Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  Later, I talked about this with Nikos. He said, yes, I may be right about that deep generative sense of music, but perhaps what seems superficial chance in the music of Cage and Tudor is in tension with that essential sense, and, simply by our paying attention to their music, that essential sense makes sense of the superficial chance, and it may even be that the essential sense rises up and makes of the superficial chance a composition that is not intended by the composers but that occurs beyond their intentions.

  Yes, I said, yes, of course, but I do sometimes want some intention to contain, to proportion and balance the unintended. I wonder if too much is left to chance in all the art forms and not enough is brought up of the essentials to the surface.

  It is as though the essentials are not for us to determine, but must assert themselves against our inability to determine them, or, even, against our doubt that they exist, so we rely on chance with a strange faith that the essentials will determine themselves, or even show that they exist.

  I would like to write an essay on how, in literature, the reliance on imagery, on description, has become the only way a writer – who cannot allow himself to determine the essentials because he doesn’t know what the essentials are, or if there are any essentials – has of allowing the essentials to show themselves, as if faith in the image is for the writer the only chance he has for something more to occur in his writing than what he can make occur. More and more, I think this reliance on the image is limiting, and imposes itself on literature in a way that flattens out the deeper, generative grammar of essential human values in justice, in love, in grief, and, too, beauty, which values are as deep in us as language. I wonder if style has been subjected to the use of superficial imagery to the detriment of style, and so I read Jane Austen for a style that, not dependent on the image, brings the essentials somewhat closer to the surface with a greater depth of deep, generative grammar than the image can. But this is a huge subject.

  John Edwards’ house is in Suffolk. It is a brick house, and its outbuildings are behind a brick wall, in very flat green countryside over which the wind blew hard when Nikos and I were there. About twenty cars were parked in a field outside the brick wall. Within the gate we saw no one, and the place appeared deserted. It was only when we approached the house that I saw, through a window, Francis sitting at a table, talking to someone and smiling, not country people, but city people who preferred to stay inside.

  Some sixty people were inside the house, most of them John’s family and friends from the East End, and some queens from the Colony Room. I met John’s mother and father, he a retired publican, and the rest of the family. They were all talkative and friendly and called me Dave. ‘Whenever you’d like to come to my house in Portugal, Dave, you let me know,’ one of John’s brothers said, and I said I’d like that.

  I wandered about the house, which is furnished with over-sized Victorian-Italian-Renaissance pieces, the mantelpieces elaborate. On the walls are many framed reproductions of Francis’ paintings, among them paintings of John. In one room, Philip, sunk into an armchair, was smoking pot.

  In yet another room, I found Nikos listening to Ian, the man who runs the Colony Room, shouting at Denis Wirth-Miller, ‘You’re a fake. A total fake. You’re a terrible painter. The only person who would buy one of your paintings is the Queen Mother.’ Denis, who at around seventy years old looks like a withered boy, simply smiled. His friend Dicky Chopping was also standing in the room, but looking away. I stood by Nikos and listened to Ian, who continued to shout at Denis, and Francis, wavering as he walked, came into the room and he, too, stood and listened with his head lowered, looking like a priest listening to a confession. When Ian paused, Francis raised his head and said calmly, ‘It’s absolutely true, Denis is a fake. That’s what he is, a genuine fake.’ Denis went on smirking, his teeth showing. I left.

  I went to look at the outbuildings, one of them the cottage done up for Francis. The interior of one long outbuilding was converted into a snooker room with a fringed, green lamp hanging low over the snooker table. At the end of the room were floor-to-ceiling mirrors and a bar, and over a beam of what must have been a barn roof dangled a pair of boxing gloves. Some men were playing snooker.

  I returned to the house to find Nikos, who said, ‘You shouldn’t have left. In a strange way, those men were showing affection for one another.’

  We went to the snooker room, where Francis was watching the men playing. Francis said, ‘I loathe parties. I simply loathe them.’ Then John came into the room with friends and Francis said to him, with a wide smile, ‘What a lovely party, John. Such a lovely party.’

  Nikos and I had to leave. Francis walked us to our car. Outside the brick wall in the field, we stood in the wind and talked about John.

  Nikos said, ‘He’s very special.’

  ‘He’s very special,’ Francis said.

  ‘He is,’ I said.

  ‘He can’t read or write,’ Francis said, ‘but, you know, there really is something very special about him. You see, John is an innocent.’

  In the car, Nikos and I waved at Francis who was still standing in the field. He was wearing a suit and tie. His thin dyed hair was blowing in the wind. He smiled and waved. The green field behind him was flat and gave way to equally flat green-gray countryside.

  Why is it that the words I want to use, but which I am too intimidated to use because I’m told that they do not convince in the age I live in, are convincing in song, in, especially, Schubert, in Wolf, in Strauss? – in Wagner? I don’t believe that such singing refers so much to the historical age in which the songs were composed that I can respond to them only as some residue of that past historical age, for when I hear the singing something rises in me, in this historical age I live in, that strains for an expression that I feel so passionately it has to be rising from deep within the age I live in. What is it that strains so for expression that I sense so deeply is in this age, but for which this age can’t find the expression? The inner straining – yes, the longing – for the moment when everything does come together into a whole globe, and then the expression of it . . . ?

  Nikos and I to Loudoun Road for lunch.

  We talked about the bad reception I am getting for my book Difficult Women, about my relationships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, Germaine Greer, all taken from my diary.

  I said, ‘I don’t understand what, in England, is private and what is public, what you can say “in the club,” and what you can’t say outside it.’

  Nikos said, ‘I don’t know if I see the difference between what is known about me by a few people and by many people.’

  ‘But there is an enormous difference, Nikos!’ Natasha said.

  Stephen sat back and looked worried, then he said, ‘It shocked me when people objected so much to my portrait of Ottoline Morrell in my autobiography that they wouldn’t speak to me – and all I’d said was that she dropped an earring in her cup of tea and, moving, disarranged her clothes so a breast was exposed – and yet these same people would, among themselves, say much more objectionable things about Ottoline.’

  ‘I suppose I should worry that I have written objectionably about Jean and Sonia and Germaine,’ I said.

  ‘You perhaps should worry,’ Natasha said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Stephen exclaimed. ‘You should write exactly what you want. For forty years I haven’t written anything because I’ve been made to feel I’d offend if I wrote what I’ve wanted to write.’

  ‘Oh,’ Natasha exclaimed even more, ‘that’s not true!’

  ‘It is,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ Nikos said, ‘it is obviously a very complex moral problem.’

  ‘Yes,’ Natasha agreed; ‘and I think writers shouldn’t write autobiography, but fiction, because, even though we may all know who’s being written about, the public don’t. Fiction is a mask.’

  We talked on, Nikos often saying, ‘It is a complex moral problem.’

  After lunch, Nikos and I worked in the garde
n with Natasha for an hour while Stephen, in his study, worked on a book that Nikos had commissioned: a book about China, where Stephen had gone with David Hockney and Gregory Evans, Stephen to write the text, David to do the drawings, Gregory to organize them.

  Perhaps Stephen is truly anti-class when he says, ‘Write anything you want.’ But, then, he doesn’t do it. I do.

  Vera R. to tea. She asked me, ‘Tell me, David, are you, as I am, high-born?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m working class.’

  ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. Henry –’ I understood her to mean Henry Moore – ‘is working class. I’m talking about something of the spirit. You’ve a high-born spirit.’

  ‘Maybe that’s my French-Canadian blood,’ I said, and wondered if she knew I was joking.

  She said, ‘Yes, you have a high-born spirit, and, like me, are attracted, as high-born people are, to common people – you to common women, I to common men.’

  ‘I never thought that,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to give it a lot of thought.’

  ‘Do think about it.’

  I saw Stephen and Natasha, who had seen Germaine, I think at a reception. She had told them, as Stephen recounted, that I am a ‘creepy crawler,’ which made Stephen laugh his shaking laugh and made Natasha look at him with that somewhat suppressed delight she has in his being méchant.

  A weekend with Frank and Anita K. in Cambridge, Nikos and I and Michael Craig-Martin. Michael helped Anita design the lay-out of her flowerbeds, which she can now consider works of art. While they worked, Frank and Nikos and I read the Sunday papers. Then lunch, and help laying the table while Anita cooked, she keen on using exotic spices. A sense among us of containment, yet, at the same time, of dimensions around us of the outer world of art and literature which we referred to as we ate. Stephen is right: we do live worlds within worlds. Also, extending in unknown dimensions all about us, were our different lives when we are not together. I know about Nikos’ and my lives together, but of Frank’s and Anita’s only what they reveal by their easy reactions to each other on a charming weekend with friends, and Michael, who is wonderfully knowledgeable and articulate about what is going on in the art world, reveals nothing about his life.

  Then there are unexpected dimensions. Tony Tanner told me something that revealed, in the Kermodes’ relationship, a passion and turbulence that I had not been aware of.

  I sense none of that passion in Frank as he calmly smokes his pipe, which keeps going out and which he keeps relighting.

  But some time later Anita told me this story from early on in her relationship with Frank:

  She and Frank, having left their families and pasts to be together, were living in a rented flat across from the British Museum. There, all of Anita’s inherited jewelry was stolen, along with the food – including a duck and the wine and cheese and even a cauliflower – meant for a dinner she was going to prepare before she and Frank were to leave for France. They did leave at the end of the rental period, and had no place to return to. The idea was that they would drive, in a rented car, to the South of France. In Angoulême they quarreled. The reason for the quarrel was incidental to the way Anita felt defeated by Frank’s vicious use of words, leaving her deprived of any language at all and helpless. The quarrel was so fierce that they stopped at the first hotel in the town they came to and Anita got out with her suitcase and Frank drove off to another hotel. It was a Friday evening in the town, which was deserted, but in the morning the square outside the hotel was filled with market stalls, parked cars, a crowd of people. Anita waited but Frank did not show up. She waited for hours, and he didn’t appear. She felt shocked and abandoned. After more hours, she thought that Frank may have driven off to Stephen and Natasha’s house, Saint-Jérôme, in the Apilles. She decided to chance taking a train to Maussane, the nearest town to Saint-Jérôme, and there she found a hotel and asked the proprietor to phone the Spenders, but no one was there. Clearly, she had no idea where Frank had gone.

  Several days went by. Then a dream she had about being alone on a Russian seashore after World War III made her feel she was alone in the universe, but that it was all right. On long walks in the countryside she tried and failed to understand what had happened. On the fifth day she thought to telephone a mutual friend in London, and he told her that Frank was there, staying with him. In Angoulême, market day, Frank hadn’t been able to find the car he had parked the day before in the town square; when he had found the car, he couldn’t remember what hotel he’d left Anita off at, and went from hotel to hotel, but she was in none. He thought she must have returned to London, so in his rented car drove back there, where, with no other place to stay, he was staying with their mutual friend. Though Frank had very little money, as did Anita, he flew back to France and from the airport, rented a car and drove to Maussane where he and Anita put their quarrel to bed. The mix-up in Angoulême, Frank tried to explain, was typical of the utterly absurd situations he tended to find himself in.

  Hearing Anita tell this story, I, forgiving myself, laughed, but she laughed too. She said, ‘It is all one with the passionate madness of our relationship.’

  Do I dare put this in, which may smack of just what Nikos has told me I must not do, justify myself ? I had from Philip Roth, living in London with Claire Bloom, a letter praising Difficult Women and asking if we could meet. Well, yes, we could, and we did, and we meet often for lunch in a restaurant in Notting Hill, where he has a studio. He told me he had had a long row with Harold Pinter about the book which may have ended their friendship.

  As I was entering a drinks party, I saw, across the room, Vidia Naipaul, who with both arms raised beckoned me to him. On the way, I did stop to have a word with one or two friends and when I got to Vidia he said, with a smile, ‘David, you have become so grand you didn’t come immediately.’ He put his hands on my shoulders and said that he had read my book about the women, his only criticism being that I was too kind, and that, because of the book, he had decided to stop writing fiction and from now on would write only non-fiction.

  Philip said to me, ‘You’re a tough person. An enigmatic and tough person. Perhaps there’s a note of masochistic self-exposure about the book, but you do stand out as tough.’

  I collected John Lehmann in my car to take him to Stephen’s for luncheon. John is as feeble as he is big; he walked very slowly and unsteadily with a stick to the car and got into the seat with great difficulty; he smelled of whiskey and uncleanliness.

  He said, ‘I may have to leave Stephen’s rather early, dear boy.’

  John Golding and James Joll were also there, and the Australian poet Peter Porter. Natasha is in the South of France, and Nikos at the publishing house.

  Stephen told me to sit at the opposite end of the table from him – he giggled – ‘As the wife.’

  He had prepared a huge roast, but the roast potatoes that went with the meat were inedible.

  He seemed hardly to speak to John, on his right, and often Stephen got up to serve more beef, but not the potatoes.

  From time to time, John would ask, ‘How are your legs, Stephen?’ or ‘What did you think of the reviews of your last book, Stephen?’

  After dinner we all went upstairs to the sitting room, the talk inconsequential, and shortly after John asked if I’d take him home.

  In the car he was silent for a long while, then he said, ‘I suppose I must accept the fact that Stephen and I, after all these years, can’t be friends. I can’t help but feel he’s suspicious of me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure what I mean, dear boy.’

  ‘It’s very interesting, and you should think about it.’

  ‘It is interesting.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  He said, ‘I keep hoping that a true affection will flow between us but it never does.’

  I let him off in front of his door.

  The next morning I spoke to Stephen over the telephone, and recounted what John had told me, hopi
ng that Stephen might be touched by John’s wanting affection to flow between them.

  Stephen said, ‘Suspicious! Of course I am. Did you hear those catty questions he kept asking me? Still, perhaps I didn’t pay him much attention during the evening –’

  Stephen has said, with a laugh, that it’s assumed he and John once had an affair because they are both so big; then Stephen frowned and, with sudden anger, insisted, ‘We did not!’

  Nikos is in Russia, commissioning books.

  While he is away, Roxy and I went to Paddington Station to meet Joe and Jos Tilson, up from Wiltshire, to join a huge CND demonstration against the proliferation of nuclear bombs. Many special trains were arriving at the station, which was crowded with demonstrators who stood on the platform with their banners, waiting for the organizers with megaphones to tell them what to do. Some young punks, with red and blue hair and

  painted on their cheeks, were passing out placards on sticks; we each took a placard and by tube went to Notting Hill, where, at Ladbroke Grove, a third of the demonstration (the Western contingent) was forming into a long, wide march. On the pavements, West Indians were beating bongo drums. Young people wearing fall-out cover-ups, white with zippers up the front, passed along the crowd with plastic buckets, asking for donations, and people threw in loose change. We stood for a while on a pavement by the bongo players and watched the march go by, wanting to choose which banner, held by the leading representatives of each contingent, and when a beautiful purple banner with silver fringe approached we all said, ‘That’s lovely! That’s the one!’ but when we saw emblazoned on the banner FEMINIST LESBIANS AGAINST DEATH we decided to wait, given that we were not lesbians. There were banners for doctors, scientists, musicians, trades unions, and mostly for towns and cities from all over Great Britain. There came along a small wood of large, paper oak leaves carried on sticks, and on the leaves was SAVE NATURE, and Joe thought we should join this contingent, which reminded him of his art, and so we did, and behind the wood we marched down Ladbroke Grove, up Notting Hill, down Kensington Church Street.