The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief
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Our first night together, we could have been the inspiration of a poem by Cavafy. But you would not make love. You wanted to lie with me and talk. I, who only really knew promiscuity, didn’t understand, but you said you must first know a person before making love. You believed lovemaking was a long and intimate conversation. That conversation with you was filled with delicacy of your sensuality, for sensuality and sensitivity were in you one, eros and agape. David Plante first met Nikos Stangos in London in 1965. He was a young American—raw, an aspiring writer, in love with a fantasy of Greece half classical and half inspired with the eroticism of Cavafy. Nikos was Greek, a poet, an aesthete and intellectual, a leftist, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of his country: a man of great sophistication and few pretensions. Nikos was pure. They spent the next forty years together. And then Nikos died of brain cancer.In The Pure Lover Plante tells us, in vivid fragments that like the pieces of a mosaic come together into a glimmering whole, the story of his beloved, of their life together, and of its end. And in this telling he shows us the nature of grief: its passion, its centrality, its vanity, its willfulness, the threat and the lure of its overwhelming force. And the griever’s fear that when it fades, the lost lover will finally, really, be lost.The Pure Lover is a book of unusual intimacy, a lament that will speak to all who have known deep love and deep grief. The Washington Post - Michael Dirda …despite the subtitle and the repeated use of "wrenching" in its dust jacket blurbs…The Pure Lover leaves one exalted rather than depressed. To me, it recalls both The Orchard, Harry Mathews's similarly pointillist portrait of his friend, the experimental novelist Georges Perec, and Gore Vidal's unblinking account in Point to Point Navigation of the illness and death of his longtime partner, Howard Austen…It would be going too far to call this evocation of a beloved companion now lost a pure pleasure to read. But out of the fragments, Proustian moments and sharply felt memories of a happy and painful past, David Plante has made a lovely book, joyful, plangent and true.
