Liberation (17 page)

David (who, like all of us, has the defects of his virtues and simply can't understand why we friends shouldn't want to get together in any conceivable combination at any time) has wished Peter on to us as a passenger; he isn't able to come himself. I don't feel this matters as far as Morgan is concerned; he likes bright eyes and bushy tails around him, as I do. But Bob Regester may well resent it, and by the worst of luck his phone is out of order this morning so I can't reach him and explain. Bob may well want to be alone with me to talk about his domestic situation. While he was at Le Nid de Duc, after most of us had left, he went down one evening into St. Tropez alone and met a French-American boy named Barry and this was a very big thing. Bob says he's never had such absolutely mutually perfect sex in his life, and of course Barry is already getting a bit possessive and starting to influence him. Barry doesn't like hippie clothes and long hair, so Bob is going to cut his hair and shave off his moustache and dress more conservatively. (He took me to a wholesale warehouse where they sell the latest in way-out shirts and pants, and it was amusing that he bought exactly the same more or less sober things I'd picked out for Don!) Neil objects to all this, strenuously, though he is trying hard to be reasonable. (My remarks to him the other day seem to have made an impression.) However, the other night, he announced that he was bringing a boy back to the house. (N.B.: It is the injured party who
always
behaves worse than the other!) So Bob, hurt by this proposed violation of the sanctity of the home, said he'd spend the night with a (non-sex) friend. And then of course Neil wouldn't go through with it, which merely made Bob angry.

During our time together, we passed Cranley Mansion (It
is
still Mansion, not Mansions) and got out to look at it. It's a very well-preserved tall brick building with nicely designed ironwork on its balconies (flowers in, maybe, the manner of William Morris). I noticed that the balcony rails were rather low and not very massive—so no wonder Frank felt vertigo while standing by them.
⁸⁰

Had lunch with Nick Furbank, who brought me a (very poor) xerox copy of Forster's story about the lovers on the ship.
⁸¹
He is a strange pallid sly little thing and I imagine he's expert at winkling information for his Forster book out of his informants. From me he got a memory of the Spanish Civil War period—how, when everyone was planning to go out to Spain and showing off a bit, Morgan was asked, “Why don't you come?” and he answered, quite simply, “Afraid to.”

Nick wanted to know how intimate Wystan had been with Morgan. I said not very, and added that Wystan has always found it difficult to be intimate—he's shy in that way. Even this little confidence I somehow regretted as soon as I'd made it. But perhaps I'm being unfair to Nick.

Dicky Buckle told me that David Hockney likes Don's paintings far more than his drawings—says they're so much freer and more original. I went out with him last night to the ballet; it was
Giselle
—with its
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
⁸²
scene at the end of it.
^*

Dicky had an art student with him named Ian Lewis, a brown-eyed tall boy with heavy cheeks and shoulder-length hair (nearly) who was quite pleasant but rather stupid-looking, like a dull girl. (Actually I don't believe he is dull at all. Probably Dicky reduces him to silence by his ill-advised showing off, he parades his literary and artistic knowledge but never really tries to entertain Ian on Ian's own terms as he should—for he claims to be in love with him.)

Later we had a quite horrid snack of scrambled eggs and tepid mini hot dogs at the flat of Dicky's secretary, David [Dougill]
⁸³
and his friend Richard Davi[e]s.
⁸⁴
I didn't mind the scantiness of the snack, however, for it was all in aid of my dieting—am now almost down to 152 again. And the boys are both bright and friendly. (Don thought David Dougill would be a nice playmate for me while he was away; and David is indeed the kind of playmate that someone's lover would pick for him under such circumstances! He's adequately nice-looking but just quite hopelessly un attractive.)

The boys are late; it's ten to ten. Have just talked to Neil on the phone. He is a bit mournful. Said the older he gets the more he hates to be alone.
^*

 

April 29.
Again a “beautiful” morning, like yesterday which ended in rain however. But we did have a fine drive. Bob didn't mind having Peter along and Peter was as sweet as usual. He admitted he had sulked during their weekend with Cecil Beaton. Cecil, he said, always treats him as the boyfriend of the great painter, and when Cecil was photographing David he made Peter stand a few paces into the background. Dicky Buckle and Ian Lewis had been there for a meal. Cecil had described Ian as having “a Brontë face,” which I find a quite brilliant, if flattering, description.

At Cambridge were Mark Lancaster, Richard Le Page, Richard Shone (whom I met with Nancy Ackerley on March 19) and a tall dark boy with beautiful blue eyes named Paul Wheeler. He is a singer, who composes his own songs. Richard Le Page is maybe stuck on him. Anyhow they are planning to come out to Los Angeles together, when Richard lectures at UCLA later this year. Paul hopes to earn money singing.

Of course the boys wanted to see Morgan, but they obviously couldn't sit round him for hours. So I arranged it that they came in to get me, just before 4:00, when we had to drive back to London and Morgan had to go out to tea with an Indian.

Nick Furbank had told me he was sad, and Morgan told me so too; he admitted to being sad and lonely and said he hoped he'd “go” soon. I asked him why he was sad and he said he felt “so empty.” He kept repeating, “There's nothing new in this room,” and, “I've got nothing to show you.” But he also repeated, “I've had such a nice sleep, I feel so comfortable,” and he showed me how he napped on his lopsided broken-down sofa (quite a feat) with one foot on the floor, a sort of sidesaddle position which prevents him from rolling off. I sat down on the floor beside him and tried to reassure him that I didn't have to be entertained; but the problem wasn't so easily solved. We are simply in different predicaments. “We perish, each alone,”
⁸⁵
is too melodramatic for this case, but, let's say, we are both awfully busy being ninety-one and sixty-five respectively.

Morgan was pleased when I told him how much I like his story about the lovers on the ship. And he was perfectly aware that
Howards End
has just been performed on T.V., though he hadn't seen it. Indeed, as when I saw him last, he seemed well aware of everything, and the boys, when they came in, found him much more alert and generally in better shape than they'd expected. Bob said later that Morgan laughed at me, when I was switching off the electric fire for him, “As if you were the village idiot.” I do clown for him a lot—that's largely my nervousness.

While I was seeing Morgan, after lunch, Peter went into town with Bob and bought a boater for himself, a real old-fashioned hard straw hat, now back in style. Bob bought me a tie and a scarf with the Corpus Christi colors, they are quite a pretty red.

Before this, we all went for a walk over the bridge and into the Fellows' Garden.
^*
Paul Wheeler had read in
Lions and Shadows
how I left Cambridge and he told me he felt just the same; he longed to get out. When indirectly flattered like this by a beautiful boy (well, he doesn't even have to be beautiful) I feel overweeningly pleased with myself and hastily pray to be released from vanity. But, really, it
is
satisfactory to walk these paths again amidst the prison-past and feel that I escaped in time and that Edward and I were
right
!

We got back in time for me to rendezvous with Robert Chetwyn and Howard Schuman and drive with them to the Polish Mime Ballet. In the intermission we met [an English boy I used to see in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. He was] at the bar, drunk. He is coarser looking, thick necked, getting plump; his nose is now definitely much too short. But I mustn't forget all the fun we had together. (I remember asking, “Does it hurt?” and him saying, “I
want
it to hurt.”) Howard Schuman knew him and Norman Prouting says I actually came to visit [the boy] in this house, when he was staying here in 1961! I dimly connect this with another memory; [the boy] wearing nothing but a leather jacket. But last night he was just rattling on tiresomely and name dropping and being loud.

The Mime Ballet was unforgettable—at least
Gilgamesh
was; the other one,
Baggage
, wasn't quite so exciting and showed more of the negative or minor qualities of the Polish approach; rigid stances, capricious body-jerks, poses with open-fingered hands, eccentricity, distortion, campy-macabre satire.
Gilgamesh
really does convey an epic archaic quality and at the same time its psychology is altogether modern. The hero-brothers wrestling naked, falling in love, sleeping with hands clasped, becoming involved in and escaping from the snares of women, dying with desperate spasms, wandering into terrible underworlds or dreams where a huge bird flutters its wings with a most intense menacing vibration. I have no idea what this ballet was about, except that it was about all of us. Pawel Rouba and Stefan Niedzialkowski (the one Dicky Buckle likes) are savagely beautiful, Pawel dark and Stefan blond. Pawel's body is dark brown, hard and faultless, Stefan's is white and voluptuous, all the more so because he has just a tiny bulge of flesh above the flat, sometimes concave belly with its deep navel—he'd better watch it.

I went on to Odin's for a farewell supper with David, Peter, Ron Kitaj, Melissa(?) and Chaik(?).
⁸⁶
Peter Langan tried hard to make me drink. David ordered champagne. But I meanly wouldn't—I even slipped my champagne to Peter while pretending to sip it.

Kitaj drove me home. He is furious with Nigel Gosling
⁸⁷
for saying in
The Observer
that, “Kitaj lacks the gift (often granted to lesser artists) of catching a likeness.” Not, Ron explained to me, that he
wants
to get a likeness, but he always could, any real artist could. So he rang
The Observer
and spoke to Gosling and told him that he had no right to write this because he'd never seen the originals of the portraits. Gosling is to be brought down to the gallery and made to eat his words—“like you rub a puppy's nose in its shit.”

Becoming less upset, Ron said that David is the greatest artist of our time, or his generation; I forget which. When we said goodbye, Ron said, “It's been a good time.”

This morning, Clement told me that Tom Courtenay has turned the play down.

3:00 p.m.
Here I am, out at the airport. Packing was difficult, because the bag I bought in exchange for the one that got damaged coming over here is smaller than the old one. I talked to Bob Chetwyn before leaving the house and tried to encourage him to take a personal interest in casting—that is, see prospective actors and talk them into taking the part before their wives or agents can talk them out of it. Clement came round to see me and really I must admire the way he bounces back from all these disappointments. But I think he is now beginning to think in terms of a production which won't be in the West End. So much the better, probably. Richard Schulman also called. So did Richard Shone. And I called Patrick Woodcock, Marguerite and David Hockney and Peter to say goodbye. “You cheered me up,” Peter said.

(A lady here at the airport just asked me if I was Christopher Isherwood and then explained that her father, a New Zealander, is an Isherwood. Did we come from Lancashire, or where? She then asked, “What's David Hockney like, is he as mad as a hatter?” I said, “He's super.”)

Have been having lunch at the Vedanta Center. Swami Bhavyananda was wearing a sort of smoking jacket over his
gerua
— it made him look like a very good-humored gangster. Buddha is skinnier than ever. He has now fixed up the shrine on a proper pedestal and was very pleased when I commented on this. I ate some deadly fattening little cakes at lunch because they were
prasad
; Buddha then told me, “You didn't have to.” The swami had been giving a talk in Liverpool, at a college. They had asked him if it wasn't selfish to retire from the world and become a monk who no longer does anything useful to help others. The swami retorted that pure scientists were also engaged in research which didn't help others, yet nobody criticized
them
. I must say, I found this argument somewhat specious.

Buddha and another monk, the big English boy, drove me to the Pan American terminal. I was grateful to Buddha when he said he couldn't stay and chat; he had work to do. Buddha says that when he's a swami he hopes to be allowed to stay here at the London center. He has a horror of India, says the centers are all too hot or too cold, and he's always getting sick there.

 

April 30.
Safe back here in the beautiful casa, with the sun getting slowly ready to set after a perfect day. It is chilly for California but so warm and heavenly after England, which now seems every inch of its six thousand miles away. As for this time yesterday, it's like something which happened a month ago.

The flight was deadly dull and the plane crammed. This is one of the most uncomfortable periods of travel we have had, probably, during the past seventy years. The seats are squeezed together so tightly that you can barely get in and out of them, and your briefcase or bag takes up half of your legroom. No doubt, in a few years, these old-fashioned jets will have become quite spacious again. I read in a magazine article that they will redesign the interiors and take out a lot of seats in order to offer a counter-attraction to the jumbo jets.