Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

Later I wonder if he isn’t a bit of a show-off as he starts to riff about running on the Beat platform for President. Leonard plays along and they list all the people who’d vote him in: the Beats, the jazz musicians, the pot-smokers, the Italians, delivery boys and girls, poets, painters, dancers, photographers, architects, students, professors.

‘Even though I’ve had two felonies I’d be voted in,’ Corso continues. ‘America is essentially a Dadaistic country. Could you imagine anything more Dada than me as President?’

George catches the end of their skit. ‘So what you going to do about bloody Russia when you’re in command?’ he growls.

‘I’d go to Khrushchev with a stick of marijuana and together we’d lie down and listen to Bach as though we were dead to the world,’ Corso replies.

After dinner Chuck ushers us to the top terrace where we sink among low cushions. There’s a small stage that he’s constructed, swathed with tasselled red silk rugs. There are sticky honey cakes and proper pastry forks and Polymnia brings a tray of coffee served in delicate blue Sèvres cups and a bottle of French cognac. Corso reaches for the bottle, uncorks it and drinks deeply straight from its neck.

Leonard bets Jimmy he can’t do a handstand while maintaining the lotus position. Corso takes up the challenge but even with Charmian holding his knees he tumbles into the cushions. Before everything gets too rowdy Chuck leaps on to the stage and claps his hands. A kerosene lamp with a goose-neck stand lights the glow of pride as he speaks of the studio that wants to make a film of The Strumpet Wind .

‘So this, my island friends, is to be adieu, for now,’ he says with a curtsy and holds out a hand for Gordon.

Gordon has discarded his chef’s apron. He steps on to the stage, his silk shirt unbuttoned. ‘And now, because it’s my party and I get to show off first, I’m going to be reading to you from something new. The novel’s to be called The Lord Won’t Mind ,’ he says, adding with a smirk: ‘Great title, huh?’

Gordon turns his profile like one used to being lit. The backdrop is the black sky and stars. He throws back his shoulders and starts to read, and read, and read. An entire chapter goes by as a man who is blessed with a prodigious penis has a pretty boy come to stay.

‘Peter’s sex leaped and quivered before him, the head as taut and smooth as ripe fruit…’ Gordon delivers his lines as he might a Shakespearean sonnet.

‘He anointed his sex liberally, as always slightly in awe of it…’ I see Charmian throw George several eye-rolls as Gordon’s honeyed tones continue through pages more of vigorous thrusting and splashing semen.

Beside me Jimmy is thumbing at his poem.

‘Don’t be nervous, we’re among friends,’ I whisper and he grins at me.

‘That’s precisely why I am nervous,’ he says.

Leonard has buried his face in Marianne’s hair; her feet have found their way to his lap. Greg Corso appears to have passed out among the cushions, with trailing hand in an attitude of the death of Chatterton. Gordon pauses to take a drink and Charmian and George start to clap, so we all join in and Göran leaps up and announces that he will read his new poem in Swedish.

Göran adopts the position of a great orator, a handwritten page dramatically aloft, but he manages only a few lines before Leonard cuts in with a splutter, ‘Hey, that’s my poem,’ and Göran bounces back laughing and bows deeply before him.

‘I admire it so much I had to translate it into Swedish,’ he says, reaching down as though to shake Leonard’s hand but pulling him to his feet and giving him a push towards the stage. ‘Now, you.’

Leonard shambles, looking reluctant and patting at his empty pockets, perhaps made a little shy by Göran’s enthusiasm. He’s certainly not born-to-performance like Gordon, who was once upon a time a matinee idol on Broadway.

Leonard gives a bashful cough before he begins, says he thinks he’d do better to tell a story than read one of his poems. His demeanour is apologetic, but the lamp catches the twinkle in his eye.

‘So, I was looking at the back of True Story this afternoon. And I saw…’ He looks at us and gulps. ‘I saw, about twenty ads for unwanted hair. The hair was a…’ Marianne starts to giggle and he waits, shrugging and deadpan, for her to stop.

‘A lot of people were offering to get rid of hair. They were offering to sandpaper it away. Shave it away. Pull it out. Cut it. Dissolve it with cream. Electrocute it.’

Marianne’s giggle is infectious; even Gordon, whose bruised ego is in the process of being eased by Chuck’s foot massage, snorts. Leonard continues. ‘I mean, you’re very concerned with unwanted babies but nobody cares for unwanted hair.’

He lopes on, his face set to doleful, almost pleading. ‘I think there should be a place for unwanted hair in this society. I think, at the very least, there should be a hair museum. I mean, there should be somewhere, a hair asylum. There should be somewhere where, um, middle-aged ladies’ moustaches reign…’ His scenarios become ever more ridiculous as he breaks into a gallop. Eventually he leaves the stage, but seems unable, even then, to pull up, muttering, ‘College beards abandoned for careers. I mean, a man should be able to go into one of these hair asylums and, you know, review his whole life,’ until George silences him by shambling on to the stage.

George unfolds some pages and holds them to the light, clears his throat. ‘I was thinking I’d read to you from the book I’m currently writing, but it’s about thousands of Chinese refugees starving to death, fleeing the Japanese, so it doesn’t seem quite the thing for this happy occasion.’ He has brought his glass of brandy to the stage and raises it to Gordon. ‘Keep on keeping on, Gordon, and congratulations on the film. I hope it makes you lots of dough,’ he says, and we all cheer, apart from the guest of honour who is still passed out among the cushions.

‘Damn, I was hoping he’d read his bomb poem,’ Jimmy grumbles, as Corso’s snoring grows louder.

George is giving his glasses a quick polish with his handkerchief. He looks like someone’s uncle about to tell a dirty joke. ‘So I’ll read to you from the galley proofs of Closer to the Sun instead. It’s set among a group of cosmopolitan misfits on an Aegean island not unlike this one… but, I hasten to add, any similarities to living people end there.’

I hear a sharp intake of breath from Charmian. I daren’t look at her. It seems we all sit up a bit straighter as George adjusts his specs. Marianne whispers, ‘Please, not this.’

George is enjoying the tension, he almost swaggers as he begins: ‘Poseidon’s Playground. The element of surprise was in fact that the newcomer was not nearly as young as expected…’

It takes a few sentences before we can breathe. George has chosen a scene about a suave but ageing theatre designer named Janáček who arrives on the island. Janáček has ‘the teeth of a dentrifrice advertisement and a cared-for complexion’. Impervious to panic, this Janáček is cared for and fussed over by the younger Kettering, who wears a garishly striped Mykonos shirt and who George, with a little devil perched on his shoulder, is busy describing as a diminutive man with a chestnut-coloured spade beard ‘who fluttered around Janáček’s feet like a hummingbird’.

It’s hard to tell if Chuck and Gordon fail to see themselves; they manage well if they do, unlike the rest of us.

Thank goodness Charmian’s got something she wants to read. She’s swaying a little as she stands on Chuck’s platform but her voice is steady and clear. She has only a couple of typed pages and she holds them so close to the lamp that her face has an almost ghostly luminosity.