Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  ‘I don’t know any,’ he said.

  We walked together to a bookshop in Notting Hill, and he told me about Claire and how he loves her. He is quite sure he is keeping her from suicide. In the bookshop, he looked around for a short while as if generally, then left, and I stayed an hour.

  At supper, Nikos told me that when he came to London from Athens, he was filled with ambitions. He had had a list of people he wanted to meet, and he has met them all. He said, ‘I was going to take London by storm.’

  ‘And do you feel you’ve fulfilled your ambitions?’

  He smiled. ‘Some,’ he said.

  ‘Which?’ I asked.

  ‘My biggest ambition was that I would meet someone and fall in love and live with him.’

  ‘And was that ambition fulfilled?’

  His smile deepened. ‘Somewhat.’

  Florence

  In Florence, I rang Harold Acton. As there is only one telephone in the villa, I had to wait until he came to it, no doubt handed to him by the butler who had answered. He is well over eighty, and he seemed not to have changed since his sixties. He greeted me in the drawing room and made Oriental gestures of welcome, leaning forward a little and rolling his hands on his wrists. His skin appeared tight on his long face and bald head, his nose thin with high, arched nostrils. He started almost every sentence with ‘Ooooh’ and spoke with an accent that put the emphasis, often on one syllable of a word, at odd places in the sentences. ‘Ooooh, you will tell me about people in London.’

  He asked me, as he always did, if I would like to see the garden, and as we walked about the statues among the cypresses he told me, as he always did, how the cocks of the statues had been knocked off. Someone had suggested that Acton kept the statues as mutilated as they were to be able to talk about his ‘problem’ – should he replace the ‘appendages,’ or, instead, attach fig leaves which would, by the bulge in them, suggest ‘something substantial underneath?’ He retained his curious, lightly jerking walk.

  His Tuscan kitchen would, he said as we walked back to the villa, produce a very modest meal, not up to the culinary delights he was sure I was used to. We had spaghetti to start, then slices of beef and peas served by the white-haired butler, Dino, in the high, vaulted dining room, among polychrome wooden statues of saints on chests.

  Acton said he could hardly leave his house now – only for brief periods – for fear of its being broken into. It had already been broken into eight times. A painting by Daddi was taken off a wall and never recovered. He couldn’t trust anyone, not even his staff. (About a new cameriere, he said, ‘His room, into which I happened to step to enquire about some small matter, is a great mess, filled with cigarette butts –’ he used the American expression – ‘and reeking of cigarette smoke.’) His staff didn’t do their jobs properly, were in fact quite useless, but what was one to do today when help simply could not be found and no one was to be trusted? He delicately shrugged his broad shoulders and pressed his thin lips together. How he envied people who weren’t dependent on staff, how he wished he weren’t dependent, but what could one do? To give up his staff would be to give up La Pietra.

  ‘How times have changed,’ he said. ‘When my parents were alive, they had a staff of thirty-five. I have only a staff of twelve, and I don’t dare ask them for anything.’

  When he started to talk about a recently published novel which he thought terrible, he became violently angry. He called the writer, a woman, a bitch, a slut, a third-rate whore – Barbara Skelton – and I had no idea why he should rage so against her, but thought it must be for personal reasons. He said, ‘Yes, art excuses all. With art one can write about anything, anything. But that novel is too bad even to say about it that it was written.’ He was raging.

  To get him down to a subject that would make him less aggressive, I asked him what his favorite work of his own was. He raised his hands and said he always reread his work with great embarrassment.

  I said, ‘All writers do that. The fact is, we don’t really know if what we write is good or bad.’

  He bowed his head and said, ‘Ooooh, that is true.’

  And then he became light spirited, and began to gossip. He said, ‘Count Morra, whom I used to visit in his peculiar villa outside Cortona, used to be somewhat to the Left, you know, somewhat to the Left. I often wondered if this had something to do with his liking for Blacks.’

  He became even more light spirited talking about sex, about, ooooh, lovely cocks.

  After lunch, Acton asked me if I’d like a nap, as the train I was to take to London was to leave in the evening. He asked a maid to prepare the blue room, la camera blu, which I followed him upstairs to. It was a huge, high-ceilinged room, with a great bed and tapestries and paintings on the walls, and a view of the cypress avenue to the gates from the high windows. He left me with the maid, whom I helped put linen sheets on the bed. She also brought in an old electric heater because Acton said the room was cold. I undressed and got into bed and looked at the room beyond the gilded, spiraling columns at the corners of my bed, and I thought: Well, here I am.

  He was waiting for me in the drawing room for tea before I left, and here he continued to gossip about people in London, mostly homosexual men, with lightness and charm.

  He was as he had once been, when his talk was all lightness and charm, with pauses that suspended you in the wonder of what the point of a sentence was going to be.

  He said, ‘I am preparing for my departure –’ he paused and smiled a little ‘– to Switzerland.’

  After tea, I walked along the cypress avenue to the gate and got onto a crowded bus into the center of Florence.

  London

  Walking alone along Wigmore Street, I heard my dead mother call out my name.

  Like Stephen (and he has noted this, joking that we are both Piscean, whereas Nikos is Scorpion), I do not have an analytical mind, and whenever I try to be ‘philosophical,’ whenever I try to ‘intend’ an explanation of a ‘philosophical’ vision, I make a mess of it. Still, I know that I am as if within the circle of a vision that is greater than myself.

  It happens from time to time that I read something which sets off in me an illuminating awareness of the vision. (Nikos tells me that almost everything I read I read as if included in and expanding on the vision.) I think that what Frank wrote in The Genesis of Secrecy illuminates the vision. And recently I read in William James’ lecture ‘Philosophical Conceptions’ this:

  A collection is one, though the things that compose it are many. Now, can we practically ‘collect’ the universe? Physically, of course we cannot. And mentally we cannot, if we take it concretely in its details. But if we take it summarily and abstractly, then we collect it mentally whenever we refer to it, even as I do now when I fling the term ‘universe’ at it, and so seem to leave a mental ring around it.

  Oh, I think, yes, yes, that’s the vision I have which is the mental ring about everything I think and feel, and certainly everything I write, even in this diary.

  I’m at my desk in my study. Nikos just came in from his study, where, when we have a rare evening at home, he works on his poetry. He said, ‘You’re writing in your diary.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. He said, ‘I’ve stopped reading your diary.’ ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but why?’ He said, ‘You’ve been writing things against me, which I don’t want to read.’ I didn’t think there was anything in my diary against him, though it is in him, as a Greek, to imagine even me writing things against him. He would never stop me from writing anything I want.

  Stephen and Natasha came to dinner.

  Stephen was very excited about the bitchy remarks about him in the latest volume of Virginia Woolf’s diary to be published; he laughed a lot, quoting them.

  Spender has the makings of a long-winded bore –

  Natasha said, ‘You’d think that Stephen would at least have been told by the editors, if not given the choice as to whether the remarks should be published or not.’

  She spoke in an em
phatically rotund way.

  Stephen seemed to enjoy the notoriety of Woolf’s remarks, if that’s the word.

  He went on to talk about Auden: ‘He never wanted to drive a car. He always imagined himself, never a car, but a train, for which all the lights would automatically be changed to green.’

  Someone is writing his biography, which Stephen is not enthusiastic about. As excited as he seems to be by Virginia Woolf mentioning him in her diary, he does not want a biography. This occurs to me: he is excited – excited and amused – by the Woolf comments because they’re unsympathetic, because they don’t take him seriously. Stephen can’t bear to be taken seriously, not really, as he feels anyone taking him seriously would soon reveal the pretensions of the seriousness of, as Woolf wrote, ‘his muddled theories.’ He reads the Woolf comments as lively jokes, and he loves jokes, especially about himself. He told me that his favourite work of literature is The Importance of Being Earnest, and he adores reading parodies, especially Beerbohm’s, which have become his preferred reading. As Auden once said, I recall, Stephen’s genius is all in his sense of humour, and he has never used that in his writing.

  Natasha has obviously read the first draft of the biography, because she said, ‘I’ve got the writer to limit the use of “homoerotic” to once per page, so the second draft won’t be as bad as the first.’

  After dinner, we played Scrabble (Natasha of course won – she always wins – and there is among the other players a deference to her true intelligence) and then we listened to music. Again, within a private circle, Natasha is loving. Nikos and I knew that she and Stephen were both pleased to have spent the evening with us, and there were kisses all round with the goodnight.

  Mind you, Stephen may be deeply hurt by the comments made about him by Virginia Woolf, whom I do not think of as a nice woman.

  But many think of me as not a nice man.

  Stephen said, ‘I told Natasha that when I die I don’t want any services of any kind, especially no memorial service. I made her promise that.’

  Natasha appeared distracted, as she often does appear, and in her distraction a blankness comes to her face.

  When this happens, Stephen tries to bring her into the conversation, which, however, she seems not to have heard.

  She asks, ‘Yes, darling?’

  He presses his lips together.

  Then he will tell another anecdote, slightly irreverent, laughing brightly. And Natasha, looking at him, smiles. She calls him ‘méchant.’

  The next day, Saturday, Nikos and I arranged books, went grocery shopping, had our usual afternoon nap, and in the evening went to a recital at the Wigmore Hall.

  To dinner, Nikos and I, at Loudoun Road, the other guests Elizabeth and Christopher Glenconner and Anne Wollheim and Valerie Eliot.

  It comes to me that dining tables are very often the settings of diary entries, and this is because dining tables are where people most often gather. Valerie Eliot was very amusing, her skin smooth and clear and bright. (Stephen says she has marzipan hair.) There were times when I thought she had all the gusto of a young working-class man in drag affecting seriousness and class, and then suddenly the seriousness and class would collapse and she’d laugh. I’d thought she’d be reserved about talking about her husband, but no, not at all – ‘Tom did this, Tom did that.’

  We were sitting together on a sofa before going down to the dining room to dinner. She told me how when she and Tom were in America newspapermen invaded their privacy all the time, even to hiding tape recorders behind sofas. I said, ‘It’s dreadful, the way they have no respect for privacy.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘dreadful.’ Then she asked what I do and pretended to have heard of me when I told her. She asked what my last book was, and I said, ‘Oh, I think you’ll disapprove of it. It’s an invasion of the privacy of three friends.’ ‘Oh?’ she asked, and her eyes widened. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve written of my rather personal relationships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer.’ She rubbed her hands together, threw her shoulders back, and, her face bright red, she exclaimed, ‘But that sounds like great fun!’ and it was as though she was prepared for a good old gossip. But Natasha, hearing us, came over and changed the subject; Valerie Eliot, however, wouldn’t change, and told me stories about the writer Djuna Barnes and what a difficult woman she was! Again, it was as though she had dropped all the affected disapproval of a middle-class woman to become suddenly a drag queen eager for a gossip and loving it, even parodying it with slight exaggerations of her hands and voice. I was sorry when we had to go down to eat, where we were separated. I sat between Natasha, who never sits at the other end of the table from Stephen, and Anne.

  I heard Valerie Eliot talking with Christopher. She said something about ‘Tom,’ and he asked, ‘Who’s Tom?’ She answered, ‘Oh, my late husband, who was Tom Eliot.’ ‘And what did he do?’ Christopher asked. ‘He was a poet,’ she said. ‘Oh, isn’t that lovely,’ Christopher said; ‘a poet! What fun to be a poet!’

  Christopher never remembers who Nikos and I are, but is as gracious to us as if we just might be old friends. He never quite knows where he is, but acts as if wherever he is is familiar to him. He laughs and claps his hands and says, ‘How lovely! How lovely!’ He probably doesn’t recognize Stephen and Natasha.

  She prepared a wonderful meal: onion soufflé, then poached salmon with boiled potatoes and cooked cucumber and home-made mayonnaise, then a pudding of sliced apples cooked in butter. Champagne and very good wines.

  As Nikos and I were leaving, Stephen, laughing, said, ‘I know I’m getting old. You may be alarmed by it, but for a moment this evening, when you both came in, I didn’t know who you were.’ Nikos and I laughed with him.

  Could T. S. Eliot have been a human being, married, in love with Valerie? Could he have been more than a disembodied spirit?

  I did once see him. He came to Boston College, when I was a freshman, to give a reading of his poetry, and I sat marginally on the stage while he, centered at a podium, read in a low cadence, the cadence often the meaning of the poem whose meaning was higher than my understanding. And now I think the meaning was higher, too, than his own understanding.

  I used to think he knew exactly what was meant by the lady and the three white leopards under a juniper tree, but I think now he wrote somewhere between intention and the unintentional, and often the unintentional rose higher than the intended, and he let this occur, let this occur especially in the music, so the music filled his low dry voice with the resonance of what his poetry tried to say but, on his own admission, could only fail saying.

  I do go to Four Quartets for spiritual recourse.

  But I think

  In the room the women come and go

  Talking of Michelangelo

  the silliest couplet in the English language, ‘go’ and ‘Michelangelo’ occurring suddenly to Eliot, who liked silly rhymes, his only way of using it seriously in a serious poem, however, to condemn it as silly, so it is not he who is being silly but the women coming and going in the room. And the exegeses on such silliness.

  In fact, I often go to Four Quartets for spiritual recourse, as this, written with such conviction:

  And all shall be well and

  All manner of thing shall be well

  By the purification of the motive

  In the ground of our beseeching.

  – the word ‘beseeching’ stirring in me the residue of a religion in which to beseech was, perhaps still is, the impulse, though to whom it may still be the impulse I have no idea.

  What a relief it would be to think and feel within the defining intentions of a religion, which I imagine T. S. Eliot finally did.

  I recall from the church services of my youth: pray for the intention of . . .

  The unintentional and the intentional – what Nikos would call the antinomies, arguments contradictory but equally reasonable.

  Florence

  Harold Acton is dead. I spoke at length about Acton and La Pietra wi
th Giuseppe Chigiotti, a young, close friend of Acton, particularly in his last years.

  He told me the funeral in the church of San Marco in Florence was very solemn, with carabinieri in full-dress uniform flanking the coffin. John Pope-Hennessy was the first to arrive, then Joan Haslip, the historian of European royalty, looking rather like a widow. ( Joan Haslip had hoped to be left something by Acton, but she got nothing.) The butler, the cook, the head gardener (who, alone of all the domestics, was left five million lire, about three thousand dollars) were present, and a few people from the Florentine aristocracy. Florence was represented by many officials, and the British ambassador gave a reading. A young, distant kinsman of Acton appeared, wearing a hat with a feather, and was shown to the front of the church, the only self-proclaimed kinsman of Acton to attend. But there seemed to be no representatives of the royals, whom he had entertained at La Pietra, not even an equerry. The Mass was said by the Jesuit priest who had administered Extreme Unction to Acton.

  Was, I asked, Acton religious? No, Chigiotti said, religion for him didn’t exist. He was, however, superstitious, and kept chestnuts on his desk and medals in his pocket. Though he didn’t have anything to do with religion, the formalities of the Catholic Church were very important to him. He was, to the world, a man of great formality, a formality he felt was in keeping with La Pietra.

  After the Mass, people were invited to the villa for breakfast, during which Chigiotti saw that some objects were missing from the rooms. There was, he found, no proper inventory of the contents, and the disappearance of items went unexplained. Chigiotti wondered if the key to the La Pietra safe was still under the wooden Buddha in the library where it had been kept when Acton was alive.