Becoming a Londoner: A Diary
by David Plante
Bloomsbury. 528 pages, $30.
WHEN the American writer David Plante (The Francoeur Trilogy, The Cath-olic, Difficult Women) got to London in 1966, he was fleeing personal and professional failure in New York (though what sort we never learn). But all that changed when he met a Greek poet and editor named Nikos Stangos. “He was in a love relationship with an older Englishman who was in fact away,” writes Plante, “and Nikos decided that on the Englishman’s return he would tell him their love relationship must come to an end.”
The older Englishman was the poet Stephen Spender—friend of Isherwood and Auden, author of the memoir World Within Worlds—who not only accepted David as Nikos’ lover but enjoyed the life they had with one another, especially when Spender’s wife Natasha was not with him. Indeed, the main plot of this novel-like diary is the relationship between the Spenders and the young couple. Over the course of Plante’s life in London, we watch Natasha change from an unseen, disapproving presence into a friend.
Becoming a Londoner deals with the physical world (food, faces, flowers), social life (“I collected John Lehmann in my car to take him to Stephen’s for luncheon”—not lunch, he learns early on), and Plante’s relationship with Nikos. The last underlies the first two: “What came to me, forcefully is this: that Nikos and I are in London loved as a loving couple.” The best part of this book is simply the details of their union: “Before we fall asleep together, he says a little prayer in Greek and makes the sign of the cross on me, and then he, as if this is his role, switches off the lamp on his side of the bed.” (“I pray for you,” writes Nikos, “in a way you never suspect except perhaps intuitively when we touch in sleep. I pray for you without knowing … something like prayer flows from me, surrounds you, enters you through your skin.”)
Most of the diary, however, is a record of social climbing: Plante’s progress in meeting what he calls the “myths” and “monuments” of literary London. No gay American writer, for instance, could move there without thinking of Henry James, though Plante has no illusions on this matter: “My fantasy of being a Jamesian character in Europe is over, and it didn’t take much … because I, from a small, French-Quebecois-speaking parish in Yankee New England, am American in a way no character in James is.” On the whole, however, people are open to the diarist, as Londoners were to Henry James, and Plante meets many of the monumental myths he hopes to; though it doesn’t always go far. “You met Cavafy,” Plante says when he finally meets E. M. Forster. “Yes, I did,” Forster replies. “I did.”
Most of the time, however, the great and good dish one another more fluently. Here’s Spender on Auden: “Wystan’s only interested in himself, in no one else.” Auden on Isherwood: “he was ‘falsch,’ using the German.” Forster on Spender: “Stephen Spender loses honour constantly through an interminable diarrhea composed not entirely of words.” Forster on Ackerley: “Oh, Joe used often to bore me with his dogs.” Or Robert Medley, after Plante says how sweet Forster was: “Don’t be fooled, my dear. He liked to give the impression that he was sweet and gentle, but he had claws, tucked away in his soft paws and could and did use them. He could be a real bitch.” Medley on Auden: “But Wystan’s a monster.”
Much of this is gleaned at galleries, concerts, luncheons, and pubs. Though the diary is largely a record of dinner parties—the ideal venue, Plante says, since it gathers everyone together whose connections, whose worlds within worlds, fascinated him. There’s lots about the painter Francis Bacon and Spender, a great story about Yeats, and even an appearance toward the end by Philip Roth (whose experience of not Becoming a Londoner led him to accuse the British of anti-Semitism after breaking up with Claire Bloom, who then wrote a payback memoir about him).
One’s response to this book will probably depend on one’s interest in these people; and even then, you may find it a bit opaque. Partly it’s because Plante eschews commentary in his diary: “I don’t introspect in my diary. Nor, I hope, do I express opinions.” Germaine Greer (one of the most “difficult women”) takes Plante to task for thinking he can just set things down as they happened. One has to interpret them, she argues, or people will misinterpret on their own. But that’s not Plante’s credo: “A diary, which is supposed to be the most personal of all forms of literary expression, really is the most impersonal, having to do not so much with the writer but the times in which the writer lives.”
But how can this be? A diary is inherently self-centered; it’s made out of its author’s sensibility, consciousness, eyes, and ears. In the end, the main drama here (skillfully plotted in a diary that has no dates, is not chronological, and has been revised for narrative flow) is a young writer making his way into London under the wing of Stephen Spender; so it’s not surprising that insecurity is a recurring note: “I always feel,” Plante writes, “in a social situation with Natasha, that she thinks my presence is a presumption on my part, as though I have somehow ingratiated myself into a world in which I do not belong.” Even “Stephen can’t take seriously what I say, and is puzzled by my—what he himself would say about himself—near success as a writer,” he thinks after an evening spent with Francis Bacon. “That I should take myself seriously talking to Francis (whom Stephen considers a genius) Stephen, I feel, takes as an impertinence.”
Some may see this diary as a charming saga of a young writer in London, others as a claustrophobic record of meals eaten and things said by people who may or may not matter to the reader. Looking back, it’s not clear that this name-dropping illuminates anything or anyone. What the diary’s really about is Plante’s dream of London. In fact, the character brought to mind is Alan Hollinghurst’s protagonist in The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest.
When late in the book the diarist calls Claire Bloom to invite her and Roth to dinner, Nikos rebukes him after he hangs up for sucking up to her. “I thought you had outgrown your falseness, your insincerity,” he says. “I thought you were no longer intimidated by people you think grander than you are.” Not so. “Later, this occurred to me: that, yes … 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.”
But admit it he does, which is part of the drama of the diary. Plante, who in The Catholic provides perhaps the most minute analysis of two men cruising ever written, is still examining his own motives, like a boy reviewing his sins before confession. For years, he says, he’s had “blazoned across my mind the admonition from Blaise Pascal” which (roughly translated) goes, “Curiosity is more often than not nothing but vanity—one wants not so much to know as to be able to talk about it—otherwise we would never travel over the sea except to say something about it.” That is “the sin of pride” of which he fears himself guilty, but which, evidently, is the side effect of all the name-dropping.
The diary ends with an epiphany in an English church meant to signify Plante’s having become English, but one has to ask: How? Aside from his widening circle of friends, one is left to conclude that it’s the long residence in London that did it. At any rate, it seems to have been a happy life; one day in particular, with a Bach concert in a church, a dinner party at home, and the company of Nikos, seems to stand for the sort of civilized urban life that Anglophile New Yorkers attribute to Bloomsbury. But it’s Plante’s world more than it is England. One suspects his real home—though he now holds dual American-British citizenship—is the vanished world of this book, whose most powerful section is an epilogue that lists almost everyone we’ve been reading about, with each name followed—as with a hammer blow—by the words “is dead.” That includes the man who, when he had a migraine, would have Plante stand before him so that he could press his forehead against his stomach—Nikos, the heart of this diary, and also the subject of Plante’s last book, The Pure Lover.
