W
HEN the American writer
David Plante (
The Fran-
coeur 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 English-
man’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 Lon-
don, 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 sim-
ply 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 intu-
itively 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
Monuments and Myths
A
NDREW
H
OLLERAN
Becoming a Londoner:
A Diary
by David Plante
Bloomsbury. 528 pages, $30.
diane ellen Hamer, a longtime associate of the
GLR
, is a writer based
in Melrose. Mass.
January–February 2014
49
in their relationship. Prior to that, Lowell had commanded that
all drafts of her work also be destroyed. All this destruction may
partly account for why she left so small a footprint in American
letters.
Rollyson suggests that this biography is the first to wholly
include Lowell’s sexuality, and he disparages earlier biogra-
phers who didn’t take her relationship with Ada Russell seri-
ously. However, it should be noted that in
Amy
:
The world of
Amy lowell and The imagist Movement
(1975), Jean Gould
never shied away from this relationship. In fact, she ends the
book thus: “Amy Lowell closed hers [i.e., arms] around Ada
Russell. And nowhere did she do so with more finality, more
complete adoration than in her poem of love, ‘In Excelsis.’”
Lowell identified with John Keats and assembled the largest
known collection of his works. She devoted what turned out to
be her last four years of life to writing a two-volume biography
that lovingly detailed Keats’ own life and loves, and the inter-
play between the two. This biography, published in the year that
she died, along with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her vol-
ume
what’s o’Clock
(prepared for publication by Ada Russell),
gives Amy Lowell her own place in the literary canon, even if
it is a minor one—minor in part because of her early death, but
also because her surviving partner chose to remain silent about
their relationship. Rollyson puts this relationship front and cen-
ter to Lowell’s most passionate works: her erotic poetry and her
biography of Keats.
“A smart, sexy, wonderfully readable novel where
the struggling 25-year-old writer actually falls in
love—with a young man.”
—
Christopher Bram
“Startlingly new ... one of the strongest novels of
the year.” —
Grady Harp, Amazon Top Reviewer
Thoreau in Love
Available in paper and e-book
at Amazon and other fine bookstores.
