by David Plante
‘I should think definitely not,’ Francis said; ‘he was mad.’
Then we talked about health, I don’t know why. Stephen keeps going to doctors for tests, though he says he is in perfect health, really. He said, ‘Somehow I’m not frightened of death. I think I was brought up not to be frightened of it, but to consider it as something that would inevitably come and not to be made a fuss over. I suppose I don’t think myself important enough to make a fuss about dying.’
Francis said, ‘I’m frightened of death. I’m very frightened of it.’ He laughed. ‘Of course, I may die tomorrow. I’m seventy-three – just your age, Stephen.’
Stephen said, ‘How is it, then, that my hair is white and yours not?’
‘Because I dye it,’ Francis said. ‘You should try it.’ He named the dye and how to use it.
I asked Francis, ‘Why are you frightened of dying?’
He said, ‘Because I love life. It’s all I have, and I don’t want to lose it. I love it.’
‘So do I,’ Stephen said.
‘David doesn’t,’ Nikos said.
‘You don’t?’ Francis asked me.
‘I love Nikos,’ I said.
A waiter came to Francis and whispered something into his ear, then left. ‘It’s John,’ Francis said to us. ‘He’s out in the street, drunk. I’d better go get him.’ He left, and in a little while came back with John, who did not appear to be drunk.
He had not been able to get the fancier pub he’d been negotiating for, and we were sorry for him; but he didn’t seem to mind, and said, ‘It don’t matter.’ He told us about his trip to America, to Atlantic City, with his brother, with whom he’s going into business buying and selling old furniture. Francis said, ‘Really a load of old junk.’ I wondered how much old furniture they could buy and sell in Atlantic City, the gambling capital of America, and thought that couldn’t be their business.
Then he took out a photograph of himself and his boyfriend Philip, who had been allowed out of prison on a three-day pass. John wanted to give the photograph to Francis, and asked Nikos, sitting next to him, if Nikos would spell out his dictation, so that he, John, could write it, as he couldn’t spell words but he could write letters. As Nikos dictated the letters, John wrote: FOR MY FRANCIS WITH MY LOVE JOHN.
John leaned over the table towards Francis and said, ‘I want to tell you something,’ and Francis leaned forward so John could whisper into his ear. Francis sat back suddenly and said, in a loud voice, ‘That’s ridiculous. I’m not going to listen to it. That you want to die is ridiculous. I’m not going to listen.’ John smiled. He held out his hand to Francis and Francis took it. John said, ‘I love you.’ Francis said, ‘And I love you, and because I do I’m not going to listen to you talk nonsense.’ John turned to us. He said, ‘I love Francis. I love my friend in prison, and I love Francis, though, you know, with Francis I have a non-sexual relationship.’ And we all nodded.
John told us he has a new house, a big house in the country, with outbuildings and two acres of farmland, where he would live with his boyfriend. They’ve been together for fourteen years, and they make love every day, sometimes twice a day, except when Philip is in prison. ‘I’m real horny,’ John said. He’d decided to live in the country because if he and Philip continued to live in London they’d end up killing themselves with drink or get some terrible sexually transmitted disease. About the house, he said, ‘Of course Francis helped me.’ About the house in the country, John said he had had one of the outbuildings done up into a cottage for Francis to stay when he visited. Francis raised his shoulders and let them drop and said, ‘I loathe the country.’ John said, ‘The cottage has a nice view.’ ‘I loathe views,’ Francis said. They both laughed, John very amused by Francis. John invited Nikos and me to the house in the country for Easter Sunday lunch.
It was midnight, and Stephen said he had to go. Nikos and I left with him. I had drunk very little to be able to drive. On the way to his house, Stephen said, ‘All night, whenever Francis said something extraordinary, I’d tell myself, this is something I’ll never forget, and I’ve forgotten everything. I must try to remember it all for my diary.’
We talked about the relationship between Francis and John. Stephen said, ‘Of course, anyone who has a relationship with a genius will end up wanting to kill himself out of a sheer sense of inadequacy.’
We left Stephen off a block away from his house. He said Natasha didn’t know he was having dinner out with Francis and us, and might get upset if she saw us leave him off; she’d think we were conspiring to keep her out.
Back home, Nikos and I talked about Francis. ‘He’s wonderful,’ Nikos said; ‘he’s totally without pretensions. Totally. I’ve never known a man to be so totally unpretentious.’
Often, over the evening, I’d look at Nikos and think: how beautiful he is. A great refinement has come to his face. I’d think, And he’s my love! with surprise at the fact.
The next time Stephen came to us, I noted that he had brightened his hair with a blue rinse.
An observation – though there are multiple connections among people in London, there are, too, many intended disconnections, for Steven Runciman may know Stephen Spender, but does not like him, and does not connect with him.
An example of Steven’s irony, this about the ritual of the ceremony of fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The sepulcher itself is held by the Greek Orthodox Church, and every Easter appoints a priest, frisked first so it is sure that he doesn’t carry matches or anything that will ignite a fire, to enter into the sepulcher, which is then sealed until the priest knocks to be released, always, unfailingly, carrying a candle lit miraculously in the sepulcher, from which all the candles in the church are lit. Having told the story, Steven will stick out his lower lip and raise his chin as if in defiance of anyone contradicting him and his implied belief that of course the candle was lit miraculously. As amused as he is by telling such a story, the irony is that you are left thinking he may in fact believe in the entertaining miracle.
Stephen is incapable of such subtle irony, and would frown with disapproval that anyone should be so ridiculous. This is not to say that Stephen doesn’t have any respect for belief, but, unlike Steven, he takes such belief seriously, for, as I’ve written before, Stephen is not good at irony.
Nor am I good at irony. I sometimes write prayers, one of which I gave to Stephen, who, I saw, was moved by it. I would never give a prayer to Steven, who, claiming as he does that he is a warlock and can cause someone to break his leg, would take the prayer to be at the same level of entertaining magic.
This comes to me as a little revelation, though I don’t at all know what it means: that Nikos and I know people who may have met one another, but who would have no interest in, or would even withdraw from, knowing one another. So, I can’t imagine Steven Runciman and Francis Bacon spending an evening together, or Stephen Spender and Patrick Kinross, or . . .
While Nikos was at work –
I rang Germaine Greer to ask her to lunch. I thought I’d invite Stephen too, and rang him, and then asked if Natasha would like to come, so they both came: game pie and salad and cheese and grapes, with wine.
Germaine was animated. At moments, she stopped talking, put her hands across her bosom and made a moue of her lips as if in astonishment, then suddenly laughed as if at herself. She made the luncheon party.
Talk about the war in the Falklands, everyone horrified by Thatcher’s grandstand gesture.
After lunch, Stephen asked me if I’d written in my diary about our dinner with Francis the other night, and I wanted to say, ‘But you said I mustn’t mention that in front of Natasha.’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and offered to read out the entry, which, with coffee, I did – leaving out the reference to Natasha. Now, at least, Natasha and Germaine know I keep a diary, and what it is like. I could have said I’ve stopped keeping it, leaving it to be read after everyone, including myself, is dead; but then I thought that would be a lie, so wh
y not let everyone know what I write while we’re alive?
I said, ‘In my diary, I never try to account for others’ opinions, always too complicated, too subtle, for me to account for them in a sentence or two.’
Stephen said, ‘You try to be descriptive.’
‘I try,’ I said. ‘I would never try to account for Germaine’s opinion about abortion.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you don’t do that. But you sin by omission. You use the glass-pane technique, which is just to record what you see. You may think that’s truthful, but it can be a total distortion of the truth. If you see someone washing his face in vodka, and record that, you give the impression that the man is a mad alcoholic; it may be that he’s cut himself and is using the vodka as an antiseptic.’
Natasha said nothing.
I did think that if I saw a man washing his face in vodka, I would wonder if he was simply bonkers.
Nikos returned early from his office and I recounted the luncheon party to him, not sure he was interested.
Should I wonder that most of the people we see are that much older than we are – old enough to be of another generation? The attraction is simple: we have so much to learn from them historically, as they do represent history. What they have to learn from us I have no idea.
But then there are friends of our generation whom we see often: Stephen Buckley, Keith Milow, Mark Lancaster when he’s in London, Richard and Sally Morphet, Julia and Howard Hodgkin, Joe and Jos Tilson, Kitaj and Sandra, all in the art world. Do we have any close friends among writers of our generation?
The Falkland Islands have been freed of Argentinian occupation, and Britain shows off to the world that there is still a British Empire.
Nikos and I received invitations to the opening of Francis’ grand retrospective at the Tate Gallery. There were long tables covered with white cloths and waiters standing behind the tables serving champagne and cooks serving portions from whole salmons.
John was as excited as if a party was being given for him. He was wearing a beautiful suit. He told Nikos and me he was very angry, as one of Francis’ old cronies from the Colony Room had, on this most important occasion, asked Francis for fifty pounds, and John had insisted Francis not give the money. John said to me, ‘I was having a nice time until this happened. Francis has given him hundreds of pounds, more than hundreds, and he never pays back. If you borrow, you pay back. Fuck it.’
Francis’ friend Dicky Chopping came to us and said, ‘Francis is going round to look at his pictures. Why don’t you join us?’ We followed Francis from picture to picture – Study for Portrait of Van Gogh II, Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, Crucifixion 1965 – and standing for a moment at each one he would laugh and say, ‘Isn’t it loathsome? I loathe it. I really loathe it.’
I went off on my own to study the great Triptych May–June 1973, the one depicting the death of George Dyer in the hotel in Paris when Francis was having his grand retrospective show in the Grand Palais. George is doubled up on a toilet in the left-hand panel; in the right one he is vomiting into a washbasin; and in the central panel he is half dissolved in blackness that pours out through an open doorway. I saw how essentially, how passionately, how heartbreakingly this triptych depicted Francis’ reaction to the horror of the death of someone he had loved.
From this I went to the pastel, almost sentimental portraits of John, filled with – what can I write? – tenderness.
Dawn Ades, who wrote an essay for the catalogue, said she thought the colours were ‘breathed on to the canvas,’ and she held her palm before her mouth and breathed onto it.
What would I most like to write? I would most like to write a short book called The Spiritual in Literature, something like Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
To tea at Kitaj and Sandra’s. I mentioned that Avigdor Arika had given to Nikos an etching of himself, perhaps in recognition that Nikos had included him in the Dictionary of Art and Artists, which Nikos is editing and in which he does include Keith Milow and Stephen Buckley, but Kitaj looked away, and Sandra said, ‘We don’t see Avigdor any more,’ and I was left wondering what had happened, but wouldn’t ask.
Then, as if by looking in the distance is the dimension in which Kitaj thinks, he turned to me and said he had recently seen Francis Bacon in the street, Francis wearing red basketball shoes, and Francis asked him, ‘Do you ever have days when everything goes wrong?’ Now Kitaj laughed his shrugging, masculine laugh, his eyes bright. I wonder about Kitaj’s obsession with being Jewish, for though his stepmother was Jewish, I think, from what I’ve heard him say, that his biological mother and father were not, and, if so, he was brought up so far removed from Jewishness that, and this he did once tell me, when he was in high school he used to pray a Hail Mary and make the sign of the cross before engaging in a baseball game. He is taking instruction from a rabbi before marrying Sandra, who is Jewish, but he baulks at the problem of how God could allow so much suffering to his people. Kitaj listened to me when I said I object to the word ‘Holocaust’ to define the horrors of Jewish suffering, as that means a burnt offering to God, and what God would accept such an offering, and to what end? I prefer to use ‘Shoa,’ which, incidentally, the Vatican uses, understanding the meaning of ‘holocaust.’ Kitaj said nothing, and I worried if I had offended him, so went on to say that I believe his painting If Not, Not, which has been made into a tapestry that hangs in the foyer of the British Library, is a masterpiece, no greater indictment of the horrors of the twentieth century, more potent than Eliot’s The Waste Land, than that painting, with the façade of the entrance building of Auschwitz commanding the landscape of civilization in ruins.
Sylvia Guirey asked me to come to her studio to show me her latest paintings, all dots, and to talk to me about her relationship with Richard and Mary Day. Mary Day has accepted Richard back on the condition that he does not see Sylvia. Sylvia is bewildered by the whole situation and doesn’t know what to do.
I listened, but didn’t understand; when friends confide in me, which they seem to do, they confide generally, leaving the details out, so that when, later, another friend tells me the details, I’m amazed, even at times shocked. I had no idea why Sylvia wanted to talk to me.
I walked home through South Kensington, through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park; the chestnut trees and hawthorn are in full bloom, and the grass is thick and fresh.
Nikos had some Greek friends for drinks. As I came in, he said, ‘Your editor at the New Yorker, Dan Menaker, just rang to say they’ve taken your latest story.’ I had drinks with his Greek friends, who stayed for supper.
Could it be that the images we witness of World War I and World War II have more power now than they would have had at the times of the wars, and form in us the consciousness, the conscience, of a world united in suffering – suffering, once seen as localized among certain people, now made global as the images expand beyond the local into the world, and, if it can be said that the wars had any positive legacy, expanding into the consciousness, the conscience, of a whole world that has, all together, to guard against such suffering?
The nuclear bombs, impelled by the wars, make us think of the whole round world.
Certainly, it is unthinkable that Germany and Britain could possibly be at war with each other, which occurred in my lifetime, and which I believe must now bring Britain and Germany, and all of Europe, close together, that consciousness, that conscience, formed by the suffering of the wars that divided the countries now uniting them.
And so I believe in and take joy in the possibility of a United States of Europe, and, with even more extended belief and joy, in a United States of the World.
This vision of the whole world has evolved, if in part as an intention, mostly unintentionally, historically.
Nikos and I to supper at John Golding and James Joll’s, who have been painted as a couple by R. B. Kitaj. Mario Dubsky there, and, however much I should by now assume it as common, I was surprised by the appearance of som
eone in a social situation I know from another social situation, for I didn’t know that John and James know Mario. Conversation about the art world.
I said I would like to write a frivolous novel about a young man who cannot see the causal relationship between work and money, and imagines they have nothing to do with each other. John said, ‘No one has ever assumed for a minute that you imagine they have anything to do with each other.’ Nikos smiled, and, I don’t know why, I felt the attention paid me was in itself an affectionate compliment.
Florence
After the death of John Pope-Hennessy –
Some years after he had retired from his curatorial positions at the Victoria and Albert, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and moved to Florence, I would visit him from Lucca, where Nikos and I have a small flat in a duecento tenement building, up seventy-three steps. John did once visit us there, and, looking about, again as if in all directions at once, squealed, ‘Very enviable.’ In Florence, I climbed the wide stone stairs within the courtyard of the palazzo to the doors of the apartment on a landing and rang the bell at the side of the thick glass doors with heavy metal grill, forged into decorative curves, over the glass. The door was opened by a maid in a black dress and white apron (as his maids were dressed in London and New York), and I was shown into the sitting room to wait. There, in a corner, stood a Venetian cabinet of curiosities, and I stopped to look through the glass – the original glass, John later told me – which made the objets de vertu inside appear to waver as I studied them, and among them was my little carved wooden rhinoceros I had given to him in London. (The meaning of objets de vertu intrigues me – were precious objects seen as inspiring virtue?) When, moving as always briskly, John entered, I thanked him for keeping that little memento, but he didn’t respond. He had just bought a painting of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mother by Pietro de Francesco degli Orioli, and together we looked at it.
