Emperor’s started having piano lessons and likes simple duets in which he plays the top part with both hands together while someone goes thump-thump on the bass.’
Would Steven come?
He went twice to the imperial residence and thump-thumped on the bass while the Emperor played nursery rhymes with both hands in unison, and when they stopped they had excellent tea and then talked a bit. He was an etiolated young man, not good-looking, with a tremendous air of aristocracy. He spoke quite good English, and told Steven that since he had the greatest admiration for the Tudors he called himself Henry. He didn’t like his chief wife, whom he called Mary, after Bloody Mary, but his chief concubine was charming, and she was Elizabeth. Steven was not allowed to meet the imperial ladies.
