#257: CITY LIGHTS—LONDON EDITION.  The lure of the great cities is a perennial theme.  A friend of mine was approached once by two temp secretaries who said to her, “We’re thinking of going into New York for the weekend.  Do you think there’ll be anything to do?”  The friend said to me later, “What are you supposed to say to that?  Oh, no, nothing much, just shops and parks and museums and restaurants and galleries and buildings and sights and people watching.  You know.”  The great cities hold the promises of life and accomplishment: you can get cast, get famous, get published, get laid, get rich, get connected.  David Plante landed, from his Franco-American home town in Rhode Island and an abortive stint in New York, in London, into the cultural and social ferment of the city in the mid-sixties.  His head was full of English lit, of stories of the Bloomsbury crowd, of an enormous hunger to meet people he admired and who were doing something.  In the particular way of the city, everyone seemed to know someone, then someone else, then someone else again, and he began constructing his sense of the “worlds within worlds” that constitute English, and London’s especially, artistic and social settings.  He began hob-nobbing with Stephen Spender, Lucian Freud, Frank Kermode, Francis Bacon, Philip Roth, Steven Runciman, David Hockney and other lesser mortals, and, in his diary of the time (Becoming a Londoner, Heinemann, 2013) they eventually stop being cautiously approached gods and turn into the people he knows.  London eventually changes (to some degree) from being the great city you go to to being the place you live.  Yet what never quite leaves him is the bedazzled sense of surprise of being the small-town kid moving among the people and the city he’d read about when young; familiar in one sense, fabulously strange in another.

        There is of course another aspect to the big city: it can be a place you go to to get away from your sad or horrid former life, to a place you hope will provide accommodation and sanctuary.  The central and enormously touching relationship of Plante’s diary is his long, intense romance with Nikos Stangos, who came to London from the political wreckage of Greece, just as Plante was getting out of a failed invasion of the New York gay scene.  London was a place where they could be.  He notes with bemusement that their friends are entirely unruffled by a relationship which is, for the first part of the book, illegal.  He notes very much in passing when in 1967 the Sexual Offences Act decriminalizes homosexuality:  “We never felt like criminals.”  “It is as if all the conventions of sex and clothes and art and music and drink and drugs don’t apply here in London.”  Freedoms come with their price, of course, and there are many accounts here of madness and suicide and malaise, of people for whom the freedoms were too dangerously heady.  London will always be a crowd scene, of course, and it’s easy to get lost in a crowd.

      But Becoming a Londoner is vivid and entertaining throughout if you allow for or enjoy an ongoing degree of turbulence.  Part of my enjoyment must be chalked up to the fact that London has always been my city of cities, and Plante’s diaries put me in mind of parallel good times and bad, though I staged my own landing a good twenty years after he did.  Plus ça change….  And Plante has no allergy to talking about the backfires and misadventures.  Not everyone takes to him (Stangos twits him for the very American wanting to be liked); not everyone is kind or nice.  He reports, “Roxy and Stef, who are something of a collective conscience to me, tell me I drop names.”   And there are, of course, life’s little indignities.  The dust jacket to one of his novels had a design by Hockney; he saw a copy in a bookshop, where the dust jacket had been stolen but the book left behind.  (Ouch.) 

      What steadies and focuses the narrative amid all the rumpus and disruptions is, of course, his relationship with his beloved Nikos.  If he’d hoped that the book might provide a convincing but glowing portrait of the man he loved for decades, he should sleep easy.  Stangos, who was a poet and editor of art books (with a childlike, toothy grin), comes across as honest, intelligent, and immensely endearing, and Becoming a Londoner is full of remembered intimacies and intensities. “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.”  Plante discovers a bit of something Stangos has written:  “I pray for you in a way you never suspect, except perhaps intuitively when we touch in sleep.  I pray for you without knowing I pray, for when, asleep myself, I hold you at night something like prayer flows from me, surrounds you, enters you through your skin.”  In Plante’s epilogue, he gives a long list of the people who made the city his home who have now died, and, in a separate line, “And oh, my great love Nikos is dead.”  That one tore me up.  Early on, he writes a sentence that, I suspect, could have been repeated on any later page of the book:  “To be in London because I am in love—amazing!”  Amazing.

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       One other aspect of London.  When she finally got to visit, Helene Hanff remarked on the supply of “handkerchief-sized parks” London offered; still true, I am pleased to report.  This has put me in mind of a patch of prose I remembered from a book read more than fifty years ago, The London of Sherlock Holmes, by Michael Harrison (Drake, 1972):

It is not the bustle and the go-getting, the energy, for good or ill, the up-and-doing restlessness which link the vanished world of Holmes with our own.  All ages have known their individual types of energy, their peculiar ambitions.  Rather are we linked with Holmes and many earlier ages, not by how we strive but by how we seek—and find—peace for contemplation; a quiet place in all the frantic striving.  London has always had such quiet places, and it is these which link our modern London most strongly with the past.  Within the soaring arches of Westminster Abbey or, under God’s sky, in the incredible peace of the Abbey’s cloistered gardens, we may seek and always find those restful backwaters of the physical and the spiritual that London has always had to offer both its citizens and the most transient of its visitors.