Liberation (57 page)

The 28th was another indoor workday. In the evening, we went with Mo and Peter to see
Lady Caroline Lamb
and then on to supper at Odin's. This was to have been primarily a bit of return hospitality to Mo and Mick Sida. Then Mo told us that Mick wouldn't be coming to the film but would join us later at Odin's. But Mick never showed up. Around midnight, Mo finally contacted him, back at the flat. Mick said vaguely that he'd gone to see some people and had lost track of time. No doubt they'd all got high on something.

Lady Caroline
was charmingly dressed and staged, but the chief character (played by Sarah Miles) is a capricious bore sentimentally presented as a martyr, and Richard Chamberlain as Lord Byron looked like the Queen of the Gypsies. Odin's has moved into the house next door and is now a very elegant establishment, more like a drawing room than a restaurant, its walls hung with paintings. But it is no longer snug. And I'm sure no Wayne Sleep will ever dance naked on its tabletops. [Peter] Langan came over to talk to us, drunk as usual and full of semihostile blarney. He insisted on giving me a painting, which he said I had raved about when I used to come to Odin's in 1970. It is late eighteenth century; of a rooster (or maybe hen) surrounded by chickens. The rooster-hen is a very odd-looking fierce bird with a crest of feathers like plumes on a helmet. Indeed, the creature has an arrogantly human air; it might be the portrait of some cruel old general. Its look gives the whole picture a sinister quality, a little in the manner of a Goya—which, I suppose, had moved me to overpraise it when drunk. Langan tried to bully me into saying I didn't want it and hadn't meant what I had said about it, three years ago; so I ended up accepting it. I think he just wanted to get it off the premises. He was full of suppressed resentment against David Hockney and Kasmin—Kasmin chiefly—and told some involved story I didn't listen to properly, of how he had wanted to reproduce some of the Hockney lithographs he owns on the covers of the restaurant menus, and of how Kasmin had demanded an outrageous fee to allow him to do this. I have probably got the facts quite wrong.

Eric Boman, Peter's Swedish lover, arrived to join us for dinner. (Peter had wished him on us, uninvited, but of course we were very curious to meet him.) He is a big, strikingly pretty blond boy, extremely self-sufficient, with cold good manners, who speaks perfect English almost without an accent. We got the impression that he is in love with Peter, but not that Peter is in love with him. Peter plays it very cool and passive. He tells us that he and Eric still go to bed together. (My first, slightly unfavorable impressions of Eric improved a good deal after two more meetings.)

Another indoor workday on the 29th. Fierce pale-faced little Mo! I could hug him for being so ferocious and harassed and dauntless. He must have given Mick a terrific bawling out for his behavior yesterday evening. Because Mick apologized to me, embarrassing me greatly. Mo is also enraged because of the many boys—David's hangers-on—who keep appearing and saying they want to take a bath; David no doubt casually told them that they could. So now Mo keeps the door of the flat locked at all times. If we go out in the mornings, he asks us to lock him in. The first morning we were here, he went out and locked
us
in. We didn't know the trick of the lock and couldn't get out of the flat for nearly half an hour!

In the evening we went to the Royal Court and saw two Beckett plays,
Krapp's Last Tape
and
Not I
, followed by John Osborne's
A Sense of Detachment
. I'm getting to be a chronic evening napper at the theater, especially if I've eaten supper beforehand. I napped through a lot of
Krapp's Last Tape
, although I admire it very much. Don says it was spoilt by Albert Finney's affectations. At the end of it, Finney didn't acknowledge the applause or even rise to his feet; he sat motionless in his chair. This pretentious stunt may not have been his idea, however; perhaps the director wanted it. For Billie Whitelaw—the voice behind the illuminated lips in
Not I
—didn't make an appearance at all. I shan't know what I think about
Not I
till I've read it; in performance it seemed mere clever patter in the manner of Joyce. Beckett (and/or his directors) always puts so many theater tricks between you and your understanding of his work.

The Osborne play seemed almost intolerable to both of us; it's a kind of intimate revue, or performed interview with him, presenting his opinions, prejudices and fantasies. But that sort of thing has to be done with immense art and care; this was sloppy. The satire was wide of the mark. The indignation was sentimental. It all projected the Osborne pose—that he's the one truly just man, incorruptible and fearlessly outspoken, who has outlived his period of fashionable success and now scorns it and curses the corruption around him, like Timon of Athens. It reminded me of Hemingway's drunken peevishness during his last period. And when Osborne dragged in the Vietnam War—as if he had
fought
in it on the side of the North—and dared to quote from one of Yeats's most tremendous passages on the revolutionary heroes of Ireland—his bad taste, in this trivial context, was obscene.
⁴¹
The actors worked bravely, trying to win over a bored hostile audience, but they failed. And, when two of them had to come out at the end with the earthshaking news that Osborne nevertheless believes in
Love
, my stomach turned in sympathy for them. Only Rachel Kempson (Lady Redgrave) managed to remain uncontaminated and almost noble as she read from a porno catalogue with which Osborne was trying to shock us.

(I don't mean what I have written to be against John personally. I'm actually trying to describe his failure as a warning to myself. Because all of us writers (nearly) are capable of lapsing into this tone of oracular complacency and making silly pricks out of ourselves.)

On the 30th we worked most of the day with Jack Smight at his flat. Then saw Deborah Kerr in
The Day After the Fair
, during which I did
not
doze. The play is absurd—based on one of Hardy's “ironic” jokes—but curiously absorbing.
⁴²
And Deborah, that queen of good sports, entertained us, heart and soul. She has only one bad habit; she stops every so often to mug at the audience, as actresses used to do in bedroom farces when one lover is under the bed, another in the wardrobe, and the husband is banging on the door. The mugging means: “How would
you
get out of this fix, if you were me?”

On the 31st, we had lunch with Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly. Stephen had warned us that Cyril liked to have lunch at a certain very expensive restaurant (I forget its name); he told us to insist on going to Bianchi's, which was cheaper. (Actually, all the restaurants we went to in London seemed hugely expensive; the cost in pounds was sometimes nearly equal to what the cost in dollars would be in Los Angeles.) Cyril had agreed to Bianchi's, over the phone, but with a somewhat bad grace.

Stephen arrived first and explained to us that Natasha refuses to see Cyril because he stole one of Stephen's rarest books, an Auden first edition, and later refused to surrender it, saying that books were more important to him than friends. (I suspect Stephen made up this line.) Stephen also told us that he had had an accident and had very nearly been arrested for drunk driving on his way home from driving us back to Powis Terrace on the night of the 27th.

When Cyril joined us, he made quite a production out of greeting Don and then sat down beside me without greeting me at all or even looking at me—maybe this was a gesture of intimacy, for his manner toward me was otherwise most friendly throughout lunch. He started bitching Wystan without delay, saying that everybody in Oxford is already bored by Wystan's stories about Yeats and by his demand to be given his supper punctually at 7:00 p.m. He has also given offence by criticizing Oxford in an interview, saying that it is noisier than New York!
⁴³
Cyril had brought some of my books for me to sign. He said that Wystan's blow job poem
⁴⁴
and my story “Afterwards” were the two best pieces of homosexual literature. But the compliment was dropped so carelessly and un-convincingly that it was nearly an insult. You felt that Cyril just doesn't give a damn about anybody or anything outside of his close domestic interests. His flat blue eyes have no mercy in them and hardly any life, though his talk is still lively. He said that, if we go to Africa this summer, he will tell us the best places to visit. I greatly enjoyed seeing him again and even felt an affection for him; I like him to be exactly as he is.

In the evening we went to a hateful catchall party at Ron Kitaj's. Romana Bouverie McKuen (the daughter of Gore's friend, Alice Bouverie)
⁴⁵
wanted to know
why
I had been a conscientious objector during World War II. I tried to explain my feelings, instead of snubbing her; I wish I had snubbed her. She has an infuriating “some of my best friends are” attitude to queers.

On February 1 we had supper with Bob Chetwyn and Howard Schuman. It was a happy evening. Don took to them at once, and they to him. Bob and Howard now seem much more definitely a pair.

On February 2, we finished our work on “Frankenstein” and took the final batch of pages to the Universal office, where we ran into Hunt and Dick Shasta; we have seen almost nothing of them during this visit. Then we went around to the dirty little flat in Reece Mews near South Kensington station where Francis Bacon lives. He has a beautiful old house on the river in Dockland but says he can't paint in the studio there, it's too big. His studio here is tiny and dark. Fruit-juice cans full of brushes; a shambles of squeezed paint tubes; the walls smeared with blazing brush-wipings (which Francis calls “my abstracts”). The disorder is extraordinarily violent, like a battlefield. On an easel, two blurred figures which might be trussed-up demons. Francis has tied their legs into knots: they are writhing furiously.

The studio seems as intensely “charged” as a shrine, but its atmosphere isn't in the least shrinelike; it doesn't calm you. This
is
the battlefield; the awe-inspiring scene of Francis's desperate victorious struggles to “get down to the nerve”—I can never forget that phrase of his.
⁴⁶
What he must have gone through! You see it reflected in the wildness of his eyes. And yet his youthfully fresh skin makes him still look strangely pretty, despite his pouchy cheeks.

He told us about his gangster friends. Some of them once stole one of his paintings. He was ready to prosecute them. They came to visit him. Nothing was said about the painting. No threats were uttered. Indeed, they kept asking him reproachfully why he didn't come to see them as he used to. But Francis understood that he would have to drop the charge or else get beaten up. So he dropped the charge. (I think these gangsters may well have been Ronnie and Reggie, the Kray twins.)

Francis appears to live in a no-man's land between the criminals and the police, persecuted by both sides. The police he regards simply as legalized crooks. Once they raided his studio and planted a packet of hashish there. He was only able to clear himself after expensive court proceedings, in which he brought medical evidence to prove that his health made it impossible for him to take the drug.

We had supper at the Old Compton Street Wheeler's. On the way there, Francis told us about [a friend] who has just returned [home]. As they were driving to the airport, [the friend] burst into tears and confessed that he is homosexual. Francis said, “Why on earth didn't you tell me sooner? I'd have found someone for you.” He thinks [the friend] is sure to become an alcoholic if he stays on his [. . .] farm—out of sex frustration.

Francis said of David Hockney's work, “She's no good.”

On the 3rd, we went with Mo to have tea with Celia and Ossie Clark. Celia was leaving next day for Los Angeles, to join David Hockney. Perhaps it was just because I know that Ossie sometimes beats her, but her eye shadow seemed exaggerated to me, as if she had two black eyes. Ossie seemed gentle as a lamb, very frail and skinny and stoned out of his mind. But I saw cruelty and rage in his face. Don agreed with me.

Later we saw Leo Madigan and his friend Sean [O'Brien] at James Pope-Hennessy's flat, where Leo is staying and working on his new book. Leo is Leo, not Larry, since he published
Jackarandy
; he seems much more assured and more “literary” than when I saw him in 1970;
⁴⁷
but his charm has increased too. We both liked him very much. Sean used to be in the Irish Guards but resigned from them when the troubles began in Ulster, lest he should be sent there and have to fight against his countrymen. His skin is very white and his hair blond. I find him much sexier than Leo. We went out to supper with Leo and Sean and Waris Hussein the film director and then on to a bar, where Sean gave me a great big wet-tongued long-lasting kiss—maybe to assure me that I wasn't too old to be still in the running. This was a drunkenly pleasant evening. But the food at the (gay) restaurant, the Masquerade, was bad and expensive.

On the 4th, we went down to see the Beesleys at their cottage. Alec met us at Audley End station, looking as ruddy faced as ever. But he has had pneumonia and wasn't allowed to get out of the air-conditioned car, the weather being damp and chilly. The pneumonia came on quite suddenly after he had had a cold. He became breathless and finally just sat down and gasped, until the ambulance arrived bringing an oxygen mask. The doctor told Dodie later that Alec would certainly have died within a few hours if they hadn't got him under oxygen. Nevertheless, Alec made an unusually quick recovery, of which he is proud.

As for Dodie, she's a little old lady. We felt that our visit was almost more than her nerves could bear but at the same time quite welcome. This latest dalmatian causes more distraction than any of the others. When leaving a room, it makes a beeline, jumping straight over any furniture which happens to be in the way. So there are very few places where it is safe to leave anything. And tension is permanent.