Becoming a Londoner: A Diary
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. --Donna Seaman