Liberation (96 page)

Noon japam made today.

 

August 29.
A reaction to my
At One With
interview with Keith Berwick:

 

Dear Mr. Isherwood: I had nightmares all night. I was so disappointed to find out that you are a faggot. How do you think you got here, because your parents were faggots? You have the power to lead many, the pity is that it is in the wrong direction. God will get you for that. Sincerely, Bonnie Purchase(?) P.S. There's still time to change.
⁵³

 

Dumb Dobbin on the beach irritated Kitty because Kitty started discussing Tony Sarver, whom they'd seen the night before, and Dobbin thought they were talking about Tony Richardson. Dobbin said, “I think he's the most difficult person I know”!

Noon japam made today. Henceforth I'll only remark on it if I miss making it.

 

August 30.
A colorblind model from Bolton, Lancashire, who has just become Miss England in the beauty competition, is named Beverley Isherwood.

Last night, Don said that he really doesn't want to do this book of his drawings and our comments on the sitters, because he feels that it is the wrong way to appear before the public as an artist. I think he's right, but we're going to discuss it some more.

 

August 31.
I meant to mention yesterday a good example of a really “in” joke. On the evening of the 29th, we went with Rick Sandford to see
The Sound of Music
, which Rick admires greatly and we very much didn't. As we drove home, I was saying how Rick's enthusiasms are always to be respected because they are so earnestly held and supported by so many impressive arguments. Don said, “Yes, he really believes in Diana.” I wonder how many people in this whole city would have recognized the allusion to [Shaw's]
Androcles and the Lion
?

Edward writes today to say that his son Christopher has multiple sclerosis, and that he himself is having attacks of vertigo which prevent him from working on his short prose pieces. In fact he is going through another period of block, just as he did when he was trying to finish his trilogy—only this time not so violent. As for Christopher, that's too cruel to bear thinking about, and I would be really upset about it, except that I scarcely know him.

The seventh volume of Byron's letters and journals has just arrived and I've started to read it.

 

September 1.
When I asked Elsie Giorgi about multiple sclerosis on the phone today, she told me that it is sometimes wrongly diagnosed because there is a tumor (benign) which sometimes forms in (?) on (?) something called the foramen magnum and produces symptoms of sclerosis until it is removed. She claims that she once detected such an error in diagnosis and that the doctor who had made it would never forgive her for it. Am writing to tell Edward this. There is just the mad millionth chance—and I keep thinking how he has so often said in the past that I've brought him luck with publishing his books—

 

September 2.
Starting to read John Lahr's life of Joe Orton,
⁵⁴
in a ready-to-become-hostile mood because, in his foreword, he says of his wife Anthea: “. . . her insight into the neurotic patterns of Orton and Halliwell are (
sic
) present on every page.” So we are to bow to the authority of this cunt. Well, we'll see.

I have missed two writing days, disgracefully. And all because of a problem which has cropped up again and again in writing this book—the brute problem of arrangement: which bit of information comes where, how should information be fed to the reader. I suppose historians have this problem all the time, and indeed I have been a historian before, but here it seems particularly irritating and acute. And am I, also, in writing this book, continually making an apology for the subject matter to Edward? Maybe so, and maybe this is as it should be. Most writers about holy men just go ahead, taking their own devotion for granted and not giving a shit how it will impress the unbelievers.

Harry Rigby called and told us, this morning, that Keith Baxter now has his “green card” and could therefore play in New York. But nothing has yet been settled for Simon Ward.

 

September 3.
I have been toiling all day and am exhausted, but at least my book is restarted, after an absurd block caused by difficulties over a time question—should I or should I not refer to a later event in the same sentence. Really, such nitpicking seems scarcely sane.

Tonight we have a huge dinner party which was really begun in order to prove to tiresome Tony Richardson that we are not “neglecting” him, as he told Gavin. Well, offer it up. Don has been drawing “Divine,” who is an enormous soft-voiced charming curiously dignified roly-poly pudding.

 

September 4.
A bad hangover after a grimly dull party. Every body seemed dreary, including the usual drears. Gavin gallantly tried to make conversation, telling how he went to a man who told him about his previous incarnations, he was a dolphin, a hater of Jews, a lover of a sea captain. Gavin was impressed because the man said he had very often been born in Africa, which would explain his love of Morocco, he thinks. Oh, I am so depressed, and Don is too but won't tell me why, yet. And this should be a wonderful day, hopeful and positive, Labor Day the start of the working season of my year.

Tony said he doesn't like Orton's plays, finds them “thin.”

 

September 5.
Another night of disaster. A Chinese restaurant downtown, the Changsha, tables all crowded together. Cukor weary and old, feeling his bad back. Two dragged-in guests, an assistant producer and his boyfriend. Kitty ready to explode with resentment, nervous irritation, and the strain of driving us all when he was at the limit of exhaustion after last night. Also, the airless wet heat had a lot to do with it. Today it's raining.

Have introduced another bit of self-discipline: to do Wittenberg's alternate isometric program every day.
⁵⁵
(Will mention whenever I miss it.) The ankle press I must omit, however. I did it yesterday and it hurt my bad knee a little.

I have talked Amohananda into accepting the fact that I will not write an introduction to Vividishananda's book. He was very understanding about this, maybe because nobody at Vedanta Place really thinks it's important. Maybe they just tried it on me, not with any bad intentions but just because they cannot, will not, understand that it could be the least trouble for me, a writer, to scribble off a little something about anything, anytime, in no seconds flat.

 

September 6.
Had an unpleasant dream—not quite a nightmare— and woke last night about 4 a.m. It is very rare nowadays for me to wake in the middle of the night or to have this kind of a dream; yet it wasn't altogether unpleasant. I was in some kind of a gothic-looking old house, English rather than American, with lots of ivy, and there I was visited by a group of somewhat sinister youngish creatures, I guess they were demons. The atmosphere was menacing but with smiles, I was aware that it might get out of hand. I remember groping what I thought would be the buttocks of one of the young creatures and finding that it hadn't any; in fact, there was a concave curve covered over with what looked like tinfoil. The dream ended with my saying somewhat coyly, “You know, I've got a
word
which would make you get out of here”—meaning Ramakrishna. They seemed to agree that it would.

On the 3rd, Don did three magnificent drawings of Divine—one of them when he was half asleep, looking like an adorable zonked seal—in another, one of his hands sticks out like a flipper. Don says they are good because Divine is his kind of person, which so few of his sitters are.

 

September 7.
Last night we saw Visconti's
The Leopard
. Although this was a terrible print, faded to sepia, I was far more moved by the film, this second time; it seemed almost a kind of cynical
War and Peace
. This made me read about Garibaldi this morning, starting with D.H. Lawrence's
Movements in European History
, a sloppily written book.

I love this, from Joe Orton's
The Ruffian on the Stair
:

 

Wilson (speaking about his dead brother): We had separate beds—he was a stickler for convention, but that's as far as it went. We spent every night in each other's company. It was the reason we never got any work done.

Mike: There's no word in the Irish language for what you were doing.

Wilson: In Lapland they have no word for snow.

 

September 8.
Speaking of
Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham
(which he is just now reading), Don, on the beach today, described Windham's literary style as “exquisitely minimal.” A few moments later, a huge wave shot up the beach slope and drenched our blanket. A glorious day—the kind on which one can't exactly feel old, only full of aches and stiffness. As I hobbled back, along familiar Mabery Road, where I've passed back and forth, drunk and sober, ever since I used to go swimming with the Viertel family in 1939, I met old Madge MacDonald, another survivor, and was complimented by her on my healthy looks. My survival reassures her, and yet, if I were to die, that would be another kind of reassurance—that she was going to live longer than anybody. As for my aches, they are comforting, in a way; they make me feel lazy and inclined to stretch out and doze. Gerald Heard had a dictum, of which I can't exactly remember the wording—to the effect that the chief pleasure of old age is relief from pain. He put it like that because he loved pessimistic-sounding utterances. The statement in itself isn't really pessimistic; all it means is that there is a deep pleasure in relaxation and relief from the feeling that it is one's duty to do something or other. Also, let it never be forgotten, relief from pain
is
happiness, because happiness is our nature—except, one sometimes suspects, in the case of Jews. . . . Such happiness isn't
necessarily
of an inferior kind.

 

September 9.
Today I've finished, though not properly polished, chapter 12. Eleven pages long, bringing the total revised manuscript up to page 138, which means that I've dropped four pages behind the first-draft manuscript.

Waiting for Don to get back from his many chores to find if I shall have time to attend a party which is being held by Henry Jaglom
⁵⁶
against the Briggs initiative. It is to convince heterosexual liberals in show biz that they ought to oppose the initiative. Jaglom, a heterosexual Jew, says he is amazed to find how scared a lot of notoriously liberal actors are of attending a “pro-fag” party. I do feel I ought to go, if possible.

 

September 10.
I couldn't go, because there was no way of communicating with Don and finding out when he was coming home. Then we had another dreary party—Jack and Jim, Gordon Hoban and Bill Franklin—to watch the first episode of the T.V. series based on Jim's
Paper Chase
. It didn't amount to much, but Jim reports this morning that it has been very well received. The party was dreary because three of the guests didn't drink and because Bill, who did, is dreary anyhow.

Stathis Orphanos, back from Greece, reports seeing Bill Caskey in Athens, drunk and belligerent and beat-up and with legs caked with dirt, because his water in the apartment had been cut off.

Prema just sent me a book of spiritual talks by the Dutch swami Atulananda who died in India aged ninety-six. I think it's going to be valuable for me in considering the later part of Swami's life. He says: “When the mind is on the ordinary plane, then all, even the saints, are mere human beings and behave like ordinary people. Thus it is said that it is difficult to live with sages.”
⁵⁷
But, surely, the memory of the higher plane must, to some extent, affect their “ordinariness”?

 

September 11 [Monday]
. Talked to Robert Rauschenberg last night, at a party given for him in Venice, at Chuck Arnoldi's studio. Rauschenberg reminded me so much of Tennessee, but louder, vulgarer. We laughed a lot—I out of embarrassment. Rauschenberg said, “It's wonderful how much you can do with laughter,” which made him seem suddenly very shrewd.

Dobbin got the week off to an auspicious start by remembering to call Natalie Leavitt early this morning, to ask her if she had seen one of the two small squares of black rubber which Kitty uses as grips for the barbells when he goes to the gym. She said no, she hadn't. But then Dobbin found it wedged inside the rim of the cover of the washing machine. Triumph! Dobbin was kissed and hugged and made much of. But what will he lose or forget before the day's out?

 

September 12.
While polishing chapter 12, I found that I dropped some more material and ended on page 137 instead of 138. Today, reading ahead through the first draft of the book, it seems to me that I shall have to cut a lot as I go along; far better to have the book shorter, unless the material is going to be really to the point and really about Swami and our relationship—nothing else has any place in it.

Last night we had a goodbye supper with Gavin, who leaves tomorrow for Morocco. He had chosen to entertain us in an Algerian restaurant called Moun of Tunis—tacky and overpriced, with inferior food, tables too near together, seating uncomfortable. Jack Larson and Jim Bridges were with us. Jim has let himself get involved in the No on Briggs movement and now he's a bit scared. He gave them a thousand dollars and appeared at that party and feels he's a marked man. And Jack talked pessimistically about how rough the campaign is going to be, with the mafia and big business involved on Briggs's side. He remarked that he's worried because their house is made of wood; some hostile activist might set it on fire. Got drunk and depressed.