Becoming a Londoner
A Diary
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
The first volume of National Book Award finalist David Plante's extraordinary diaries of a life lived among the artistic elite in 1960s London.
"Nikos and I live together as lovers, as everyone knows, and we seem to be accepted because it's known that we are lovers. In fact, we are, according to the law, criminals in our making love with each other, but it is as if the laws don't apply. 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 . . ."
In the 1960s, strangers to their new city and from the different worlds of New York and Athens, David and Nikos embarked on a life together, a partnership that would endure for forty years. At a moment of "absolute respect for differences," London offered a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes. Friendships with Stephen and Natasha Spender, Francis Bacon, Sonia Orwell, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Steven Runciman, David Hockney, and R. B. Kitaj, meetings with such Bloomsbury luminaries as E. M. Forster and Duncan Grant, and a developing friendship with Philip Roth living in London with Claire Bloom, opened up worlds within worlds; connections appeared to crisscross, invisibly, through the air, interconnecting everyone.
David Plante has kept a diary of his life for more than half a century. Both a deeply personal memoir and a fascinating and significant work of cultural history, this first volume spans his first twenty years in London, beginning in the mid-sixties, and pieces together fragments of diaries, notes, sketches, and drawings to reveal a beautiful, intimate portrait of a relationship and a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists, and thinkers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
American novelist Plante has outlived most of the dear characters he depicts here in this diary kept over the many decades he lived in London with the editor and poet Nikos Stangos. Both exiles in London, Plante from a "failed life" in New York, and Stangos from political turmoil in Greece, the two met in June 1966, both in their mid-to-late 20s, and soon grew inseparable: Stangos, working then at the Greek embassy, left a love relationship with the much older poet Stephen Spender, whose Bloomsbury relationships from an earlier generation prove invaluable connections for the two young men. Living first at Stangos's flat on Wyndham Place, then in Battersea, when Stangos was the poetry editor at Penguin and Plante began publishing fiction, then in Central London, when Stangos needed to be closer to his job as editor of Thames & Hudson, the two moved among rather well-heeled friends like Spender and his wife, Natasha; Francis Bacon; and Sonia Orwell, from drinks to dinner parties and discreet trips to country houses in Italy and France. Self-consciously aping a pared-down style of description Spender himself suggested, Plante has deliberately excised dates and scrambled chronological order so that entries take on the languid feel of the floating world. His uneasiness living among Londoners and deepening love for Nikos meld into a seamlessly charming narrative both evocative and sensual.
