Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  Mary McCarthy wanted to have, not a service, but a gathering at which friends would speak about Sonia. The writer Francis Wyndham rang to ask me if I would be the compere, as he did not want to be, and I agreed – agreed, no doubt, because the position gave me some prominence in London. The gathering was in a stark hall with rows of folding chairs and a simple table. A song was sung to a guitar, a poem was recited, and I read from my diary an account of Sonia staying with me in Italy. Nikos told me later that the critic and editor John Gross, in the audience, seemed to be scowling at my presuming to speak about Sonia. Then Mary McCarthy spoke, her rectangular smile held rectangular and exposing her teeth as she spoke, and what she said about Sonia didn’t seem complimentary, except her comparing Sonia’s pure English looks to a portrait painting by Reynolds. I’m very pleased that, a few days later, I had a postcard from Miriam Gross, John’s journalist wife: ‘I thought your diary was marvellous – it evoked Sonia with terrific accuracy and vividness.’ This makes me feel I in some way belong in London.

  I asked Gregory Evans, David Hockney’s assistant, how often it happens that he and David don’t know all the people they are entertaining in a restaurant, and Gregory said, ‘Oh, all the time.’ Among the people at a table in a restaurant, David presiding (and as always paying in the end), was a delicate youth with golden eyelashes and golden hair. I later asked David who he was, and David said, ‘Ian Falconer,’ and David said, ‘He’s in love with me. He wants to come to California to stay with me and study art with me. But I’m intimidated by him because he’s so beautiful. I’m always intimidated by beautiful boys, and can hardly speak to them.’ I said, ‘I used to feel that way. Since I’ve been with Nikos, I don’t any longer.’

  Some days later, Nikos and I went to the Mughul Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where we met, by arrangement, Ian, and the three of us stood together in the wonderfully decorated tent of panels of Indian chintz, the panels decorated with small vases at the bottom from which expand and expand and expand flowers that cover the panels, and on the tent’s roof more flowers, so we were in a bower of flowers. After an hour, we went together to David H.’s studio. David, with so many demands made on him, had to leave, and Nikos and I stayed on with Ian, whom Nikos flirted with. Later, Nikos said, laughing, ‘I wouldn’t mind making love with Ian.’ Well, he is very beautiful. I said, ‘Nor would I.’

  It used to be that when Nikos and I had a row, I would say, ‘We’ve got to talk about this,’ to which he’d respond, ‘No, we’re not, I’m not going to indulge you in your American introspection.’ We would be silent towards each other for a while, then I’d think, Well, I know he loves me, and conversation would be resumed.

  I don’t introspect in my diary. Nor, I hope, do I express opinions.

  As an aside: Steven Runciman recounted his having invited the Queen Mother to his club, the Athenaeum, when she asked him what men did in their clubs. He booked a room and invited what he called other queens, as the Queen Mother likes queens. After their meal, he showed her about, and noted, as they entered the large common room, men in their deep armchairs lower their newspapers and frown at the sight of a woman, until, that is, they recognized who she was, and, my God, they stood to attention! I asked him, ‘What is she like?’ to which he answered, ‘She is not introspective.’

  I think I am not, after all, an introspective person, and it’s because I’m not that I so easily accept that Nikos will not talk about our rows. Perhaps I feel that our love for each other is in some way objective, and contains us as a great globe, and has love’s own will.

  From Frank’s An Appetite for Poetry, this:

  We understand a whole by means of its parts, and the parts by means of the whole. But this ‘circle’ seems to imply that we can understand nothing – the whole is made of parts we cannot understand until it exists, and we cannot see the whole without understanding the parts. Something, therefore, must happen, some intuition by which we break out of the situation – a leap, a divination . . . whereby we are enabled to understand both part and whole.

  A novel, The Family, has been published. I call it a novel, but it is entirely autobiographical, and a lot of it comes directly from my diary.

  The residue of my religion – what is left is not belief, no, but a constant awareness of a way of thinking and feeling. What awareness? It is the awareness inculcated in me by my religion, the essential teaching of which was: the reason why we are on this earth is to suffer in order to earn our places in heaven to be with God for all eternity.

  As a boy, I had no choice but to believe. Again and again, I recall how, in my parochial primary school, I and all the first-grade students standing by our scratched and ink-stained desks were taught by a nun to make the sign of the cross. The nun, rigid in her black robes, faced the class and, slowly repeating the gestures over and over, demonstrated on her body the sign that the students were to repeat on their bodies. But I couldn’t do it. I was so aware of myself in the glaring ring of my concentration I became uncoordinated and wasn’t able to tell my right from my left, my forehead from my chest. The nun had to take my right hand and guide the tips of the fingers first to my forehead, then to the middle of my chest, then to the left shoulder and across to the right. The nun nailed to my small body the sign of the suffering of my Savior, the Savior whose suffering gave meaning to my suffering, to all the world’s suffering, because it was by suffering that I and the world would be raised into heaven to be with God eternally. Our deepest love was for God in eternity, and our deepest longing was to be with God in eternity.

  No, I do not believe in God, but the love and the longing remain – remain, however, love and longing that cannot be fulfilled, because there is no God in eternity.

  Sometimes I feel that everything I see, hear, smell, taste, touch I do in that awareness, so that even the sight of a glass of water on a sunlit windowsill will fill me with the awareness of something promised in the glass of water on the sunlit windowsill, something that I sense so profoundly is there to be fulfilled, but can’t be fulfilled.

  Walking along Oxford Street among the crowds, that awareness comes over me about everyone I walk along with or pass, that awareness of so many of us aware of what we love and long for, but what we can’t have, because it is beyond having.

  When I am with Stephen Spender, I may suddenly see in him a large, awkward man who wants to fulfill so much more than he knows he can fulfill, and a feeling of tenderness comes to me for him.

  Even with Nikos – say, sitting next to him at the Wigmore Hall for a recital of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, he so attentive to the music and I trying to be attentive – a loneliness will occur to me that isolates me, a feeling that as much as I love him and long to be with him, the love and the longing will never be fulfilled, not fully, because it can’t be.

  That awareness is the dimension in which I wrote the novel, The Family. The awareness I retain most of my family is the love and the longing that surrounded us all – the love and the longing inculcated in all of us, mother and father and seven sons, by the enclosing religion of a small, working-class, French-speaking parish in Yankee New England, a parish that might have been enclosed by a palisade – and within that surrounding awareness the memory of my father coming home to say he had been fired from the factory, the memory of my mother in a daze after shock treatment, the memory of my hysterical self shouting that I’ll kill myself, memory after memory after memory, and all, again, within a surrounding awareness that made us helpless, and because helpless innocent, and because innocent vulnerable to a world promised to us in our suffering, suffering that would earn us our places with God in eternity.

  It ends with a prayer.

  Pray to God the Father

  To the Holy Spirit

  To the Son

  To the Virgin Mother

  To all those, in their strange high country, in their large bright house, pray for the small dark house in this low country.

  Catharine Carver worked cl
osely on editing the novel, but did not want any acknowledgment.

  Stephen is enthusiastic about the novel, as if for him I have finally situated the characters in the world.

  It especially pleases me that Sonia Orwell said, ‘Enfin, you’ve written a novel I can take seriously.’

  Frank Kermode gave it a nice quote.

  Nikos said, ‘The suffering of your family.’

  Jennifer Bartlett is in London to design the dining room, in tiles she paints, for Doris and Charles Saatchi. We went together to the Saatchi house, which is attached to another house used for their collection of modern art, including a huge John Chamberlain crushed-automobile sculpture standing alone in one room. Doris prepared tea for us while Charles, hardly greeting us, played backgammon with his brother Maurice, of Saatchi & Saatchi, meant to be responsible for Margaret Thatcher being elected as Prime Minister with the slogan: Labour isn’t working. Doris moves slowly, with the grace of a ballet dancer, and as carefully.

  Left alone, Jennifer and I lay on a bed and talked and talked, often shifting positions. She prefers lying down to standing.

  Invited by Tony Stokes, Jennifer gave a reading at Garage from her book, The History of the Universe, in which she recounts, in a flat tone, recollections from her life:

  I went to swimming lessons at the bay. The lifeguard wore red trunks, the water was blue, the sky was blue.

  In that same flat tone, she recounted very intimate facts about her life.

  In the book are written portraits of her friends, including Jan Hashey, her pseudonym Meredith Ridge Slade-Ryan, and Michael Craig-Martin, his pseudonym Robin Slade-Ryan (‘In Corsham, Wiltshire, England, Robin and Meredith fell in love with the same student, Brian, a young boy committed to an extreme evangelical faith which involved speaking in tongues and being moved by the spirit’); also of Keith Milow as Gavin Frazer; then there is the woman Maggi Hambling (‘He lived for some time with a woman who became a lesbian’), and I, Daniel Francoeur, the name I use for myself in The Family (‘During college Daniel woke up, looked out the window and even if the day was fine thought of suicide. In London, Daniel was cured of an ulcer by acupuncture. During the course of the cure he went mad, beat his hands against the headboard of the bed, wept, screamed, shook, shouted. Since then he hasn’t been seriously depressed. Andreas, who is a poet and works in a publishing house, took care of him’).

  The epigraph of the book is from Gertrude Stein: ‘She was more interested in birds than flowers although she wasn’t really interested in birds.’

  Jennifer would like to meet Francis Bacon, but I’m not sure Francis would get on with her.

  Needless to say, Nikos has no interest in all of this, but allows me my interest and, yes, amusement, and, yes, more than amusement in the charm I feel when I am with Jennifer.

  Nikos has made me aware of the critical works of the French deconstructuralists, Piaget, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and especially of Roland Barthes whose books take up a length of shelf space in his library. I pick up a book, read here and there, and pick out a word that seems charged with meaning for me, then I close the book. Such a word is ‘syncretistic.’ Out of its original context, I use the word ‘syncretistic’ in conversation with Nikos, and he asks me what I mean, and I suggest the meaning is in connections that all come together in a way that Frank means by ‘divination,’ and Nikos, smiling, asks me, a little devilishly, what I mean by divination, and I try to give ‘divination’ a definition that I trust Nikos will understand in the way he understands me, and I answer, ‘That there is an impulse in the mind to make everything connect,’ and he smiles more and looks at me as if I were a student whose naïveté he is touched by.

  The BBC producer and interviewer and critic Julian Jebb asked me to drinks, or so I thought, and as I was sure he wouldn’t mind – also, to show her off to him and a friend of mine he would not have suspected I had so he would have been surprised and intrigued – I brought along Jennifer. Julian welcomed us as if he had been expecting us. Jennifer and I joked lightly with each other more, I felt, than we talked to Julian, she and I as though lolling together in the talk. In fact, Jennifer does have a way of lolling, even when sitting on a chair, and often she will slip off the chair and loll on the floor, her head propped up by her elbow against the floor and her hand to her cheek, and then, that too taxing, she will lie flat on the floor, but go on talking. I felt Julian liked her, but was bemused, and all the more bemused when I said we had to go, for he said I had been invited to dinner with Vidia and Pat Naipaul. Apologies, of course embarrassed apologies, but Julian insisted, all was prepared. Jennifer sat back on the chair when the bell rang and Julian went to open to the Naipauls.

  I wanted them all to wonder what I was doing with her and what she was doing with me as a couple, which I wasn’t sure of myself.

  Julian said he had to go to court for not having paid his bills, but he couldn’t, he simply couldn’t, open brown envelopes with narrow windows in them that show his name and address.

  I should write about our evening out with Francis and Stephen. I should, and yet I don’t want to. Why? When Nikos and I were driving Stephen back to Loudoun Road after, Stephen asked, ‘Will you write about this evening in your diary? It was very strange.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘of course I will.’ The evening was strange, but I think the strangeness can’t be accounted for.

  As usual, we all met at Francis’ flat in Reece Mews. John Edwards was there (his friend Philip is still in prison for raping a woman at knifepoint, and John misses him terribly) and a young, thin, beautiful man named Roc. Whereas John, who is working class from the East End, was dressed in a smart gray suit with a white shirt and a dark silk tie and smelled cleanly of cologne, Roc, who is upper class and from a very rich family, was dressed in a black motorcycle jacket too big for him, shabby, tight corduroy trousers, and old, narrow and pointed black suede shoes, and he did not give the impression that he was altogether clean. It took me a while to recall that I had met Roc before at a big party given by Rodrigo and Anne Moynihan, and that he is Roc Sandford, the son of the writer Nell Dunn. In Francis’ narrow sitting room–bedroom with the large, smashed mirror held together with duct tape, in front of which, Francis likes to say, someone tried to kill him by throwing an ashtray at him that missed, we drank champagne. Francis showed us the only work of art by another artist he owns: done by a Royal College of Art student, a girl, a sewn portrait of her mother, so the nose, made out of canvas, was sewn on, and the open mouth and tongue and teeth, and eyes and eyelashes, and even the hair, were all sewn onto the canvas, the hair, Francis said, the hair of the artist’s mother. He said it was the only good work of art he had seen by a living artist in a long while, and he had bought it. After he showed it to us, he propped it against a wall, in a corner. We all said it was extraordinary; we didn’t know what else to say about it. We drank two bottles of champagne and then went to an Italian restaurant round the corner, a basement restaurant, where we all sat at a long table. I sat across from Roc. I realized I had as much difficulty understanding Roc’s upper-class accent as I did John’s Cockney. I asked him what he did, and it seemed to me improbable that he does what he said he does: runs a large farm, a family farm, on Majorca. He flies between Majorca and London often, but he isn’t happy in Majorca and wants to stay in London, though he doesn’t know what he’ll do here. He looked at me deeply in the eyes, then, suddenly, he slumped back and put his hands over his eyes, and I wondered if he had passed out or had a fit of depression. No one took any notice of him, and I joined the conversation of the others, which was about John’s friend in prison and how cruel it was to keep him in prison for so long. Francis said, ‘It’s criminal.’ Roc appeared to revive, and drank more, and when the waiters came he asked for all the food to be heaped on his plate, so he had a mixture of pasta, beans, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, cannelloni, and on top a big gob of mustard. While he ate, the rest of us talked, then, again suddenly, he slumped back and put his hands over his eyes, and whe
n he lowered his hands he smiled at me and said he’d just had a little sleep.

  When we got out of the restaurant, Roc invited us all to his flat in Soho for vodka. Francis said he’d go home, and the rest of us, Stephen (who appeared bigger and less coordinated than ever), John, Nikos and I, and Roc, left Francis in the street and went by Nikos’ and my car to Roc’s flat in Brewer Street. The flat is the top floor in a building among porno film houses, the lights of which flashed through the curtainless windows. The flat appeared to be in the process of being torn apart, with exposed wall struts, and rubbish. One room, the bedroom only because there was a mattress on the floor and clothes thrown about, though there was also a mattress on the floor of the sitting room, the sitting room only because of some broken chairs and a big record player.

  I sat with John by a wood fire, the only light in the room – Roc appeared to be burning bits of table he’d smashed – and we talked, though I wasn’t sure I understood, about Francis. He loves Francis, and Francis is helping him to buy a pub, but their relationship is non-sexual; he feels he can do Francis a favour, however, by making sure his friends don’t nick him, so at least Francis is safe in a world of thieves.