Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  This comes to me: that we are not only formed by our history but by our geography, and both history and geography together.

  And this comes to me: the objects of my family house which I grew up with, objects that predated my birth, objects that had their presence in the house before I was present, objects that had, and in my memory have, more presence than I did, and do, objects that make me aware of how little actual presence I had, and have.

  Sonia is not rich, but she often gives to friends who can’t afford them gifts to help those friends live their lives as well as possible. When her friend the writer and very much bon vivant Cyril Connolly died, he left huge debts, and Sonia helped with letters of appeal to all her friends to raise money for his widow, Deirdre.

  On the verso, Sonia wrote:

  I’ve been so involved in this horror that I haven’t been able to ring you. The point is do you know anyone I could usefully send this to??? Any ideas would be marvellous. Please suggest as it is desperate. Love, S.

  Nikos did send some suggestions, and, too, some money.

  To the rumor after that Deirdre Connolly was using some of the money to buy champagne Sonia replied, in a rage, ‘Of course she bought champagne.’

  Some of Frank’s anecdotes he loves to tell:

  At a reception, Oscar Browning, the Cambridge don, accosted Tennyson and announced, ‘I’m Browning.’ Tennyson peered myopically at him for a while, then said, ‘No, you’re not,’ and walked away.

  Maupassant, on his only visit to London, was entertained by Henry James. According to an anecdote by Oscar Wilde, Maupassant, dining in a restaurant with James, pointed to a woman sitting at a nearby table and asked Henry to go over and bring her back to their table. James carefully explained that in England there was the matter of being properly introduced. Maupassant tried again. Pointing to another woman, he said, ‘Surely you know her at least? Ah, if I could only speak English!’ When James had refused, with full explanation, for about the fifth time, Maupassant was said to have remarked irritably, ‘Really, you don’t seem to know anyone in London.’

  When Picasso came to London for the first time, he was invited by Roland Penrose, who, unable to meet him at Victoria Station, sent Victor Pasmore. Pasmore could not speak French, and Picasso no English. In Pasmore’s car, they were silent for a long while, then Pasmore said, ‘Je suis peintre.’ Picasso paused, then said, ‘Moi aussi.’

  Frank laughs – his laugh always subdued – when asking the riddle of the weasel and the stoat: how can you tell the difference between a weasel and a stoat? The one is weasily distinguished and the other is stoatally different.

  In the past, the classics scholar Peter Levi would sometimes stay with Stephen and Natasha, then Stephen found that Levi, having the Oxbridge power, voted against him getting the Oxford Chair of Poetry, which he may have rightly believed Stephen didn’t deserve, but, I think, he shouldn’t have also presumed on a friendship with Stephen. A moral judgment which I shouldn’t make, but this turned me against him. He writes poetry himself – Pancakes for the Queen of Babylon – copies of which he once gave to both Nikos and me, perhaps hoping that Nikos would publish other poems, but Nikos did not, which he told Stephen. Peter is good-looking, quick, decisive, knowing, always distracted so that I feel he is attentive to me only in passing, as when he said to me, ‘You are too pretty to be taken seriously,’ then hurried away, as he always seems to be in a hurry. A Jew who converted to the Roman Church and became a Jesuit, he left the Order to marry the widow of Cyril Connolly, Deirdre.

  Which does make me wonder what is, or was, done with the money Sonia raised to pay off Cyril Connolly’s debts, apart from his widow buying champagne. Nikos and I contributed some small amount. I think Anne and Rodrigo contributed substantially.

  Nikos and I were in a taxi with Suzi and John, and as the taxi went round Hyde Park Corner, John said, forming the words with his entire mouth to stop from stuttering, his eyes bright in his red face, ‘A man shouldn’t live with a woman for more than seven years.’ I asked, ‘How long have you been with Suzi?’ John did stutter when he answered, ‘Seven years.’ Suzi smiled a wide smile, clearly thinking that John was talking in a general way that didn’t apply to her. But she rang the next morning to say that John is leaving her to move to New York, where he will be art critic on the New York Times. Suzi depends on the I CHING for advice as to what to do now.

  She makes collages made of images she cuts out of glossy picture books of jungles or rocky bare landscapes or animals or the natives of primitive tribes, dense collages that conjure up an alternate, magical world.

  She so believes that art has lost the essential enchantment art must have, and talks of the re-enchantment of art.

  Suzi lived for a while with René Magritte and his wife, during which time she gathered together her book on Magritte, the best book, John Golding has said, on the artist. Magritte gave Suzi a drawing of flying nib pens pursuing a man running down a street and Suzi gave the drawing to Jasper Johns in exchange for a small encaustic of the American flag in which Suzi’s picture is imbedded. Suzi crosses many borders in the art world and at the crossroads is making a life of her own.

  Lockerbie, Scotland

  Nikos commissioned Steven Runciman to write a book on Mistra, the Byzantine capital in the Peloponnese. Steven asked him to stay in his castle in Scotland, Elshieshields, and I was asked along. We arrived in darkness at the Lockerbie train station, from which a driver took us into deeper darkness to what Steven called his house. There had been no restaurant car on the train, so we arrived hungry, and Steven served up plates of ham and salad in his study. ‘I’m not going to give you water in your malt whiskey,’ he said.

  He showed us to our rooms, mine hung with paintings by his mid-eighteenth-century Scottish relatives John and Alexander Runciman – among those in the family who had ‘gone in recklessly for the arts.’

  There was no question that Nikos and I would share a room.

  After breakfast – prepared by Steven, who walked up and down alongside the sideboard on which were a silver tea pot, a silver coffee pot, a silver water jug, silver toast-racks, and porcelain egg-coddlers – Nikos and I took a walk on flat country roads. We were late for elevenses. Steven had already had his coffee. He looked at us sternly, but he made another pot for us, waited for us to drink, then left us to go to his study.

  Nikos joined me in my room, where we tried to read, but the cold was numbing, and not relieved by the electric fire on the hearth. From the windows was a view of high Scottish firs, in which rooks cawed: ‘Car-car, car-car.’

  Unable to bear the cold, Nikos said he would go out to look for a warm room, and returned after fifteen minutes, laughing. He had found a room with a fire, but shortly after he sat down before it, a door opened at the back of the room, a door made up of the spines of books to blend in with the shelves of books on either side, and Steven entered and said, seeing Nikos, ‘You’re not allowed in here.’ This amused Nikos.

  We were on time for luncheon. The paper napkins were printed with poems by Burns. Steven had prepared curried chicken livers. I salted the liver before tasting, and Steven leaned over the table towards me, as he does when he has something that you take to be personally addressed to you, and said, ‘I don’t invite guests who salt my food before tasting it to come back.’

  ‘I’ll try to be better behaved,’ I said.

  ‘It will help to know you’ll try,’ he said.

  On the wood-panelled dining-room walls were large paintings by John and Alexander Runciman.

  Nikos and Steven discussed the lack of interest that the West had had in Byzantium until, really, Steven inspired attention to those 1000 years of civilization.

  Nikos suggested that the Phanariots kept Byzantium alive.

  I had to ask who the Phanariots were.

  ‘Are,’ Nikos said.

  Steven explained –

  They are the Greeks of Constantinople who remained after the city fell to the Turks in 1453.
By the sixteenth century, they were rich and influential, and even more so in the seventeenth century. They were called Phanariots because they lived in the Phanar, the Greek quarter of the city, a self-contained group, intermarrying and inter-quarrelling. The Ottoman Sultans appointed them Princes of Walachia and Moldavia in Romania, and from there they dominated Greek civilization from the late seventeenth century through the eighteenth, and maintained the great Hellenic-Byzantine tradition. They had printing presses in Bucharest, discouraged in Constantinople.

  Smiling, Nikos listened as Steven went on to me, ‘They maintained the now defunct Big Idea to resuscitate Byzantium.’

  ‘Resuscitate?’ Nikos asked, offended.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Steven apologized to him. ‘Their Big Idea was to get hold of the Ottoman Empire from within. The Phanariots existed as the aristocracy of Romania until the last world war.’

  Nikos said, ‘They’ve never been very welcome in Greece itself.’

  ‘Because they were thought to be too grand and too pleased with themselves.’

  ‘Koraïs disapproved of them.’

  ‘That monster Koraïs.’

  And so more explanation for me:

  Adamantios Koraïs, a European Greek of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, was one of the instigators of Greek liberation from the Turks. ‘Doing it safely from a flat in Paris,’ Steven said. ‘He was totally Westernized, and had hardly ever been to Greece. He visited once or twice Chios, where his family were from. Like all Europeans of the time, he saw Greece purely in classical terms. After all, the Turks had occupied what we now know as Greece for four hundred years. The Greeks there hadn’t thought of classical times at least for that long. It was the Orthodox Church that kept everyone aware of Byzantium during the Ottoman Occupation, because the Church was functioning all during that time. Koraïs disapproved of Byzantium, disapproved of the Orthodox Church, disapproved of Greeks of his day. He disapproved because of Gibbon. Gibbon thought the whole of Byzantium decadent. And Gibbon was the god of Koraïs. He thought all Greeks should be like the classical heroes. I can’t think why people praise him, except that he did leave a very good library on Chios. About the only good thing he did. He was basically responsible for Katharevousa. Just think of all that poetry written in a language now disclaimed. It’s the great disaster of Greek literature written in Katharevousa.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Nikos said.

  ‘Of course, Koraïs was European, and no European of that time thought of Greece as anything but classical. Think of Byron.’

  ‘And Greeks welcomed the myth of ancient Greece imposed on them by Europe. They wanted to be European too.’

  ‘Would you say that is still true?’

  ‘Greece wanting to be European? Yes.’

  ‘They repudiated Byzantium, these Europeanized Greeks. Koraïs disapproved, and they, ashamed, disapproved.’

  ‘But so much of the recent – well, recent in your lifetime – revival of Byzantium is due to you.’

  ‘I hope I played a little part. I think I made Greeks a little more aware of Byzantium than they had been. When I first started, and even after the last world war, when I was living in Greece, it was thought somewhat odd to be interested in Byzantium. It was certainly not fashionable.’

  ‘It became fashionable among Greeks because a foreigner took it up,’ Nikos said.

  ‘How the Greeks explained the survival of Hellenism when they took out pretty much all of the Byzantine centuries, and took out entirely the Turkish domination – well, how they did it was not historical. My book The Great Church in Captivity was one of the first to deal with Greece under the Turks – a very necessary link in Greek history.’

  Nikos simply nodded, as he was not going to disagree with Steven.

  ‘In some ways I regret the passing of the Ottoman Empire,’ Steven said.

  I asked, ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I’m the Grand Orator of the Great Church of Constantinople, which in Ottoman times would have entitled me to be a prince. Alas, the Ottoman Empire has fallen.’

  Steven stuck out his lower lip and made a face as of someone looking down at another from a great height.

  Maussane

  We are in Provence staying with Stephen and Natasha.

  It was six years ago that I was last here, alone with Stephen, which I found out later upset Natasha very much. Now she asks me if I saw this or that when I was here.

  She has been tremendously hospitable. Today she drove Stephen, Nikos and me up to the Ardèche Gorge, a very long way, for a picnic, prepared and packed by Natasha in a basket with plates and knives and forks and napkins. We’ve just got back, and it’s late, but while Nikos sleeps I, in the bed next to him in the guest room, want to describe the day, which was so much like a dream I want to get it down before, like a dream, it fades.

  The mistral is blowing outside.

  We stopped at various belvederes on the way for views of the gorge, the river flat and black and shining far below between the steep white rocky banks. From one belvedere, Nikos spotted some bathers far below in the river, and we decided to go down to the river bank to have our picnic lunch. We walked down and down a path, through woods still filled at this late date with purple wild flowers, Stephen’s untied shoelaces getting tangled in the branches of small bushes, then down rocky places, all of us laughing, until we came to the broad flat stone bank of the river, like a number of smooth stone platforms that seemed to float in strata one above the other by the side of the river, green and flowing over and around boulders out in the current. Some people were swimming in the river, some canoeing. I put down the basket I was carrying and Nikos the rug he was carrying, and the four of us went to look out at the river, and just then there swam toward us three youths, their bodies green in the green water, who rose up onto a stone platform below us, naked. Their hair was long and wet. Touching their genitals, they stood in the sunlight to dry themselves, then sat on the rock.

  Natasha turned away to go back to the picnic basket and unpack it, and I quickly followed her to help. Nikos came, too, to spread out the rug. Only Stephen remained where he’d been, and sat on the edge of the platform and took out his spectacles from his shirt pocket and put them on to stare down at the boys.

  Natasha called Stephen to eat, and all the while we had the picnic the boys remained on the rock below us. Natasha and Nikos and I pretended that they were not there and didn’t look toward them, but Stephen kept his spectacles on and didn’t stop looking at them, smiling. I heard them speaking German, and I thought that they had put a spell over us and were tempting us to acknowledge them, and, in acknowledging them, something would happen to us that Natasha and Nikos and I must not acknowledge. And yet I was, as much as I pretended not to be, always aware of them while Natasha and Nikos and I talked and laughed about anything but where we were. I didn’t even focus on them closely enough to find out if they were in fact attractive, but just my awareness of them naked and near us gave to that river, to the rocks, the trees, the entire gorge a sense of sexual potency that was all the more potent to me for being unfocused. Stephen alone acknowledged them. The spell they cast lasted long after we had finished our picnic and walked back up the path to the car.

  I told myself I knew what Nikos’ and my reactions to the boys were, and there was no doubt about Stephen’s reaction, but I had no idea what Natasha’s reaction was.

  She drove very fast, often all of us in silence, but she stopped again at different spots so we could get out to see the gorge, which had now become enchanted.

  Then Natasha drove through beautiful countryside, past beautiful little villages on the sides of green hills, to Orgnac, where we stopped to see the grotto. Natasha stayed in the car to rest while Stephen, Nikos and I went down, giggling and now able to talk freely about the German boys, into an enormous space of stalactites and stalagmites, the air damp and feverishly cold. We were with a group, and before the tour the group’s photograph was taken, then we went down
deeper and deeper, down long flights of cement stairs, into a surreal world. Stephen and Nikos, however, were bored, and Stephen said, ‘I always feel that what I imagine these places to be like is always better than what they in fact are.’ Perhaps he was right, but it was strange enough that when we came out into the sunlight and flat ground I had the strong feeling that I had just woken up from a dream. Stephen had bought and given to us a copy of the group photograph.

  And then I felt I went right back into the dream as Natasha drove us on, through Barjac, through small towns like Tharaux and Rochegude, and by the time we got to Uzès it was dark. We had dinner there, and on the way back to Maussane we saw, the moon shining through one arch, the Pont du Gard, seeming to float like a dream image in vast blackness. We saw the castle at Beaucaire, the medieval dungeon at Tarascon, the Roman triumphal arch and mausoleum at Saint Rémy.