Synopses & Reviews
“Nikos and I live together as lovers, as everyone knows, and we seem to be accepted because its 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 dont apply. It is as if all the conventions of sex and clothes and art and music and drink and drugs dont 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, and David Hockney, and 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.
Review
“Entries take on the languid feel of the floating world…A seamlessly charming narrative both evocative and sensual.” —Publishers Weekly “Love and life among literary lions . . . .[Plante is] a crafter of limpid prose, possessed of keen insight and sympathy. He also displays a rare gift for finely wrought characterization. . . . A richly detailed document of the London art scene of the 60s and an affecting memoir of the artist as a young man.”—Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
The first volume of National Book Award finalist David Plantes extraordinary diaries of a life lived among the artistic elite in 1960s London.
About the Author
David Plante is the author of nine novels and The Pure Lover, a memoir of grief on the death of Nikos Stangos, and has published stories, profiles, and features in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, and Vogue. The notebooks of his diary are kept in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. He has both UK and U.S. citizenship and lives in London; Lucca, Italy; and Athens, Greece.