Liberation (18 page)

To make matters worse, Jean-Louis Barrault
⁸⁸
and his entire company were with us, flying out to San Francisco to give their
Rabelais
show there. The Frogs were aggressively noisy and jokey and they walked up and down the aisle and stood over us, gossiping. At one point they got
so
noisy that some member of the crew switched on the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign to make them return to their places and sit down—at least, I can't think of any other reason for switching it on; the air at that time was totally calm.

At last, at last, after about eleven and a half hours, a movie (
The Molly Maguires
) a terrible meal and a worse snack, and around fifty pages of
The First Circle
, we saw the shining sea and the vast constellation of the city and bumped to earth (the Frogs clapped) and as I came out of the plane I looked at the big window and there was Don, standing just where I've so often stood waiting, his face dark golden and his hair parted in the middle and more silvery than ever, smiling that marvellous smile that every human being must wish to see on the face of someone waiting for
him
—what happiness that was! Even the passport examiner was pleasant this time, he knew who I was and said it was a pleasure to have met me, and the customs inspector hardly poked into my bags at all and I got out quite quickly and there was Don himself, no longer behind glass, and I was home again and the luckiest old dobbin of them all.

 

(The funny thing is, I wanted to fill this notebook exactly and I have; I dislike having half-filled notebooks lying around. Yet I didn't make any effort to work out the number of pages to be written per day. I couldn't have, until very near the end, because I didn't know exactly when I should be leaving—even at the last moment the acceptance of a couple of actors could have changed our plans. It just happened like this.)

May 27, 1970–August 26, 1972

May 27.
This is to launch another volume of diary. It's exactly four weeks since I got home from England. During my time alone there, after Don had come back here for his show, I kept a diary every day; oddly enough it was only a short while ago that it occurred to me I'd kept it in handwriting—which means that my much-complained-of arthiritic thumb must either be much better or so much a part of my normal experience that I don't notice it any longer! I do still prefer handwriting for a diary, this typing
is
an obstacle and makes you self-conscious, and I seriously considered going out and getting a notebook and writing in it this time too. But somehow that seems infantile here. When I'm away and haven't a typewriter it's necessary. Here, it's just a caprice. Handwriting gives me a sense of privacy, but who's kidding who[? N]othing I write will be permanently private unless I burn it; and I can just as easily burn a typescript.

Am now really plugging away at
Kathleen and Frank
. My objective is to finish the three chapters covering the Wyberslegh period before my birthday, three months from now. Well, one chapter is roughed out already. But now there's this prospect of maybe working on this film for Dean Stockwell.
¹
More about that after I've talked to him tomorrow.

No more news from London. Clement Scott Gilbert writes saying why don't we send the script to Richard Burton, who's actually in town here at present. Robin French discourages me from doing this, perhaps because he has other plans for Burton. Anyhow neither Don nor I feel Burton would be any good, even if he wanted to do it. Clement has nobody else in prospect— except Albert Finney! Chetwyn hasn't written at all to say what he thinks of the rewrites we've done since I've been home. Clement thinks it's wrong for Tom to speak directly to the audience at the end and wrong for him to dance with Penelope and Mother. I'm
sure
we're in the right about this. In fact, I think the idea of their dancing together is brilliant!

 

May 28.
I went into my workroom after breakfast this morning and, after a few minutes, I heard Don talking to someone and he called to me and I came out and there was David Hockney. I could hardly believe my eyes. David had just flown over nonstop from London. He looked younger and sprucer, although his jacket was stained, and he smiled in a self-contained manner. He seems to have left England quite suddenly. Don feels there is something wrong between him and Peter. David merely said he felt he had to get away and draw. He is staying at the Miramar.

Dean Stockwell called to say he can't come and see me today.

We had Evelyn Hooker and Jo Lathwood to supper last night. While we were fixing the food, Evelyn and Jo had a big heart-to-heart. That was the point of the evening; Evelyn had said, rather rashly, that she'd like to give Jo some advice as a psychologist. So of course Jo needed no prompting to pour forth her woes. I heard Evelyn saying, “But why do you
torture
yourself with such thoughts?” At the end of the evening she had to concede that she didn't think she could help Jo at all. At least not as long as Jo maintains her present attitude. When Evelyn reminded Jo that she too had lost someone, Jo implied that that wasn't at all the same thing and not nearly so bad—in other words, better Ben [Masselink] dead like Edward [Hooker] than married.

I have made a resolve, to read the rest of Dante before my birthday. Paradise or bust.

 

May 29.
Last night we went to a lecture by Shirley, Irving Blum's wife and my former colleague at U.C. Riverside, on modern American art. It was very disappointing, deeply infected by that dreary heresy which regards artworks as automobiles which keep rendering earlier models “obselete.” Thus, Monet's waterlilies were made obsolete by Jackson Pollock and his haystacks by Larry Bell's glass boxes—that was the implication. Shirley is a really very sweet girl, though. We had supper with her and Irving and David and Brooke Hopper (who had gatecrashed the party) afterwards. The evening was originally designed as a gesture toward the Blums, a sort of thank-you for Don's show. Don is mad at Brooke because she told him she'd buy the drawing he did of her if it was in the show and then she backed out and pretended that it wasn't flattering enough! She is terribly stingy.

Meanwhile, David has already started working. Asked what he would draw at the Miramar, he said everything in the room, the furniture, his clothes, the view from the window. How simple he makes life seem! Still no hint that there is anything wrong between him and Peter.

A nice businesslike letter from Bob Chetwyn this morning. He is quite pleased with the rewrites and he mentions again the possibility of trying the play out in a small theater without any stars. We favor that too, of course.

 

May 30.
Am depressed, because it's a grey morning and a public holiday, Memorial Day, and because Don is depressed about his work. In moods like this I always feel acutely the nervousness and instability of the life everybody is leading here. I don't mean just the war
²
and the recession
³
and all the other political tensions—I mean the jitters of nowadays, the strain of living now and here. Partly, of course, this rattles me because I'm getting old; I feel I can't keep up with it all. Why do things have to change so fast? It no longer seems exhilarating that they do. For instance, I mind enormously that they finally are going to put up this monster apartment building at the end of the street, two twenty-floor towers. And yet, why not? Why shouldn't we have to move? We've been here ten years, already.

Every day I say in my prayers: help me to know that you are my
only
resource.

After all this long time, Don decided to put a piece of plywood under his half of the bed; I've had one under my half since the beginning. It is a great success; he says he sleeps much better and it helps his back.

David, Jack [Larson] and Jim [Bridges] to supper last night. I barbecued swordfish steaks. Don and I definitely do not have the art of casual cookery; we always make such a production out of it and I'm sure this gets on our guests' nerves. Jim is deep in rehearsals of a lot of short plays, including two of Jack's; he only brought part of himself to the house. And David wasn't entirely present either; at least, I felt he wasn't, having become accustomed to seeing him always with Peter. Jack rattled on about Nixon and the students.
⁴

He feels a better age is at hand, when all the old conservative farts will have died off.

 

May 31.
Soon after I finished writing the above, Swami called on the phone and read me a passage from a letter Swamiji wrote to the Hale sisters on July 31, 1894. Swami said, “I was reading it this morning and it made me cry”:

 

Say day and night, “Thou art my father, my mother, my husband, my love, my lord, my God—I want nothing but Thee, nothing but Thee, nothing but Thee. Thou in me, I in Thee, I am Thee. Thou art me.” Wealth goes, beauty vanishes, life flies, powers fly—but the Lord abideth for ever, love abideth for ever. If here is glory in keeping the machine in good trim, it is more glorious to withhold the soul from suffering with the body—that is the only demonstration of your being “not matter,” by letting the matter alone.

Stick to God! Who cares what comes to the body or to anything else! Through the terrors of evil say—my God, my love! Through the pangs of death, say—my God, my love! Through all the evils under the sun, say—my God, my love! Thou art here, I see Thee. Thou art with me, I feel Thee. I am Thine, take me. I am not of the world's but Thine, leave not then me. Do not go for glass beads leaving the mine of diamonds! This life is a great chance. What, seekest thou the pleasures of the world?—He is the fountain of all bliss. Seek for the highest, aim at that highest and you
shall
reach the highest.
⁵

 

While Swami was reading this, I kept saying to myself: He is telling me this because he knows I need spiritual instruction. I am being instructed by a saint. Even if I can't feel much, I do believe that things like this are being stored up inside me and that they are valuable, in a way I can't yet imagine.

Don says he is more depressed when he's with me because I'm so optimistic. When he's alone he knows he can't afford to let himself get depressed. But you can't help that, he says. It's just role playing.

In the afternoon we went with David to Griffith Park, where there was a Gay-in. Only it wasn't very gay or very well attended. The police had been by, earlier, harassing them because they were distributing leaflets without a permit. Nobody got arrested but it scared a lot of people off. Lee Heflin was there, and a friend of his stamped our hands with the sign of a hand in purple ink, denoting some gay-liberation front group; they took a lot of scrubbing to get off. Lee introduced me to an elderly man named Morris Kight(?)
⁶
who was wearing a silk dressing gown and a funny hat and who appeared to be directing the proceedings. He married two pairs of girls, explaining that this wasn't a marriage but a “mateship.” We had to join hands and chant something about love. Kight also introduced me publicly and called on me to speak, so I said, in my aw-shucks voice, “I just came here because I'm with you and wanted to show it.” There were several journalists with cameras and quite possibly Don and I will appear in the
Free Press
or
The Advocate
or elsewhere. Well, at least it was a political gesture of sorts. David was taking photographs too, as usual, and a black boy came up and protested that he didn't like his picture to be taken without his permission. I thought maybe there was going to be trouble but there wasn't. The black boys were almost the only attractive ones there. There were lots of dykes, black and white.

Then we went to see a film about Vietnam, [
In
]
the Year of the Pig
. The most damning parts of it were simply clips of various politicians, making speeches. It was being shown at the Bay Cinema in the heart of Republican Pacific Palisades, but the audience was strongly in favor of the film, quite big and mostly young.

Have finished a rough draft of chapter 12 today—the second chapter I have finished in rough since I got back here and started working again. Now I'm wondering if maybe I won't try to get right through to the end of the book in rough and then go back over the whole thing later.

 

June 8.
Yesterday morning, a woman called me from New York—I think she was representing United Press—and told me Morgan had died that day. Of a stroke or a heart attack or maybe both, I forget. She said he died at Coventry, which means with the Buckinghams. I was talking about it to Don and I said, “He really had a very happy life, he was very lucky.” As I said this I began to cry a little, and Don kissed me and said, “So is Kitty.”

But I can't feel sad about this. When I last saw him, on April 28, he told me he wanted to go. And he didn't die alone in that big chilly bedroom in college; he was snug and warm and tucked up and looked after by May and Bob.

He is absolutely alive inside my head as I write this. I have been living so long with him in my head that I know he won't fade out until I do.

This morning we went down to see Michael [Barrie] and Gerald [Heard]. Michael told us that Gerald became quite lucid yesterday for a short while and told him that, living as he does between the two worlds (or however he put it), he sees quite clearly that this world is held together by “the demiurge.” So Michael asked him, “Do you mean Ishvara?” and he nodded.

David Hockney went back home yesterday, planning to make a stopover in New York. We both of us feel very fond of him, and admiring, too. Don said that he has an “easy grip” on things.

On Saturday night, when we were giving him a goodbye supper, Nick Wilder (whom David had asked us to invite) arrived wearing a kind of formfitting dark female gown, and leather boots. He also forced us to have his friend Jason in after supper. Jason talked a lot of shit about art which greatly irritated Billy Al Bengston. Billy Al said, “I'm an autocrat,” and added that nobody was going to talk to him about motorcycles who couldn't get out there and ride one—“faster than I can” was implied.

 

June 12.
Today I finished chapter 13 of
Kathleen and Frank
in rough. That means that I've covered more or less all of the family history material, Marple Hall as symbol of the Past, the ghosts, etc. Now my feeling is that I'd like to push on hard and try to get as much roughed out as I can, before some new interruption takes place. Playing projections is really a meaningless game,
but
—if one projects two weeks per chapter, then I ought to be able to get five more chapters done in rough before my birthday. That would mean I'd have eighteen out of twenty chapters done, assuming that I can do the rest of the book in seven chapters, which I think is really quite possible. I don't want to dwell nearly so much on Strensall, Frimley and Limerick.
⁷

Yesterday, Peter Schneider came over with Jim Gates, and Don did three of his very best pen and ink drawings of Peter. I honestly can't see how anyone wouldn't have to admit that they put David's work to shame; but that's a silly remark, because of course David's not being able to draw too well is the whole point. Don caught so beautifully the grossness and the cuteness of Peter, his thick gross lips and his big dirty feet. Peter actually looks adorable now, with his beautiful golden skin; while Jim seems to be getting homelier by the week. Peter has decided to go and live in the back country someplace and grow nuts and meditate, and Jim seems to be thinking of coming with him. Peter is very grand and superior about the “typical American adolescent” he has staying with him now (and paying him eleven dollars a week rent). This youth smokes, and he says fuck and shit, and it's so awful to watch him getting up in the morning that Peter has taken to sleeping out in the yard in a blanket. Nevertheless, Peter feels that the Ramakrishna atmosphere is starting to work; the youth is slowly improving. He is the same age as Peter, nineteen.