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Becoming a Londoner: A Diary

Becoming a Londoner: A Diary

by David Plante (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2013

    $3.25
Synopsis

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... Strangers to this new city, from previous lives in New York and Athens, David Plante and Nikos Stangos are embarking on a new life together, a partnership which will endure for forty years. London, at a moment of `absolute respect for differences', offers a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes. From the King's Road to Bloomsbury, worlds within worlds emerge: 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 E. M. Forster and Duncan Grant. Connections appear to criss-cross, invisibly, though the air of London, interconnecting everyone. David Plante has kept a diary of his life among the artistic elite for over half a century. Spanning his first fifteen years in London, from the mid-sixties to the early eighties, this first volume of memoirs draws on diary entries, 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.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 544
 Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 26 Sep 2013
ISBN 10: 140883975X
ISBN 13: 9781408839751
Book Overview: The first volume of David Plante's extraordinary diaries of a life lived among the artistic elite, both a deeply personal memoir and a hugely significant document of cultural history

Media Reviews
A compelling, absorbing account of a most vivid period in our cultural history, both high-minded and full of high gossip ... a rare treat * Melvyn Bragg *
The cast is impressive: there us Francis Bacon in the Colony Room, W H Auden buying carpet slippers in the Strand, Philip Roth and Claire Bloom ... A wholly new picture of the Spenders' marriage materialises ... The book also offers a window on to a changing world ... The sense of an older, more formal and class-based world giving way to a new order is movingly portrayed ... The book is also powerful as a portrait of mutual love * Lara Feigel, Guardian *
David Plante is the ideal diarist: he has a fascination with the famous, a relish for anecdote and gossip, an ability to capture people in a few words, and the essential self-awareness. His elegiac and often very funny portrait of the years 1966-86 ... The treat of the year * Peter Parker, Spectator Books of the Year *
This memoir casts intriguing new light and shadow on the poet Stephen Spender ... The complexities of interconnected liberal literary and artistic life in 1960s and 1970s London are exposed in candid extracts from the extensive, sharply observant, drily witty diary that Plante has kept since 1966 * Iain Finlayson, The Times Biography and Memoir Books of the Year *
An experimental amuse-bouche of a book ... Fascinating ... In Plante's account, Francis Bacon comes alive * Spectator *
It is Plante's study of his private life with his lover Nikos in their London home and their glittering cultural circle which makes his diary an eye opening glimpse of a recent but very different England * Metro *
A diary of 1960s London packed with high-end literary and art world gossip * Town & Country *
David Plante's Becoming a Londoner was a shameless wallow in lost time for me, since, in reading about this world, I see that it is one I too both did and did not inhabit: high-bohemian, mainly male, homosexual London Seventies society. Plante, a French-Canadian, sees it with an outsider's acuity, hankering and disconnection, already nostalgic for his own present. And there is a strong account of one great, lifelong love * Candia McWilliam, Scotsman Books of the Year *
As readers of the notorious Difficult Women (1983) will know, candour is also the hallmark of what Plante writes about others, and those drawn to this book for its high-calibre gossip will not be disappointed ... Absorbing, illuminating and hugely entertaining diaries. They stand as a vivid memorial to an entire era from which, as the necrology in a postscript all too vividly shows, most of the leading players are now lost to us * Times Literary Supplement *
Plante's anecdotal, witty diaries, spanning two decades, recall drinking sprees with Francis Bacon, partying with Rosamond Lehmann and standing next to Rudolf Nureyev at the urinals of the Curzon Street cinema * Independent *
Author Bio
David Plante is the author of the novels The Ghost of Henry James, The Family (nominated for the National Book Award), The Woods, The Country, The Foreigner, The Native, The Accident, Annunciation and The Age of Terror. He has published stories and profiles in the New Yorker, and features in the New York Times, Esquire and Vogue. He lives in London; Lucca, Italy; and Athens, Greece.