Liberation (26 page)

Jim is busy trying to organize this reading of our play for after the holidays. Yesterday we saw a young British actor named Ter[r]ence Scammel[l]; but he isn't right. Scammell told us he has read the script of the
Cabaret
film (because he's up for the part of Chris) and that “Chris” (now called Brian) is queer, that's to say he can't make love to Sally at first and then later he can and then Sally does it with a mature but very attractive baron and Chris is jealous and makes a scene about it with Sally, and Sally exclaims, “Oh, fuck the Baron!” (meaning that he's unimportant) and Chris replies coyly, “I do.” That's the kind of thing which offends
my
dignity as a homosexual. The queer is just an impotent heterosexual; that's what these Jews keep saying, over and over again.

 

December 24.
Just to record that I am sitting down at my “refinished” desk today for the first time since this upheaval began. My workroom is now painted. So is Don's little back bedroom and so is the hallway. That is all. John Bleasdale works very slowly but he is pretty thorough it seems and easy to get along with. The girl who did the desk isn't much good and she still hasn't delivered Don's desk and his chair. Her name is Carol Palermo. Cliff Lemke, the carpenter recommended by Lon McCallister, is no good at all. The work he did on my bookcases had to be redone by another carpenter, Bob Main, whom we like. The floors look beautiful but they will mark easily and occasion much sweeping and polishing. My room seems staringly white at present but no doubt I'll get used to it.

Today, I got the advance money from Methuen and the money from Simon and Schuster is promised before the New Year. Both contracts are signed.

So far, this has been an unexpectedly happy period, despite the discomfort. It was snug sleeping out in the studio. And, up to today, we have had our mattress on the floor in the front bedroom instead of on the bedframe.

There is much more to say, but time is slipping by and I must get on with tidying the desk and stowing everything away again in drawers and cupboards and on shelves.

 

December 28.
From December 14 until the 21st, while the floors were being done, I didn't get to meditate at all, and meditation is still badly disturbed by this sense of
house
, this preoccupation with endless domestic details—the sanding, the painting, the light fixtures, getting rid of unwanted furniture, fussing over this and that. It's more alienating than lust or pride or vanity or anything else. I have got to evolve a better way of making acts of recollection. In the mornings there is always the problem of getting the show on the road; if Don has finished his meditation and gone into the kitchen, then I ought to hurry up and get in there too, to help him.

Yet this has been such a happy time and my health has been good, thanks to jogging and perhaps also the endless vitamins we take, and my weight has been down sometimes as low as 146, which would have seemed miraculous at the beginning of this year. Don and I seem to come closer and closer together, in between spats. Sometimes the sense of our togetherness is terribly painful because it gives me such a sense of human impermanence.

Don is bothered by the sense of
house
quite as much as I am. While we were grappling with the mattress of our jumbo bed, trying to erect it again after the painting, he said, “There must be something desperately wrong with one's life when one has huge pieces of furniture like this.” We have discussed getting a proper Japanese bedroll which we can spread on the floor and stow away in a chest.

We had Christmas dinner with Jennifer Selznick and her children, including Bobby Walker
⁵⁸
who has decided to settle with his wife and children on one of the islands of the Seychelles group. They are going to get back to nature. He is humorless and a bit too holy but admirable and he said one thing which impressed me a lot, that in a situation like that you have to learn to accept boredom and make it part of your life.

Swami's birthday party was rather a success, less embarrassing than usual. He is exactly the same age as Mao Tse-tung! They are still waiting for news about the promised swami.

At Jennifer's we got a lot of presents, all unwanted except for a gaudy but pleasing waistcoat with great silver buttons and tassels on it, made of leather dyed in various colors. The rest of the stuff, plates, red glasses and a huge useless thing to hang on the kitchen wall in order that cups, corkscrews, knives, etc. may hang on
it
, we hope to trade in at Van Keppel Green's
⁵⁹
today.

Yesterday a Michael Silverstein came to see me—he had interviewed me a few years ago for a student paper at UCLA. He is active in Gay Lib. I liked him. He is very intelligent, in a belligerent Jewish way. He dislikes the idea of presenting “normal” queers to the world (as Evelyn Hooker wants to do in her book) because he says how can any of us be normal as long as we are subjected to this persecution. He believes that a revolution is inevitable. He says that psychoanalysis is ultimately political because it judges the patients according to the standards of the establishment; those who are for it are “normal,” those who are against it are “neurotic.”

 

December 30.
One effect on me of Silverstein's visit is that I have rewritten a couple of sentences on page 279 of
Kathleen and Frank
, making them much more aggressive. Instead of:

 

Without even trying to decide between the relative disadvantages of alimony and police persecution, he is now quite certain that heterosexuality wouldn't have suited him. And he has always felt content and well-adjusted, being as he is. . . .

 

I have written:

 

Despite the humiliations of living under a heterosexual dictatorship and the fury he has often felt against it, Christopher has never regretted being as he is. He is now quite certain that heterosexuality wouldn't have suited him; it would have fatally cramped his style.
⁶⁰

 

Incidentally, Silverstein's personal “discovery” seems to have been that you could go to bed with your friends, not just with one-night stands from bars. He was quite astonished when I told him I had done this all along!

Don is in a fury against Carol Palermo, who, he now finds, left his desk out in the rain and ruined it and then didn't dare tell him so and stayed away from home on the day when he picked it up. He left a note on her door, telling her what he thinks of her.

Yesterday evening I had supper with Swami. Telling me the familiar stories about Maharaj, he shed tears. How amazing he is! In one respect I find him much more wonderful than those first disciples, who lived together and helped each other and who had all known Ramakrishna. For Swami has lived all these years in an alien land, amidst the most alienating people and surroundings, and now he is an old man and all alone—for however much we love him we can none of us really understand him—and behold, “The inner life has paid,”
⁶¹
his faith is its own absolute reward. What else need any of us do but meditate on him and his achievement? He told me that if you think about Ramakrishna you are thinking about God, even if you don't regard Ramakrishna as God. When you think about other people, you have to think of them as God, consciously.

 

1971

 

January 1.
First lines of New Year dialogue on waking:

 

“Beautiful Kitty.”

“Dobbin always notices Kitty's beauty when he hasn't got his glasses on.”

“From here, his profile is so beautiful.”

“Dobbin likes half a cat much better than a whole one.”

 

We didn't get home till nearly four this morning, from a nice party of young things, mostly stoned Buddhist boys, to which Jack [Larson] and Jim [Bridges] took us to see the New Year in. The only jarring note was Jack's enthusiasm. Dear Jack! He would make heaven absolutely intolerable by raving about it.

The reading of our play is now definitely off, because a Patrick can't be found. However, Camilla told Don over the phone, from Mt. [K]isco, that she has “a new idea.”

Yesterday Hunt Stromberg called to make an appointment for us to talk to the new boss of Universal about the “Frankenstein” project.

 

January 11.
The “Frankenstein” project now seems to be sanctioned by the head of Universal, Sid Sheinberg, who is not too bright but quite pleasant—he has a mad idea that the story should be written in four [one-]hour sequences! Personally I am still doubtful if the story can be written at all. Have been reading Jim Bridges' treatment which only shows up its weaknesses. When people say it is a “classic,” they really mean only that the makeup is a classic, as long as Boris Karloff wears it. But now Hunt has another project which appeals to me far more, to do a film about
The Arabian Nights
.

Yesterday I went to see poor old Charlie Locke, who is in a convalescent home in Santa Monica. He had a heart attack after his wife died and also I suspect a nervous breakdown, but now he is fairly all right except for lapses of memory and a state of anxiety which reminds me of Granny Isherwood;
⁶²
he kept asking me if there wasn't something I was looking for, had I ordered “something from the kitchen” or was it a telephone call? The room where we talked was crowded with old men and women listening to some ghastly-colored golf tournament on T.V., mostly lilac. The old women were like greedy seagulls; one of them swooped down and carried off the ashtray from right under Charlie's nose. Poor Charlie talked cancer solidly for an hour and a half, and how it is increasing everywhere. At the same time, he seems to understand quite well how psychologically dangerous it is to dwell on it. The surgeon had told him, “It tries to scare you to death.”

On the 14th we shall have been involved in this house decoration for a whole month, and it seems unlikely that John Bleasdale will finish the painting by the end of the week, even. He is still not through with the service porch and has much of the outside trim of the windows to do. He is slow and tactless and infuriates Don, but his work seems to be fairly all right. Don says he looks like an old koala bear.

Last week we were haunted by a sweet little cat, which marched into the house and was so loving and eager to be petted. I really suffered terribly because I had to be the one who said absolutely that we mustn't adopt it; Don didn't want to really, but he liked to play with the idea a little. And then John Bleasdale fed it, which made me really furious, because everybody says that is the one thing you must not do if you want a cat to go away. And then the next day, quite inexplicably, it did go away! It had a flea collar on and was quite sleek, so maybe it belonged to someone.

Gavin and Mark are back from the South Pacific trip. They say it was marvellous, but we suspect otherwise. They left Moorea without even spending a night there and they never went to Bora Bora, and when they got to Honolulu it rained and they didn't even see the Pali!
⁶³

 

January 13 [Wednesday]
. It's pouring down rain. The weatherman promised water-spouts but none have appeared so far, and the rain is a terrible nuisance at this point because John Bleasdale was just about finished inside the house (only the service porch remains unpainted) and we were hoping he would be doing the outside windowsills today and that we'd be rid of him by the weekend. Yesterday he didn't come at all because he broke a tooth and today (11:40) he hasn't shown up so far.

The day before yesterday, it was announced that Derek Bok has been chosen to be president of Harvard. He is forty—and I remember him so vividly as a little boy jumping up and down and rushing around the garden at Peggy [Kiskadden]'s Alto Cedro house. It makes me curiously delighted—partly because I feel he has become admirably sly, a rogue in the right cause. The paper (
Los Angeles Times
, January 12) tells how, during trouble on campus in 1969, “law students held a study-in at that school's library to protest grading. Bok” (who was then Dean of the Law School) “was summoned [at 12:30 a.m.] to handle the crisis. He calmly ordered coffee and doughnuts, climbed atop a library table and announced, ‘I want to thank you all for coming here to show your concern about the law school.'” Derek also travelled to Washington last year to join Harvard groups protesting the sending of troops into Cambodia. That to me is the typical action of a very shrewd person—seemingly a dangerous, perhaps career-ruining move but in fact one which was sure to please and impress the governing board; in these days of terror of the Young, anybody who can manage them is in, even if he shares their dreadful revolutionary opinions! So I've written Derek a note of congratulation. I wonder how Peggy will react to that, if she hears about it.

Nothing about “Frankenstein” yet, but Hunt did call this morning to ask if Universal had got in touch with Robin French to arrange a deal. They hadn't. However this is explained by the fact that Frank O'Connor
⁶⁴
has gone to New York, and he was supposed to handle it.

A fan in Derbyshire has sent me the interview Brendan Lehane did with me for the
Telegraph
when we were in London last spring. It is well-informed and fairly well written and it gets Don's name right and mentions that his Auden drawing was bought by the National Portrait Gallery. (The way it does this is amusingly ambiguous, because it calls the drawing “his
Auden
,” as though the picture were an unrecognizable abstraction which Don might as well have named
Solitude
or
Fish
!) The article also says I am homosexual, quite flatly, without further explanation. I think it is the first time anyone has said this right out, in print.
⁶⁵
I'm glad he did. It sort of prepares readers for my remarks in
Kathleen and Frank
.