Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  The Emperor remained a puppet of the Japanese for years, as the Emperor of Manchukuo, until Mao conquered Manchuria. The Emperor didn’t mind. If the Japanese wanted him to be an emperor he would be an emperor; if Mao wanted him to be a market gardener, he would be a market gardener. Mao liked him, and got him to write his autobiography – or, rather, sign one written for him. The last that Steven heard of him was from Queen Maria José of Italy, the daughter of the Red Queen – Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians, who always visited Communist states before anyone else did. In the early sixties, Queen Maria José went to China with her mother, and Mao provided as their dragoman the ex-Emperor – a charming gesture of Mao. ‘She told me about it when she got back, and I said I wished I’d known beforehand, because I’d liked to have known how the Emperor’s piano playing was getting on, though I fear it would have been discarded. He died soon after.’

  Nikos told him about his beginning with analysis, and Steven, the last person to have any understanding of the value of undergoing analysis, looked at me first as with an attempt to understand what I thought, which was, really, nothing, then he said to Nikos, ‘I would suggest a long sea voyage.’

  When I stare at – stare into – this photograph of Nikos as a boy long, long before I met him, a sense of incomprehension comes to me that we did meet, in the same way that when a coincidence occurs there also occurs a strange sense that the coincidence has a meaning, but a meaning just beyond one’s comprehension of it. I can name the contingencies that came together in our meeting – simply, that I was given his telephone number by a mutual friend in Boston and told to ring him when I arrived in London – but the contingencies don’t add up to understanding that elusive meaning of our meeting, a meaning rather beyond the contingencies. That we did meet strikes me all the more strange, the meaning of our meeting all the more elusive, because I cannot, staring and staring into his photograph, connect with that boy, so remote from me in his different world that there is no way I could have met him; and, not having been able to connect with him then, my connecting with him now seems so strange, the meaning of our connecting so incomprehensible as to be – to use a word he uses – mysterious.

  I stare more deeply into the photograph, and wish I could have known him as he was then, and, too, to have loved him then, and in my love have saved him from what he now appears to me to be in his delicate beauty: vulnerable, lonely, unhappy.

  And then this happens: mysteriously connected, I see into the photograph of Nikos as a boy Nikos now, and project the loneliness, the vulnerability, the unhappiness of Nikos as a boy onto Nikos now, and I love him with the impulse to save him from the vulnerability, the loneliness, the unhappiness I see in him now.

  He calls out to me, as he very often calls out to me, ‘Where is the book I was reading?’ and I go to try to find what he can’t find and is irritated at not finding, suspecting that the cleaning lady misplaced it, or I did.

  Roxy and Stef, who are something of a collective conscience to me, tell me I drop names.

  In warning me that I may be basing my life too much on Stephen’s, is Sonia warning me against the possible allegation that Stephen is so social his poetry is incidental to his social self ? And Natasha, she claims, is as social.

  How could I tell her that Stephen and Natasha impress me for their enthusiasm for going to and giving parties? Sonia would ridicule both Stephen and Natasha and me by my recounting Stephen once telling me that he and Natasha were in a quandary, as they had invited Philippe and Pauline de Rothschild to dinner but worried about what wine to serve, so Stephen rang the Wine Society to explain the problem and ask for advice. Stephen so enjoys social life, and so does Natasha. I wonder if one of the reasons why Stephen and Natasha do bond is in their attraction to going to and giving parties. Perhaps I am open to the allegation of wanting a lively social life, that I, unlike Nikos but like Stephen, so enjoy going to and giving parties.

  Why will someone such as Steven Runciman be found amusing for his social life and Stephen not? Is it because they are from different classes? I came to London with the American idea that British society is structured by class, and that the classes range from the working-class navvies who work digging in the streets up to the Queen, and now I find that all this, too, becomes a cloud of unknowing. Is Steven, from a Scottish ship-owning family, upper class? I once heard Stephen Spender tells Elizabeth Glenconner that he is middle class. Perhaps it would be best not to think of classes, but of social worlds, so that Runciman belongs to a social world and Spender to another, and the navvies belong to a social world and the Queen belongs to a social world, and though the worlds overlap, they sort of float about in the cloud that is Britain.

  Steven, in his world, amuses himself and amuses others, not simply because he so enjoys it, but because of the high-pitched wit and irony in his voice which suggests that such enjoyment must not be taken seriously, must amuse; and Stephen is from a world without such irony, so his social life does not amuse. If there is irony in Stephen, it is mostly in self-deprecation; Steven’s irony has a high degree of self-regard in it. Or so I sense. If I were Proust, I would develop this, especially from the point of view of Nikos and me, for though we are friends with both Stephen and Steven, they are hardly friends with each other, but seem to belong in different worlds within the world of Great Britain.

  Steven has, he has said, ‘endless anecdotes,’ and will ask, ‘Would you like to hear the story of my dancing with a lady who danced with the Prince Consort, Albert?’

  Yes, we would.

  ‘She was the daughter of the Duke of Montrose. Her mother was, I think, the Mistress of the Robes at the time that she came out, at the age of seventeen, and so a ball was given for her at Windsor, and, as it was for her, the Prince Consort danced with her. I met her when I was in my late twenties and she was in her eighties. I remember I sat next to her at lunch, and then I met her a little while later at a party where there was dancing. I very seldom dance – except in Scottish reels, at which I am quite good – but I couldn’t resist when she suggested we might take a few steps together. She knew perfectly well why I was doing it, and after about three or four minutes – she really was past it, and I never really got to it – she said, “Well, now you can say you danced with someone who danced with the Prince Consort.”’

  He made a face as of mocking himself, drawing down the corners of his lips in the opposite of a smile, and he looked away.

  Christopher Isherwood is staying at a friend’s in South Kensington. He asked me to visit. I brought along a copy of The Ghost of Henry James and held it out to him when he opened the door, and he, seeing it, exclaimed, ‘I’ve already read it! I love it!’ and he showed me into the sitting room and pointed to a copy propped on the mantel of the fireplace.

  As enthusiastic as he was, I felt something put on in the enthusiasm, as if he was trying to impress me for more than his enthusiasm about the novel, but with his own ability to enthuse exuberantly. I felt this, too, in the way he would from time to time exclaim, ‘Gee!’ the exclamation seemingly unrelated to whatever he was exclaiming ‘gee!’ about. I thanked him but kept my thanks somewhat reserved, because Nikos has told me often that I can sound affected by overstating my appreciation of another’s appreciation of me, which affectation he calls the American need to be liked by everyone. Has Christopher himself become American in that way, for I so felt he wanted me to like him? I recall Stephen telling me that Auden said of Isherwood that he was ‘falsch,’ using the German, so perhaps Christopher has always given the impression of overstating both approval and disapproval in an over-exuberant way.

  We went to a restaurant where we sat at a small square table with a votive candle between us, his gaunt but young face lit by the candle as he leaned towards me to speak. Again, I felt there was an overstatement in his telling me how happy he was that his lover, Don Bachardy, was now having sex with someone in London, Don Bachardy in bed with someone else as Christopher and I sat across from one another at the restau
rant table.

  He asked me if Nikos and I have an open relationship. I said, no, no, not really. Though Nikos has said that I can do whatever I want, he has also said I must not go to him after as if he were a father confessor and ask for his forgiveness. And, really, why should I have ever wanted to make love with anyone else when I have him?

  Christopher smiled a rather compressed smile.

  He did not ask more about Nikos, nor did he mention Stephen.

  What did I feel, on my way home, about having spent the evening with someone who had been to me one of those mythological figures in a mythological world of cabaret? I felt that that world was ‘falsch,’ appropriately defined so in German because of Christopher’s Berlin stories, and that any attempt to hold it with nostalgia against the horrors of history – oh, to be in Weimar Berlin and indulge with wonderful freedom in sex while the Nazi troops are parading the streets! – is a very great affectation.

  More and more, mythologies I once fantasized participating in fall apart when I am in contact with the people whom I once imagined mythological.

  I told this to Stephen when I next saw him, and he stared at me, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that I could begin to be critical of a world that I, standing outside, had no right to criticize.

  Stephen once told me that his first sexual experience was with Wystan Auden when they were undergraduates at Oxford, any mythological vision of which has to be mitigated by Auden, in his rooms made dim by the curtains drawn all day, saying to Stephen, ‘Now, dear, don’t make a fuss,’ and Stephen, always complying with a giggle to the matter-of-factness of Auden, not making a fuss.

  After supper, sitting with Nikos on the sofa and together listening to music – Artur Schnabel playing a Beethoven sonata, the music as always chosen by Nikos, to whom I defer – I looked at him, his head lowered and his eyes closed to concentrate, and I wondered what his inner world is. Again and yet again, I imagine that inner world more historical, and as evolved from his history more cultural, than psychological. Today, he had a session with his analyst, and though he didn’t talk about the session, and I did not ask him about it, I realize more than before that I’m not interested. I do not believe psychoanalysis can reveal in him what would be revealed by his history, by his culture, history and culture in one; and I think of Nikos’ character, the character of his inner world, as formed by what I like to think the aristocracy of his being a Greek, of being able to claim a lineage, century upon century, through ancient Greece, through Hellenism, through Roman conquest, through Byzantium, even through the fall of Constantinople and the Ottoman occupation, through Revolution, and, as he lived it all, through Nazi occupation and through Civil War, through his education in Europe and America, through a Greece struggling to assert the ideals that Greece stands for, the surviving lineage evident, as I envisage him, in his delicate features, in the way his head is lowered and his eyes are closed as he concentrates on the music.

  Because of the success of The Ghost of Henry James, I was asked by a producer at the BBC. if I’d be interested in doing a filmed tour of the house in Rye where he wrote his great novels.

  The occupants of Lamb House are the novelist Rumer Godden and her husband. Part of the agreement in renting the house is that they would show visitors about, a duty I felt they found imposed on them a little when it came to a young American who couldn’t know as much about Henry James as they did, and for whom it would have been more appropriate to give a televised tour. I did say I had read Godden’s novel The River and liked it very much indeed. She gave me tea in the sitting room and informed me, as if to make her own presence more felt by me, that all the furniture in the room was hers. I recall chintz-covered armchairs and misty white curtains over the windows through which the trees outside were diffused into bright green blurs.

  I had no sense of the presence of Henry James – none at all – and wondered what I had expected. In fact, according to Godden, there was very little in the house that had belonged to James, and all of what remained was in one room, just off the entry hall, which James called the telephone room as the telephone receiver was kept there. This was, if the truth be told, the only room normally open to visitors, at certain hours. I asked if I could see into it. Rumer Godden said, ‘You won’t see much,’ and she and her husband let me go on my own.

  The door to the telephone room was open. Inside, I looked at what had been recovered since the nineteen-forties, when most of James’ possessions were sold at auction: his desk, some photographs, a walking stick, a cigar cutter, some books from his library. There was no telephone. Feeling low, and feeling, too, all the pretensions of my expectation, whatever my expectation had been, I left the room and closed the door. My hand on the door handle, it occurred to me that James had held the same handle and closed the same door, and a shiver passed up my arm.

  When I returned to the sitting room, the tea things had been cleared, and Rumer Godden was gone. Her husband stood there, and I knew I must go. But, perhaps to make up for something, the husband, whose name I hadn’t heard, told me there were still books from Henry James’ library – old, uncut French novels – which I might find in secondhand bookshops in Rye, if I cared to look. He also said that James’ knife boy – a boy who sharpened and cleaned the knives before stainless steel was invented and did other chores and errands – Burgess Noakes was still alive, and if I went to a certain pub I’d be bound to see him, a small, crumpled man, who would talk to me about James in exchange for a pint. Godden’s husband warned me, however, that if I did speak to Noakes I’d find he remembered little about Henry James, and was not interested except for his pint.

  I thought I wouldn’t go to the pub, but I happened to pass it on my way down the hill on which Rye is built, and, drawn as I was to make whatever connections were available to me, I went in. The inside was musty and hardly lit with sunlight through the small windows, and there I saw a small crumpled man standing at the bar, wearing a hearing aid and blinking. I thought he must be Burgess Noakes, and I wanted to shake his hand, but he appeared too isolated to approach. I left.

  Yes, gone, the ghost of Henry James.

  While I’m making pottery with Ann, Adrian works in his study, but at tea time she asks me up to his desk and we have tea from Ann’s cups.

  I always bring Adrian little gifts, mostly postcards. One was of a Mughul miniature, which he liked. Another was of a Surrealist painting, and this he did not like, though his way of indicating he doesn’t like something isn’t to say so, but to laugh a little. Later, he told me he didn’t like the Surrealists, but as an aside. My little gifts – besides postcards, a volume of three Greek poets, fancy cakes from a pastry shop in Hampstead – are offered partly with the wonder of how he will react to them.

  I have no idea what Adrian’s likes and dislikes are, and I realize that this both intimidates me and excites me. All I know for sure is that he has a vision, and vision excites me.

  Once, having been first to Stephen Buckley’s studio, I went to Church Row with a little work of Stephen’s under my arm which I showed to Adrian: he looked at it for a long time on his desk, and I, standing by, wondered what he was thinking. When he said, ‘Yes, I like it,’ I was very pleased.

  I’m always aware that his appreciation of something is, in a way, reflective, that it has to do with deciding something about the object. His appreciation is, I feel, based on the object’s standing up or not to Adrian’s awareness of it. I don’t think: Adrian is coming to terms with the object. I think: the object is coming to terms with Adrian.

  One afternoon, Henrietta Garnett came to visit me. She was wearing a huge ring, made, she said, from a fourteenth-century Portuguese sailor’s silver buckle and an aquamarine which Ottoline Morrell (Henrietta called her ‘Ot’) had given to her grandmother, who had given it to her mother, who, Henrietta said, ‘found it in a drawer among dirty socks, put it in an envelope which she didn’t seal, misspelled my married name and got my address all wrong, and sent it off to me, and it arrive
d. And that is Bloomsbury.’ Henrietta took the ring off and threw it across the room for me to catch.

  Sonia invited Nikos and me for a birthday party for Francis. I sat next to Francis, and across the table was David Sylvester. I asked Francis if he ever worried about the meaning of art. ‘No,’ he said, and laughed. ‘I just paint. I paint out of instinct. That’s all.’ ‘Then you’re very lucky others like your work,’ David said. ‘That’s it,’ Francis said. ‘I’m very lucky. People, for some reason, buy my work. If they didn’t, I suppose I’d have to make my living in another way.’ I said, ‘I’m sure people buy – or, if they can’t buy, are drawn to – your work because you do paint out of instinct.’ ‘Perhaps it’s just fashionable for people to be drawn now,’ Francis said, and I said, ‘No, that’s not true, and you know it’s not true.’ He said, ‘You’re right. I do know. Of course I know. When I stop to wonder why I paint, I paint out of instinct.’

  David looked very thoughtful. He sat away from the table, his large body a little slumped forward, his hands on his knees. Slightly wall-eyed, he stared at the table as he thought, and he finally asked Francis, very slowly, ‘How does luck come into your work?’

  Francis answered, ‘If anything works for me in my paintings, I feel it is nothing I’ve made myself but something luck has given to me.’

  David asked, ‘Is there any way of preparing for the luck before you start working?’

  ‘It comes by chance,’ Francis said. ‘It wouldn’t come by will power. But it’s impossible to talk about this.’

  This excited me, and I immediately asked, ‘Because it’s a mystery?’