by David Plante
A tall, blond man came up to us and asked, ‘Who are you all? You all look so interesting, so glum.’ Not even Francis spoke to him. He asked Nikos and me, ‘Do you two live together?’ ‘Why do you think that?’ I asked. ‘I can tell,’ he said. A friend behind him said, ‘Come on, let’s go, they look creepy.’
We were in the club until three-thirty. Nikos and I left only when Francis said he’d leave. Bill remained with a fellow who looked like a bearded Greek priest.
Outside, Francis said, ‘Bill and I spent four days together and discovered we’re incompatible because we both like the same thing. But we’ve remained friends.’
I ran around the square trying to find a taxi, but none would stop for me though their lights were lit. Francis, who hadn’t moved, simply put up a hand and a limousine, not a taxi, stopped in front of him. A young man rolled down the window and said, ‘You look like three cold gentlemen. I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.’ Francis got in beside him, Nikos and I in the back. The driver asked, ‘Now, what have you been doing up at this hour when all honest people are in bed?’ Francis answered, with that short, shrugging laugh he has, ‘Not being honest.’ He asked the driver his name. ‘George,’ the driver said; ‘and what’s your name?’ ‘Francis.’ ‘Is that Mr. Francis?’ ‘Mr., Mrs., Miss – however you like it,’ Francis said. The driver left Nikos and me off first.
I asked R. B. Kitaj what he thinks of Francis’ painting, and he wrote me, on many postcards, his favourite form of communicating:
For me, Bacon is not a great painter like Matisse or Picasso. He is a narrower talent, and he seems to have refused to draw, but from my perspective he is the best, most original and engaging painter . . . I cherish unusual paintings and, boy oh boy, are they rare and hard to achieve! Bacon keeps doing them . . . Of course it’s all a matter of taste, so I don’t wish to argue Bacon with those who are turned off by him, including brilliant friends of mine . . . But I do think he sings the song of himself. His pictures are every bit as elegant as the high American abstraction, but he engages his urbane nihilism to one’s one neurotic unease and achieved a psychological bloody pitch which almost always holds my attention.
A conversation with David Sylvester. He wondered if Yeats, great a poet as he was, failed to be the greatest because he lacked ‘helplessness.’ Nikos said that Yeats is limited because he is, however subtle, rhetorical – his poetry is constrained by its complicated intentions.
I said I wonder if this applied to Francis’ paintings, but with an essential difference: he himself is aware of the constraint of intention and tries, with more than will power, with passion, to go beyond intention and give his work ‘helplessness.’ I wondered if Francis in fact succeeds, if there is too much intention in his attempt to give himself up to the unintentional, even by throwing paint on the canvas then to work it into a figure. Nikos smiled and said nothing, but, as he always does, David looked at me for a very long time, and after a very long time he slowly, carefully said, ‘That is very interesting,’ as if he himself had not thought, among many, of such an obvious comment about the works of Francis Bacon.
When I think of ‘helplessness’ in writing, I think of Victor Shklovsky, who started out a novel with an intention but at the end he found he had written a novel completely different from what he had intended it to be, a novel that had occurred and expanded beyond his intention; so, when he started a new novel, he gave in helplessly to whatever novel would occur, that novel expanding as if on its own intentions beyond his, and he did this by writing whatever came to him, however seemingly disconnected, taking it on faith that everything in the end would connect, but not as he had thought. The unintended is truer than what is intended, because – and this I wonder at – what can’t be helped is truer than what can be helped, what is allowed to happen is truer than what one tries to make happen, what one gives in to is truer than what one imposes oneself upon.
But what is the unintended that expands on its own, to which the writer and the artist give themselves up helplessly? What expands beyond intention? What is it that we can only ever have a ‘sense’ of, can never give a rhetorical name to? What? We can’t say, but it is in us – it strains in us, it strains with a longing in us – to want to say what it is, to release it, to see it formed out there around us into – what? – a bright globe of everything, everything, everything all together held in that one great globe, is that all I can imagine of what it is?
Paul Levy (writer on all forms of culture, including cuisine) and Penny Marcus (editor) give large parties in and outside their large stone house in Oxfordshire, parties during which the guests seem to fall in love, sometimes in the barn in the straw, or guests fall out of love, in no place in particular. Usually, the party takes place in the garden, as if in the midst of greenery diffused into the green air, where there is a site-specific rock sculpture by Barry Flanagan. And there is a long table covered with a white cloth and food and bottles, though the guests more often than not wander about, attaching and detaching, and so I attached myself to Beryl Bainbridge (novelist) and asked her if Maggie Drabble (novelist) and Michael Holroyd (biographer) – standing side by side near a brick wall against which was an espalier apple tree, he a tall man slightly stooped and she, shorter, her shoulders thrown back and her chin, as if she were at attention, held in – are a couple, to which Beryl, at first testing the elasticity of her mouth by twisting it about so her nose swerved, answered, confidentially, ‘If I tell you nothing,’ which left me to go to Maggie and Michael to ask them nothing but say how lovely to see them, they both nodding and smiling.
Maggie said, ‘Come to me for lunch, then we’ll go to Michael’s later for tea.’
In Paul and Penny’s sitting room, over the mantelpiece, is a painting of Paul by Howard Hodgkin, which does look like Paul, round and multi-coloured. During the party, he, his hands out and twiddling his fingers, goes from guest to guest, while Penny sits still.
In China, Paul, who is what is called a ‘foodie,’ that is someone who is interested in and writes about even the most exotic cuisines, went to the market where caged dogs are sold for their meat, but the cages were empty. He was told that though the Chinese eat dog, they do have pet dogs they love.
Dinner at the Glenconners’, in London from Corfu for the winter. Vidia Naipaul and his wife Pat were there.
The Naipauls have, for twelve years, lived in the gatehouse of the house Christopher’s brother Stephen inhabits in Wiltshire. They have never seen him but once, when, across a lawn, they gently waved to one another.
Stephen Tennant stays in bed all day, all winter, spring, autumn. His bed is covered with objects, mostly dolls, so he can’t move. Only in the summer does he get out of bed to go down to the west lawn to sit for an hour. He wears jewelry and make-up. And from time to time he does drawings, of flowers and French sailors.
Christopher said, ‘It is wonderful that he’s never bored.’
When he’s in London, Christopher goes to Wiltshire to see him. He spends twenty minutes by his brother’s bed, then his brother says, ‘I’m really rather tired,’ and Christopher goes down to the kitchen to have a meal with the housekeeper and her husband, whose company he loves, then he returns to London. He never spends the night; the beds are too damp. Clearly, Christopher is supporting his brother Stephen and would never pass a judgment on him, but say, ‘He’s wonderful.’
Christopher said, ‘Nothing really matters, you see. I’m not a believer, really, but I’m sure the workings of the universe are on such a grand scale that what we consider important isn’t. There is no reason to be upset by anything. I’m a very happy man.’
I asked John Golding if his being an historian in any way influenced him, or, perhaps, hindered him for the self-consciousness that history might have imposed on him, and he said, No, not at all, he was able to work in direct contact with the painting. Yet, John, in writing, say, about Malevich (in an essay contained in a book that Nikos was responsible for Thames & Hudson publishing, P
aths to the Absolute), will include an appreciation of art by Hegel that he supposes was an appreciation of art by Malevich: ‘Hegel’s view of evolution, as propounded in the 1820s, is that in which spirit detaches itself from nature and achieves total freedom, thus becoming “pure universal form . . . in which the spiritual essence attains the consciousness and feeling of itself.” It was this state of advanced spirituality that Malevich felt had at last been brought to a conclusion by himself.’ Malevich’s work became ‘frankly mystical.’ There is not a hint of irony in John’s attributing the spiritual, the mystical, to Malevich, none. But he would not, ever, attribute the same words to his own work, which, in conversation, he described as being influenced by Adrian Stokes’ view of the body, as in Adrian’s essay ‘Reflections on the Body.’ (I once told Adrian how wonderful I thought that title, which made him look at me with bemusement, for I had seen in the title a wet body on which light was reflected.) I said to John, ‘I don’t at all see the body in your paintings,’ which consist of very abstract planes of colour that, on looking for a long while at them, appear to take on dimensions, one plane receding and another plane coming forward, and he said, after a long pause, ‘Well, the spirit,’ and I pointed at him and said, ‘I’ve got you,’ and laughed, and he laughed a little, grudgingly.
There is a divide between the appreciation of art allowed by a critic, which appreciation can make use of transcendent words, and the view an artist (most of the artists of today, who seem to deny the transcendent, or at least refuse to admit it) has of his/her own work.
I think of the white-on-white paintings of Robert Ryman, about which he will only say that they are white-on-white paintings, as if to deny he has any intention in painting them than that they should consist of white-on-white paint, so that everything unintended beyond his intention is left to the art critic to admire – which admiration, however, I can only think Ryman reads with the thought, yes, yes, that’s what my work is all about, but I would never say so. At the exhibition of his work at the Tate, I thought: But he’s wrong not to admit that his paintings have transcendence, because they do have transcendence. I asked him to sign the catalogue, which he did reluctantly, as if that would be to give too much of himself away.
After I’ve been to a dinner party where I’ve heard a remarkable story – one of those stories that belies the reserve of the English – I, at my desk, write out the story with the idea of using it as the basis of fiction. I wrote out the following some time ago, long enough that I forget ( just as well) who gave the dinner party and whom (better) the story was about.
She went to Ghana where she fell in love with an African, became pregnant, came back to England, near Salisbury, went into a wood, nine months pregnant, and tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists, made a mess of it, woke up covered in blood, staggered out to a road, was picked up by a farmer who took her to hospital where her baby was born, took baby to Ghana, a boy, drowned it and gave the dead body to the father, a tribal chief who in his grief went off into the jungle, but came back to try to help his imprisoned, mad wife, swearing to a judge that the baby had died a cot death, so she, free, returned to England, her mother bought her a slum house in Brixton, where she now lives alone, and where her husband comes from Ghana once a year to visit her.
Coming across this, I thought, but there is no way I can turn it into fiction, and put it into my diary as a story in the history, not only of this woman, but of Great Britain – of colonial Great Britain, about which I know so little, my ignorance very much a gap in my ever becoming British.
I think of John Osborne’s play at the Royal Court Theatre, West of Suez, and a scene in which all the actors sit on canvas lawn chairs in a circle and announce where each was born, not one in Great Britain, and I felt a circle of loneliness among them, all of them displaced, dissatisfied, even defeated, and yet nostalgic for a lost world. What I don’t understand is the residue of colonial times, in which, it seems to me, the above tragedy occurred, as if the nostalgic were deep in the post-colonial conscience, but not the tragic. For all that I recall, the above story might have been recounted with irony, a British affectation I often find difficult to appreciate when I hear someone British dealing with tragedy, and which Nikos disdains. I remember the story above was told with amusement, and, yes, it was told by someone of the upper classes, among whom I can hear the dictum: we do not take ourselves seriously.
Harold Acton rang. He had got, he said, our number from Eva Neurath, whom he sees in Florence. Nikos is not interested, but indulges my interest – my fascination! I invited him to supper. How could I not be fascinated by Acton for the worlds he is connected to? Nikos suggested we invite Howard Hodgkin. Acton arrived in a three-piece grey suit, elegant, and he was all elegant declamations about our flat, our food, ourselves, with something of a Chinese elegance. He and Howard had more connections to make than Nikos and I with him, for Howard is well connected. In our flat, I saw, as if visible about Acton, his villa and gardens, and what amused me was his complaining about the responsibilities of the villa and garden. ‘Oh, it is a prison, a prison. I hardly dare leave it for what may happen while I’m away, the staff not to be trusted, no, not to be trusted. And how can I afford to keep the staff ?’ He made elegant gestures with his hands and said, ‘There should be a charity for destitute millionaires,’ and smiled. After he left, Nikos asked, ‘Why did he want to see us?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.’ Howard stayed on and we talked about the artists we know, he praising the work of Stephen Buckley.
A few days later, a thank-you letter: ‘Much love to you both, Yours ever, Harold, hoping to see you in Florence.’
How can I not be impressed by this? – though I admire Nikos, keeping an ideological distance, for not being impressed, though he was very courteous towards Acton.
Strange, violent dreams about Nikos. Here is one: he, in the centre of a room, is fashioning a work of art out of variously shaped blocks of wood, and pays no attention to me, so I, angry, throw things at him and his work of art; he remains indifferent, his indifference calculated; he is resentful of me, will have nothing to do with me, though I have no idea why he is resentful, why he won’t have anything to do with me, and my anger turns to rage. What I wonder is: who is this Nikos in my dreams, a Nikos who reoccurs in my dreams, and who is completely unlike the Nikos I know and love? In life, Nikos is never indifferent to me, never even suggests rejecting me. Why, in my dreams, does he reject me so often?
I am always, if less and less, surprised by the way the sexualities of people in London appear to be incidental to friendship. So, I think of Stephen Buckley, who has all the seductive good looks of a young man who rather enjoys the friendships of other young men – in particular, Mark Lancaster – who are seduced by his good looks. That Stephen has girlfriends – in particular, Stevie – in no way diminishes his friendship with those others who have flirtatious feelings for him. Stevie became pregnant by Stephen, and gave birth to a daughter. I went to visit her in hospital with a large pot of blue hydrangeas, but I couldn’t recall her maiden name, which, as she and Stephen were not yet married, she still went by, so I had to go along the beds looking for Stevie, who waved to me. They married some time after.
With pleasure, I thought this was rather bohemian of them.
If I were to try to create a British character, how would I characterize him/her? Would I centre on someone I know somewhat – say, A. J. Ayer who represents Logical Positivism as a thoroughly British mode of thinking? I see him from time to time at the Spenders’, and once had an amusing talk with him about the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mother, trying to establish the date of her bodily assumption and the speed at which she was assumed into heaven, whereby we would be able to calculate where in the universe she is, and, if she had reached heaven, where in the universe heaven is. His wife Dee said he visits the Jesuits in Farm Street to talk about Scholastic philosophy, which talk I would very much like to hear, Ayer against Aquinas! Dee told me that e. e. cummings, a friend, descr
ibed Ayer as having a stainless-steel mind. How would I be able to give a character based on Ayer a soul? And by soul I mean: what can’t be made logically positivist, what is beyond intention. Would such a character in a novel be interesting? Doesn’t Ayer’s Logical Positivism reduce the novel to, at best, social life? Could I possibly create a British character with a soul, a soul in an agony that embarrasses him for being an agony, so a soul he must deny as an indulgence for not being positively logical? And whom would that be based upon?
Could it be Stephen Spender?
I would never try to engage Freddie Ayer in a conversation that had any hint of being serious, but I would like to ask him, in a joking way, if what is called an idea is no more logically positive than a vague ‘sense’ of having something to think about, in which vagueness we imagine we think logically, especially when we think we are thinking logically? The joke would be that, as I am not good at logic, better do away with it all as illogical. The closest to making a reference to his own philosophy – if it can be called that – is my hearing Ayer say, with a gesture as of cancelling it out of the air, that the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, when Wittgenstein states that the mystical shows itself, is rubbish. It is just this affirmation of the mystical that appeals to me in Wittgenstein, but I laughed at Ayer’s affirmation that it is rubbish, thinking to myself: yes, it is rubbish, and everything that has its appeal for being imagined mystical is rubbish. This reassurance lasted only as long as I was with Ayer.
