Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  Now he shrugged and again laughed, now a high laugh. ‘Did she? I can’t see why she should have believed that. I’m not a success.’

  I said, ‘Sonia had a great deal of respect for creativity.’

  ‘I think she did,’ Francis said; ‘I think she wanted very much to be creative, and even tried, but she failed. You know, she was sent by the Observer’s editor David Astor to Israel to interview General Dayan, and she went with great enthusiasm, but when she got back her piece on Dayan was found to be unpublishable. She simply didn’t have the talent.’

  ‘I wonder if her realization that she had no talent changed her. I’ve often wondered what changed her from the charming, bright, young woman everyone thought she was to the dark woman I knew her to be.’

  Francis said, ‘Drink.’

  ‘Yes, but why did she drink?’

  ‘I think you’re right – one of the reasons, perhaps the central reason, was that she wanted to be creative, and knew she couldn’t be. And once she knew she couldn’t, once she denied it totally in herself, she was in awe of it in others.’

  Odd, I thought, that Francis could take what I had said and repeat it in a way that seemed to be original with him.

  I repeated, ‘Only those others she thought had really succeeded in realizing their creativity, which were not many.’

  ‘Not that she knew much about books or paintings or music. She read a lot, but, as far as I heard when she spoke about the arts, all her ideas were received.’

  ‘About books, I think her enthusiasm was great, and her enthusiasm about certain writers – I remember her praising Victor Hugo – was inspiring – she made me want to read Victor Hugo. But she didn’t know much about painting and music.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘And yet, and yet,’ I said, drunk enough to repeat myself, ‘she had this tremendous respect for all creativity. She thought it was what she most wanted but didn’t have. She wanted to possess it in others, but couldn’t. At times, she imagined that if she couldn’t be creative herself she could understand creativity, especially writing. I remember her once talking to Jean Rhys and me about a writer’s intention, and Jean and I both said, “No, it’s not that way,” meaning there is much more to writing than what the writer intends, much more, much much more, and Sonia looked very puzzled – puzzled and hurt – and said, “Tiens, that goes to show I know nothing about writing.”’

  Francis said, ‘Nothing about what happens.’

  I asked, ‘Do you think she was a pessimistic person?’

  Francis answered, ‘Totally, totally pessimistic. You see, I am at least optimistic in the moment –’

  ‘When you’re painting?’

  ‘When I’m painting.’

  ‘Because to create is to be optimistic. Sonia didn’t have that. At least that’s what I imagine.’

  ‘As much as one can be right in anything one imagines,’ Francis said, ‘I think you’re right. I think you are.’

  We were sitting at the bare table before the windows at the end of the long narrow room which is his living room and bedroom; bare bulbs hung from the ceiling, and though the electric fire was lit, there was a chill.

  John Edwards came. We went out for lunch. We drank three bottles of wine. I was very drunk. After, we got into a taxi to go to the Colony, where Francis ordered a bottle of champagne. I can’t recall what the three of us talked about. For a while, we talked to a short, dark, bull-like man who spends four months working in an Arab country running a power station, then four weeks in London, over and over; he has done this for fifteen years. Very friendly, he invited us all to Sunday lunch: roast lamb. Francis said, ‘We’ll come. That’ll be lovely. We love roast lamb.’ The man left. I asked Francis, ‘Where are we supposed to meet him?’ ‘I have no idea,’ Francis said, and laughed. He ordered another bottle of champagne.

  One glass more, and I knew I was going to be sick. I said I had to go. Francis helped me down to the street, asking if I’d be all right. Yes, I said, but I would be all right only if I kept moving, so crossed streets if the little man was red. In the bathroom, I lay on the floor, naked, and from time to time vomited into the toilet.

  When Nikos returned from his office he found me on the floor. He had planned on taking me and Stephen out to dinner. I said, ‘I can’t go out.’ Stephen arrived. I fell asleep on the bathroom floor. Whenever I woke, I heard Nikos and Stephen downstairs talking while they ate an improvised meal Nikos prepared.

  It took me a couple of days to recover.

  I have never asked Francis what he thinks of Minimalist Art, that of Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Richard Serra, which Nikos and I have seen most prominently displayed in the privately owned Saatchi Gallery in Boundary Road. (I have to interject here that when I told Stephen S. about the Boundary Road Gallery, he frowned as if what I knew, which he had not heard about from more authoritative sources, could not really be serious. I resented this a little, and told Nikos as much; Nikos, unabashed, then told Stephen, who told Nikos that, yes, he could only take seriously people of his own generation, and found it difficult to take seriously younger people.) No doubt Francis would stick out his lower lip and say, as he says about the Abstract Sublime (a term David Sylvester prefers to the Abstract Expressionists), that it is all wallpaper. Sometimes, studying a painting by Francis, I eliminate with a hand the figure if I can, and see in itself the space in which the figure appears, space delineated by lines that stand out from the flat backgrounds, space that seems to me the essence of his pictures, the figures the accidents. But this is getting too close to opinion, which I won’t allow myself. To go back to the Boundary Road Gallery. The Saatchis never appear at the openings of the exhibitions there, so, at those amazing openings, those invited are aware of them with more amazement at what they have accomplished than if they were there. I’ve met them, Charles and Doris, at Stephen and Stevie Buckley’s house, and, talking to Doris, I had more than an impression that it was she who determines the exhibitions in their gallery, especially the works of the American Minimalists, against whose works I see her, her very pale hair half covering a pale, delicately angular face, precise, her demeanour itself apparently minimalist.

  The photograph of her by Robert Mapplethorpe shows this.

  About Robert Mapplethorpe, Doris said he is a very gentle man.

  The Boundary Road Gallery was designed by Max Gordon.

  Max gives the impression of not only knowing everyone intimately but of being an influence in their lives, such as his promoting the work of Lisa Milroy to the Saatchis, Max particularly keen on Lisa’s paintings of piles of folded shirts, for Max collects shirts which he keeps in piles in drawers. His flat, designed by himself to be all white space, appears meant to be a space for the art he collects. It amuses him to point to the floor at a very tiny house in bronze, or perhaps iron, by Joel Shapiro, the size of it made all the more meaningful spatially in the space of the room. Max is very much in contact with New York artists such as Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan and Jennifer Bartlett. Max also collects narrow boxes that tubes of toothpaste are sold in, his prize a box with the brand name Craig-Martin.

  He urged Jennifer Bartlett to give the name Rhapsody to a large work of art, many white enamel plates covered with different-coloured dots and dashes that cover whole walls, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have bought.

  Learning to be English –

  I received a notice from H.M. Inland Revenue to inform me that I had overpaid my tax for two years and I would soon be getting a ‘check’ (American) to the amount of £1,517.08. I have learned that in England such things take a long time. I waited a few months, then thought I would notify the Inland Revenue that I hadn’t got it, as I had asked at my bank if it had been deposited.

  A handwritten note came back a couple of weeks later expressing surprise. The cheque (British) should have been sent. The note was signed by a Mr. Ridge, with his telephone number and extension.

  A soft-voiced
man, he said he didn’t at all mind my ringing him. I gave him my reference number. ‘That’s just what I wanted,’ he said, then added, ‘Now let me see if I can find your file.’ He came back and said he was terribly sorry, he couldn’t find my file, but they did have a system whereby lost files were eventually ‘kicked up.’ I asked him if he minded my ringing him again in a week’s time, and he said not at all.

  My file still hadn’t been kicked up by the time I rang again.

  Mr. Ridge said, ‘You can’t imagine the confusion here.’

  I said I would ring again in a week, and by then my file was found. Mr. Ridge had placed it on his desk in anticipation of my ringing him. The problem seemed to be what had happened to the cheque. He couldn’t issue a new one without finding out what happened to the old. Had it been cashed? And if it had, who had cashed it? This he couldn’t find out himself, but would have to alert the Computer Centre in Worthing to do so. He would write to them that very day.

  He hadn’t heard from Worthing when I rang him a week later. He couldn’t understand why. Never for a moment did I doubt that Mr. Ridge had in fact written. We decided between us that we would give them another week. We did, and they still hadn’t responded. Mr. Ridge would write to them again, and he would mark his letter urgent.

  When I rang a week later, as usual on a Wednesday, I was told that Mr. Ridge was on sick leave for two days. I said I’d ring again on Friday, and the receptionist said I would have a much better chance of getting Mr. Ridge on Monday.

  Monday morning, Mr. Ridge, recovered, was back at his desk, but he hadn’t yet sorted out the morning’s post, so he wouldn’t be able to tell me till the afternoon if Worthing had responded, though, as far as he knew, Worthing hadn’t responded to his letter marked urgent while he was on sick leave.

  I rang him at 3.00, but Mr. Ridge was still out to lunch. I rang at 4.00 and found that Mr. Ridge had gone home.

  I rang the next morning. He explained that, as he hadn’t had any word from Worthing, he hadn’t wanted to disturb me, but, perhaps, today there would be a notice from Worthing. I asked him what was a good time to ring him in the afternoon, and he said 3.30. But Worthing hadn’t sent him the information he had so urgently requested.

  He said, ‘You could threaten to write to your M.P. That always gets them going.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ I said, not wanting him to know that, as a non-voting foreigner, I didn’t have a Member of Parliament to whom I could threaten to write. ‘But I wonder if, in the meantime, we might give Worthing another chance by in fact telephoning them and speaking to them directly.’

  ‘That is a possibility,’ he said.

  He rang me that afternoon to tell me he’d spoken with Worthing. I would appreciate that they were in the process of transferring one tax district from another (indeed, I had had a notice about a year before that my tax district had been changed to Willesden from I can’t recall what previous district) and the information I requested was not yet on the computer. He suggested I ring in two weeks.

  I’d be happy to know, he told me when I next spoke to him, that the information was on the computer, but the computer would take forty-eight hours to come up with it. This was Friday, and he wasn’t sure the computer worked over the weekend.

  Each time I spoke with him, he reiterated the problem: he could not issue a new cheque until it was clear that the previous one hadn’t been cashed. He said, ‘There is a possibility, you see, that you might have cashed it.’

  I had a moment of English doubt. Had I, without remembering, cashed it? But for the first time I became irritated, angry even, that he should be making me doubt myself.

  I said, ‘Of course I didn’t cash it.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ he said.

  When I next rang him, the computer still hadn’t come up with the information. Mr. Ridge had done everything he could, and was going on holiday for three weeks.

  I said, ‘This has to be settled before you go.’

  He would do everything he possibly could, but if he couldn’t bring the business to a satisfactory conclusion before he left, he would leave it in the hands of Miss June, his colleague, to whom he would explain the situation.

  Miss June startled me by saying she had not yet ‘gotten’ information from Worthing, and I was worried that that Americanism (however old English it is meant to be) indicated American infiltration into the Inland Revenue. She was understanding, and said she would keep ringing Worthing until she had the reply she wanted. We spoke every day, I often ringing her, she sometimes ringing me. Whispering, she told me, just between us, that Worthing was in a terrible state, but she would keep trying.

  I did get the cheque (British).

  Thinking about Sonia –

  Sonia rejected God, any God, with a force that would have destroyed God had God existed. A cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, her ash blonde and grey hair shaking as she, frowning deeply, shook her head from side to side, she would rage, rage, not only against any belief in God, which she found totally uninteresting, but against God Himself for ever having supposed He existed, for ever having supposed He was of any interest to anyone. He had never existed, and he was of no, but absolutely no, interest.

  I knew that if I asked Sonia if anything at all was left of her once having believed in God, she would have answered, ‘Don’t be so stupid. Of course not.’ But Sonia remained a passionately negative Catholic, a kind of passionately negative Catholic missionary to friends who doubted: there is no transcendence, no redemption, no realization of any promises made by Catholicism or any other religion. She considered herself a realist. And she was, and the greatest expression of her realism was her pretty dining-room table.

  Sonia said to me, ‘Our both being Catholic is our secret.’

  There was a time in my life when I believed the Roman Catholic Church, under the absolute dictatorship of the Vatican that I was brought up not to question, portraits of Pope Pius XII hanging in our church and school rooms as the supreme authority over morality, dictated to me whom I could love, and what the expression of that love could be. Imagine. The residue of that belief has gone, gone, gone, and so dated it is not of any interest to me. What the residue of my religion that remains is – oh!

  If she is to be away, Natasha will ring us and ask us, please, to take care of Stephen. Often, we will be just the three of us for a meal, and I will mentally draw back from the conversation and look at Stephen and wonder how it happened that he is with us, this person who connects us to people from the past who survive in cultural history, this witness to so much history, our closest friend. How can we not be attentive when he recounts bringing T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky together, Eliot complaining that his blood was too thin and Stravinsky bragging that his blood was thick enough to form rubies? And his laugh, his high, bright laugh when he tells a story that Natasha calls méchant, his face beaming red, how can we not be as amused as he is? And how he turns self-deprecation into something to laugh at, as when he told us he had been to a dinner party in some Mid-Western American city where he sat next to a woman who asked his name, she reacting dismissively when he told her with: the only Stephen Spender she had heard about, a poet, was dead. At moments, his large body appears to be too large for him to support it, and he slumps a little, as he appears, too, to slump in spirit, but only for a moment, because he would say he has had a good life, a very good life. He may hint that it is only because of his connections that he has had the recognition he has had as a poet, but he goes on writing his poems, and from time to time shows us a draft – rather, shows it to Nikos, and if Nikos suggests a change in one line Stephen will rewrite the entire poem.

  Max Gordon invited Nikos and me to the Albert Hall for a performance of music by John Cage. After, he said we should go backstage, and Nikos and I, assuming that Max was friendly with Cage, went with him to the entrance to the backstage, where, however, a guard stopped us and said we were not allowed in. Max simply walked past
him. Nikos and I held back. The guard, who was stunned by Max simply walking past him, stepped aside, and Max, beyond him, gestured us to follow him. We did, into a wide, curving corridor with many closed doors along it. Max opened door after door, until he opened a door onto a room where, it appeared to me, at a far distance were John Cage and the pianist and composer David Tudor and others, who stared at us clearly without knowing who Max was and who we were. Again, Max told us to follow him in, but Nikos and I held back and said we’d rather not, and left. The next day Max rang to say we should have stayed on, he had joined the group and with them gone to a restaurant for a meal.

  I have been reading the diary of Virginia Woolf. As fascinated as I was by the people who I imagined would appear in the diary before I started to read, I find that as I read my fascination diminishes and I see, not a world, but a room with blank windowless walls and a low ceiling, Virginia’s own room where she is locked in, locked in with people whom she gives no space to move about, to talk to one another, to be themselves; and she won’t let them escape her severe judgments of them. I think: I would not have wanted to be locked in that room.

  Steven Runciman at dinner:

  ‘Here is an anecdote for you from my stay in Jerusalem in 1913. I was staying at Government House, where my fellow guest was the late Lord Athlone and his wife, the late Princess Alice – Victoria’s last-surviving granddaughter. There was a British regiment in Jerusalem, and the colonel of the regiment, a certain Colonel Montgomery, used to come to dine at Government House. He lectured us on our unnecessary luxuries. He was priggish, and we all loathed him. It so happened that at one of the ceremonies of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, I was next to Princess Alice in the gallery; we looked down, and there was Colonel Montgomery’s bald patch just below, which prompted Princess Alice to say, “See if we can hit him with some wax,” so I tilted my candle, as she did, and she was a better marksman than I . . . She wrote later in her memoirs about being in disgrace with the future Lord Montgomery for accidentally dropping wax on him. I reproved her, and she said, “I know, my dear, but I didn’t think it would do to say I did it deliberately.” “You’ve been a coward,” I said, “you’ve put history wrong.” She giggled. I met her after the war, and she said to me, “Do you remember when we dropped wax on Field Marshal Montgomery?” And that was the first time I realized that the odious colonel was the odious field marshal.’