Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  All that is left in my memory of a drinks party, as if I have reduced it in my memory to what most struck me in it, was seeing Christopher Isherwood among a number of people, and as I went towards him he, I thought, came towards me, but he didn’t stop, he went on past me, all the while humming, his eyes staring out from beneath hanging lids and long drooping eyebrows.

  Providence, Rhode Island

  I am staying with my parents in my old parish home. While they are asleep, I look through the desk in the living room, through the pigeonholes where papers are kept, among them envelopes with clippings from the first haircuts of all my parents’ seven sons, each envelope with the names of my brothers and me written on it by my mother in pencil. I also found many bits of paper on which my mother wrote in pencil sayings and fragments of poems that struck her while reading magazines and newspapers. This most struck me:

  The realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.

  The winter afternoon is waning.

  In London, I am constantly threatened by American darkness, which at moments comes over me portentously – comes over me, I feel, from outside, as if the vastest generalizations in America do exist outside, and the most vast is the darkness of ‘everything’ failing, of ‘everything’ just about to give way to ‘nothing,’ of ‘everything’ coming to an end. How dark American literature is, how fatalistic that America will fail, and the ‘everything’ promised will become nothing, that the end is always nigh.

  When back in London, I will see through the surrounding large dark globe of America, see through it to the particulars of the London world about me, but there are those unaccountable moments when the globe becomes opaque and closes in on me, with both a sense of threat of its portent and a sense of the sublimity of its portent. The English live without it, and it is a relief to me to be among them; but, lacking that fatalistic, sublime dark, the English to me lack – what? – the spiritual, lack souls.

  A difference between America and Britain: in New York, I would see people carrying placards warning against Armageddon, and in London I sometimes see a small man walking up and down Oxford Street carrying a placard warning the world against SITTING.

  The constant impending threat in America of failing the written Constitution.

  In Great Britain, no written constitution.

  London

  When I met the Briks in Paris, I wondered how they, Soviets, were able to visit Paris, as I thought Soviets were not given exit visas easily.

  Recently, I’ve read that Osip Brik worked for Cheka. Boris Pasternak, who often visited the Briks, said he was terrified by Lili telling him to wait on dinner because Osja had not yet come back from the Cheka. Did he wear the long black leather overcoats and black leather cap? Did he participate in interrogations, in torture, in condemnations to death he knew were falsified? Did he believe that terror was the best way to govern?

  And I think: there I was, in Paris, invited to dinner by the de Rothschilds, where I sat at the same table as Osip Brik, and even had my grand chair exchanged for his lesser chair in deference to him. Was it known that he worked for Cheka? Of course it was known, if not, as I believe, by Stephen, by the de Rothschilds.

  In the same way that it is unbearable to be with a person who has been tattooed on entering a death camp and yet survived because her experience, as that of Katia Meneghello, is unbearable to any sane imagination, it is unbearable that I sat with a member of Cheka, because I cannot sanely imagine that Osip Brik’s experience was the experience of a sane man. And yet, there he was, a man who seemed to me rather mild, perhaps, unlike his wife, shy.

  I think this: that you have had to live through an experience, even the historical ones about which everything seems to have been exposed, to know what the experience in fact was to live through.

  I asked Nikos what he thought, and he raised his arms high and dropped them, and turned away.

  We are invited more and more by Natasha to dinner parties at Loudoun Road.

  She always has an anecdote to tell, and she tells each rounded out with all the articulation her mouth and tongue allow, often with glee in the telling. She had a career as a pianist until a double mastectomy ended it. When she played at Wigmore Hall she, at the keyboard, would from time to time look up to the apse over the stage where a Dantesque figure writes on a long, flowing scroll, the figure, Natasha thought, marking down every one of her missed notes. She laughed. When she laughs, hardly more than opening her mouth so the muscles of her cheeks rise, she also appears to be thoughtful, frowning a little, as if wondering why she is laughing.

  She laughs at Stephen’s anecdotes, méchant of him, she says, to tell, but without that slight frown and thoughtfulness, she clearly amused by him by the way her eyes shine looking at him. Somewhere in their relationship is, I think, his joking and her appreciation of his joking, however méchant he is. She may exclaim, ‘Oh, Stephen, really!’ but with delight as he laughs, delighted by his joke.

  For one dinner party, Sonia came early to help Natasha with making a coulibiac, and from the kitchen, where they both were, I heard from the dining table where I was sitting Sonia contesting something that Natasha had done to undo her, Sonia’s, work on the coulibiac. I rang Natasha the next morning to thank her, and she asked if I had noted Sonia’s contention about the coulibiac, and I said, well, yes, I had, and I felt that I was taken into Natasha’s confidence about her strained relationship with Sonia, which made me feel confident in my relationship with Natasha. Whoever was most responsible for the coulibiac, it was very good.

  Nikos did not like the way Penguin Books was going after the death of the founder, Allen Lane; he thought the emphasis was on being commercial not on upholding the standards.

  He has gone to the privately owned Thames & Hudson, whose chairman – as she insists on being called – is Eva Neurath.

  Nikos was invited to her house in Highgate for an interview before he was hired, and he came home to say they had had tea, beautifully laid among her beautiful Biedermeier furniture, on a table by her chair the poems of Heine, in German of course. She didn’t talk with him about publishing, but the late quartets of Beethoven. Nikos was hired as a director.

  At Thames & Hudson, Nikos’s first impulse was to publish all the works of Adrian Stokes in three large volumes.

  He has plans for books on David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Howard Hodgkin, Frank Auerbach . . . And he has contacted art historians to write books, among them the great expert on Cézanne, John Rewald, who is meant to be very, very difficult, but whom Nikos has charmed. Rewald has invited Nikos to stay with him in his castle in France. The castle, he told Nikos, has runnels over the main gate from which flaming oil was poured when in the Middle Ages an invading army tried to break through the closed gates; Rewald has kept them in case the self-justifying connoisseur of art Douglas Cooper ever dares to cross the drawbridge to try and enter before the doors close on him. Nikos does not like being a guest except with close friends.

  The Mother of Feminist Art History, Linda Nochlin, greets Nikos with embraces and kisses, and has introduced to him her feminist disciple art historian Tamar Garb; together they gave Nikos a white yarmulke embroidered in silver, making him an honorary Jew as well as a feminist. Nikos has said that Jews, of all the other people in the world, just may be superior to the Greeks.

  He will publish David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis Bacon.

  It is no surprise to Nikos that all the poets who were once keen to meet him when he was poetry editor at Penguin Books no longer have a vested interest. In fact, he took this as an of-course, perhaps a relief.

  Somewhere in the writing of William James – whom I read as if to remain in contact with the American spirit that is everywhere in his writing (if in his writing the spirit isn’t German!), for I am after all American – I came across an abstraction made concrete by his use of an example something like: when Peter and Paul are asleep together, Peter becomes Paul and Paul becomes Peter. I thought of Niko
s and me, for whom sleeping together is perhaps where we are most attractive to each other, and where, after a row, everything that was contentious between us is resolved. What is that attraction?

  Before we fall asleep together, he says a little prayer in Greek and makes the sign of the cross on me, and then he, as if this is his role, switches off the lamp on his side of the bed.

  Stephen and I were on the crowded pavement among people coming out of the Aldwych Theatre after the performance of a play by Shakespeare (Henry V), and a man behind him in the crowd tapped his shoulder so Stephen turned round to the man and, beside him, a short, almost diminutive man with a long grey beard to whom the man introduced Stephen. As if lost in the crowd, Stephen simply reached out a hand to shake the hand of the short, almost diminutive man with the long grey beard, then Stephen turned away. I said, ‘Stephen, that was Solzhenitsyn you shook hands with,’ and Stephen frowned. ‘Was it?’ ‘Yes.’ He frowned more, with the expression of bemusement I’ve become familiar with, as though he couldn’t quite believe that he had just shaken hands with someone who could only have existed on the world stage.

  Because he had not seen his mother in Athens in years, and because the dictatorship is weakening, Nikos did go to visit his mother. While in Athens, he saw Chester Kallman at a kafenion where Chester spends most of the day, drinking, every day, bottles of ouzo, in the company of young men. Nikos said the young men were suspicious of him for what he might be after from Chester, whom they appeared to treat with protective affection. Nikos was expected to pay the bill.

  Back from Athens, Nikos brought with him little tins – like paint tins – of gliko koutaliou, small oranges or strawberries or even rose petals preserved in a thick syrup which are meant to be eaten with a spoon, a specialty of the island of Chios. He also brought back a jar of almost solid but ductile white paste made from sugar and mastic, also from Chios, the basis of something of a ritual: a spoonful is plunged into a glass of cold water and left for a little to flavour the water, the spoonful of mastic is then licked or pulled out with one’s teeth, and the water then drunk, called ypovrihio.

  So I learn something about the past daily life of Nikos in Greece. As if nostalgic, he told me his aunt always set out on the dining-room table a starched white cloth and starched white napkins and small coffee cups and little crystal dishes with silver spoons and a crystal bowl of gliko koutaliou, all prepared for him on waking from his afternoon sleep, he to take a spoonful of gliko (strawberry, made by his mother once a year, the only time she goes into the kitchen), she then making coffee in a little pot, called a briki, over a burner, heavy rather bitter coffee to shock him awake. Perhaps it was I who felt the nostalgia, if it is possible to have nostalgia for a world never lived.

  No doubt I romanticize Nikos’ Greek life with these effects, but how can I not? And, yes, I romanticize Nikos’ history, which is the history of gliko koutaliou from Chios, mastic from Chios, which island became famous and rich for sweets and gum from mastic trees in the Middle Ages, if not earlier.

  And how much refers to the past life of his family in Constantinople? As a treat for me, he will prepare Kidonato, lamb with quince, which he says is Anatolian, or Chounkiar beyendi, lamb in a tomato sauce with a puré of aubergines made from the vegetable reduced outwardly to charcoal under a grill, the innards scooped out and squeezed and then cooked with milk and butter. And he talks of a pudding called Taouk kioktsou, chicken breasts pounded into a paste and boiled with milk and sugar. Surely, these, which may be merely picturesque to me, refer in him to a past deeper than his past, to layers and layers of civilization, if not civilizations.

  He tells me that Turkish cuisine is really Byzantine.

  And I see in his very features, which have an Oriental cast about his eyes, a past from so long past yet present in him that I imagine he in his very body dates back to a Mongol in a Byzantine Emperor’s court and a lady in waiting to the Empress.

  Separate from Nikos who was to come on his own from the publishing house, I went on my own to an opening of an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, and, entering, I saw, standing facing me and talking to others, Pauline de Rothschild. I approached her to say hello and she turned her back to me. I thought she hadn’t recognized me, or had had her attention taken away by someone behind her who had called her name and to whom she had turned. Her hair was in a long thin plait that fell between the delicate shoulderblades that jutted out through the thin black material of her dress. I went round to her side, where I spoke to people I knew to let her know, I supposed, that I privileged to be invited to the opening was able to engage familiarly with other privileged people also invited (this entirely because of Nikos, for he is invited as a publisher of books on art, and I as his partner), and, there at the side of Pauline de Rothschild, I positioned myself so that if she glanced to her side she would see me. She did glance and she turned away again. And again, I thought, if I were to retain her attention even for a second she would recognize me and engage in talk, and I would remember with her that time in Paris when she entertained Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet and Osip and Lili Brik, to relive a little an evening that had meant so much to me that I wrote it all down in my diary, amusing her with an anecdote or two. (I think I am getting rather good at telling anecdotes – never, however, as well as Natasha, who will tell one after the other in a vivid and well-rounded way, even though she, laughing, told me that a friend of hers driving with her to the South of France begged her, please, no more anecdotes.) I stepped round the group of people Pauline de Rothschild was among, now no longer talking to anyone, and I faced her, and she for a moment faced me and I nodded and she nodded, and she turned away, and I knew she did not want to engage in any way with me. Still, someone I knew standing by me asked, ‘Who is that?’ and I said, ‘The Baroness Pauline de Rothschild,’ as if I had just had an intimate conversation with her that ended with her inviting me to the Château Mouton. That she kept turning her back on me didn’t offend me, and it didn’t because I saw the scene – rather, see it now as I write about it – as literature, as Proustian literature, which surrounds the event with literary charm, for it was literature to me. Yet, why had she turned her back on me? What was there about me she didn’t like? That there are people who don’t like me does, I suppose, offend me, but, again, not much, no, not much.

  When I was in Providence, I went one afternoon to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum to look at the classical torso there that I used to go study as a teenager and, within a world so far removed from Greece that Greece was certainly not aware of, revered Greece for having meaning in all the world.

  About classical Greece, a Greek friend said, ‘Modern Greece has nothing, but nothing, to do with classical Greece.’

  Still, when Nikos props on his desk a postcard of the bronze charioteer from Delphi, standing still in his long chiton, his eyes staring far out, the horse reins a suspended tangle in his hands, I feel that the classical love of the beauty and the virtue and the honour made evident in this statue remains vitally meaningful, and, because Nikos has propped the postcard on his desk with special veneration, I feel that the statue is especially meaningful because Nikos is Greek. Nikos may be within a myth, a myth more meaningful to him than it is to me, for he is Greek, but in him the myth has to me, non-Greek, a great meaning.

  Empedocles:

  Don’t try to see love, don’t try to hear love, for love is a sphere of joy all about us, is all harmony inspiring harmony in the world, in which we do see, in which we do hear, in which all our senses are harmonious, and our deeds too.

  Frank Kermode often stays with Nikos and me when he is in London for meetings, as he is now at King’s College, Cambridge.

  He got up before Nikos and me and went down to the kitchen to make coffee. I heard a big bang, and got up and went down to see Frank, staring out of the kitchen window, coffee grounds splattered everywhere and the Italian coffee pot exploded into two. He said, ‘My father told me I would never be capable.’

&nbs
p; He suggested to me that we write together a book to be called CONNECTIONS, which would connect all the characters of recorded history to one another, but the accounts had to be first-person accounts, forming, Frank thought, a daisy chain.

  We have got this far:

  CONNECTIONS:

  King George III and Dr. Johnson Dr. Johnson and Boswell and Boswell and Rousseau and Boswell met Voltaire and Rousseau met Napoleon and Chateaubriand met Napoleon and Chateaubriand also met Louis XVI and Chateaubriand writes of meeting Washington in his memoirs and Lafayette writes of meeting Washington in his memoir and Mrs Catherine Macaulay met Washington and Washington left no account of meeting anyone . . . Napoleon met Goethe and Goethe and Beethoven met and Napoleon and Stendhal conversed outside the gates of Moscow and Goethe and Crabb Robinson met and Crabb Robinson Blake and Blake and Voltaire and Voltaire and Frederick the Great and Frederick the Great and Haydn and Frederick the Great and Casanova and Haydn and Mozart met Haydn and Beethoven and Haydn and Scarlatti and Beckford was taught the harpsichord by Mozart and Mozart and Maria Theresa met and Mozart met Fanny Burney, who met George III.

  If I were knowledgeable enough, I would write a book about connections among writers that cross the borders of nations and their national identities and languages in order to see the more international influences of writers among themselves, such as Dickens on Dostoyevsky, Ruskin on Proust, Edgar Allen Poe on Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac on Henry James, Gustave Flaubert on Franz Kafka, etc, etc, etc . . .

  Waking and rising from bed before me, Nikos opened the curtains and said, ‘Snow!’ and I saw thin English snow falling, and I lay back in bed while he, as he likes, spent the morning alone, shaving, bathing, having his coffee and breakfast. Snow continued into the waning of the winter day, and I, at my desk, felt just enough of the effects of the winter afternoon to remember heavy, snow-bound New England winter afternoons – those paradoxically stark but deep afternoons that waned both outside and inside the house, in which details I fixed on as I walked restlessly from room to room appeared to take on a vividness and even a portentousness: the open book on an armchair, the tea mug on the kitchen table, the fluted, fringed lampshade of a floor lamp. I wonder if the deep but stark winter afternoons I remembered from when I was a boy make up the dimension of my awareness, the awareness in which details do become vivid and portentous, the awareness that so fixes my concentration on the details that they become, oh, meaningful! And so, away from my native New England, in England, in France, in Italy, in Greece, even there, I fix on details as if my awareness of them remains my native awareness, that deep but stark, stark but deep winter awareness that, in fact, defies any meaning, or, perhaps, any more meaning than the meaning of a winter afternoon.