Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  But so much of the London I knew in the first formative years of my life here has gone.

  W. H. Auden is dead, Sonia Orwell is dead, Mary McCarthy is dead, Philippe and Pauline de Rothschild are dead, Francis Bacon is dead, Stephen Spender is dead, Natasha Spender is dead, John Lehmann is dead, Adrian Stokes is dead, Patrick Procktor is dead, Johnny Craxton is dead, Lucian Freud is dead, James Joll is dead, Frank Kermode is dead, Richard Wollheim is dead, Catharine Carver is dead, Patrick Kinross is dead, Christopher Glenconner is dead, Tony Tanner is dead, Anne Wollheim is dead, Sylvia Guirey is dead, David Sylvester is dead, Joe McCrindle is dead, Eva Neurath is dead, Robert Medley is dead, Anne Graham-Bell is dead, Keith Walker is dead, Bruce Chatwin is dead, Vera Russell is dead, Öçi Ullmann is dead, John Fleming is dead, Ben Nicolson is dead, John Russell is dead, Nikos Georgiadis is dead, A. J. and Dee Ayer are dead, R. B. Kitaj and Sandra are dead, John Edwards is dead, Barry and Sue Flanagan are dead, Francis King is dead, Olivia Manning is dead, Max Gordon is dead, Sybille Bedford is dead, Mario Dubsky is dead, Joseph and Ruth Bromberg are dead, Sebbie Walker is dead, John Golding is dead, Angelica Garnett is dead, Valerie Eliot is dead –

  And, oh, my great love Nikos is dead.

  Julia Hodgkin, our pal when Nikos was alive, the primary witness to our ups and downs and always reminding us of the ups, came to his burial in Athens and she held me as I sobbed in her arms.

  I went with her to visit the cathedral at Durham, which I had for years wanted to do with Nikos, and which Julia proposed we do shortly after his death.

  When we entered the great Norman cathedral, I had the vast sense, a sense held down by the grand pillars, of vast associations that I would not have felt had I not been British, a sense that I was now within my history. That the history of the cathedral is Norman, a history imposed on Anglo-Saxon history, made me aware of layers of history, layers and layers, and all together British history.

  And, too, I had the more personal sense that I have my own British history. I came to London from New York in 1966 with a sense of total failure – failure in my vocation as a writer and failure in relationships. In London with Nikos I began a positive life, and to have lived for forty years in a relationship sustained by love, and, too, to have achieved some realization of a vision as a writer, can only be to have grown from the immaturity of previous years into years of maturity in London. Yes, that’s it: I grew up in London, the most important years of my life those early years in that world – early years that developed into later and later years, all those forty years during which Nikos’ and my inward world extended into an outer world. Nikos and I had – and I still have – our deep London past, and by extension beyond London into Wiltshire and Devon and Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire and Somerset and Cornwall and Cumbria and Wales and Scotland our British past, our past of friends and events, of worlds within worlds which I felt revolving around me in the cathedral.

  Julia and I stayed in the cathedral for a long while, the sunlight through the high windows slowly fading. The hour for Evensong was approaching, and as if in inverse order to the central service of the cathedral tourists left rather than gathered. Julia and I sat at the very front row of chairs to watch the procession, the verger leading, carrying a great silver mace over a shoulder, followed by other members of the clergy and the choir into the choir stalls. A member took hold of the thick, multi-coloured pull attached to a rope that, beyond view, was attached to the bells, and the sound of the bells was so distant the resonance was all we heard. And the choir sang.

  At the same time, in all the cathedral towns of the realm, choirs were singing, as they have for centuries.

  Whatever ‘British’ means to me, at that moment the meaning was filled out, rounded out, with love.

  Author’s Note

  I have kept a diary for over half a century. It is many millions of words long, and is stored in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. This present book is just over 165,000 words, and is roughly within the scope of the first twenty or so years of my life in London, 1966 to 1986, with events from later. The book consists of selections taken from my diary, all elaborated upon by memory and, too, made informative of people and places for publication, as I find footnotes distracting, though I do sometimes introduce a name and later give the person an identifying context. It is not uncommon for me to take an entire day, or even days, to complete one diary entry. The entries are not chronological – in fact, I have eliminated all but one date with the idea of forming something of a narrative which I hope forms into a world. The narrative continues beyond this book into what may be further books, allowing me in the present book to introduce someone who will, I hope, be more fully realized in the next book. I think of the title of Stephen Spender’s World within World as appropriate to what I would like to do – appropriate in many ways, as he is himself a world within the world of this book. To make a book out of the diary has meant choosing what to put in and what to leave out, and though my impulse is to put everything in as the honest way (no doubt a more honest way would be to leave everything out), the book would bulge its covers. I have had to leave out worlds of experience in Italy, in Greece, in France, in Russia, in New York, in, oh!, Tulsa, Oklahoma, worlds which occurred within the more circumscribed London world that I have concentrated on here. And within the London world I have concentrated on people I think most representative of the culture of that world. I came as a stranger to London and here was lucky enough to form relationships with people I could not have imagined meeting before I came to London. Ideally, I would have liked to start with the very first entry of my diary, June 1959, and only after having included the entries from then arrive at June 1966, this the only date stated in this book. Within the millions of words of my diary there are worlds within worlds, but this book accounts for a span (by no means all of it) of my continuing life in London, in which world capital my life continues to expand far beyond this book.

  The entries from my diary featuring Francis Bacon were collated and published in the New Yorker; the entries featuring Harold Acton were expanded from diary entries for a portrait also published in the New Yorker; as for Steven Runciman, I used a tape to record his amazing elaborations on history, especially the history of a hubble-bubble, none of which I could have remembered, the resulting portrait also published in the New Yorker. The events featuring Philip Roth were first published in the New York Times Book Review.

  Spelling and usage have sometimes changed into British from American over the years, so I note that I write ‘honour’ but kept ‘gray’. I rather like this evidence of an American becoming British while remaining American as well.

  From so many years past, I feel that the events recorded in here have nothing to do with me. I have no idea whom they have to do with, this young man dazed by a world around him that in itself has gone.

  As for my continuing the diary now, as a diarist I remain who I was at least in this way: possessed by a diary that is in itself possessive, always anxious that much more has been left out than got (gotten?) in.

  David Plante, June 2013

  Acknowledgements

  Bloomsbury has opened up a world to me, and for that I thank Alexandra Pringle, Michael Fishwick, Anna Simpson, Phillip Beresford, Oliver Holden-Rea, David Mann, Paul Nash, Tess Viljoen and Ellen Williams; Nancy Miller and Sara Mercurio at Bloomsbury in New York; and Peter James, Sarah-Jane Forder and Geraldine Beare.

  Image Section

  The Youthful David by Andrea del Castagno, sent from Stephen Spender to Nikos with the message, ‘Another messenger for Nikos, with love from Stephen’, June 1966. Nikos thought this ‘messenger’ by way of Stephen made inevitable our meeting each other.

  Saturday afternoon on the King’s Road, 1966: a funfair at which people dressed for a different world… I sketched three interesting characters.

  Patrick Procktor’s watercolour of me and Stephen Spender, 1967. Very good of Stephen.

  My watercolour of Nikos, San A
ndrea di Rovereto di Chiavari, 1968.

  Three ‘Exquisite Corpses’ from many dinner parties Nikos and I gave for friends during the seventies, everyone clearly fixated on the inventive parts.

  Sandra asked to paint my portrait – in the nude, if I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. Then she suggested I come again and pose with another male model, very sexy, both of us nude. ‘And you never know what will happen.’ Dear, dear Sandra. Kitaj gave me the painting after Sandra died.

  R. B. Kitaj’s portrait of me, David in Russia. Nikos pointed out that the hands come from icons by Theophanis the Greek, mentor of Andre Rublev, the great Russian painter of icons. Kitaj didn’t know this, but was very pleased, as his paintings are filled with references.

  In the 1980s in London, while Keith Milow was fabricating a series of lead pieces, he heard of the death of Joseph Beuys, a mentor and an inspiration. Though the pieces were intended to be nameless memorials, as he worked on them they became charged, almost imprinted, with the presence Keith retained of having met the great man. This is one of those memorials. Lead, wood, putty, 1986.

  This was painted in 1972 by Adrian Stokes after an operation on his brain; he seemed to be painting on air. It is the first of eleven paintings from before he died. He gave me this, the art critic Lawrence Alloway was given the last, and the rest belong to the Tate.

  A note from Stephen Buckley: There have been a number of paintings called FIELD over the years, none of them of a particular field, just as the flower stencil, first cut in 1963, is not of a particular flower. This flora universalis has made regular appearances over five decades in various paintings, always in colour.

  A Note on the Author

  David Plante is the author of the novels The Ghost of Henry James, The Family (nominated for the National Book Award), The Woods, The Country, The Foreigner, The Native, The Accident, Annunciation and The Age of Terror. He has published stories and profiles in the New Yorker and features in the New York Times, Esquire and Vogue. He lives in London; Lucca, Italy; and Athens, Greece.

  By the Same Author

  Fiction

  The Ghost of Henry James

  Slides

  Relatives

  The Darkness of the Body

  Figures in Bright Air

  The Family

  The Country

  The Woods

  The Catholic

  The Native

  The Accident

  Annunciation

  The Age of Terror

  ABC

  Non-fiction

  Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three

  American Ghosts

  The Pure Lover

  Copyright © 2013 by David Plante

  “Dreams Dreams & More Dreams” copyright © 1972, 2013 by Gerard Malanga, reproduced in its entirety by kind permission. All rights reserved.

  Poem copyright © 1971 by Aram Saroyan from Complete Minimal Poems (Ugly Duckling Press, 2007), reprinted by kind permission.

  Poem copyright © 1972 by Andrew Wylie from Gold (Telegraph, 1972), reprinted by kind permission.

  All rights reserved.

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. For information, write to Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, New York, 10018.

  All images are from the author’s personal collection except where credited otherwise.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of materials reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Plante, David.

  Becoming a Londoner : a diary / David Plante. — First U.S. Edition.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-1-62040-182-8

  1. Plante, David. 2. Plante, David—Friends and associates. 3. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. 4. London (England) —Biography. I. Title.

  PS3566.L257Z46 2013

  813'.54—dc23

  [B]

  2013018704

  First U.S. Edition 2013

  This electronic edition published in October 2013

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