by David Plante
I went up the circular stairs in the rotunda to the next floor. The shutters couldn’t be opened because of the alarm system, so there was electric lighting in the corridors. I wandered down a long corridor, with double doors along it which I opened into dim, shuttered bedrooms, the bedclothes heaped up on the beds, and bathrooms with enormous tubs behind screens, and chaises longues and tables covered with objects.
I passed an internal window, and through it saw the pink-orange plaster falling away from a wall.
The master bedroom, called la camera della Baronessa, which had been the bedroom of Acton’s mother and which had been used for royal visits by the Prince and Princess of Wales, by Princess Margaret, by the Queen Mother, had a large Renaissance bed, covered with a red silk counterpane, with gilded columns at its corners, and over the grand fireplace the most valuable painting in the villa, a Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist by Vasari, still in its original frame. The fringe hanging from the bottoms of the chairs was in places coming off, the gilt on the slightly tilting columns at the corners of the bed was worn, and the counterpane looked as if it had not been cleaned since the Renaissance.
From this bedroom I went into a bathroom, where a man in jeans and a tee-shirt was measuring a wall from a corner to the edge of the deep embrasure of a window. He was taking measurements of all the rooms. Beyond the bathroom was a low, very narrow room with a new toilet, perhaps put in especially for the royals.
When I came back along the corridor, I found Alexander Zielcke and the lawyer in charge of the will and the secretary in the office, all gathered about a sheaf of papers held by the lawyer. I nodded at them and continued down another corridor.
In a huge, dim room, many eighteenth-century chairs were lined up along the walls. I was in the ballroom. From there, I opened double doors onto another room, so dark all I could see were points of dim light and shapes of furniture, and I didn’t search for a light switch. I shut the doors and returned to the office.
Before I left, Zielcke said he would walk around the grounds with me. With an umbrella, we went into the walled-in garden to the side of the villa, where vegetables and flowers for the house were grown. There were many lemon trees in pots which would, during the winter, go into the immense limonaia, a vast building with a dirt floor and huge beams along one side of the garden. Then we wandered about the formal garden at the back of the villa.
Zielcke said he had been having some of the box hedges replanted. He couldn’t have done this while Sir Harold, as Zielcke called Acton, was alive. Sir Harold, who didn’t notice how the garden was going in places, would have been worried by someone replacing old, dying hedges with new ones. He had thought everything was in perfect order. The garden, designed in 1904 by Sir Harold’s father after a Renaissance garden, was as old as Sir Harold himself. I noted, as we walked about the garden, that the statues were crumbling, as were the architectural follies. A stone bench in front of cypress trees was broken in two. The steps of pebbles imbedded in cement were covered with moss and the kerb stones cracked. Sections of hedge were missing, and sections so overgrown I could see through the dark green leaves to the grey twisted branches.
I am, I know, indulging somewhat in the decay of the villa, and, with the villa, the, to me, fantasy life lived there. Perhaps I am jealous, perhaps, and want it all to decay. I do realize, more than ever, just how much Harold Acton was a fantasy figure to me, and, yes, the fantasy does – no, did – hold me. Trying to be as sincere as I possibly can be, I also realize that the fantasy no longer does hold. Nikos is right to have derided me for my fantasy figures. The sense of possibility I had in knowing Acton – the possibility of entering a world that should have been the realization of a young man’s most colorful vision of an artistic, a social, and, especially, a sexual world – seems to me exposed as having in fact little possibility in it, and, in fact, to be abandoned by the world for some other world that Nikos would approve of. The world of Harold Acton is in no way in my world to revive it in my memory, but I have the deep sense that it has little inner value in the memory of the outside world, which outside world Nikos has always been more aware of than I have.
If I were to tell Nikos this, he would simply smile, not quite believing me.
London
Of course, I think of writing novels and short stories, which require forms of art, as being superior to writing a diary.
Where else but in fiction can such moments occur as – ?
When, in Pride and Prejudice, Darcy lets go and admits to Elizabeth: ‘I love you.’
When, at the end of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin weeps over the body of the murderer Rogozhin, so his tears drip on the face of Rogozhin.
When, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, we hear out of the darkness, ‘Mr Kurtz, he dead.’
When, in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, we read the note, ‘Done because we are too menny.’
When, in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (and this is the only novel by Waugh that rises to the pitch), Lord Marchmain makes the sign of the cross before dying.
When I tell myself, everything is too much, I can’t bear it, what, I ask myself further, is that everything that is too much and that I can’t bear?
If too much, let go of everything, let go for –
What?
When I saw Nikos silently lower a book he had been reading – Chekhov stories, and I knew in particular ‘Ward Number 6’ – now in tears, this came to me: that Nikos feels he is a defeated person.
In him the sense of the unbearable is not merely aesthetic, but moral, spiritual, because it comes to him with such an acute awareness of all that is unbearable in the world.
This came to me: that I need him to give authority to an authentic moral and spiritual awareness of the world, he so much more a witness than I.
Then this came to me: that as I do need him for the authenticity of a feeling I have in me, the feeling has to be in me, has to be in me and has to be crying out to him to make it relevant to a world I hardly belong to, a world in whose history I have so little a part, but a world that I feel is the world at its most authentic, which is Nikos’ world.
Does he know this about me, that I need this in him because it is a need in me? A strange need. I think he does know, for, his book lowered, he stares at me staring at him, and he smiles a little, and what happens? – I feel roused in me an almost sexual desire to go to him to be held by him.
About Chekhov: how can any reaction to his work be anything but moral, spiritual?
As the birthdays of our neighbor Joseph Bromberg and of Frank coincide, Nikos and I offered to give them a joint birthday party. In the dining and sitting room, we arranged card tables covered with white cloths, and bought folding chairs, enough places for some fifteen or more people. Anita helped to serve the Kidonato – lamb and quince – that Nikos had prepared. And there were many bottles of wine. Most of the guests were friends of Frank and Anita: Al and Anne Alvarez, Jonathan (writer and director of plays and operas) and Rachel (medical doctor) Miller, Luigi (novelist) and Katia Meneghello, and our mutual friends Richard and Mary Day Wollheim, and Nikos’ and my friend from Greece, Fani-Maria Tsigakou. And, Philip Roth being away from London, Claire Bloom on her own. The Brombergs supplied the dessert, a confection of ice-cream in a bowl made of ice.
Nikos presenting the ice-cream to Claire, Joseph looking on, and hidden behind Claire Ruth, a hand held out.
It is very strange to meet someone who is as famous as Claire Bloom, so that when I am with her I am with Charlie Chaplin in Lime Light, with Laurence Olivier in Richard III (which I saw when the film was shown on black and white television in the living room of my family home when in 1955 I was fifteen, an event of very high culture), with Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Claire’s refined beauty appears to be one with the refinement of a culture she represents as an actress, and even when we are talking about, say, the weather, I hear in her voice the voice I have heard declaiming Shakespeare. In person sh
e seems shy, and often pulls back her hair as if suddenly not sure of herself, and then a look of sadness comes to her eyes.
About Chekhov, Claire Bloom made this remarkable connection – when she was in Hollywood preparing for her part as The Brothers Kavamazov with Yul Brynner to play Vronsky, he suggested they have a Russian coach, Michael Chekhov, the great-nephew of Anton Chekhov.
Fani-Maria is staying with us. She is a curator at the Benaki Museum in Athens. Thames & Hudson published her book The Rediscovery of Greece, which expands on what Nikos has told me about Europeans and Europeanized Greeks wanting in a.d. 1830 to reclaim 500 b.c. Greece from the defeated Ottoman Empire.
Fani-Maria explained how the myth of ancient Greece has been such an influence in Greek history.
During the four hundred years of Ottoman Occupation and continuing after Greek independence from the Occupation, the myth of Hellenic Greece – that is, the myth of a unified Greece that in reality hardly ever existed in ancient history – was kept alive as a way of ‘determining the ideological and cultural identity of an independent nation in the collective memory of Greeks.’
This myth has had some bad consequences.
‘Hellas’ became the rallying cry in the early nineteenth century for Greece to invade Turkey to win back the Empire of the Hellenes, but Greece lost, and the result was the Catastrophe.
‘Hellas’ also became the rallying cry of the colonel dictators, who used the age of Pericles as their dictating mythological vision of Greece.
That myth of ancient Greece in Greek education is still seen as a source of enlightenment dating from the ancient illustrious ancestors, but also resented because it is a myth. The Greek political Right emphasize that ancestry, which the Greek political Left keep challenging as nationalistic.
And yet, the myth is there, informing Greeks that they have a past that dates back to Plato and Aristotle, Solon and Pericles, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Phidias and Praxiteles, Ictinus and Callicrates, for the reality of the myth is that the greatest philosophers to define all the philosophy of the Western world remain Plato and Aristotle, the statesmen who defined Western democracy were Solon and Pericles, the greatest playwrights ever are Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, the greatest artists are Phidias and Praxiteles, the greatest architects are Ictinus and Callicrates, and all were Greek. There is a degree of indulgence for a Greek in – and here Fani-Maria stopped for a moment as if not sure she should use the word, but then she did – ‘narcissistic’ feelings for being poised between the myth and the reality of Greece’s classical past, with an emphasis on the myth.
Well, what is the reality? There is no doubt that there exists one unbroken and living bequest from the classical past: the Greek language.
Fani-Maria said she becomes both furious and sad that not just foreigners but Greeks are unaware that, however altered grammatically and syntactically, modern Greek is in an unbroken line from ancient Greek, the vocabulary of which can be traced back to Homer.
I said I recalled from when Nikos and I, on the island of Paros, were walking along a field where farmers were working, and a woman raised her arm at us and called, ‘Xairete,’ and Nikos told me that that is an ancient Greek expression of welcome.
‘There, you hear?’ Fani-Maria exclaimed.
When I asked what remains in Greece of the four hundred years of Ottoman Empire, which most Greeks I know do not quite recognize as a determining part of the reality of Greek history, she listened but she didn’t respond.
As I want to get world events into this diary, I should put in that, after a referendum in Greece, the young King Constantine, heir to the Greek throne, lost, and now lives as ex-King with his family in London.
Stephen told me that his daughter Lizzie, who had been on holiday in Greece where, with friends, she more or less lived and slept on a beach, back in London was invited to an event where she knew the ex-King Constantine would be, and she brought along photographs of Greece to show him, he filled with nostalgia for a country he cannot return to.
Nikos said that the ex-King has enough money in Switzerland that he doesn’t have to be nostalgic for Greece, which, given his non-Greek ancestry, was never his native country.
Philip telephoned to say he is back in London after the funeral and burial of his mother. He said he couldn’t look at her body. He didn’t want that meaningful image to obliterate all the images that matter.
During the two weeks he spent with his father he took notes about the funeral and burial. He is still taking notes.
I asked, ‘What kind of people are we that we don’t even stop taking notes about the funeral of a mother?’
‘Good enough,’ he answered.
‘Are we?’
At an Italian restaurant with John Lehmann and his young nephew or cousin. John moves with great difficulty because of his hip. He is hard of hearing. His hands shake badly, so when he pours out wine the bottle shakes against the glass and wine spills over. His false teeth keep falling out; he smiles a tight, sinister smile to keep them in. So few people like John. Do I like John? Like or dislike, such unimportant opinions; I neither like nor dislike John, for there he is, and I am interested in him for what he is. His nephew or cousin and I did most of the talking while John smiled at us.
His nephew or cousin is an historian. I said, ‘I know so little history, but would you consider me justified to think that historians have tried for too long, and with too limited a vision, to identify nations and national politics and sciences and arts, whereas, really, they should pay much more attention to international politics, to the international influences on the sciences and the arts? I think history should refer outwardly to relating and integrating the whole world in every historical event. Steven Runciman, I believe, does this.’ He said, ‘Yes, you’re right, history should do what you say, as expansive a task as that would be. But I don’t like the history of Steven Runciman so very much; his writing is dull.’
As I do, and I’m ashamed that I do, I assumed to know better by knowing Steven Runciman, and I said, ‘I once asked Steven if his style of writing was influenced by any other writer, and he answered, immediately, yes, Defoe.’
This made John’s relative jut out his chin.
When I mentioned to Caro Hobhouse that Sybille Bedford was to me a mythological figure, a writer whose work I think of as itself having a mythological aura about it, especially The Legacy, Caro said, ‘But Sybille Bedford is not at all a mythological figure,’ and she arranged a dinner party for me to meet her. I arrived early, and Caro asked me to stir a special sauce she was cooking and not stop stirring until she told me to, and I felt at ease, as I felt at ease with Sybille Bedford, the talk about the table mostly about haute cuisine. Sybille Bedford appeared to me a dry but sharp woman, her face pale and her long thin hair pulled back severely except for strands. I knew that she knew Bruce Chatwin, and she said how much she did admire his writing and took it seriously, if – and here she smiled a tight smile – she found him in himself perhaps a little too glamorous to be taken with total seriousness, and, as circumlocutious as this was, I sensed it was a dry, sharp judgment. I felt I should be wary of her for her judgments on any form of pretension, but I wanted her to like me. I offered to drive her home, which she accepted, and outside where she lived we sat together in the car for a little while and she thanked me for admiring her work, which, however, was earning her so little she was not sure what she would do, and I felt she was making herself vulnerable to me, and, by making herself vulnerable to me, I thought that she must like me. I asked if I could see her again, and she said it would be a pleasure.
A week or so later I invited her to a restaurant not far from her in Kensington Church Street, collected her, and hoped the restaurant, though simple, would be to her liking, which it was as she asked for a card and even the number of the table we sat at so that she would be able to reserve it. I asked her to choose the wine, which she did carefully, clearly aware that I was being extrava
gant by inviting her. She said sharing a meal is a ceremony, and I did imagine we were engaged together in a ceremony of getting to know each other.
She talked about Brian Howard, whom she knew: a failed poet, an exquisite man who, having found his wallet and all his clothes stolen from him in a male brothel in Paris, borrowed an apron from a maid and went out into the street to hire a taxi to take him to his hotel; he was very courageous during World War II, acting in the resistance to save people’s lives at the risk of his own life, a soldier at the landing of Dunkirk, an agent for MI5.
Now a connection occurs from outside: Keith Walker rang the day after he came to a supper party at our flat to say that he had had an adventure back at his flat during the night: wanting to pee, he, still drunk and stark naked, went out of his flat onto the landing looking for the loo, and the door shut behind him; he waited until dawn and rang the bell of his neighbour to ask for a blanket, and, wrapped in the blanket, he went out into the street to hail a taxi to bring him to his office at University College where he had extra keys to his flat and money.
Keith thinks that the recently discovered long poem by Byron about his love affair with a boy in Athens is genuine.
Back to Brian Howard, with another connection to the side: Stephen told me that Howard once complained to Auden that he, Auden, didn’t have enough imagery in his poetry, so Auden wrote ‘The Fall of Rome’ (dedicated to Cyril Connolly, but I’m sure there is a poem by Auden dedicated to Howard), which has the most haunting last image of any imagery I know of:
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very vast.
Stephen – who, I think, is not within the world of Harold Acton, nor Christopher Isherwood nor W. H. Auden – told me that Blanche, of Brideshead Revisited, is partly based on Brian Howard, Stephen referring to a world that he seems to look at from a distance.
