by David Plante
I know that whenever I mention Steven Runciman, Stephen frowns with disapproval.
Yet another aside: when referring to W. H. Auden to Nikos and me, Stephen never calls him Wystan, even when in his presence, but always as ‘Auden,’ as if Stephen is shy of presuming on familiarity with Auden.
My mind is always making connections, now so many that I do begin to think that they refer to one another more than they refer to me, so that I have begun to assume that everyone I meet knows everyone else, and all of them with their own interconnections too complicated for me to sort out.
Sybille Bedford had heard of Nikos, and asked about him – and how long had we been together, where did we live, did we have pets? Then, leaning towards me over the table, she said, ‘You must always hope to outlive Nikos to save him the pain of grief , ’ and for a moment we looked steadily into each other’s eyes. She did not talk of herself, and I knew I shouldn’t ask her. When she stood to leave, she put her hands into the pockets of her trousers with something of a masculine gesture, and she appeared about to fall over but she righted herself and walked to the restaurant door, as if leaving alone.
Something I’ve been wanting to write about – I rang Claire to invite her and Philip to dinner, but they couldn’t make it. I emphasized how much I want to see them, and sent her love, etc. After I hung up, Nikos admonished me, ‘You were totally false. Utterly insincere.’ I groaned. ‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘I thought you had outgrown your falseness, your insincerity. Your niceness towards Claire was completely unconvincing. I really thought you had reached a point in your development where you were no longer like that.’ I groaned more. ‘What shall I do?’ I asked. He said, ‘Be aware. The fact is, you’re intimidated by Claire and Philip, that’s why you are the way you are with them. I thought you were no longer intimidated by people you think grander than you are. I thought you’d even become bold.’ ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘I am intimidated by them. I’ve ceased to be intimidated by most people. But I am by them.’ ‘Why?’ he asked. And I thought: He isn’t intimidated, so can’t understand being intimidated by people I believe to be on a level of having something I do not have.
Later, this occurred to me: that, yes, I have ceased to be intimidated by certain people because I do not want anything from them, whereas I remain intimidated by people from whom I want something they have, which, in the case of Claire and Philip, is their fame. This is difficult to admit.
When Nikos came home from work, he, cold, got into a hot bath and while he soaked I sat on the edge of the bathtub and we talked. I left him to go down to the kitchen to prepare hors d’oeuvres – mussels and bits of lobster and spring onions and thin slices of toast – and drinks, for when he came down, and we talked more. For supper we had a gray mullet baked with dill and lemon, and we talked more. Nikos said, ‘How lucky we are to have what we have,’ and then he added, ‘Spit three times because we may lose it all,’ and I said, ‘We won’t lose it.’
A party at Claire and Philip’s house in Fulham. At 10:30, I said to Philip, ‘I must get home and write in my diary for an hour. I don’t want to experience any more today, I’ve got all I can manage to get in. So no more stories from you.’ He said, ‘I’ll write my stories down for you and you can simply paste them in.’ Nikos and I came home and, very tired from seeing so many people, went to bed. I had had no intention of writing in my diary, and I wonder if I’m at the point of giving it up, as I so often want to do.
Stephen rang to say that he’d woken that morning at three o’clock and couldn’t go back to sleep. I asked him why. ‘I have so much work,’ he said. He is working on publishing his journal, on a new Collected Poems, on his translation of the Oedipus plays. Stephen is the least self-indulgent person I know towards critical reception of his work – that is, outwardly – and he expects others to be the same. He was annoyed with me for being upset about the bad press I had for Difficult Women. I feel he is now upset by his bad press which has continued since the publication of his last book of poetry, The Generous Days, but he would never admit this. As Auden used to say, ‘Mother wouldn’t allow it,’ I think Stephen says to himself, ‘Wystan wouldn’t allow it.’ I wonder if the reason why he can’t sleep is that he is in fact worried what the reaction will be to his journal, his Collected Poems, his translation – all of which he must feel his final work.
I’ve sensed in the past his hidden upset as a tremendous inability to concentrate on what I’d been saying to him, as if he couldn’t help thinking of something he at the same time told himself he must not think about. He frowns. Perhaps because he is such a big person, all of this seems to happen on a massive scale. Then, suddenly, he does rise above his upset, and I tell him something that makes him giggle.
Because Nikos was too tired and needed to be alone for a while – he worries about losing his soul by socializing – I went alone to Loudoun Road for dinner with Stephen and Natasha and Lizzie, en famille. It was a deeply pleasant evening. ‘Cozy,’ Natasha called it. I left feeling I love them, their lives, their house, the objects in their house –
The next day Natasha was off to the South of France, to Saint Jérôme, to pick olives. Stephen rang. Often, speaking to one or the other of us, he’ll say, if me, ‘I’d like to ask David –’ and if to Nikos, ‘Would you and Nikos like to –’ as though he displaces one of us for the other. He didn’t have anything to do that evening, and wanted to invite Nikos and me to dine at the Savile Club with him. I told him to come have supper with us at home. Julia Hodgkin coming.
Nikos and I prepared risotto, mussels, salad and cheese, tangerines, marrons glacés and coffee, and of course wine. Stephen and Julia kept saying, ‘A feast!’
Stephen said, ‘Wystan always thought that if he got a bad review it was because the reviewer wanted to go to bed with him. He never cared about reviews. Now, what do we think about them?’
Quietly, Julia said, ‘We don’t think about them.’
Stephen said, ‘Yes, quite,’ and he sat back.
Julia then said, ‘Of course I’m not the one to say, as I don’t get reviewed.’
I wondered if Stephen was referring to the mixed reviews his latest volume of poems has had, The Generous Days.
He had given copies to Nikos and me, each one of us, a deluxe edition. In the one he gave Nikos he inscribed, ‘see page 9,’ on which page is his poem to Nikos, now a ‘Fifteen Line Sonnet in Four Parts.’ In the copy he gave me he inscribed, ‘see page 16,’ and there I found this poem:
PRESENT ABSENCE
You slept so quiet at your end of the room, you seemed
A memory, your absence.
I worked well, rising early, while you dreamed.
I thought your going would only make this difference –
A memory, your presence.
But now I am alone I know a silence
That howls. Here solitude begins.
This poem refers to that time when Stephen and I were at Saint Jérôme, supposedly working in the garden planting trees but touring about with Francis and George. Stephen and I shared a large room, he sleeping at one end and I at the other, I sleeping deeply and, yes, dreaming. When I read the poem, I think: does he love me so? Does he love Nikos so? In whatever way, he loves us, I feel, as a couple, even more than he loves us individually, and his love is a world about our world.
I also feel that London loves us as a couple more than we are loved individually, and I owe London that love.
How often lines from Stephen’s poems come to me, as:
My love and my pity shall not cease . . .
Or:
Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive trees, O world, O death?
And I try to see these thoughts and feelings as having come from Stephen when I see him. They move me as if distanced from him, and often enough lines move me more than entire poems (which happens to almost all poems I read), but do I read them as hav
ing been written by Stephen, he at our dining-room table for a supper of cottage pie, which he likes? And yet, he wrote the lines, and I am aware that somewhere in his spirited talk is a deeper spirit, that of love, of pity, of grief, the deeper spirit which in love, in pity, in grief calls out, O world, O death!
And how beautiful and mysterious the lines:
The outward figure of delight
Creates your image that’s no image
Dark in my dark language.
Philip belongs to a club in Pall Mall, the Royal Automobile Club, where we from time to time have lunch, he always ordering chicken sandwiches without mayonnaise, as he is very conscious of his diet for reasons of health. His health is a big preoccupation. About the club, he of course joked about being a Jew who finagled to get in. The last time we met, he told me he has decided to move back to New York. Claire will go with him. He needs the vulgarity of New York against the politeness of London, the hypocritical politeness. He needs someone in a traffic jam to roll down his window and shout at him, ‘Asshole,’ which would make him relax and with a deep sigh of relief feel he was back at home.
He told me he had taught Claire to use the word FUCK, and had had printed as the headlines of a fake newspaper something like SHE HAS USED THE WORD! and presented it to Claire, who was amused and touched.
Of course, once again, I ask myself why I keep a diary, why I have kept it for years, day after day after day, trying to include everything that I can possibly include. Is it, as Nikos tells me, because I am so possessive that I must get everything in? The only other way, I think, is to leave everything out, and not account for anything.
I think that in the end, whatever the end may be, my diary will have nothing at all to do with me, but on its own bulge with such a vast roundness that it will go on turning of itself, and I will no longer command a diary but the diary will command me. My diary is in itself more possessive than I am, possessed by the concept of everything, and impelled by the possession. I have tried, over and over, to stop writing my diary, but my diary won’t allow me to stop. My diary is a vast jealous One who will have everything, and won’t listen to me insisting that that can’t be, that my diary can have this or that or the other, but cannot have everything, which is impossible; no, the One will. This is a One beyond believing in One or not, a One with the One’s own all-commanding will to have everything in one great round world.
I’ve lived long enough in London to have memories of my life here – as when Nikos and I were with Francis in the Colony Club, where the barman – not Ian, but a young man with tight black curly hair who was very very good looking – flirted with Nikos, who responded with a shy smile. I had never seen Nikos respond to someone flirting with him, nor would I have thought he would have responded by smiling a shy smile, because I don’t think of Nikos as shy. My reaction was to wonder: why wasn’t the barman flirting with me?
Evening after evening alone together at home, Nikos and I. We are very close – closer, I think, than ever before. He has come round to loving our flat here at 38 Montagu Square, as I do: our home.
We listen to music, Nikos and I, always his choosing, as he has much more understanding of music than I do, and I defer. My ear concentrates on the moment, on, say, a passage, while Nikos hears the development of a passage into a whole, as in a fugue.
We were sitting side by side on the sofa, listening to Artur Schnabel play a Beethoven sonata, and it occurred to me to wonder again:
What is that too much when, listening to music, you feel that the music is too much, is beyond all my feeling and thinking too, and you tell yourself, I can’t bear this?
Frowning as he listened, Nikos’ eyes were closed.
Will whoever reads this indulge me for claiming that this is what I feel, this is what I think, when I look at Nikos and tell myself I can’t bear my love for him?
He seems to me to be content.
As I write this, I hear him come in downstairs and call me –
Some time after Francis Bacon died, Nikos, looking through the catalogue of a posthumous exhibition, came upon a photograph and stopped and, calling me over to the desk, pointed to it and said, ‘That’s you!’ Among the mess of rubbish left on the floor of his studio, piece by piece catalogued and sent to a reproduction of Francis’ studio in a museum in Dublin, was this:
I recognized the photographs from when, in the train station at Avignon, Francis, George, Stephen and I had taken photographs of ourselves in an automatic photographing box. From the number Francis had taken away with him, he later pasted three strips on the back of an old cover of a book. In the caption under the reproduction in the catalogue I was not identified. I rang Miss Beston at Marlborough Gallery, who took care of Francis – if he wanted £10,000 in cash, she had it sent to him – and I identified myself, and she sent me the above. My wonder is: why did Francis paste me alongside himself and George?
Both Nikos (he at a weekend conference in the country) and Natasha (she in the South of France) away, Stephen invited me to dinner with Julian Trevelyan and his wife Mary Fedden. I did not know his paintings, but looked them up, and wondered if Surrealism was ever really possible in Britain, as Surrealism requires deep shadows and I have no sense of these deep shadows in the British, considered by the British as negatively unBritish as Logical Positivism is British. It seems to me axiomatic that for a Brit, if it can’t be articulated, it is of no interest. Yet there is a primitive charm to his work. As there is to hers, based on, say, the simplicity of fruit and flowers.
Julian talked of having been the head of the Etching Department at the Royal College of Art, where one of his students was David Hockney, and he praised David’s line.
Stephen had prepared, or bought, kipper pâté, then a risotto which I helped him with. His shirt tails were out and he was in his stocking feet.
During supper, he said, ‘I sometimes think that the most important relationships are invisible relationships. Matthew is my son, but, really, I think of him as a brother, and our being brothers is an invisible relationship that is stronger than the visible. I think I have invisible relationships with David and Nikos in which they are my sons. All these relationships are so much more real than the visible.’
I was very moved by this, and, walking home, I thought of all my invisible relationships, invisible even to me but important to me, and I thought: they are your reason for being alive and loving life, those invisible relationships all around you right now, as you walk home.
I slept alone.
I’m reminded of the fragment from Sappho that Nikos used in ‘Pure Reason’: . . . I sleep alone.
I often think of how I almost didn’t meet Nikos. I was given his name and telephone number by a mutual friend in New York and I rang him on my arrival in London and he invited me to tea on a Sunday afternoon, but when I at four o’clock rang his doorbell at 6 Wyndham Place he didn’t answer. I thought he had meant five o’clock, so wandered about Hyde Park for an hour, among people lounging on the grass in the sunlight, then returned and rang his doorbell, and he answered, and I, oh yes, went into a trance that has lasted all these years since. He told me later that he, standing at the window of his flat, had seen me ring a bell but his bell inside hadn’t rung. When he saw me leave he went out to test his bell and found it didn’t work. He unscrewed it, attached some wires that had become detached, and thought, that was that, assuming I would not return, as he would not have returned if someone who had invited him wasn’t there to welcome him. If he had not lived on the ground floor and had not been standing at the window to see me, and if he had not wondered if I was the one he had expected and, after my leaving, had not gone out to check his bell and repaired it, and if I had not returned, I would not have met him. But I did return.
Here are some photographs taken at a book launch given by Thames & Hudson, photographs I found in a drawer that bring back memories of the world Nikos and I have lived in:. Sonia and me, behind us Frank Auerbach:
Nikos:
Th
e back of Big Suzi, on either side Francis Bacon and Stephen Spender:
Robert Medley and John Russell and Frank Auerbach, Francis in the left-hand corner:
Freda Berkeley and Lucian Freud in the distance (and next to him, I think, the head of Marlborough Gallery, Harry Fischer) and the eye surgeon Patrick Trevor-Roper:
And so we have lived long enough in London to look back at events fixed in photographs.
How little I account for in my diary, how very very little.
Some Thirty Years Later
I remain an American citizen, and I am also, officially, a British citizen, with my United Kingdom passport in which I am inscribed as a citizen, an anomaly, certainly, as the United Kingdom is not a republic.
So many of my early fantasies about living in England did come true. As writer in residence at King’s College, Cambridge, I did sit at High Table wearing an academy gown. I sat across from the Lord Kahn who, I was told, had given to Maynard Keynes all his ideas about economics. I had pre-prandial sherry in the combination room with the Bloomsbury paintings hanging on red walls, and I went to the College Feasts when all the silver was brought out from the vault. I had drinks in the rooms of Dadie Rylands, there where, on a window seat, Virginia Woolf had thought of writing A Room of One’s Own, Dadie’s rooms decorated by Dora Carrington, and on the wall a portrait of Lytton Strachey. In a cupboard I found the pictures that had hung in E. M. Forster’s set, the one I most remembered of a boy leading a horse by Picasso. I went every evening to Evensong, especially during Lent when the chapel was almost empty but for the dean, the lay dean, the choir and the choirmaster, the boys singing plainchant and the flames of the candles in their glass chimneys shaking in the cold drafts.
