by David Plante
Jean told me that if I ever found myself again in such a situation with a lady, I should place a glass of water and an aspirin beside her bed and leave quietly, and on telling the story later I must make it funny. As we did writing this story, giggling.
Dear Jean, now dead and cremated and ashes.
She once said to me: all of literature is a great lake, and there are rivers that feed the lake, such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Dickens and Balzac, and there are trickles such as Jean Rhys, but however little one must always believe in feeding the lake.
Peter Schlesinger has left David Hockney for Eric Boman, and David is very upset. The many people around David comfort him, and, slumped over, he puts a hand to his chin and sticks out his lower lip then says, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’
Jean Rhys once told me that she writes to let everything go, and I do often think, Let it go, let it all go, though I’m not sure what the ‘all’ is that I want to let go of.
We are often invited by Eva Neurath, the head of the publishing house Thames & Hudson, to drinks parties, to dinner parties, to the opera or to recitals.
She is not Jewish, but in Nazi Berlin she identified with Jewish students, and when they were expelled she herself left school. She was fourteen years old. She educated herself. She married a Jew and with him and a son left Germany. She speaks about the horrors both with gravity and – not a contradiction – almost a lightness of tone, sometimes with a delicate snort of laughter. She would never, she says, have become what she became if it hadn’t been for that ‘chap’ in Germany, meaning Hitler.
Often interrupting her talk with a nasal ‘Hum?’ which, it seems, is a way of making sure one is keeping up with her, Eva recounts stories from her past life. If we are having a meal with her in her home, just the three of us in the basement, her stories will include her asking us to go to the wine cellar for another bottle of wine, and I think this is not as a sudden request but yet another turn in the multi-cornered story. When the story all comes together, it is like a whole world and she is aware of all the details of its history: from her childhood in Berlin, the detail of being accidentally stuck in the eye with the nib of a pen, the detail of listening to her older sister play the piano in another room for Eva to guess which notes she was striking, the detail of her mother coming into her room to say goodnight before going off for the evening.
When she and her husband first arrived in London, Eva and her son lived in dim rooms, and she worked as a domestic; her husband was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. In the camp he became friendly with a German Jewish inmate, Walter Neurath, who had been living in England for some time. Working for the book ‘packager’ Adprint, Neurath had been responsible for a series, Britain in Pictures, which was seen as proof of his loyalty to Britain, and he was released. He was asked by Eva’s husband, who remained interned, to help his wife and son, and Walter Neurath not only found Eva a job at Adprint, but started, in 1949, the publishing house Thames & Hudson with her. They married.
Eva is open with us, and she expects us to be open with her. She often asks Nikos and me about our relationship as lovers. ‘I don’t mean your sexual relationship. I mean your night-time relationship.’ This amazed me until I knew that Eva is very attracted to Jungian analysis.
Nikos and I might be with her in the foyer of Covent Garden during an interval, all of us talking about the opera performance, when, suddenly, she will, with a quick, elegant movement of her wrist, grasp one’s chin and, smiling, kiss one on the lips.
At an elaborate dinner party she gave, with many tables set in her dining room and sitting room, my place card had me sitting next to Hattie (I think the spelling) Waugh, the daughter of Evelyn Waugh. She said to me, ‘I hope I don’t like you, as I have too many friends as it is,’ which only someone brought up in a certain British culture could say, she not only not being offensive, but with a wit that I like to think I am British enough to be amused by.
Catharine Carver would want to be left out of this diary, but I can’t leave her out. Editor at Chatto & Windus, she asked to read a novel I’d written in America, but was sorry to say it is unpublishable. Still, she takes an interest and reads what I’ve written and advises. A scout for Viking, Gwenda David, is waspish about Catharine liking her hot-water boiler to break down so she must bathe in cold water, but she did tell me that Catharine was/is the editor for writers such as Saul Bellow, John Berryman, e. e. cummings, Bernard Malamud, Elizabeth Bishop, Lionel Trilling, Katherine Anne Porter, Hannah Arendt, Flannery O’Connor. I know she is working closely with Leon Edel on a one-volume edition of his biography of Henry James. A while ago, Catharine rang me to say she would like to burn all the letters she had from whomever, and would I drive her out into the country to a field where she could make a pile and set it aflame? I answered that we would be arrested. I imagined the letters she wanted to burn would be from the writers whose work she had edited, and hoped that her not being able to make a pyre of them would deter her from destroying them in any less dramatic way. But she rang me a few days later to tell me she had thrown them all out into the rubbish.
Before she left America, she traveled to every state, then she left New York, where she was a publisher, to come to London, never to return to America.
All she ever said about her youth in America, without saying where in America, was that as a girl she once threw herself down a flight of stairs.
Nikos and I had a drinks party with an odd mixture, I suppose, but we like odd mixtures – including Catharine and Patrick Kinross, who sat side by side on a sofa, she small and grey and he large and red, Patrick smoking a cigar from which he flicked ashes onto Catharine’s head. Leaving, she asked, ‘Who is that wonderful man?’ I now always think of Catharine as having ashes flicked on her head and finding the abasement – wonderful!
And I must include Joe McCrindle – stocky Joe, American living in London, rich, owns the Transatlantic Review, in which a short story of mine was published, my first time published. Joe also published in the Transatlantic Review the poem, ‘Present Absent,’ that Stephen wrote when I was staying with him at Saint Jérôme.
Heathcote Williams is the editor. He intimidates me, if not frightens me, for his startling good looks and startling bad behaviour, justified to himself, I think, as a Rimbaud qui essaie de dérégler ses sens. In a way, I envy him.
In the basement flat that is the office of the Transatlantic Review, I met B. S. Johnson, who appeared to me large and dark. He had a novel he had just published, the pages unbound so they could be arranged in different ways, the pages held in a box. It is called The Unfortunates. Adamant, Johnson said he was not interested in the creative imagination, no, but in describing a football match in itself, for itself; or the work of fishermen in itself for itself. He said he hated fiction. In his large dark presence I felt such a force of resentment towards the world for not recognizing his large dark presence.
When I heard he had killed himself in part for not being recognized, I thanked God that Nikos has always warned me about resenting the world at large for non-recognition, has told me that even the expectation of recognition is an egotistical self-indulgence. What did B. S. Johnson expect from the world?
Many of the walls of Joe’s large flat are hung, it seems from ceiling to floor, with red-chalk drawings of male nudes.
He has massive drinks parties. If books do make a room, people who are celebrated make a party, though they do not in London. Once, I was surprised to see at one of Joe’s drinks parties Christopher Isherwood, standing alone with a drink, and I went to him. We talked about the revelation that Encounter magazine, of which Stephen was co-founder and editor, had recently been revealed as being financed by the American C.I.A. Christopher Isherwood said he wondered why there was such an objection to the C.I.A. financing the magazine, as it was in fact a very good magazine. This, I think, would have made Stephen pause, but would have enraged Natasha, who took the betrayal of Stephen as personal, it seemed, to herself. To account for all o
f this episode would so overweigh this diary that it would fall flat, and, in any case, however much I try simply to account, the matter has been looked at by people involved, which I was not. Natasha has written, for the record, her account, as though she were the commanding conscience of Stephen.
It happens often enough at drinks parties in London that I remark it: the most ‘celebrated’ guest is left alone. I recall one book-launch party for Toni Morrison at which she seemed to be left by herself in the midst of other people talking, she standing with a warm glass of white wine, and I, thinking this was impolite, went to speak to her. Is it because the Brits think it would be a presumption to speak to the ‘celebrated,’ and, not wanting to risk that grave social sin, ignore the very person the party is given for? I feel embarrassed for the Brits that that person does seem to be ignored, so, not being a Brit (yet), I do presume. I saw, at one of Joe’s drinks parties, L. P. Hartley, standing alone and looking about, and I thought, But it’s socially wrong to leave him alone! so introduced myself and said I hoped to live long enough to see my past as another country, and this seemed to please him, and it pleased me to be able to speak to L. P. Hartley shortly before he died.
Joe’s parties appear to fluster him terribly.
I see less and less of Rachel Ingalls, which I’m sorry for, but she seems not to want to see me. Both of us American, we have known each other since before we published, when we saw a lot of each other. We talked about writers and writing, especially about Ernest Hemingway.
Her first book, Theft, is a passionate retelling of the death of Jesus Christ, a great lament. In the novel, she reduced the settings to timeless images, such as rocks, prison bars, cups.
Whereas I am eager to meet critics who may, just by getting to know me, write in my favour, Rachel will not meet any, as she thinks that would be opportunistic and falsify her as a writer true to the writing.
Whatever the weather, Rachel always appears – or so I think of her – wearing gloves with buttons at the wrists and carrying a fold-up umbrella.
She has never invited me to where she lives, which I assume is one room, with a telephone in a passage outside. She requests that I do not ring her whenever, but send her a postcard to let her know just when I’ll ring, and she sends back a postcard to confirm or not that she will answer. She may not be able to because she is writing or washing her hair.
Her style is of great clarity, and her subjects have become more and more strange, such as a young couple in a car lost in the countryside, the car attacked by a mass of man-eating frogs. It is the remarkable clarity of the writing that raises the dark subject to works of high literature.
I introduced her to Sonia Orwell, who invited us to tea and, as Sonia can do with flashing spontaneity, she took from a wall a painting that William Coldstream had done of her and gave it to Rachel.
She does not respond to my cards or, even, letters asking if I have offended her. Uncompromising as she is about standards, perhaps Rachel thinks that I have let go of standards.
As I read more of Victor Shklovsky I find more in his books that is meaningful to me, not only in the way I think of writing, but in my constant awareness of connections, for he was in love with Elsa Triolet.
And of course I am charmed by him into imagining Lili Brik:
Lili Brik loved things – earrings in the shape of golden flies and antique Russian earrings. She had a rope of pearls and was full of lovely nonsense, very old and very familiar to mankind. She knew how to be sad, feminine, capricious, proud, shallow, fickle, in love, clever in any way you like.
There are times while writing when I stop at a word and the word appears suddenly strange, an apparently simple word such as struggle, and I wonder not only about the origin of the word, if it is possible to think back at a time when the word was first used, but how the word has changed meaning over the centuries, accruing many different meanings. Such words are so one with their historically multiple etymologies that they appear, paradoxically, to be outside of time, timeless in time.
Idioms to me refer too much to the time in which they have appeared, so I don’t use idioms.
This may have to do with Nikos’ English, which is without contemporary idiom, is in a way purist for not being colloquial, and, of course, grammatically correct. I once asked him, ‘Who do you love?’ and he corrected me, ‘Whom do you love?’ And he seemed puzzled when I said that sounded pretentious, as if for him grammatical structure, as logic to thinking, is what language is essentially about.
He would never say, ‘Someone has left their book on a chair.’
Nor would he ever say, ‘Hopefully, the letter will arrive tomorrow,’ or, ‘He’s too judgmental.’
Steven Runciman does not say ‘healthy food,’ which gives to food its own awareness about its health, but, instead, ‘healthful’ food.
At a gallery opening, I saw Ossie Clark, wearing, as he always seems to wear, a tight, sleeveless jersey knitted with many colours in a jigsaw pattern. He looked at me as if wondering if I recognized him enough for him to say hello, which surprised me as I had always felt he hardly recognized me and never made an effort to say hello. I noted how his long hair was greasy, his face pale and narrow and creased. I’d heard that he’d separated from Celia and that the business, badly mismanaged, had filed for bankruptcy. I’d also heard that he was deeply into hard drugs. He appeared isolated, perhaps even ashamed to be among people who had once gathered round him but who now left him alone, the past designer of frocks that appeared to float about the thin, long-legged models like large, light, fluttering wings.
At a dinner party of a rich Greek Nikos and I were invited to, he having reluctantly accepted because I said I wanted to find out about rich Greeks, I sat next to a woman who asked me if Nikos always takes off his shoes on entering our flat, and on my saying yes, he does, she simply smiled as if knowingly, she having put Nikos into a world she, a thoroughly Anglicized Greek, was ironically aware of; and the habit of Nikos taking off his shoes and putting on slippers before entering our flat (which he never insisted I do, but which habit I took on) became, to me, not a personal habit but a habit identifying the history of a culture. How could I have ever thought of wearing in our flat shoes that I had worn in the dirty street?
Anne Graham-Bell invited us to a dinner party. When I stepped out of the Underground train, I saw Nikos waiting for me on the platform. He was laughing. He had been in the same carriage as I, but at a far end, and, somewhat myopic, concentrated on someone at the other end he thought sexy – me!
Through Sonia, who told us how to answer a formal invitation, we were invited by the French ambassador to meet the writer Nathalie Sarraute, Sonia herself not attending. I arrived before Nikos, and found Marina Warner was seated next to me, and, as happens when I meet someone I know from a different context, I wondered through what connections she was there. I know her more from her novels than I know her in person, so I see her within the context of her novel The Skating Party rather than her lived life, always a strange way to see writers. As we were in the French Embassy, it seemed right that we should speak in French. The ambassador’s wife came to me to ask when Mr. Stangos was to arrive, and I noted an empty place at the ambassador’s table. I apologized, something must have delayed him, but, please, the luncheon must not be delayed. Across the table was, I recognized, Lee Miller, whom I’d seen at a drinks party at Suzi and John’s flat. I kept hoping Nikos would arrive, but the chair at the ambassador’s table remained empty. The dessert was a high, tapering configuration of profiteroles down which caramel dripped. After the meal, Marina introduced me to Lee Miller, who spoke to me as if she had always known me, which I imagined she did with everyone she met. She said she had to go to a department store to buy a clothes hamper, and would I like to go with her? I said I would, and thought it strange, very, to be in a department store with Lee Miller looking for a clothes hamper, she who had been photographed in Hitler’s bathtub after the war, who had, a fashion photographer, gone into the dea
th camps and taken photographs of the horrors, after which she stopped taking fashion photographs of bottles of perfume, who had been in the film Le Sang d’un poète by Jean Cocteau, had been painted by Picasso, had been married to Man Ray and an inspiration to the Surrealists, and was now married to Roland Penrose and devoted to cooking. At home, I rang Nikos, who said he really hadn’t wanted to go to the luncheon, and would write a note of apology. I thought, well, we won’t be invited again. I hadn’t met Nathalie Sarraute, whose nouveaux romans Nikos admires more than I, for he is always keen on what he calls ‘innovation,’ and he will exclaim ‘how innovative!’ about books, paintings, music, his exclamation not restricted to the contemporary, for he’ll become even more excited in his appreciation of how ‘innovative’ Bach’s music is.
For a week or so I’ve had the flu.
Nikos said he likes me to be a little ill so he can take care of me. But when he is ill, he doesn’t want any care; he becomes impatient, and won’t even stay in bed.
Stephen came to visit with a Picasso etching from the Vollard Suite, a monstrous, stony Minotaur raping (?) a delicately outlined woman, which he said he wanted me to have. As I have nothing, he said laughing, I should have this in case Nikos threw me out. He had taken it from the wall in his study where I had seen it in Loudoun Road.
Nikos said, ‘But what if Natasha asks where it is? She’d be furious to find out we have it here, and rightly so.’
‘She won’t find out,’ Stephen said. ‘She knows I’m always turning in pictures to sell them to buy others. But there’ll be hell to pay if she does find out. If she ever comes here, make sure you hide it.’
I thought, he obviously likes the possibility of her finding out.
I wonder if Stephen would become bored with us if we really became friendly with Natasha.
