Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  In the poetry of Pound, the following moves Nikos to a state in which he is speechless for what it expresses beyond words, so that he simply closes his eyes and shakes his head:

  I have brought the great ball of crystal.

  What daring to write that in all its sublimity.

  Ah, to rise in a diary to the level of

  A little light, like a rushlight

  To lead back to splendour.

  But something more comes to me thinking of Nikos and Ezra Pound: that in the way Pound was essentially intellectually and culturally and ideologically centered in the world of the ancient Mediterranean, so is Nikos, and so in Nikos am I.

  And this comes to me: hang it all, Pound, your Sargasso or my Sargasso, your Sargasso your Cantos, my Sargasso my diary.

  And in my diary to sustain the belief in the divination, in the faith: it coheres all right, even if my notes do not cohere –

  Julian Jebb has killed himself. He was someone who could only have evolved in England, as, say, the Samuri evolved in Edo Japan. Julian was known to be elfin, with tight trousers and a polo-neck jersey, his gestures quick and fluid, his effeminacy such that if he had been an American no American would possibly have taken him seriously as an interviewer, critic, man of intelligence and culture. How far I have come from America to have appreciated Julian for what he was as English, for I was always aware that he was English. Even in his suicide, I think, he was English, in that I imagine him saying to himself as he swallowed pill after pill with water, as I suppose, ‘Now don’t be histrionic about this, just get on with it.’ ( Which makes me think of someone else whom I consider to have evolved in England and in no other country, the costume and set designer David Walker, elfin too, with tight trousers and a tightly fitting shirt often printed with little flowers and buttoned at the neck, his wig very carefully calculated to blend in with whatever hair he has, whom I see from time to time and who once told me that a friend of his, a young woman, had confided in him that she couldn’t bear living any longer and longed to do herself in, to which David advised, ‘Then do it, darling, but don’t make a fuss of it.’ I asked, ‘Did she do it?’ and David, extending his neck and thrusting out his jaw and looking at me expressionlessly, said starkly, ‘Yes, she did.’) I am incapable of that utter distancing of feeling from death, even from grief, which I think of as English (or whatever small enclave of the British I know), and will never be able to reconcile myself to it. So, what do I remember Julian for and hope to appreciate in him? For his own appreciation of intelligent wit, that appreciation so marked in his interview with Evelyn Waugh (in which Harold Acton is mentioned) for the Paris Review, as when he asked Waugh if he found any professional criticism of his work helpful and mentioned Edmund Wilson, about whom Waugh asked, ‘Is he an American?’ and went on, after Julian said yes, ‘I don’t think what they have to say is of much interest, do you?’ And I can hear Julian’s delight. What am I to feel about his suicide? Germaine Greer, who is not English, published a severe letter addressed to him in which she condemned him for the act.

  In what other world than the world Nikos and I live in could this have been written by one man about another?

  From ‘Pure Reason’, Nikos’ additions from since we met:

  I pray for you in a way you never suspect except perhaps intuitively when we touch in sleep. I pray for you without knowing I pray, for when, asleep myself, I hold you at night something like prayer flows from me, surrounds you, enters you through your skin.

  Perhaps, without our being aware at all of this in our love for each other, we are ourselves living a cause. I say this, because we in fact do not participate in the gay movement, would not, for example, go to a reading of gay poets because they are gay to support them for being gay. Our failing.

  At dinner at Ann Stokes’, one of the guests, a lively friend of Ann’s, told me I was wrong to assume Edward VIII abdicated for political reasons: ‘Not at all, I know exactly why he abdicated. My mother told me, and she was very much a part of that world, so would have known. He abdicated because he had no testicles. There was no way he could have had children. He had to step down.’

  At times, Nikos will say something that strikes me as odd coming from someone I know to be intelligent and original but who seems not to be aware that what he says is a sentimental cliché – such as his describing someone having skin like jasmine petals and eyes like sapphire, or, to express regret, that we long for what we can no longer have, too late now – and then it comes to me that Nikos could be quoting from poems by Constantine Cavafy. In fact, such sentimental clichés are expressed in Cavafy’s poems and are accepted by Nikos not only because within the poetry of Cavafy but within a tradition in which Cavafy wrote his poetry, a tradition in which Nikos, too, finds his expressions. If I were a social anthropologist – and living with Nikos makes me aware of culture as I never had been before – I would try to investigate the derivations of these sentiments, which I think refer to layers and layers of culture that make up Greek culture, and I would guess that one of these layers is, say, French literature of the Belle Epoque, and, of course, Baudelaire, all evident in the more recherché poems of Cavafy.

  I’m reminded of Nikos talking, with amusement, of an uncle who in his youth was known as the Oscar Wilde of Constantinople, which suggests a quite dazzling layer of the culture of one country becoming the cultural history of another, very different country.

  Steven Runciman has sent me this limerick:

  The stories I tell David Plante

  Soon acquire a curious slant.

  His fertile invention

  Twists all that I mention.

  I could tell him more,

  But I shan’t.

  Paris

  I’m in Paris, on my own, to see Kitaj and Sandra, who have been living here for some months. They told me to meet them at a brasserie in rue des Ecoles for dinner, where they were sitting by the window at a table covered with a stiff white cloth, the napkins stiff and white, too. We embraced over the table.

  They said they see few people and work, and I had the sense, all the more vivid for seeing them out of London context, of their exclusivity, which makes seeing them something of a privilege. And, looking at them, I had the momentary flash that they were strange, and I noticed things about them that I hadn’t before, or had lost sight of. Sandra sits upright, looking right at you, smiling with her American red lips open, her eyes American bright, her long black American hair loose about her shoulders. It is as if to be attentive is to her to smile. Kitaj’s deafness is worse, so he has to lean close, his elbows on the table, his left or right ear turned towards you as he tries to look at you at the same time, but as he can’t quite manage this he keeps turning his head in different directions. His way of being attentive is to frown and press his lips together. His beard is almost all white.

  We seemed to be reflected on all sides by mirrors.

  We ordered. The waiter said something in French to Kitaj which he clearly didn’t understand, but as he didn’t want to let on that he doesn’t know French, all he said was, ‘Bien, très bien,’ and with a gesture dismissed the waiter, who appeared puzzled.

  Sandra defers to Kitaj. He said he first came to Paris when he was nineteen, in 1952. With the hesitant way he speaks, often clearing his throat and hitching up a shoulder as if to put a muscle back in place, he told me he had wanted to come to Europe because of the writers he’d read who had found Europe a revelation of creativity, and one of those writers was of course Hemingway. He knew that a great creative flowering, equal to that of fifth-century Greece or Renaissance Florence, had occurred in Paris over a period of, say, a hundred years, when so many of his American compatriots had gone and themselves produced amazing works. But when he got to Paris he found something different: Paris only seven years removed from German occupation. ‘And imagine what it felt like,’ he said, ‘to walk down a street and know that people there had been pulled out by the Gestapo and sent off to concentration camps. It was
, really, my first awareness of being a Jew. At home, I was brought up with little awareness of being Jewish. In my high school, before a game, I’d make the sign of the cross and say a prayer. Europe made me aware of something I hadn’t expected.’

  He spent only a few days in Paris, then he took the Orient Express to Vienna, and there it was as if the war had ended the day before he arrived. He saw American jeeps being driven around, and in the jeeps soldiers from each of the Four Powers. His grandmother, who was born in Vienna but went to America, had inherited a chemist’s shop in Vienna that had been taken over by the Nazis; the reparation money Kitaj himself collected from a lawyer representing his grandmother, just enough money to live on while he studied at the academy in Vienna. The lawyer lived in a medieval courtyard. Once a week, Kitaj would go to his flat for the money. The flat was over a Soviet barracks, and after lights out the lawyer and Kitaj would go into the bathroom to listen to the soldiers singing in the darkness. People wore the same clothes they had worn during the war. He remembers people in the streets grovelling for food, and the great number of beggars.

  I said that, when I first came to Paris in 1959, I came expecting the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound, came expecting that that world, which seemed to me a secret world within the larger secret of Paris, was there to be discovered, found that my attention walking down a street was not on the architecture but on the bullet-strafed walls. The real secret of Paris was the war.

  Kitaj said, ‘You talk about the secrets of Paris.’ He put his hands behind his head and raised his elbows, and as he did he spoke from the side of his mouth, his eye narrowed. ‘Perhaps there are no longer the secrets we fantasized were here, but I make it my business to invent a secret Paris, even if it doesn’t exist, or only partially. I have two secret cities here.’ He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table edge, and continued to speak from the side of his mouth, often stretching his neck as if he was wearing a tight collar, or hitching a shoulder as if to ease a suspender strap. The collar of his shirt was open, and his jacket was unbuttoned. ‘The first secret,’ he said, ‘has to do with sex. I first visited the red-light district along the rue Saint Denis about thirty years ago, and it hasn’t changed much, or at least I tell myself it hasn’t. A few of the women there are beautiful.’ He stretched his neck and laughed. ‘They renew themselves like sperm all up and down the mile-long street. I find places where I can lose myself in forgetfulness. I usually go to bed early, but a couple of nights during the month I’ll disappear into Saint Denis. Sandra knows about it. I have no secrets from her.’ Sandra smiled. ‘In Saint Denis I can create my own Paris, and savour the sexual flavour of the place. I go to restaurants, bars, among whores and pimps, and I write or sketch. One reason why I came to Paris is to enjoy the myths. Sex is a myth.

  ‘And the other secret Paris,’ he said, now sitting back in his chair, but with his hands on the table, ‘is what is left of Jewish Paris. In the Marais, deep in the Marais, is the Pletzel, the area where the Jews still have their separate culture, and Sandra and I will have a meal, once a week, in a kosher restaurant there. What is it called?’

  ‘Joe Goldenberg,’ Sandra said.

  ‘We don’t have many friends here except for Avigdor Arika and his wife Anne, he a Jew who was in a concentration camp, she an American Jew who only heard about the camps. With Anne I went to Drancy, once a concentration camp for Jews outside of Paris where they were sent before being sent off to the death camps. Avigdor didn’t want to go. Drancy is a Communist working-class area. The buildings of the camp, originally thirties buildings, are now council flats. There is a monument to the Jews, an eleventh-rate sculpture. That’s all. There’s no coincidence between good art and such—’ He stopped, both his eyes blinking, not both together, but one after the other. He appeared to have suddenly forgotten what he was talking about. He looked out.

  I asked Sandra when she first came to Europe.

  ‘In 1969,’ she said.

  I asked, ‘Why did you come?’

  She clapped her hands together and then pressed them into her lap so her shoulders were raised, and she leaned her elongated body to the side. As if worried about what she would say, she smiled at me.

  ‘I guess it’s an impossible question,’ I said.

  She said, ‘In Los Angeles, I painted in the morning before going to work. I dreamed of coming to Europe to become a painter.’

  ‘Did you have an image of Paris before you came?’

  ‘From pictures and from what I’d read. I don’t feel sentimental about some lost European culture, but I sense that here there are so many references to the past that are still alive. A plate of oysters and a glass of white wine are reinforced by paintings, by literature.’

  After dinner, Kitaj and Sandra and I walked to their apartment, near the Seine, in what Kitaj said is one of the oldest streets in Paris, the rue Galande. His studio is the largest room in the apartment, and has stone walls and a well, as in a medieval courtyard. By the well is an easel. Paved with lithograph stone, the floor has large sheets of paper strewn over it. Kitaj picked up the sheets, one at a time, to show me soft-ground etchings and people he knows, and drawings of himself with twisted expressions.

  I asked him if there were any exhibitions of art that I should see.

  He said, ‘Not that I know of. It pleases me that there’s no noteworthy painting going on. There is only Avigdor. He’s the greatest artist-scholar alive, and he is my mentor here. I see him every other day.’

  Kitaj has a way of making such a statement, this about Avigdor, sound portentous.

  I said, ‘For myself, it isn’t what is going on in the world of European writing that I live in Europe. My writing isn’t at all connected to anything happening here. Not that I think it is connected to what is happening in America.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Oh, what are called the Fabulists.’

  Kitaj grunted.

  He said, ‘If what you’re talking about is what’s finished for you in Europe, what’s finished for me is my affair with Mediterranean-centred European culture. That’s all gone for me.’

  ‘Ezra Pound.’

  ‘My favourite anti-Semite.’

  And yet, I said, European culture does exist. Living in Europe, have we just become so used to the culture that we don’t see it any longer, in the way we saw it as Americans before we even came to Europe? We’re no longer self-conscious about being Americans in Europe.

  ‘Are we used to it?’ Kitaj asked. ‘No, I don’t think so. I think it was never ours for the having. It was and is an alien culture in which I had and have no business. Were Hemingway and all kidding themselves in their love affair with Europe? I don’t know.’

  ‘Then why do you stay?’

  ‘Habit,’ Kitaj said. ‘And habits are not simple. They’re as complex as love affairs.’

  As he was showing me out, Kitaj said, ‘Did I tell you I discovered that we’re living over a medieval Jewish cemetery? Right under our feet are Jewish bones.’

  He smiled his large rectangular smile, his white clenched teeth showing in his white beard.

  I’m writing this in my hotel room.

  London

  Lunch with Caroline Lowell. She appeared to age in the few hours we were together, she drinking vodka after vodka. We talked about the Falkland Islands crisis, about which she was witty, scathing, and utterly pessimistic. Britain in the person of Margaret Thatcher is trying to flex muscles, and in showing off is revealing just how flaccid the flexed biceps of the country are. In going to war to keep the tiny, insignificant Falkland Islands British, what Britain is demonstrating to the world is how tiny and insignificant the country is. Even if it recovers the islands from Argentinian occupation, the country has lost, and won’t regain, what remained, in myth, of its prestige as a nation. Caroline rings up her friends in New York for the real news, as the British news fabricates in favour of a petty war. She can laugh and groan at the same time, a dry
laugh and a dry groan. Her large green eyes are as they appear in the painting of her by Lucian Freud, and when I look into them I see the painting, not in terms of art, but of personal relationships that come before art.

  Nikos’ mother has died, and he went to Athens for the funeral and burial. In the cemetery, his mother in a coffin in a room where the coffins were kept for burial, he insisted on having the cover removed to see her. He said he touched her and felt she was still warm, and believed that she was alive, and was horrified that she would be buried alive.

  Stephen has given me a copy of E. M. Forster’s Commonplace Book, just published. He said he didn’t want it in the house in case Natasha picked it up and read what Forster wrote about him, as it would upset her. How could it not upset Stephen? ‘Stephen Spender loses honour constantly through an interminable diarrhoea composed not entirely of words.’ Is this what Forster thought of Stephen when we visited him?

  And there is an entry about Natasha and Stephen’s former lover from before he married Natasha, Tony Hyndman, who visited Forster: ‘Tony Hyndman has been in, recovering from shock also, administered electrically at the Fulbourne mental . . . Natasha Spender has come out well. I did not suspect such generosity and responsibility. I saw only the climber, who is always with the most interesting people.’

  Forster was right about Natasha’s generosity and responsibility, which Nikos and I have experienced in her inviting us into her life with Stephen.