Liberation (21 page)

A letter from Charles Thorp, head of the National Students Gay Liberation Conference, asking me to go and talk to them in San Francisco on August 23. “Give a short talk and then just rap with us. What I'd like is to have you come ‘hold-our-souls,' hold our hands.” Instead of “my best regards” or whatever, he writes “my gay-love.”

I feel quite strongly tempted to accept this invitation (as indeed I've often wanted in the past to accept others like it). I highly enjoy the role of “the rebels' only uncle” (not that I would be, this time—for there are scores of others—and Ginsberg their chief ) and, all vanity aside, I do feel unreservedly
with
them, which is more than I can say for ninety percent of the movements I support. But something prevents me from accepting. Oddly enough, it all boils down to not embarrassing Swami by making a spectacle of myself which would shock his congregation and the women of Vedanta Place! I can admit this because I am perfectly certain there's no other motive. I am far too sly and worldly-wise to suppose that I'd be injuring my own “reputation” by doing this. Quite the reverse; this is probably the last opportunity I'll ever have of becoming, with very little effort, a “national celebrity.” And I hope I'm not such a crawling hypocrite as to pretend I wouldn't quite enjoy that, even at my age!

 

July 31.
Suddenly there's so much to record, or so it seems.

Yesterday I had a classic day of failing to get started with the last chapter of
Kathleen and Frank
. I made every possible excuse: I couldn't begin without consulting my diaries, until I'd got a letter from Richard answering my questions, until I'd read through the whole manuscript first. But this last alternative just depressed me so much that I ended by rereading the script of
The Monsters
²⁵
and “Afterwards”
²⁶
and doing nothing. (The two chief characters of
The Monsters
seem utterly unconvincing but just the same I wouldn't be surprised if the thing didn't play well and even have a success with a West End matinée audience; the twists of the plot are still fairly surprising. “Afterwards” in its present form won't do at all. Wystan was right, the chief character is so unpleasant. Anyhow, I've used much of it far more successfully in
A Single Man
.)

In the evening I went down and had supper with poor old Jo. And by God she has two new subjects for
moaning
, and one of them is truly serious. First, less seriously, Ben's father in Florida has had a stroke and won't be able to live alone any longer, and Jo would so gladly have rushed to him (“he really cared for me far more than he did for Ben, and I just adored
him
”) but no, she couldn't, because Ben and Dee are on their way there. Jo says that of course they ought really to bring Dad back with them, but even if they did they'd be hopeless at looking after him. So now, the old wound is open again and Jo, who was beginning to get used to the situation, she says, hates Dee more than ever because, just because she exists, Dad won't get properly taken care of. Ben had called Jo when he got the news—probably half hoping that somehow Jo could be conned into coming along with them to Florida and taking charge—and when he found she wasn't about to, all he could say was, “I'm so
sorry
about everything” . . . But what's ten million times worse, what
is
really ghastly, is that her old enemy Louis [Gold], the owner of the Tumble-Inn and the motel opposite, has decided to build a three-floor block of apartments on the parking lot right smack outside the windows of Jo's apartment! She won't be able to see anything, except the channel at one end and the street at the other,
²⁷
her view of the sea and about one third of the daylight will be cut off completely and people will be staring in on her. Jo was in tears and no one could blame her. Of course she's got her little house, she can turn the tenants out of that and move in, but she doesn't want to, says it is too big for her alone and besides she'd be “away from everything.” Curiously enough, she really loves all the noise and traffic and hippie music on Channel Road! So poor old Jo, I'm glad I went down to see her.

This morning I did finally manage to get the chapter started and then I went to the gym and then I took Forster's short stories to Gavin, who's been sick. He was being visited by a young man who dances at the Honey Bucket and the young man came on very strong in the Sincere Young Nature Boy style, asking me what I thought of him when I came out into the garden and saw him and why it was that I didn't look at him while I talked to him, so I said, you mean why didn't I flirt with you? So then the conversation got quite relaxed. The young man (wish I could remember his name) is actually far from being a simple little enormous stud nude dancing boy; he's an actor with quite a lot of experience in the theater up in San Francisco and he's been in films and whatnot, and I kind of think Gavin is considering him for the lead in that adaptation from Colette,
The Cat
, which he originally did for Clint [Kimbrough] (Christopher Wedow is
out
!
²⁸
)

Yesterday Don went down to see Jack Fontan and Ray Unger, as I said. What happened down there is what I mostly want to write about—but that must wait until tomorrow, because it's so late, tomorrow in fact. Today, I mean yesterday, Don and Mike drove up to Montecito together to draw with Bill and Paul and they're spending the night and coming back after breakfast.

Oh, one other piece of news, we did hear from Ellis Rabb, expressing great interest in our play; he excuses himself for his silence by saying he's been trying to get it put on up there but he wants to see if he can do anything for it elsewhere, etc. We neither of us think, from reading his letter, that he likes it.

 

August 2.
This morning I finished a first draft of what will most likely be the end of the whole book, an analysis of Frank and Kathleen as influences on Christopher and as symbolic figures in his myth. What remains to be done is an outline of Kathleen's life from the end of 1915 to her death. This is either a small chapter all by itself or it fits into chapter 17 immediately after the diary entries of 1915.

Don and Mike got back around noon yesterday; they had been to see John Ireland
²⁹
in the morning to deliver a portrait Don drew of him several years ago, which he had paid for at the time but never collected! Don said he'd had a nice evening with Bill and Paul, but he didn't come back happy and stimulated as he did after being with Jack and Ray. Talking to Jack Fontan about his horoscope was an important experience for him.

Don has made four pages of notes of the things Jack told him— they talked for several hours. I'm not going to try to write down even as much as I remember of what Don told me, and it's quite possible there are some very important things he
didn't
tell me, for one reason or another. Jack said to Don, for example, “You don't have to worry about losing him,” explaining that I would live to be very old and then die very suddenly. He also seems to have said that Don will die or be in danger of death a few years from now but that he will probably survive the crisis and will then completely change his way of life. (Don may well have done some censoring there.) Jack said Don would fulfil his ambition, to be taken seriously as an artist by those whose opinion he values. Jack thinks that Don is very ambitious in this way and very determined. He said that Don is an “evolved soul” (maybe that's not the phrase he used) and that even when we first met[,] Don and I were equals (this seems to me to be absolutely true, in a paradoxical way).

After hearing all this from Don, it struck me that analyzing a horoscope, when it's done by someone with Jack Fontan's perceptiveness and empathy, is really quite as good or better than a session with a psychologist. Don strongly agreed, saying that he had got far more out of talking to Jack than he ever got from Oderberg.
³⁰
I suggested that this is because the psychologist is fundamentally dealing with your hang-ups, inhibitions, phobias and other weaknesses, while the astrologer is helping you to create your life myth, to see your life in terms of poetic significance and creative potentiality, so that even your weaknesses are exciting, like obstacles and hazards on a knight's quest, and even impending dangers only stimulate you to make a greater effort to struggle through them. “Why,” I said, “Jack makes our getting together sound like the meeting of Tristan and Isolde!” “Well, and so it was,” said Don.

 

August 12.
Poor old Jo called me this morning to report another disaster, she has lost her job! The firm is closing down her whole department because it isn't making money and every business is economy minded these days. Jo doesn't know what she will do next. She hates the thought of working at home because it's so lonesome—and besides, her home's being taken away from her, too!

I have been going ahead revising the early chapters of my book, one a day, daubing the pages with “liquid paper” and typing in corrections on top of it. I want to make a version which can then be xeroxed, rather than copied by a typist. Today I finished chapter 8. Two more to go, and then I have to rewrite the rest of the book and write the passage about Kathleen's later life, for which Richard has just sent me a lot of details I asked him for.

Don is very active, painting. Also he writes down his dreams for Ray Unger and he is enthusiastic about Adelle Davis's theories in her book
Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit
. He is putting us on a protein diet, with some homemade breakfast food, etc. He is being absolutely adorable.

A cliché of nowadays: “Have a nice day.” Even kids say it to you, in filling stations and markets.

How-dumb-can-you-get department: A girl came into the gym the other day. About a dozen of us were working out. She looked at us, pulled out her card from the file and was actually heading toward the locker rooms when someone stopped her and pointed out that this was a men's day. She was shocked and utterly amazed.

 

August 17.
On Wednesday I saw Swami. He is up at Vedanta Place again, because Pavitrananda has been having his prostate operation and is still in hospital. He asked me about my meditation and I told him it was as bad as usual and he told me to try to make my mind a blank before meditating, and then to try to feel that I am in the presence of Ramakrishna, Holy Mother, Maharaj and Swamiji—only I think he said to think of Maharaj first, and then the others. I asked, is it all right if I think of you there, too, and he said yes. He also told me, as he has told me before, to say to myself that I am the Atman and that it doesn't really make any difference whether I am aware of this or not, I am the Atman and that's that. (This I do find helpful. As for the rest of his instructions they just don't
seem
to help, at all. But then again, what do I mean by that? The point is, I am trying to meditate and that in itself is a great grace—a grace arising out of the infinitely greater grace of having met Swami and become his disciple in the first place.)

Two things distract me chiefly at present; lust and my book. Right now, I am thinking of the extreme shortness of Michael York's shorts which, despite the extreme longness and badness of the film we saw him in last night (
Something for Everyone
) kept me sufficiently stimulated throughout. And I am always thinking about
Kathleen and Frank
. I have now finished revising the first ten chapters and am about to start writing the section about Kathleen's later life—how I wish I could start it today, instead of toiling down to Laguna and wasting time while Gavin gets his horoscope read and Don tell[s] his dreams to Ray. But Don for some reason wants me to go, so there it is.

A fearful row is building up with Phil Carlson and probably with Elsa as well, over the article he wrote about Don. Phil asked for the interview letting Don suppose it was for an article on California artists, and now it's revealed that what the magazine (
Esquire
) really wants is an article on “the friends of the great” and how their talents are being overshadowed by the friends' reputations.
³¹
In other words, it's just another anti-fag operation. Phil knew this all the time and it does seem more than likely that Elsa sicked him on to Don; her enmity knows no limits and never tires, we are all to be punished for her sufferings during her marriage with Charles. Oh, cunts, cunts, cunts!

And talking of cunts, I can definitely say, having now reached canto 23 of the
Paradiso
, that Beatrice is the character I most hate in the whole of fiction.

 

August 19.
Don is most terribly upset about the Carlson article. It has shaken his security to the very foundations; he feels that if it is published and Billy Al and Irving Blum read it he will be humiliated in a way which he can't even face. When I try to get him to face it, he accuses me of treating him as if he were being a bit insane. Actually, he has talked to the editor (who suggested this himself, th[r]ough Phil) and been assured that the article won't include him; but he feels he should discuss the whole thing with Arnold Weissberger and get his advice. This was Jack Larson's advice and I think it's a good idea.

Talking of getting upset, I had an almost crazy outburst yesterday when one of these representatives of the oil company came around—“to improve public relations.” I slammed the door in his face, instead of being wonderful and subversive and fatherly and sending him away with a worm of guilt in his mind.

I am full of nervous energy, these days, but so deeply weary underneath it all. We get very little sleep because we go to bed so late and Don insists on having the alarm go off at six-thirty, but the real trouble is, I don't sleep soundly anyhow. And I keep bleeding from the rectum. I
think
it's only piles.