Becoming a Londoner Read online

  For Paul LeClerc

  ‘You always get it wrong.’

  Philip Roth to David Plante

  Nikos Stangos and David Plante by Stephen Spender, San Andrea di Rovereto di Chiavari, 1968

  Contents

  London

  Paris

  Mausanne

  Paris

  London

  Keswick, Cumberland

  Bowness-on-Windermere

  London

  Lucca

  San Andrea di Rovereto di Chiavari

  London

  San Andrea di Rovereto di Chiavari

  London

  Providence, Rhode Island

  London

  Lockerbie, Scotland

  Maussane

  London

  Lockerbie, Scotland

  London

  Chartres

  Greece

  London

  Paris

  London

  Florence

  London

  Paris

  Florence

  London

  Florence

  London

  Some Thirty Years Later

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Image Section

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  London

  June 1966

  As I was approaching from one end of the street the house where Nikos lives, 6 Wyndham Place, I saw him approaching from the other end. He was wearing a dark business suit and carrying a briefcase, returning from the office of the press attaché at the Greek Embassy.

  Meeting me, he said, ‘If you’d come a minute earlier, you would have rung and no one would have answered.’

  ‘I’d have come back,’ I said.

  I followed close behind him as he opened doors with keys into his flat, so close I bumped into him when he paused just inside to turn to me to ask me, his face so near mine I could have leaned just a little forward and kissed him, if I’d like to go out or stay in to eat.

  ‘I’d prefer to stay in,’ I said.

  ‘You like staying in?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So do I,’ he said.

  He said he’d change, and I, in the living room, looked around for something Greek, but saw nothing.

  He came from his bedroom wearing grey slacks and a darker grey cardigan, and we had drinks before, he said, he’d prepare us something to eat.

  He told me how much he likes America, how much he likes Americans, who were, he believed, the only people capable of true originality.

  I asked him why he was living in London.

  Because, he said, living in London he was not living in Athens. His job in the office of the press attaché was the only job he had been able to get that would allow him to leave Greece.

  Why?

  He would tell me later.

  I said, ‘I have a lot to learn about Greece.’

  He showed me one of his poems, written in English. It was called ‘Pure Reason’, and it was a love poem, addressed to ‘you’. The poem read almost as if it were arguing a philosophical idea with the person addressed, the terms of the argument as abstract as any philosophical argument. The philosophical idea is reasoning at its purest. What is remarkable about the poem is that, in conveying, as it does, intellectual purity, it conveys, more, emotional purity, and it centres the purity – intellectual and emotional and moral – in the person with whom the poet is so much in love. I had never read anything like it.

  When I handed the poem back to him, he asked me if I would stay the night with him.

  In his bed, he said to me, ‘Even if you’re worried that it would hurt me, you must always tell me, honestly, what you think, because, later, your dishonesty would hurt much more.’

  I said, ‘I’m not certain what I think.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘About everything.’

  I am staying with Öçi in his small flat in Swiss Cottage.

  He is at work, at Heathrow Airport, where he welcomes and sorts out the problems of visitors using his languages, besides English, Turkish, Greek, Hungarian, Spanish, making him linguistically the most cosmopolitan person I know.

  Seven years ago, the Öçi I came to London longing to be with is no longer the Öçi I now know. I was in love with him. I don’t love him as I so loved him, but he is a friend.

  It seems to me that the Öçi I loved is contained within a room, a moonlit room, in Spain, in a seaside town in Spain, we both in beds across the room from each other, talking. Never mind how we found ourselves in that room, in our separate beds across the room from each other, talking, but remember the smell of suntan lotion, remember the sensation of skin slightly burnt by the sun, remember that skin seemingly made rough by sea salt, remember lying naked in the midst of a tangled sheet, the erection of a nineteen-year-old who had never had sex bouncing against his stomach. We talked, we talked, I can’t remember about what – perhaps my telling him that my holiday in Spain would soon come to an end and I would go to the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, for the academic year, emphasizing my regret that I would be leaving Spain, which would be leaving all that was promised in my having met him – and then silence between us. He got up from his bed and, naked, went to the open window and leaned out into the moonlight and breathed the fresh pre-dawn air, from where he turned to me and I held out my arms to him. Never, never had I known such a sensation, never, and I fell in love with Öçi for the wonder of that sensation.

  A sensation I had to have again and again with him, because I felt that it was only with him that such a sensation was possible.

  I went to Louvain, but longed for Öçi in Spain.

  When he wrote that he would be in London for the winter holidays, I, possessed by my love, came to London.

  He did not love me.

  Leave this, from seven years ago, but remember that moonlit room.

  When I told Öçi that I had met someone named Nikos Stangos, whom I liked, he said he would find out about this Nikos Stangos through his connections. He smiled his slow, sensual, ironical smile, and said he had many connections, in Turkey, in Greece, in Spain, even in Hungary if I was interested, and, of course, in London.

  Later, Öçi told me he had made contact with a Greek who had met Nikos, and, as always with his slow, sensual, ironical smile, as if this was his attitude towards all the world, he said that he had heard that Nikos, working in the Press Office of the Greek Embassy, is ‘acceptable.’

  I tried to smile, saying, ‘That’s good to know.’

  I rang Nikos at the Press Office of the Greek Embassy. He said he had thought of going, that evening, to a cello recital by Rostropovich at the Royal Festival Hall. Would I like to go with him? During the recital I was attentive to his attention to the music. As always, I felt that he was in a slight trance; it showed in his stillness, but also in what appeared to me a presence about him, as if his calm extended around his body.

  After the recital, he was silent. I didn’t know why he was so silent, but I, too, remained silent. Delicate as the calm was that appeared to extend all about him, I felt, within him, a solid gravity; it was as if that gravity caused the outward, trance-like calm by its inward pull. Silent, we crossed the Thames on the walkway over Hungerford Bridge. The trains to the side of the walkway made the bridge sway. In the middle, Nikos reached into a pocket of his jacket and took out a large copper penny, which he threw down into the grey-brown, swiftly moving river far below.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

  ‘For luck,’ he said.

  The evening was warm and light. We walked from the Embankment at Charing Cross up to Trafalgar Square, all the while silent.

  In Trafalgar Squ
are, he suggested we sit, and we walked among the people standing in groups to the far left corner, behind a great, gushing fountain, where there was no one else and we sat on a stone bench.

  We wondered who, in history, had first thought of a water-gushing fountain. In ancient Greece, Nikos said, a fountain was usually a public spigot that water flowed from to fill jugs brought by women. Perhaps the ancient Romans first thought of a gushing fountain that had no use but to look at?

  After a silence, Nikos said he had thought very carefully, and he wanted me, too, to think carefully, about what he was going to say. It was very, very important that I be totally honest.

  He was in a love relationship with an older Englishman, who was in fact away, and Nikos decided that on the Englishman’s return he would tell him their love relationship must come to an end. He had decided this on meeting me, but I must not think that this meant I should feel I had to return the feelings Nikos had for me. I was free, and I must always know that I am free. Then he asked me if I would live with him.

  I placed my hands over my face and rocked back and forth.

  I moved in with him the next day.

  He is twenty-eight and I am twenty-six.

  Öçi is offended that I should have left him to move in with Nikos. He sent me a sarcastic letter, denouncing me for my ‘opportunism’ in my ‘affiliation with Mr. Stangos,’ who I must think can offer me more than he, Öçi, can as a friend. I showed the letter to Nikos; he said that he would find out about Öçi among Greeks living in London (Öçi’s mother is Greek from the Pontus in Turkey, his father Hungarian, and he grew up in Turkey), and when Nikos did he said that he had passed on a message to Öçi through the network of Greek connections (a network that Nikos does everything to stay out of ) that he would like to meet Öçi, that we should all meet.

  Nikos was eager to show me something he had received from Stephen Spender, in Washington, which is on his desk in the sitting room. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘a reproduction of Andrea del Castagno’s The Youthful David.’

  He said he was not sure how he would tell Spender about me when Spender returned to London.

  We should go for the weekend to Brighton, Nikos said, to see Francis King, who lives there. Francis has recently published a novel, called, I think, The Man on the Rock, about an Englishman falling in love with a Greek young man. With his pointed, pale face and large, gold-rimmed glasses, Francis King looks like someone who would work for the British Council, which he did do in Japan and in Greece. He spoke a little Greek with Nikos. He arranged a hotel for us. He said he was sorry, he had tried to put us into a hotel for queers, but it was full up. I was relieved that Nikos and I were not staying in a queer hotel. Our room had zebra-stripe wallpaper. We met Francis to go to a pub, and as we were entering I realized it was for queers, and everything in me drew back from going in with Nikos. He hung back with me and asked what was wrong. I said, ‘I don’t want to go in there with you.’ He asked me, please, not to insist, and I went in.

  As though he assumed Nikos would be amused, Francis recounted how, for a pack of cigarettes, he had had sex in Greece with a shepherd. Nikos smiled a small, tight smile, clearly holding back from this insult to Greece.

  Later, alone, he told me how the long tradition of men from Northern Europe thinking that Greek boys were there for them to have sex with is part of the fantasy that these men have of ancient Greece continuing in the Greece of today, and the Greek boys are so in need of money that they comply.

  He said he was glad I hadn’t wanted us to go into that pub.

  Why didn’t I want to go into the pub? I wanted, and want, Nikos to have nothing to do with my past in America, in New York, where I failed, and failed most severely in relationships that I associate with being in the New York queer world. I want, here in London, in England, in Great Britain, to form a new life with Nikos, even though he is Greek and I am American, for we have both left our countries for new lives in this country.

  I want us to be, as a couple, Nikos and David, which I think we could not be if we were Nikos and David in Athens, which city Nikos has left, or David and Nikos in New York, which city I have left.

  We went to the pier and played at the slot machines, using up many big copper pennies. A penny animated a whole landscape in a glass case: a tiny train ran about a track, children’s heads popped out of flowers, and, in the midst, a large, plastic tulip opened and out of it emerged a ballerina, en pointe, who turned round in jerks and then sank back into the tulip, which closed its petals over her.

  For the fun of it, Nikos and I took photographs of ourselves together in an automatic booth.

  In a junk shop, as if acquiring objects that would fix us in our domestic lives, Nikos and I bought two yellow ceramic pots, an art nouveau vase with purple irises, and four blue volumes of Masterpieces of British Art with a gold art nouveau design on the covers, the objective beginnings of our shared lives.

  Nikos showed me a poem which Stephen Spender, who is now resident poet at the Library of Congress in Washington, wrote for him.

  When we talk, I imagine silence

  Beyond the intervalling words: a space

  Empty of all but ourselves there, face to face,

  Away from others, alone in the intense

  Light or dark, it would not matter which.

  But where a room envelopes us, one heart,

  Our bodies, locked together, prove apart

  Unless we change them back again to speech.

  Close to you here, looking at you, I see

  Beyond your eyes looking back, that second you

  Of whom the outward semblance is the image –

  The inward being where the name springs true.

  Today, left only with a name, I rage,

  Willing these lines – willing a name to be

  Flesh, on the blank unanswering page.

  Nikos said he loved Stephen Spender very much.

  Why Nikos left Greece, he told me, is history – the history of his father having to leave Bulgaria, where his father’s family had lived since when the town, now Sosopol, was the ancient Greek town of Apollonia; and his mother having to leave Constantinople, where her family had been since Byzantium – had to leave because Greece had invaded Bulgaria and Turkey to reclaim, after centuries, the Hellenistic empire, known as the Big Idea, but Greece had been defeated, and the agreement was, in the 1920s, an exchange of populations in which all Greeks had to leave Bulgaria and Turkey and all Bulgarians and Turks had to leave Greece. Nikos’ parents were refugees in Athens, and were treated as refugees, Nikos himself always feeling that he was a foreigner in Greece, his accent not Athenian, and, his parents of the diaspora more cultured than native Greeks, more culturally and linguistically international.

  He told me that if I meet Greeks who speak various languages, who are informed about art and literature and music, most likely they will have come from Constantinople or Alexandria, from both of which cities they were expelled.

  The Exchange of Populations is called the Catastrophe.

  ‘Catastrophe’ is a word he often uses.

  We are back from Yugoslavia, in 6 Wyndham Place. Coming back from our holiday together to his flat makes me feel I am no longer just staying with him, but living with him, so that his flat is my flat too.

  In Venice, crossing the Piazza Grande, Nikos put his arm across my shoulders and said, ‘Here in Italy, we can walk together like this.’ We stayed in a cheap hotel behind the basilica.

  The boat from Venice to Opatija stopped for a few hours at Pula. The little seaside town appeared to be all hard edges, with a roughness to it that was like the roughness of the khaki-green uniforms of the soldiers walking down a muddy road. Nikos and I went to the Museum of the Revolution in the ruins of the fortress on a promontory overlooking the town, a small, whitewashed museum with machine guns, yellowing posters and blown-up photographs of executions. We were the only ones there, all around us the summer sound of insects. The museum seemed to be falling apart.
Nikos looked at everything carefully, even reverentially, and said, ‘I feel so safe here.’

  The boat took us to Rijeka, from where we took a taxi to Medveja, outside Opatija, and we found a hotel on the coast, a former mansion of Tito, where we had a small room with two very small beds. It rained a lot. Yugoslavia was not at all like Greece, as Nikos had supposed it would be, so there were no coffee houses to go to and sit out the rain. We stayed a lot in our room.

  He had taken Stephen Spender’s autobiography World within World for me to read. Often we read it together, both of us squeezed into one of the narrow beds.

  This was a touchy period for us. We easily argued, easily became depressed about the rain or the bad food, but were also easily elated when the sun came out or when we were able to order a fresh fish for dinner. Whatever we did, whatever we said, whatever we read took on large proportions, the proportions of a relationship expanding and contracting and expanding again into some form of love. Reading passages from World within World to one another about Stephen Spender’s relationship with Jimmy Younger, we were moved to tears.

  And for me to read about people I had only ever fantasized about – W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and the inner world of the fantastic Bloomsbury group which included Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West and Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey and Lady Ottoline Morrell and T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster, all of whom Spender in fact knew – was to open up that world, that entirely English world, in which I fantasize having a place, even if that world no longer exists in itself. It exists in the witness of Stephen Spender.

  And this is my overwhelming fantasy of England: that it is a country of absolute respect for differences in each and every one, all the more so for the startling originality of each and every one, this respect made possible because they all knew one another, all of them, and they all knew that they had created in their work a new awareness that was English, whatever the Englishness of the awareness could be.