Liberation (78 page)

Swami and Chetanananda are both said to be pleased with my foreword to the book of Vivekananda's teachings on meditation.

Today, Elsa has gone to spend the night at St. John's Hospital where she is to be x-rayed some more and the decision is to be made, operate or wait. Poor miserable old thing. How awful her remnant of a life must be.

Am reading
The Canterbury Tales
, Pound's
A.B.C. of Reading
, Andersen's
Fairy Tales
, Claud Cockburn's first volume of autobiography (
In Time of Trouble
). Have just finished the five Dashiell Hammett novels. I like
The Dain Curse
and
The Maltese Falcon
the best. The others are so densely plotty. And all of them I find displeasingly sentimental, macho-sentimental. I keep feeling what an unpleasant man Hammett must have been.

 

August 11.
Old Jo is in the orthopaedic hospital. They have taken scrapings from her bones and don't think it is cancer but aren't sure yet. Elsa is in St. John's Hospital and will be operated on tomorrow. It may be cancer or it mayn't. I'm going to see her this afternoon. What upset me much more is that Larry [Miller], the sweet little new monk up at Vedanta Place, has cancer in his back and only a fifty-fifty chance of getting over it. When I had supper at the monastery he seemed so cheerful and looked so young. It was heartbreaking.

Only three days since Nixon's resignation speech. Most of the commentators praised it. But he didn't show the least awareness of his guilt. He talked as though his resignation was a big patriotic act of self-sacrifice—of “binding up this country's wounds.” But he
is
The Wound. And he is being nicely dressed and bandaged by being given huge sums of money every year for the rest of his life, at the cost of the taxpayers.

Don is in a great phase of painting. Now he doesn't want Nick Wilder to see the work, lest he should make discouraging remarks. He's right, of course. Not that I expect for one instant that Nick won't admire the new pictures. But the great thing is to get them painted while Don is in the mood.

I am gradually nearing the end of the Berlin section of my book. God, it is hard to put together and I have all manner of doubts and fears, but at the same time I know it is worth doing—oh, far more than that: this book creates a situation in which I can say things I have never—could never have—said in any of my other books.

At present, I don't look beyond what I now think of as the first volume: March 1929 to January 1939.

I admire the first part of Claud Cockburn's autobiography very much. But it hasn't helped me at all in my researches. I can't find the faintest allusion to Jean Ross,
¹⁷⁴
or indeed to myself either. I must get the later volume.

 

August 19.
The day before yesterday, I finished this draft of my Berlin section, and now I really have to get down to
writing
it, not just assembling the bits and pieces.

I feel as if we were passing through a sort of minefield of disease. Elsa has had her operation and, yes, it was cancer. They tell her that they have got it all out but Elsa is rightly suspicious; she has heard all this before, when Charles was sick. She is very strong and calm and “British” about it. Old Jo is not. She keeps hysterically weeping and complaining. Her daughter Betty has got her back home in the apartment, but she is as miserable as ever. They haven't told her definitely if the test shows cancer or not.

A few days ago, Don and I were both being tormented by the noise of a toy motor horn on a child's tricycle. So I walked down to the house where the noise was coming from and talked to the lady who lives there. It wasn't her child but she promised to talk to the child's mother. And then she told me that her husband has just died of cancer and that the husband of a lady across the street has just died of cancer. And then, when I was coming back from the beach after a swim, I met Madge MacDonald, looking the picture of health, and she told me she had had a colostomy two or three months ago—“I've got no rectum, thank you very much”—and laughed loudly and said she is going around reassuring everybody that it isn't the end of everything. And then Roddy McDowall was here for supper on the 16th and told us that Paul Dehn is dying of cancer in London. Oh yes, and poor Swami got up in the middle of the night and felt dizzy and fell and cut his head, not seriously. So Sudhira has been spending the night in his room, so he shan't be left alone. They are giving him oxygen to sniff from time to time, because the doctor says his dizziness was due to lack of it.

 

August 23.
When I went up to Vedanta Place the day before yesterday, Swami didn't feel like seeing me, said he felt so weak. He is said to be in a strange state, partly with his mind in his early life with Maharaj, partly cantankerous about his food. He said on one occasion that he mustn't talk about spiritual things and he turned on the radio news. Anandaprana told me that he came out of the bathroom and said to her, without any preamble, some words which Brahmananda had said, quoting from the Gospels; I think it is when Jesus addresses Philip and tells him that he has seen the Son of God, meaning himself.
¹⁷⁵
And then he told one of the girls, “I don't scold you for now but for after I'm gone.” To hear Anandaprana talk, the girls are really acting in the most wretchedly self-indulgent manner. One of them is “shattered” because she had to cook three meals for Swami in one day, and the rest are so upset because he finds fault with their cooking. Good God, any faithful housekeeper of the old school would put them to shame. And then Avoya (I can never remember how her name is spelled and I have just looked right through this journal in vain to find it written
¹⁷⁶
) in her matter-of-fact hospital-nurse's dry tone told me: “Yesterday morning, he said something that didn't sound so good—he said, ‘I've been dancing with Maharaj'”! Despite the seriousness of all this, I have to find the situation funny. It's so like the Hostess in
Henry V
: “I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.”
¹⁷⁷
Only, in this case, “The Hostess” is a devotee and “Falstaff ” is her guru!

Last evening, Don had a slight collision on the way to the gym. Later we had supper with George Cukor, who is quite enthusiastic about the prospects of working with the Russians in Leningrad on the filming of Maeterlinck's
The Blue Bird.
¹⁷⁸
But he admits that the food is awful and that he will have to take lots of books because there is nothing to do but read when you aren't working. He finds Leningrad beautiful and nostalgic but also squalid and run-down and sad. He met a lot of Jews and doesn't feel that they are all of them being persecuted. The other day, Cukor asked us if we would be interested in writing his biography. He seemed to think that Don'd be willing to do all the research—because of his interest in films—and also write a rough draft of the book itself, which I would then touch up! We declined politely. But we would be interested in touching up the
Blue Bird
script, if necessary. Partly because that might also earn us a visit to Cukor in Russia.

 

August 26.
Yesterday, Nick Wilder looked through the fifty paintings which Don had picked out for possibles, for his show. On the whole, he approved of them and was just as enthusiastic as ever and the show's opening has been set for November 5. So Don is enormously relieved. He had been so afraid Nick would cool off. As for me, as I told Don, Nick's approval of the paintings was the best birthday present I could possibly get.

I wasn't there during Nick's visit, because I had to go to Vedanta Place and read one of Vivekananda's lectures to the congregation (it was “Maya and Illusion”) so that the assistant swamis could get a bit more of a holiday. This time I saw Swami. He seemed weak but he gave me such a sweet smile. No talk of Maharaj. He told how he soiled two pairs of pajamas every day in the bathroom . . . I suppose he meant his sphincter muscle is weak.

WE INTERRUPT THIS REPORT FOR A NEWSFLASH: 5:35. EDWIN SHERIN, MICHAEL MORIARTY'S DIRECTOR AND ADVISER, HAS JUST PHONED FROM NEW YORK TO TELL US THAT HE LIKES
A MEETING BY THE RIVER
VERY MUCH AND WANTS TO DIRECT IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

So there's Dobbin's second super birthday gift. But now I must get ready to go out with my darling, so the rest must wait till tomorrow.

 

August 31.
The first of the three days of the Labor Day week-end—and then the beautiful autumn begins. I have just got off the phone talking to Paul Millard (“Jemima Puddleduck”) who quacked away about the kites which he and Rob Matteson fly and sell on the beach. They drive around with them in a royal hearse bought in England and painted yellow.

Every day I have meant to write something here and every day there have been other things to do. I keep on with my book, but at such a crawl. It seems that I simply cannot write a sentence straight until I have done it over half a dozen times. And I have so little energy. The “shutter” of my brain is only open for about three-quarters of an hour in the morning—I mean, really open. Nevertheless, I continue to feel that this book is one of the most challenging and potentially marvellous projects I have ever undertaken.

To get back to some of the things I have been meaning to write about—

On August 25, we had a very nice, really well-planned supper at Jennifer and Norton Simon's house—Hope Lange, Nick Wilder, Leslie and Michael Laughlin. Nick arrived informally dressed—as we'd all been told to do—whereas Michael seemed dressed for a wedding and Leslie was every inch la Parisienne in a long white formal. Hope was jolly, plump and a bit boozy. Michael got into a big dialogue with Norton about gold—Michael rejoicing that he had bought so much and Norton kind of dubious—as far as I could hear; it seemed funny to hear someone bragging about his wealth to a multimillionaire! Afterwards, Jennifer told me that Norton had said he wanted to talk to me about politics and get my point of view, as something I had said had interested him. I can't imagine what.

My chief birthday present from Don is a silver bracelet, of very good design; he found it at Tiffany's. He wants me to wear it always, as he does the gold one I got him at Bulgari's for our twentieth anniversary last year. At first I didn't want to; I find I have an absurd prejudice against bracelets as being faggy—for me, not for anybody else! But now I have worn it since my birthday without taking it off and already I'm so pleased with it that I keep letting it slide down my wrist onto my hand, to look at it. The only time I do feel still faintly embarrassed is when I go to the beach in it.

Nick Wilder gave me a brass paper knife, kind of art nouveau with a floral pattern, French, signed by the maker, whose name looks like “A. Terler” or “Tezlet.” It is handsome and nice to hold but so blunt that I sometimes can't cut paper with it! Leslie and Michael gave me a big illustrated book called
Farm Boy
, which is a reportage about three generations living on a farm in Illinois, by an ex-
Look
photographer named Archie Lieberman, over a period of twenty years. I'll try to remember to write about this when I have finished it.

Ismail Merchant has called to say that he has talked to Edwin Sherin and that Sherin wants to do our play in London in April. We await confirmation of this.

After an unusually long spell of sanity, Don's brother Ted seems to be flipping again, and Don of course is terribly upset. But I think perhaps not quite so much as he has been before, because he has gained in self-confidence as an artist. He says that he now no longer wonders if he's one or not; he knows that he is and that he'll go on working, whatever other people may think of his work. That's my great cause for rejoicing, now. Whatever happens to me, I know he's “all right.”

The day before yesterday, I saw Evelyn Hooker. She has been in a lot of pain because of inflammation all around the vagina, due to something wrong with her blood. Because of the pain she has been drinking a lot of wine, and this has made her fat. But now she has met a doctor she believes in; his name's Thomas Hodges and he lives at Malibu. So she has stopped drinking because he told her to. She kept repeating that she needs discipline. She wants to go to Vedanta Place and have another interview with Asaktananda. (Which reminds me that Tom Wudl is having an interview with him too, on the 5th.)

Evelyn gave me a cushion with late-nineteenth-century embroidery on it; Santa Claus carrying some toys. It looks very German. Her reason for giving me this gift was that she had misremembered something I say in
Kathleen and Frank
about my name—that I hate it in some combinations, like it in others: “Christopher Marlowe yes, Christopher Robin
no
!” Evelyn thought I had written that I like Christopher Robin, and the cushion had reminded her of him!

I saw Swami yesterday, still weak, but he does get out a little. He had told me at first that he couldn't see me, then sent a message that he could. So I drove right into town for ten minutes with him. He asked me if I was still thinking a lot about Holy Mother and was very pleased when I told him I keep praying to her. He said how Brahmananda had bowed down before her “and trembled,” and how he had said that she was the gateway to knowledge of Brahman. About his health, he said that he sometimes gets discouraged. But then he said that he hopes to take the question period when we restart our Wednesday night readings. Also he mentioned the lecture he is due to give in September. And for the second time he told me how, after Sudhira had sat up with him for two nights in a row, he had discovered that she had been working throughout the day on those two days. Sudhira had had to sit up in a chair because she was in such pain from her arthritis.