Becoming a Londoner

August 1, 2013
A memoir of young love and life among literary lions. Novelist Plante (The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief, 2009, etc.) excerpts from his voluminous diary, here covering his first years in London, chronicling his artistic coming-of-age in the mid-1960s. The author moved in heady circles, counting such artistic luminaries as Francis Bacon, David Hockney and W.H. Auden as friends, and the young writer took in this milieu with a novelist's attention to detail--and a literary tyro's self-obsession. This period also marked the beginning of Plante's long-term romantic relationship with Nikos Stangos, a politically engaged, erudite expatriate Greek--and the subject of The Pure Lover. The evolution of Plante's relationship with Stangos and his experiences navigating the fraught social circle of London's art scene are the focus of the narrative. The young Plante groped hungrily for an identity, accumulating political awareness, a sense of Englishness (Plante is a native of Rhode Island), artistic accomplishment, respect and community. As is perhaps inevitable in a diary, the reading experience is periodically bogged down by repetition; there are an awful lot of dinner parties and lunches to get through. But even at this stage, Plante was a crafter of limpid prose, possessed of keen insight and sympathy. He also displays a rare gift for finely wrought characterization. The poet Stephen Spender, an intimate of Plante's, vividly emerges from these pages as a profoundly endearing sad-uncle figure, an accomplished man of letters beset by insecurity and furtively hiding his homosexuality from his forceful wife, Natasha. A richly detailed document of the London art scene of the '60s and an affecting memoir of the artist as a young man.

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October 1, 2013
Novelist and memoirist Plante (The Pure Lover, 2009) was a 26-year-old American new to London when he fell in mutual love-at-first-sight with Greek expat Nikos Stangos. When Stangos told his older English lover about aspiring writer Plante, poet Stephen Spender graciously befriended Plante and introduced him to the likes of painter Francis Bacon and writer Christopher Isherwood. When Stangos, Plante's partner until Stangos' death in 2004, became the arts editor for Penguin Books, the couple found themselves at the center of London's literary and art worlds. In this lapidary yet flowing volume, which runs from 1966 to 1986 and is charged with keen attentiveness and dazed astonishment, Plante meticulously records a perpetual carousel of luncheons, dinners, parties, and vacations punctuated by encounters with Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant and Ben Nicholson, David Hockney, Edna O'Brien, Bruce Chatwin, and many others. Writing with supple exactitude, Plante sidesteps the diarist's usual habit of obsessive self-analysis to create a living history of this artistically dynamic time and place. And to think, this is just one small part of Plante's immense, half-century-spanning diary. More, please.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

July 15, 2013
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.