by David Plante
Steven’s voice reached such a pitch it became song, and he seemed, for all the dense interconnected detail of his account, to go into a trance, as if such dense interconnections always put him into a trance.
‘As he was the husband of my assistant, I saw the Çelebi Effendi often. The first time I dined with them, he said that if I could smoke a hubble-bubble without being sick he’d give it to me. And there it is. Not a very beautiful one, as hubble-bubbles go. One day, he died, quite suddenly, leaving by an earlier marriage a son of sixteen, who was the heir. This was towards the end of the war, the beginning of 1944. The boy, in order to be accepted as head of the Mevlevi, had to go round the various establishments and have his knee kissed. That was the proper ceremony. But how could a boy of sixteen, in war conditions, get a visa to Syria? The Free French were in occupation, and I had a friend among them, Count Stanislas Ostroróg, who was of a Polish family that, in the eighteen-forties, had fled Russia to settle in Istanbul. They had one of the most beautiful houses on the Bosporus, where Stanislas’ elder brother lives, married to a daughter of Sir Basil Zaharoff, the arms magnate.’
Steven stopped, closed his eyes for a moment as though to contemplate the circumference of his trance, then, opening his eyes wide, said quietly, ‘Sorry for all these details,’ and closed his eyes to continue, with a slight swaying of his shoulders, within his ever widening trance. ‘I had stayed with Stanislas in Damascus before the war, when he was Résident there, and I knew he would understand, because he was interested in such things as the whirling dervishes. I wrote to him. The immediate result: a huge envelope came back to the boy, addressed – never before had he been addressed like this – to “Son Altesse le Çelebi Effendi,” with the visa and everything needed for his trip to have his knee kissed. So off he was able to go to Syria, blessing me. And when I followed, on leave, a month or so later, at every station a delegation of whirling dervishes came to greet me. They asked me if I would like them to dance for me, and I made them dance at Aleppo and Homs. I thought that perhaps twice was enough. Anyhow, they all said, “You see, you’re one of us.”’
Steven now looked at me and, back to a low, growling voice, said, ‘In Istanbul, they were started up as a tourist attraction, which is really monstrous. We real ones consider this indecent. We don’t approve. But we are in a very bad way, because the Syrians decided to close the tekke in Syria. One had a wonderful international situation – the Turkish government suing the Syrian for annexing the property of Turkish citizens, though they’d done it themselves several years before. Practically no tekke is dancing still. I’m not sure the one in Cyprus dances.’
I was, in my own way, in a trance, assuming as I did that Steven’s ability to make connections could go on and on, connecting all the stars, making of them all one great story. He did tell a story, the suspense sustained not just because of the unexpected events but the unexpected connections. I had asked myself if the young Çelebi Effendi would be able to get out of Turkey to have his knee kissed and save the Mevlevi. The answer was yes, made possible by the unexpected connection in Istanbul between a Polish count from Russia and a Scottish historian. And all along there were unexpected connections made – Turkish, Greek, Egyptian, Albanian, Hittite, Armenian, French, Syrian, Polish, Russian – so I was drawn into the story with expectations of the even more unexpected, which was the interconnection of everything. I understood so little, but I thought that there was no way, ever, for me to understand everything, and that was the great mystery of history: to understand everything. I imagine Steven does.
A spoon, a button, a coin could be the center of world history, so complex, however, that the history could never for me be known.
And, in a sense, I imagine my diary as historical, recording what may appear to be incidentals, spoons, buttons, coins, arcane table manners, but about these incidentals expands more than I could ever possibly account for, expanding into history.
I think I am in one place at one time, but really I’m in many places and at many times, too many for me to make the connections that Steven is capable of making.
Steven Runciman on history:
‘From my earliest childhood, I’ve liked history. I wasn’t drawn to it by a scientific desire for knowledge. Oh, no. I was drawn by romantic imaginings. I’ve always liked stories. I’ve always liked people, and I’ve always liked trying to understand the great stories of the past. As romantic as my imaginings are, I have always wanted my stories to be based on truth. Because of this, I have never got much pleasure out of reading ghost stories that are fiction. I like my ghost stories, too, to be real. I prefer history to fiction – though, like all historians, I would like to write an historical novel. It would be so marvellous to be able to put down what you’re quite sure did happen but you can’t prove it. It’s a wicked temptation, however, and I must stick to the sterner discipline.
‘The Crusades was one of the big stories of history, and, as it hadn’t been told recently, I wanted to tell it. I suppose I’m considered a rather old-fashioned historian. What the Namier historians of the new French style think of me I can only too easily imagine. They concentrate on details, and I – well, I know I’m terribly in disgrace with the Crusading historians because I’m not interested in things like the detailed legal arrangements, although I know roughly what they were. These historians are very recondite, I think, and have a snobbish and undemocratic view of history. I, in my old-fashioned way, am much more democratic. I want to know what made the whole story happen. They forget that the word history means story.’
I said I would like to know how he writes history.
He sat at the very edge of his armchair, with a pile of newspapers and magazines behind him.
‘Well, one starts with the sources. Published sources proliferate. If Gibbon, who when he wrote the Decline and Fall had consulted practically all the printed sources available to him in his day, were to write the same book today, he’d have about three times as much to consult. Then, there are the unpublished sources – the material in archives, often ill catalogued, and sometimes not catalogued, or even arranged in any order. Then, there is always the possibility of something hitherto unknown being discovered – the life of a saint in a monastic library, or a batch of letters, or a forgotten character. But in classical and medieval history such finds are very rare, and most primary material has been published. Occasionally, one thinks as one goes through catalogues of collections, oh, this would be interesting. Then one finds it has been published in slightly different form or under a different heading elsewhere. I’ve never found, myself, any new manuscript of any value. In fact, I’m not very good at reading manuscripts. And I can’t bear reading on microfilm. I’ve got a rather fitful memory. When I go into a library and don’t happen to have a notebook on me and I see somewhere in a book something that is of great interest, I think that I shall certainly remember it. I remember exactly what it looked like on the page, but I can’t remember which book it is in. In the end, I’ll locate it.’
Steven was not looking at me but over my head.
‘With so much to consult, a historian, not unnaturally, does tend to take refuge in details, a detailed discussion of some small point. What he produces is very useful, but he is not really writing history; he is providing another secondary source. To write history, he has to bring the details together into a significant whole.’
(How can I, in recording this talk, not stop on the words ‘a significant whole,’ which suddenly appeared to centre my whole life in a vision?)
‘There are some historians who begin with the significant whole – before they have mastered the details. The trouble is that to explain the course of all history you should be acquainted with all history – and it would be hard to find such a polymath. I rather like the idea of writing a story. The idea is to find some well-rounded theme – without being afraid of the large theme – that makes a story of its own. But it must fit into the stream of history, and the historian must be conscious of its
causes in the past and its influences in the future. All the reading takes time, but during that time you’re thinking about the work, consciously and often subconsciously. Much of your best thinking is done, say, on a country walk or when you’re working in the garden. It’s helpful to have a garden.’
History to Steven is world history.
London
I don’t know why, but when people insult me I take the insult as a joke.
I was invited to a conference at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, on Franco-American literature, I suppose because I have written in The Family about the Franco-American world, the world of my family.
At the conference, someone approached me and asked, ‘Est-ce que vous connaissez Paul Theroux (the The- pronounced as Té-)?’
I answered that I had met him.
Why, I was asked, had Paul Theroux, a Franco, not written about us, Franco-Americans?
I didn’t know.
Back in London, at a book-launch party, I saw Paul and went to him, and, hardly saying hello to me, he spoke about himself so rapidly it was as though he was stopping me from talking about myself. I tugged at the lapels of his jacket and said, ‘Paul, it’s about you that I came over to talk to you.’ He waited, and I told him what I had been asked by someone at the conference: why doesn’t he write about Francos, as he is one? He jabbed a finger at my chest and said, ‘Because you do.’
Then I said, ‘Il m’a demandé si je te connais.’
‘Et tu as répondu?’
‘Oui.’
He looked up and away and said, ‘Si quelq’un me demanderait si je connais David Plante, qu’est-ce que je lui dirais?’ He looked down at me and said, ‘Non.’
He turned away and I did laugh.
It is innate among Franco-Americans, our truly lost tribe, that not one of them wants to know, much less help, another one, and how very few we are.
I would never expect from Paul Theroux any recognition of any kind.
John Fleming has written that Patrick Kinross is dead. The illness that killed him was never diagnosed. He was reduced to a skeleton.
Thinking about him, I think of how, the more I live in London the more, yes, I am fascinated by connections that take me back into history, and, yes, people I have met in London have taken me far back into history, far back, linking me to history, which I think of as the most formative evolution of anyone’s life; and the connection with one person in the past brings more than that person into the present, the connection brings into the present past époques.
So when I, turning the pages of a biography, came across a photograph taken in the 1920s of Patrick Kinross dressed for a fancy ball in eighteenth-century court dress complete with wig, he among others also in fancy dress, leaning over a pit in which roughly clothed navvies are digging, one of them with a pneumatic drill, Patrick and his company presumably in conversation with the navvies, I reacted with a mixture of revulsion at the class divide (as would Nikos) and fascination (as would I). The fascination is, I like to think, justified by my seeing the scene historically representative of past ages, for Patrick in his court dress does appear to have come directly from the eighteenth century and to have found himself in a London where, curiously, men were digging a pit with a strange, stuttering instrument that he must stop and ask about. But, yes, I am glad that the époque of Patrick in fancy court dress divided by class from the navvy in overalls with his pneumatic drill is past, however fascinating I find it, because, if I had been born and raised in working-class England as I was in working-class America, I would have been the navvy in the pit looked down upon by the baron.
Still, Patrick did make even details historical, as when he said that, before attending the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in his robes, he was warned to pee, because the ceremony would be interminable, and I took this as a detail that was a warning to everyone in the deep past who attended royal ceremonies, a detail that gives historical particularity to the historically grand event. I do like details.
And no doubt the Queen sustains the details of history.
Roy Strong told me that he loves being High Bailiff and Searcher of the Sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, an honorary role which includes attendance at all great state occasions in the building, which duty allows him to wear a ruff.
An image often comes to me – as do many many many images – from when I first came to Europe in 1959, when I was nineteen and in Barcelona in a barber’s chair from which I saw reflected in the mirror before me a door behind open and a man’s hand appear holding the edge of the door, the nail of his little finger long and pointed, and a shudder passed through me at what I had never seen affected by a man, and what I later learned was his way of demonstrating that he was not a manual worker, and this made me wonder at the long history of keeping the nail of one’s baby finger long and pointed. And so, over and over again, I find myself wondering about such small details for having long histories. And it was in Spain that I met a Spaniard who, shaking my hand, scratched my palm with his index finger, I wondering what this meant and only after realizing that it was a sexual message, a message, I imagined, that had its long history within Spanish sexual signaling. It is always a pleasure to me to try to decode these coded messages, which make me so aware of what I like to think of as an occult foreign world.
And so the occult world of London.
And, more, Nikos’ occult Greek world.
More about Patrick Kinross.
After Oscar Wilde, whose trial and imprisonment did cause such contemporaries as Arthur Symons anguish by suppressing their sexuality, and did ruin the lives of such men as Simeon Solomon arrested for importuning –
(though I do wonder if, for queer men of this past generation, the law did not discriminate unless some more serious crime was committed to which sex was incidental, but which, in the process of the trial, became more and more the issue, for, surely, there must have been male brothels the police knew about as they also knew about those men who frequented the brothels, both tolerated by the police) –
but which trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde seems not to have caused queers of the generation of Patrick Kinross, not so far removed in time from the trial and imprisonment, to suppress knowledge of their sexuality, and not even to stop them from acting on their sexuality. The trial and imprisonment seem, instead of leaving a legacy of harsh suppression and harsher trial and imprisonment, to have brought out the sexuality of the generation of Patrick into common knowledge. They, the queer men of Patrick’s world, must have assumed the law that condemned Wilde didn’t apply to them, for why should any disposition as common as homosexuality be criminal? And all their friends, of whatever sexuality, assumed the same about them. Everyone must have known that when Patrick married he was queer, and that he divorced because he was queer, and I dare say he remained friends with those who knew he was queer, such as Charlotte Bonham Carter. All this, perhaps, among the upper-middle into the upper classes. But this is only guessing about a world I know nothing about, and dangerously near the speculation I avoid.
Still, it comes to me: we of course take an outstanding event from the past, as the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, to speak not only for the whole past but the whole present, and this is what causes are based on.
Chartres
Nikos and I went to Chartres to visit the cathedral.
I had been before, when I was a student at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, where theology was a living discipline with essential problems to be discussed: how can the immutable and eternal God, the Uncaused Causer, change enough in time to have caused the universe and the world, to have created Adam and Eve, to have condemned them for their sin, then to have changed again in time from condemning them to forgiving them? As I no longer believe in God, these problems are mere curiosities. But I had believed when I first visited the cathedral.
From the car, we saw the spires of the cathedral rise from the flat, pale green fields of spring wheat. I pulled over to the side
of the road, not far from a ditch along which were pollarded willow trees, and I stopped the car. This view couldn’t have changed in twenty-five years.
There was heavy traffic in what was no longer the town I’d known, but a city. The buildings were new and had wide, stark windows, and the traffic was dense. Nikos and I had a row. With difficulty, we found in a hotel a room with a view of a darkening back yard.
As if our being late was my fault, Nikos said resentfully, ‘We’ll unpack later. We’d better get to the cathedral before it closes.’
He was always the one who was late and whom I had to hurry along.
With a map, we found our way to the vieille ville, which had been, I recalled, all the ville when I’d been there, and I thought I should be able to find my way in the vieille ville to the cathedral. Nikos asked, Was I sure? Yes, I was sure. But I lost the way. Finally there, a guard said the cathedral was closing.
I told Nikos I was sure I could find a restaurant from years before. I was sure it was on a street very near the cathedral. It had white curtains on a brass rod over the lower part of the many-paned window, and through the top you saw inside to the dark wood wainscoting. I walked up and down the streets.
