by David Plante
Now I will go to sleep.
When I got up, Stephen was having breakfast and I joined him. Natasha and Nikos were out in the garden, working. The mistral was still blowing, and from the breakfast table we could see them, through the French doors, their clothes and hair blown out.
I said to Stephen, ‘Those boys we saw yesterday in the Ardèche River, they were Rhine Maidens.’
I had thought this would be our joke, which we might share with Nikos later, but keep from Natasha because she would not find it amusing, but Stephen, excited, said, ‘That’s wonderful!’ and he immediately got up and went out into the garden and called, ‘Natasha! Natasha!’ She and Nikos stopped working, and ‘Yes?’ she called back. Stephen shouted in the wind, ‘Those boys we saw in the river, David says they were the Rhine Maidens.’ I saw Natasha laugh and say something to Nikos, who smiled, and I thought that the spell the boys had cast on us all was broken.
Natasha, Nikos and I walked through the valley of the Alpilles to pick blackberries. The mistral was blowing harder than ever, and sometimes pushed us forward, sometimes drew us backward. Tree branches and cane thrashed. The light was bright and pure, as were the smells: smells of lavender and rosemary and mint and thyme and fennel and juniper, bits of which we picked off as we walked along. The smell of lavender or rosemary or any other wild herb seemed, as I breathed it in deeply, to hollow out, as penetratingly as the smell of ammonia, a great dark space behind my sinuses and the space filled up with the scent, so pungent that I’m able to recall the smell long after having dropped the twig of lavender or rosemary.
It was very curious, the three of us walking along. I kept wondering what our relationships were, Natasha’s to Nikos and me, ours to her, and, even, Nikos’ to me and mine to him. What, I wondered, did we really think of one another as we walked along together? Nikos picked almonds and broke them open on the paved road with a stone, Natasha picked thyme, I found a snake’s shed skin tangled in grass – little events which themselves seemed very strange to me.
When, later, I was alone with Natasha in the house, both Stephen and Nikos in their rooms reading, she told me about her childhood: that she was an illegitimate baby, her mother an actress, her father a Welshman, brought up by a working-class foster mother, finally taken back by her own mother.
After dinner, which Nikos prepared, the four of us worked in the garden. The moonlight was bright, the stars dense, the Milky Way showing like a thin, luminous mist, the mistral still blowing strong, and the rocky hills of the Alpilles beyond the garden looked to be wild and to be moving. We transplanted irises. Stephen would simply dig a hole and stuff in all the irises he could fit in, then stomp the earth in around them. His white hair flying about, he would then ask, ‘Is that all right, Natasha?’ She would answer, ‘It’s perfect, darling,’ and when he’d go for more irises she’d smile at Nikos and me.
I think he was worried about having Nikos and me here before we arrived, but he has relaxed. However, he still seems particularly to want Natasha to like Nikos, because whenever Nikos does anything or even says anything, Stephen draws Natasha’s attention to it as if hoping to make her see how helpful or how intelligent he is. Natasha is always appreciative.
He has three kittens he has become very attached to. He feeds them over and over all day and keeps trying to pet them, but they run away.
London
Nikos keeps adding to the poem he showed me when we first met, ‘Pure Reason.’ I have never asked him whom the poem was initially meant for, someone he loved and someone whom I don’t want to know about, because I want that someone to be a vague presence that Nikos is filling out, perhaps, after all, with me. The additional layers consist of an investigation into what love means, and Nikos has looked into our love for each other with a critical eye, at times severe:
Disjunction has triumphed. Now each on our own, we muse about our pure craving . . . We have failed. Each of us keeps to himself.
Reading this, I’m shocked, and wonder what happened between us to make him write this.
Then, after many considerations, many of them when he is alone, the revelation comes to him: love is a category of the mind, an absolute.
Once the centre is fixed we can allow the antinomies to revolve around it, to resolve themselves as if by magic, and fabulous marriages will take place among them.
Conversations with Frank (his heavy-framed spectacles too big for his pale face, his longish hair in wisps, preoccupied with keeping his pipe lit) seem to be incidental. It is as if he, well known among his friends to be self-deprecating, wants at best to keep his comments light-spirited, yet he touches lightly on some of the major issues of literature. He never in these conversations refers to any of his books, but it is in his books that the issues, these too seemingly incidental to him, are made so vital. And the one that strikes me personally as being most vital is The Genesis of Secrecy.
If there is one belief (however the facts resist it) that unites us all . . . it is the conviction that somehow, in some occult fashion, if we could only detect it, everything will be found to hang together.
( What a Jamesian expression that: to hang together!)
How might this be done? By halting the movement of the senses, or by trying to – which I take to mean: by fixing on what Frank calls an immediate interpretation to focus in the blur of sense for one central sense about which the infinite chaos of objects will come together as a temporary whole.
. . . the shrine of the single sense.
(This is Wallace Stevens.)
I remark: Frank does not use the word idea, but ‘sense’.
The very last sentence of the final chapter ends: ‘our sole hope and pleasure is in the perception of a momentary radiance, before the door of disappointment is finally shut on us.’
As for what the book reveals about Frank himself – he never assumes it would be possible for him to be a ‘spiritual insider,’ and yet remaining a ‘carnal outsider’ doesn’t give him a ‘hold’ to see ‘inside.’ He is a ‘carnal’ working-class man from the Island of Man, an outsider to the rest of the world, but being such a ‘carnal outsider’ doesn’t give him an identity enough, a ‘hold’ enough, to reject the identity in order to free himself and find his way among the ‘spiritual insiders,’ where, however, he wants to be. So he is neither outside nor inside.
Anita told me that Frank deliberately changed his Manx accent into what he thinks a more conventional English accent. She also told me that, having been rejected by Oxbridge and so educated at Leeds instead, he always felt like an outsider, but an outsider who wanted to get inside, which outside was, for him the one most open to him, that of literature. As much of a ‘spiritual insider’ as Frank is, and he is considered to be very much one, he himself does not consider himself to be one, not really. He does not feel entitled.
What does Frank want?
Frank is in ‘love’ with literature, in which he finds his greatest fulfillment, but the moments of fulfillment are only held for as long as the radiance lasts against the overwhelming threat of the unfulfilled. The spiritual is too inconstant to be anything but a disappointment.
I honestly feel there is a lot of Frank as a person in this. I remember what the moral philosopher Bernard Williams once said about him: that Frank can’t bear too much feeling, and shuts the door on it when it threatens him.
Only once did he tell me he had an experience that had a ‘sense of meaning’: he was in Japan, and was asked to place a branch on an altar, and as he did that ‘sense’ came to him. He told me this simply, and then went silent. He remembered the ‘sense,’ was even able to refer to the ‘sense,’ but it passed.
In his dedication to Nikos and me on the flyleaf of The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank wrote, ‘Keep the carnal outsiders outside . . .’
Alone, Suzi continues to give drinks parties, and Francis, faithful to Suzi, comes. After one party, when most people had gone, Francis said to me, ‘Let’s go to dinner – you, Nikos, Suzi, me, we’ll go to dinn
er.’
At the restaurant, Greek, Nikos said, reading the menu, ‘They have grilled gray mullet. That’s what I’ll have.’ Francis said, ‘That’s what I’ll have, too. Grilled gray mullet. I love that. I’m a simple person. Aren’t I a simple person? Aren’t I, Suzi?’ Suzi smiled and reached across the table and squeezed one of his hands. Nikos asked him, ‘What do you mean by simple?’ He answered, ‘I’m direct and I’m obvious. I’ve had an appalling life. I’ve had a very unhappy life. I don’t think about it. There it is. That’s simple.’
Suzi asked him, ‘You’ve never been happy?’
‘Once or twice,’ he said. ‘When I was young, in moments of ecstasy. Now I’m too old. I don’t think about it, about happiness. There are many things I don’t think about. I’ve done horrible things in my life, horrible. There they are. I don’t think about them. I’m too old.’
His dyed hair, with, it appeared, a hair cream to make it smooth and keep it starkly in place, was combed against his head, with some stiff strands carefully arranged down over his forehead. He said, ‘I’ve had a horrible life, a tragic life.’ He picked up a small pickle from a white plate and ate it, picked up another one, a large one, ate it, picked up another one, a large one, ate it, picked up another and put it into his mouth, and as if the taste had only now occurred to him, he said, ‘These pickles are horribly sour.’ He didn’t laugh but everyone else did. He said, ‘I’m a very simple person who’s had an appalling and tragic life.’
Nikos said, ‘What’s been so appalling? You’ve never been seriously ill, you’ve never had to worry about money.’
Francis said, ‘You’re right. I was pretty when I was young. Old men liked me. One old man, an old Greek – I even remember his name – fell in love with me, gave me money, and I used the money to paint. I lived off old men. I always had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to be exceptional. I wanted to do exceptional work. I just took money. I was an old whore. I still am. An older whore. A lucky old whore.’
A strange sensation passed through me. I sat back and tears came into my eyes.
A waiter put a gray mullet in front of Francis and he asked, ‘What’s this?’ ‘Your grilled gray mullet,’ Nikos said. ‘I hate this,’ Francis said, ‘I can’t eat it. I couldn’t get a forkful down me (sic) throat.’
Nikos asked Francis, ‘What makes your life tragic?’
‘I’ve been in love, and love is tragic.’
‘Love can make you happy,’ Nikos said.
Francis said, ‘I was in love with someone who killed himself. That made our love tragic.’
When I told Sonia about the deaths of my parents, she didn’t react, just stared at me, her eyes, within puffy lids, hard. Then, after a moment she said, still staring hard at me with bloodshot eyes, ‘Now there is nothing between you and eternity.’
In what way am I essentially American? Though I have dismissed Henry James as a fairytale European, I go back to him as an American, and I go back to him for what I believe an essentially American awareness that has survived in me for the simple fact that I was born and brought up in America –
I counted the use of the word ‘everything’ over eighty-five times in The Wings of the Dove, which I have recently reread after many years. For example:
‘I want everything at once and together –’
‘There was more to come – everything.’
‘I want the whole thing.’
‘It gains you time.’ / ‘Time for what?’ / ‘For everything.’
‘It makes everything fit.’ / ‘Everything.’ / The word, for a little, held the air, and he might have seemed the while to be looking, by no means dimly now, at all it stood for.
‘But a denial, when it comes to that – confound the whole thing, don’t you see! – of exactly what?’ It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but she in fact enlarged. ‘Of everything.’ Everything had never yet seemed to him so incalculably much. ‘Oh!’ he simply moaned into the gloom.
‘He has done everything.’ / ‘Oh, everything! Everything’s nothing.’
The word, repeated so often and in so many contexts, appeared to me to attract the whole novel into itself. Was ‘everything’ money? Was ‘everything’ life? Was ‘everything’ a horror? Was ‘everything’ a great and final fulfillment? What was ‘everything’ in itself ? (As Ezra Pound wrote: ‘Henry James was aware of the spherical form of the planet . . .’) The awareness of ‘everything,’ the possession to connect ‘everything’ into a whole, the need to have everything – isn’t that essentially American, and isn’t my essential, impulsive American awareness to sustain that ‘everything’ within one spherical globe?
When I recall myself, a college student in Boston, walking around Louisburg Square, the Hub of the Hub of the Yankee Transcendentalist Universe, I, in my Ivy League suit, desiring ‘everything . . .’
In London, this desire is mitigated by the particulars that life here is essentially made of, particulars so particular they belie the desire for ‘everything,’ which is, of course, a spiritual desire, but in London to be kept to myself, my secret.
Nikos, from whom I have no secrets, is aware in me of that desire.
Suzi gave a dinner party for Sonia, Francis, Nikos and me. Francis didn’t drink, and put his hand over his glass whenever Suzi was about to pour wine into it. He didn’t say much all evening. He looked sad – polite and attentive but making an effort to be so.
We talked about people becoming dependent on others, and Francis said, ‘George became dependent on me. If he hadn’t, he’d probably be alive now. He was a thief, an inept thief, always getting caught, when I met him. He’d probably be in jail and alive now if he hadn’t met me. But he did, he drank himself into a mad state and, because of me, killed himself.’
Sonia said, aggressively, ‘He didn’t kill himself. I read to you the medical report, in English. His death was accidental.’
‘He did,’ Francis said, ‘he killed himself.’
I thought of Frank Kermode when I read the following:
We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things ‘unadapted’ to each other in this world than there are things ‘adapted’; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills our encyclopedias. Yet all the while between and around them is an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
When I quoted this to Anita, she sat back, as though a revelation had occurred to her, and she told me that when Frank sets himself to read a novelist it is to discern the untraced lines, the connections that the text makes but that haven’t yet been made by another critic. He uses the word ‘occult’ a lot, trying to trace lines that form a pattern in the details. It is natural that Frank should turn to the Bible, that most occult of texts. What he longs to do is write a book about religious heresies.
Interesting, Anita’s telling me that Frank has lost interest in the poetry of W. B. Yeats for being too obvious, and has instead taken on the more occult poetry of Wallace Stevens.
The title, The Genesis of Secrecy, was Anita’s idea.
It is odd to go to her for an elucidation of Frank’s work, which he would never elucidate.
Often, when we have dinner parties for friends, we play the game of Exquisite Corpses – that is, a sheet of paper is folded into four or five parts, one person draws a head and folds it over so the next person can’t see it and this person draws the shoulders and torso, which is folded over so as not to be seen, and the next person draws the thighs and genitals, and on and on until a whole figure is drawn, which is then revealed when
the folded sheet of paper is unfolded. There have been evenings when we were howling with laughter.
So far, these are the friends who have played the game with Nikos and me:
Mark Lancaster, Andrew Lord, Keith Milow, Stephen Spender, Suzi Gablik, Stephen Buckley, James Joll, Tony Stokes, Teresa Gleadowe, Stephenie Bergman, Gregory Evans, David Hockney, Barry Flanagan, Sue Flanagan, Jan Hashey, Anne Wollheim, John Golding, Frank Kermode, Keith Walker, Michael Craig-Martin, Antoinette Godkin, Maggi Hambling.
About Patrick Kinross – he goes to North Africa for paid sex with young men (which Nikos seems to accept as what is done between older and younger men, and he laughs), and, after a recent tryst there, in London became afflicted with a disease that can’t be diagnosed that wastes him away, so he is becoming thinner and thinner.
I suddenly recall Patrick opening the door to Nikos and me and, as I saw, noting that I had a small wound on my forehead, and this made him smile in a way I thought knowing, as if the small wound, which was caused by my bumping my forehead against a low lintel, signaled to him an activity, shared by Nikos, which he indulged in and that involved wounding.
From time to time, hinted at and then withdrawn, a suggestion opens up of a world Nikos and I know nothing about, that of sado-masochism, a world that seems as closed as the world of homosexuality once was, but, as once happened among homosexuals, hinted at and the hint withdrawn if the hint is not taken up. My impression is that the world includes all sexes, as if sado-masochism is a sex in itself, in which wounding and being wounded identifies the sex. I find myself wondering about so-and-so or so-and-so if he or she is of that sex, which keeps itself closed, but the members of which may be among my close friends. And I find myself not expressing horror at one person inflicting pain on another for pleasure, in case someone who is a friend is far from horrified – as, I suppose, a heterosexual may hold back from saying anything against homosexuality which he suspects in a friend he loves.
