Worlds Apart: A Memoir Hardcover – August 25, 2015

David Plante, Worlds Apart, MemoirRiveting ReadingThe second volume of David Plante’s diaries, Worlds Apart, is as riveting as the first, Becoming a Londoner. Plante continues his chronicle of life with his lover Nikos Stangos (publisher/poet) in London, a life that included friendships with the elite of the literary and artistic world. Plante could count as dear friends, Stephen Spender, David Hockney and Philip Roth, among many others. What is noticeable and significant about Plante’s prose is that the author in his diary is maskless. He seemingly is incapable of pretense, being himself is his forte. Which makes his diary so accessible to its readers, for his prose is simple and humble. Look all you want and you will not find one false note because Plante possesses an exquisite awareness not only of himself but of the world around him. If he were to make a false move, he would catch and subdue it. One of the strengths of the memoir is Plante’s talent to describe and to bring alive the people he knows and loves. Spender is endearing, a father figure to David and Nikos. Natasha Spender is neurotic but also brilliant in her own field of music. Plante captures the Jewish Roth; though not bar-mitzvahed, Roth is fascinated by his heritage. When he goes to Jerusalem, he takes Plante along with him, hoping for a more objective view of the political situation in Israel. Some of Plante’s best sections are devoted to Roth and him discussing the writing process. Plante defers to Roth; it is another sign of his humility. Plante ‘s prose, to this reader, is the equal of Updike, Roth and Cheever. Plante’s domain is one that hovers between reality and fantasy, its borders lost in the mists. Plante will look intensely at a thing, and will see the aura in which it abides, such is often apparent in the diary. When Plante writes about philosophy and religion, he employs language that is dense, if not technical. Trained by Jesuits, he well knows how to dance around philosophical terms like essence, substance, accident or contingency. When he speaks of God, he tells his readers that he is an atheist.The pious boy of Rhode Island, who attended Catholic school and college, no longer believes in God, and yet he writes much about God, placing this God “beyond darkness.” If God does not exist, there is nothing to contain, not even darkness. If God does not exist, why does divinity become an issue in everything Plante writes?It may have something to do with Plante’s “longing.” What is he longing for? A return to the innocence of youth before the appearance of sexuality, in his case homosexuality? Or a return to his original Catholic faith? Innocence? Faith? Plante , now in his 70s, still refers to himself as a Catholic. One also can’t help comparing him to another gay novelist, Julian Green. Both men were Catholic, both novelists, both committed to one man in their lives, both famous for maintaining diaries. Plante includes sections titled “Providence” Rhode Island, where he and his six brothers grew up in a Franco-American family. He writes mostly about his mother. It’s a complicated relationship as it always is between a gay man and his mother. He confesses to annoying his mother to the point that she strikes him for the first time. Problem? He can’t help her deal with her cancer or with anything else. He feels hopeless about it, but he has to be honest about it. He can have no effect on her life. All he can do is love her, and that love comes across in his diary. But her last words to her son are devastating. And he will have to live with those words for the rest of his life. It seems terribly unfair, but surely not unexpected for a gay man living with the man he loves. The star of Plante’s memoir is, of course, Nikos Stangos (d. April 16, 2004). Whenever Plante is alone, or alone in another country, he pines for Nikos. Their love for one another is the constant of their lives. Which is not to say that they didn’t argue or fight. According to Plante there were indeed many grand opera fights over nothing. As in all marriages, for they were indeed married in the true sense of the word. All it would take to return them to their love was a touch, a gesture, and all was forgotten. Even unfaithfulness was dealt with because as Spender once said to Plante, you and Nikos truly know each other, thus you will stay together.If the star of the memoir is Nikos, then second billing goes to Stephen Spender, who also had an important role in the first volume. And why not since it was Spender who opened, to Plante and Stangos, the door to the elite of London, a gift from a true friend, for throughout the memoir Spender is shown as a man sometimes silly but always intelligent, gifted, generous and above all compassionate. All the latter adjectives can also be applied to both David Plante and Nikos Stangos. Although Plante’s diary is a window on the past, it is alive with its universality. People don’t change much, love is always life’s main concern, as it is in Worlds Apart. The kinds of love? Eros and Philia: that of the erotic and that of friendship.

I read in bed at night, and this book has consistently kept me wide awake and reading far beyond my usual lights-out time. In addition to being a highly talented writer, Plante has that rare gift of being able to make absolutely anything compelling, and sometimes even riveting. He really makes you care. Add to that the fact that he has known very well some of the most interesting people in recent history, and you have quite a great read.

An interesting account of Plante's life.

Plante's London diary, which precedes this one and which I reviewed on this site, made me eager to read this next instalment, and it's almost as good. It's called a memoir but it is more a continuous blend of diary extracts - perhaps we should coin a new term for this form, a diary-memoir? Plante has a transparent, generous, self-centred, vaguely religious, passionate, perceptive, innocent personality, which shapes the style and tone of his narrative. It's the 1980s, he's living in London with his long-term partner Nikos Stangos, a poet and editor, he's writing novels, teaching abroad, travelling widely, helping to renovate an old stone mill the pair have bought abroad, doing a lot of socialising and name-dropping, analysing himself, recounting domestic life and marital rows with detailed frankness, always reaching for some kind of transcendant understanding of his relationships and what underpins his life. The most successful diary writers - I'm thinking here of Frances Partridge, Julian Green - let you right into their intimate world and talk to you as if you were a close friend, as in a series of letters, and Plante has this quality in abundance. He's not perfect, he can be a bit garrulous and obscure, especially when he attempts to make some philosophical point - his forte is narrative, not analysis. He deals in trivia but somehow makes it feel important.One of seven brothers, there are some touching, conflicted moments with his family and his mother, who is dying of cancer - theirs was a complex relationship. But mostly the diary is about four or five people: Nikos, who comes across as an utterly loyal but prickly, moody man; Stephen and Natasha Spender; Philip Roth and Germaine Greer. We get an insight into Stephen Spender's late love for one of his students, Bryan Obst, despite the 50 year age gap between them, and how that affects his volatile wife Natasha. Roth and Plante spar over their books, very much two writers commenting on each other's work, Plante not too proud to take a subservient position. And we learn of the time Greer and Plante shared a house in Tulsa where they were both teaching a semester, a portrait of Greer that's refreshing and unexpected (she loved sitting in her room on her own watching baseball). Later, after featuring her in a book he wrote, 'Three Difficult Women', he became her enemy, as I think is now well known. Many other famous names come and go, and Plante dutifully sits down to record thee encounters in his diary, but these three provide the most continuous threads.His voice is so confiding and intimate you feel bereft once the book is finished, as if you lost a close friend.

First rate writing

This is a Xmas gift for my brother-in-law.It was on his wish list so am sure he is going to enjoy it.