Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  After he died, the contents of this flat were auctioned by Christie’s in New York, and I saw in the catalogue the furniture, the bronzes, the pictures I had seen in the flat. When I had visited him, the rooms, especially a round, rotunda-like dining room with a round cherrywood table in the center, the walls, as I recall, pale yellow, with vitrines on three sides filled with objects as in a museum, made the objects contained in them appear so carefully and knowledgeably chosen that I felt whatever small items of little worth I had were collected haphazardly and without any overriding historical knowledge to make them a coherent collection. In no way could I have identified a Giorgio d’Alemagna miniature, a red-chalk drawing by Ventura Salimbeni, a painting of the Baptism of Christ of Pier Francesco Mola and more, and all privileged by the knowledge of Pope-Hennessy. But, again, seeing them separated out in the catalogue, they lost that privilege. He had often said he had no money, and, studying the objects in reproduction, I realized that, of course, he had had money, but not enough that individual works, taken out of the context of the flat in Via de’ Bardi, retained the uniqueness they appeared to have there. I was told that there was a blizzard at the time of the auction, and the sale was not as had been hoped. Among the items of furniture auctioned was the Venetian lacca povera corner cabinet, decorated with commedia dell’arte figures, in which my little carved rhinoceros had been displayed, but that object clearly not auctioned.

  John liked, he said, to show friends off on trains, and from the other side of the Arno he would accompany me across the Ponte Vecchio, walking more vividly than I, past the Giotto Tower and Baptistry and the Duomo and all the tourists and to the train station at Santa Maria Novella. The whole of Florence seemed to be his privilege, his way through the city le droit du seigneur.

  When with others, he went first through a doorway or up a flight of stairs; he took it for granted that his position in a car was next to the driver. A mutual friend said about him, ‘It’s not as though he has bad manners, it’s that he has no manners at all.’

  And yet, in his apparent total, authoritative self-confidence, he was a man without conceit, without pretensions.

  I always felt totally intimidated by him, and never understood why we were friends.

  One hot evening we arrived too late at the station for the train to Lucca, and he matter-of-factly announced, ‘You’ll have to spend the night.’ Back in his apartment, he asked his assistant to show me to a bedroom, and I was given toiletries, pajamas and a change of underclothes for the morning by his assistant, Michael Mallon. I did not sleep well.

  At breakfast, Michael Mallon, as if this needed a reminder, said that the day was Epiphany, and Pope-Hennessy (or, as he was called, the Pope) was almost operatically high-pitched when he exclaimed, ‘Off to Mass!’ and he and the assistant left me to go for their missals, I now at the front door waiting for them. They were off to Mass in a church, S.S. Annunziata of the Servite Friars, whose devotion was (is) to the Mother of God, especially as La Mater Dolorosa. By special dispensation from the Vatican Pope, the old Tridentine Mass of 1570 was celebrated, the Mass, I said, of my youth, long before the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s changed the Latin Mass to the vernacular. I asked if I could join them, and was not refused.

  But we were early, and went into the Ospedale degli Innocenti across the Piazza Annunziata to look specifically at a painting of The Adoration of the Magi by Domenico Ghirlandaio, a strange painting, for behind the scene of the Magi bringing gifts to the infant Jesus and his parents was the gory scene of the Massacre of the Innocents, perhaps an ironical reference to the Ospedale degli Innocenti which was established to save orphans from death. No one said a word, but simply studied the painting for a long while, long enough to take in all its details, especially the Massacre of the Innocents enacted in a bloody landscape behind the manger, which I so wondered at, but which I felt I must not ask about. No doubt my silence was guarding my ignorance, but I also sensed too great a reverence in the silence of Pope-Hennessy and his assistant to break it.

  The Mass was very much the Mass of my youth. John and Michael followed the ceremony in their missals, which I vividly remembered doing when I was at Mass in my parish. The priest, in a green chasuble and carrying the chalice under a green veil, one hand flat on the square purse on top and the other holding the chalice beneath the veil, came down the aisle of the small white church. Two servers in surplices were with him, one carrying a smoking censer by its chains and the other a little silver boat of incense. The choir in the loft at the back of the church sang. The priest climbed the steps to the altar and placed the veiled chalice on it before the tabernacle and descended the steps, made the sign of the cross then turned to the congregation and held out his arms and intoned, ‘Introibo ad altare Dei,’ and the servers on either side of him responded, ‘Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,’ and I felt a strange movement in me at those words invoking God the joy of my youth.

  In the church of S.S. Annunziata in Florence, memory brought back Sunday after Sunday in my parish church. I remembered the Latin. I remembered the times to stand, to kneel, to sit. I remembered the way the wide, stiff chasuble of the priest moved with the movement of his shoulders when, his back to the congregation, he moved his shoulders with the movements made in the ritual. I remembered the Bible on its stand being changed by the server from one side of the altar to the other.

  I watched the priest lift the purse from the veil and remove from it the corporal, the white linen, handkerchief-like cloth, which he spread on the altar; watched him remove the veil from the chalice placed on the corporal, still covered by the pall and the purifier. I remembered all the names. And I remembered the moment of the elevation and consecration of the host, announced by the delicate chiming of bells rung by a server, and the bowing of the congregation in adoration of that high white host which was no longer a wafer but was transubstantiated into the body of Christ.

  A feeling started up in me that I felt sway back and forth in me, like keening. John and his assistant went to the rail for communion, but I, more than ever, could not. The choir in the organ loft sang.

  After the Mass, out on the pavement, Pope-Hennessy introduced me to a number of people, one of whom a countess who, in refined appreciation of the chant, commented that the Gloria was pre-Gregorian.

  I left John Pope-Hennessy for the train station and on the train to Lucca I looked out at the grey and dun-brown Tuscan winter countryside, where, here and there, bare persimmon trees were hung heavily with bright orange fruit, and I calmed down.

  A mutual friend who lived in Florence, Thekla Clark, rang me out of interest to tell me that John Pope-Hennessy had told her that I was praticante. I said, no, no, I was not praticante. She asked, ‘You’re an agnostic?’ and I answered, ‘I’m an atheist.’ She repeated, ‘Not an agnostic?’ And I repeated, ‘No, an atheist.’

  Some time later, another mutual friend, John Fleming, with whom the Pope often stayed, rang me to inform me: my visit with the Pope had not been a ‘success.’ Oh? I had gone to Mass as a non-believer. This shocked me. The Pope objected to my going to Mass for the aesthetics of the ceremony. This shocked me more. I protested: I had gone because the Tridentine Mass was the Mass of my youth and as such had a very deep meaning to me, whatever that meaning was. Well, I might write a postcard to the Pope to explain. I was on the verge of being excommunicated. I did write a postcard, and I did see Pope-Hennessy again, this time as guests of John Fleming and Hugh Honour outside Lucca, and no mention was made of my heresy.

  As if to get back into his good graces, I mentioned that I had been very impressed by an essay he had written on Michelangelo, which ended with something like: ‘Michelangelo prayed for the angels to descend to help him, and the angels did.’ On that high note that was always near a delicate screech, he turned away and said, ‘I don’t remember,’ and my attempt to be blessed was dismissed. Michael Mallon was able to name the essay with which the lines concluded.

  We were, with dri
nks before lunch, beneath a loggia by a lotus pool. John didn’t refer to my postcard or his having objected to my going to Mass as a non-believer, and I knew not to refer to either myself. As he had dismissed my reference to angels in his essay on Michelangelo, I thought I would be clever by saying how marvelous the footnotes are in Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in particular the footnote about the prophet Iamblichus who miraculously evoked two fountains to rise from the desert from which the gods of love, Eros and Anteros, emerged, fondly embraced him, and at his command stepped back into the fountains which would then sink back into the earth.

  Self-consciously laughing, I said, ‘If only that were possible.’

  John did laugh, and I thought I had at least amused him. Then he asked, ‘You don’t believe in miracles, David?’

  ‘No,’ I said somewhat apologetically.

  ‘You don’t believe that the natural order can be suspended and what was thought to be impossible becomes possible?’

  ‘I’d like very much to believe that,’ I said, ‘but I don’t.’

  He said, ‘I believe all the miracles depicted in predelle.’

  John laughed his high, abrupt laugh and turned away, but I felt that what he had said was not a joke. It was as though he, with the absoluteness of his self-confidence, had never questioned his belief in miracles, had not even considered that some people do not believe. I couldn’t see John Pope-Hennessy as helpless in any way, couldn’t see him giving in to longing, or, more, passion, but I saw him encircled by absolute belief, and this precluded any questions. Did he know theology as thoroughly as he knew the history of art? He would have thought it impudent of me to question not only his absolutism but the absolutism of Roman theology. I could no more have questioned him about his beliefs than I could have asked him why he had kept that little wooden rhinoceros in a cabinet in his sitting room.

  And yet, the questions remain.

  If he hated aesthetics, hated style, what was his vision of art?

  What, I wonder, did he see in the Domenico Ghirlandaio painting of The Adoration of the Magi in the Ospedale degli Innocenti with the Massacre of the Innocents as background?

  London

  Dinner at Germaine’s (individual soufflés, boiled mutton with a caper sauce, rhubarb sponge, all prepared on an enormous cooker with many ovens and hobs, and the wines very good, as if Germaine has all the time in the world and all the money in the world for such a meal) in honour of the writer David Malouf, an Australian compatriot of Germaine. She invited Stephen and Natasha, Stephen often laughing at her inventive use of expletives, Natasha wide-eyed with amazement so that, as she told me later, she kept thinking her eyebrows would fall off. Germaine, like an Italian peasant woman, never sat with us, but prepared the courses while we ate, and the food appeared and disappeared and appeared on the table.

  She kept apologizing about the food, and treated it, in serving it, as if she was embarrassed that it wasn’t good enough and shouldn’t be given the attention it in fact deserved.

  Feeling at home with her, Nikos carved the mutton joint; I helped with wine, coffee.

  I had the vivid sense of a woman entertaining completely on her own who was frantic that she wasn’t up to the entertainment. All the while we ate, the telephone kept ringing and other people, among them Melvyn Bragg, kept arriving.

  An insight into Germaine, or so I like to think: she has a huge chest of drawers inlaid with mother of pearl, as extravagant as I imagine Germaine to be, but when I commented on it she told me she didn’t like it, and if I wanted it to take it away. So I see in her an attraction to the extravagant and, at the same time, indifference to that extravagance, she herself as if between extravagant statements and at the same time willing to let the statements go.

  Her palms pressed to her bosom to make the enthusiasm heartfelt, she so enthused over a poster by David Hockney he had given to us that we gave it to her.

  She can be so intimate, taking one’s chin in her hand and staring into one’s eyes as if one were the only person in the world, and then she turns away and she sees something altogether unrelated to one that leaves one totally apart, leaving one to wonder what that intimacy was all about.

  A memory: John Byrne – who, I must say, has all too meaning a name as he was severely burned when a boy, dancing in a hula skirt too close to an electric fire in his mother’s sitting room – is a close friend of Germaine, and he invited her and Nikos and me to a fish and chip restaurant, which John, not the richest young man in the world as a dealer in rare books and manuscripts with Bertram Rota, could afford, and there, all of us in a booth, Germaine held John’s chin tightly and kissed him on the lips, the expression on John’s scared face one of joy, an expression of unrestrained affection on Germaine’s part that was for the moment, after which she looked with a frown at the menu, as if in Germaine there is no continuity between a moment of almost sexual affection and what to order on the fish and chip menu.

  Nikos thinks Germaine amazing, as he says when he meets someone who is totally original – that is, she takes nothing for granted, but will, after having made a statement for which she in the public is known, overturn the statement and make a contradictory statement, such as her finding Muslim women in an Arab country perfectly content to be in purdah.

  Steven Runciman sent me this limerick about Germaine, whom he met at supper at our flat:

  They told me to stay clear

  Of the formidable doctor Greer,

  But, in spite of her learning,

  For all my discerning,

  I find her rather a dear.

  John Gaskill has killed himself.

  The art historian Michael Jaffe told me that when he was showing the Queen round the Fitzwilliam Museum, she paused at the painting by Poussin she recognized from when she had had lunch with Anthony, and all she said was, ‘Poor Anthony.’

  Nikos, always enthusiastic about works he calls ‘innovative,’ took on at Thames & Hudson a book called Current Trends in British Art, among the young artists in the book Liam Gillick, Grenville Davey, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, Sarah Lucas, Lisa Milroy, Julian Opie, Rachel Whiteread. Many of these were students of Michael Craig-Martin at Goldsmiths’ College. Looking through the book, it is very difficult to generalize about the works as representative of a generation, given that some seem to be contained within flat rectangles while others are as free of the containment as glass milk bottles and stacks of chairs, or the list of bids at the auction of a Stradivarius violin, or photographs of the artist in a morgue among the dead, the faces and bodies of the dead blocked out. I defer to Nikos, he who will say with excitement about Titian, Vermeer, Chardin, ‘How innovative!’

  To Loudoun Road, the blue and white house set among dark green bushes, for tea with Stephen, Natasha out. We sat in Stephen’s study, the tall, glassed-in bookcase with a classical bust in plaster on top, all around loose papers, letters, books and paddy bags, crumpled newspapers, he in an armchair and I on a chair. I said never mind the tea, as Stephen, in his deep armchair, appeared so deep in it I thought it would be difficult to rise, and there he appeared to be settled deeply into his life.

  He spoke of people whom I knew of from his autobiography, World within World: of the family cook and housekeeper, Bertha and Ella, who were called, together, Berthella. Berthella didn’t approve of having bells rung for them by the family and served meals only when they were ready to. Stephen spoke lightly in a dry voice of his older brother Michael, a young man who insisted that even the beauty of the music he played so well on the piano could be explained scientifically; his sister Christine, who, receiving instruction to become a Catholic, refused to believe dead unbaptized children go to Limbo. He laughed lightly, as if he, in his advanced years, was seeing his early years with humor. But when he remembered his father saying, ‘May God, for as long as possible, preserve my son in his innocence,’ he became silent and I sensed him withdraw into himself in a way he almost never allows, and from which he s
uddenly sat up a little and said that perhaps we should have tea. I said I’d prepare the tea, and he thanked me and sat back into his armchair.

  After our cups of tea, Stephen did heft himself up and out from the armchair to go out, and, alone, I stood and turned to the glass-fronted bookshelves in which the room was dimly reflected, so that, my back to the room, I saw the reflection as another room, and between the two rooms were shelves of books as if suspended in space. Leaning close, I saw some of my own novels were there on a shelf, and it came to me that years have passed since I first came to London and met Nikos, met Stephen, met so many people that do make up a world.

  When Stephen returned, he suggested we listen to some of Tristan and Isolde, and again we sat in our deep armchairs, he so deeply that I rose to change the records. Hours later, during the Liebestod, Natasha appeared at the doorway and, seeing Stephen and me in a state of stupefying enthrallment, smiled and left us.

  Nikos and I went to a recital at the Institute of Contemporary Arts of one of John Cage’s chance pieces for piano. He had taken a blank score sheet and placed over it a map of the stars, and wherever there was a star he pushed a pin through to the blank score sheet below, which pin pricks became notes, notes played on a piano by an intense-looking woman with thin grey hair, each note, it sounded to me, a non-resounding plunk. After the recital a brief talk given by David Tudor, John Cage standing by, and after the lecture questions from the audience. I raised my hand and, standing, I asked, If there is, as there seems to be according to research into linguistics, a deep generative grammar that makes sounds into words and sentences, couldn’t there possibly be a deep generative grammar to sounds that makes sounds comprehensible as music, so that random sounds aren’t comprehensible as music is? David Tudor said something, but John Cage nothing.