Liberation (97 page)

 

September 13.
(A big holdup here, because I noticed that the bottom has fallen out of the e on my typewriter, so had to switch on Don's, and now, fuck it, Don's ribbon is so faint that I'll have to change it, but not yet.)

Last night we had supper with Billy Al Bengston and Penny. Bob Graham was the only other guest. I have come around to liking him quite a lot, largely because he seems genuinely impressed by Don's work.

Billy showed us watercolors he did while in Hawaii. They seemed even better than usual, but this was partly because I had a sudden insight into the quality of Billy's art in general. Can't describe this, except by saying that it all seemed to relate to itself as one enormously long chain of variations on his themes. And the big red painting which was near the dining table seemed so power fully lively and exhilarating that it became like a band playing loud brassy seaside music. I was drunk, yes; but drinking doesn't ordinarily give me perceptions of this kind. It was as if I had been stoned.

Couldn't stop reading Armistead Maupin's
Tales of the City
, which I got in the mail from the author yesterday. The mood of it, the kind of campy fun, is perfect of its kind. I kept thinking how Wystan would have loved it. Somehow, though so different, it made me think of the novels of Ada Leverson.

Just changed the ribbon. Have been listening to the radio but no news so far about the threatened postal strike.

 

September 14.
Michael di Capua called this morning from New York, wanting to know when my Swami book would be finished. So I kind of promised the end of this year, which has now thrown me into a flap. Can I really manage that? Theoretically, yes— practically, I'm not sure. My “Muse” is such a
bitch
sometimes, and it knows that it has the whip hand.

Also a call from James P. White. After all these years, his wife has suddenly become pregnant. And can he please name the child after me? He takes it for granted that it'll be a boy, apparently. I had to say yes, of course, and was then told that the second name would be—
Jules
!

 

September 15.
Last night, we ate with Paul Sorel as his guests at La Ruche, surrounded by politely insolent Frog waiters—the only people with whom Paul seems truly at ease. He made one of his strange boasting self-deprecating speeches about how half of him is crazy or evil or something, and will spend absolutely any money it can get its hands on. This whole speech keeps bringing in Chris Wood, so that one feels his presence powerfully. Paul speaks with great affection of him, yet keeps pointing out that Chris really despised him and would only give him money in the form of tips, as it were, never in the form of, say, income property to provide for his future. Once, they decided to split up altogether and Chris gave him thirty thousand dollars. Paul spent it in a few months. Now, he seems to be getting through most of his available inheritance money, according to him only about twenty-nine thousand dollars remain; after that, he has absolutely nothing except the house, and his car. Today on the beach (which was glorious but already autumnal) I asked Don if he thought Paul is hoping to get us into the mood to help him when he is finally broke. Don said he didn't think so but maybe; anyhow we ought not to give him a cent, although we could continue to buy him meals.

Have just reread Gavin's
A Case for the Angels
. It is actually the Case for Lambert versus Clint Kimbrough. I found it curiously depressing and lowering, although it's so well done.

 

September 16.
Was so delighted when dear old Muhammad Ali won last night and became champion for the third time.
⁵⁸
What does one demand of a hero? That he shall be admired, prepared to risk his fame by doing something unpopular, that he shall be sexy, that he shall be a comedian, that he shall be vulnerable, losing sometimes as well as winning, that he shall have weaknesses, such as boasting, that he shall nevertheless not be corrupt.

Running down to the beach, I noticed, as so often nowadays, the bad state of our hillside with its dangerous slippages, the bulge of the brick wall below our deck, and all the cracks. Thought, it's like me, with my eye going dim and my head getting bald and my sore tongue and the tweaking pains in my bad knee. But the house alarms me more: it's collapse seems a much more catastrophic event than my impending death.

Reading Laurens van der Post's
Jung and the Story of Our Time
. I think this is going to be really interesting, but his sentences are like long limp bits of wet string. Does he think it's somehow
insincere
to write well?

 

September 17.
Amazing, what a block I have against getting on with this book. It's a question of tone. I don't know exactly the right tone of voice in which to narrate it. Never before have I been so aware of the truth of [Cyril] Connolly's accusation that I desire to ingratiate myself with the reader. And yet, just because of that, I know that there is a danger in the opposite direction: The lady doth confess too much. ( Just as I was about to write this misquotation, a doubt struck me. I'd thought it was from
Macbeth
—no,
Hamlet
.
⁵⁹

 

September 18.
Last night we saw
Days of Heaven
, directed by Terrence Malick. The story lacks force because it is a heavy sex-drama in the Italian tradition, treated artily. The treatment, the artiness, in itself is beautiful—a shot of a train crossing a high bridge against the sky, the clouds of a thunderstorm over the prairie, a wineglass lying underwater in a stream—the first of these made me actually gasp out loud. The effect is curiously like something by Virginia Woolf, especially in
Mrs. Dalloway
. The trouble is that, if you attempt this, if you try to show all kinds of outside sights and sounds of nature surrounding the human drama, then you must somehow relate the whole thing to its parts—that's the difference between art and real life. In real life, all the parts
are
interrelated, but not evidently—only by their existence within Brahman. . . . Still and all, this film was truly an experience, visually—otherwise it wouldn't have made me write all this rather confused stuff.

A glorious brilliant windy day. We ran down to the beach and went in the water.

 

September 19.
A hangover from Clytie's birthday party last night combines with hot Santana weather to rob me of my strength. Only the ocean was bracingly cold. An interesting intimate talk with Don on the beach—he was in an unusually happy mood, saying that everything at that moment was perfect. I see now much more clearly why he needs someone like Bill Franklin, a sort of familiar; also I felt how heterosexual he is in his homo sexuality. We agreed that he had had only one boyfriend with a good character, Bill Bopp. Bill Franklin, says Don, is ugly, undersexed, Jewishly competitive, sorry for himself, always worried about his health; but Don feels he can connect with Bill (that's the word he used) and he likes Bill's ass. Don also said, “I couldn't possibly be an artist in the way that David Hockney is.” He describes his being an artist at all as almost accidental; it arose out of an interest in people, not in art.

Natalie was very drunk last night while cooking. I fear she may have smashed some more glasses. She always disarms us with her joy over Thaïs's success. Thaïs is now to dance the lead in
Death and the Maiden.
⁶⁰

 

September 20.
Another hot brilliant day, with the ocean water even colder. Walking back from the beach, I overtook a little blonde girl, five, six, maybe seven years old, pretty but unmistakably weird. She said “Hi,” I said “Hi.” She said, “I'm wearing two lots of clothes, I had a heart attack.” She
was
wearing some kind of a tank-top shirt with a jacket over it. She said, “It wasn't really a heart attack,” and then mumbled something I couldn't understand. Then we got to the house she was evidently living in, one of the smaller ones, on the south side of the street. She said, “Do you want to come into my house and do it?” Maybe this had some quite innocent meaning, which I'd missed by not having heard all of her dialogue. But I didn't want to get involved, so gave her a smile and waved my hand and went on.

 

September 21.
We had a birthday party for Penny Little last night—her birthday is really on August 7, but she was away then in Hawaii. Except for Billy Al, all the guests were female, which made, for us, an agreeable change. The girls got together in a bunch and entertained each other merrily, with a certain amount of lesbian flirtation. Billy Al said to me, “Don's twice the artist David is.” Don says that Billy Al is very shrewd—which I know— and that he sees into the real David, whose greatest inspiration is ambition.

We scream at the neighbors' dogs. Last night, being a bit drunk, we screamed a lot, at midnight, and this resulted in a furious call on my recording machine from a Mrs. Lawrence Davidson, who lives below at 242 Maybery Road. However, when I called her up today, she seemed quite on our side. Her bedroom is right next to the neighbors with the dogs and she hates them as much as we do. In fact, she contradicted herself completely. She promised to go round to the neighbors tonight and speak to them about the barking. I doubt if she has. Anyhow, the barking continues.

Another wonderful beach morning today.

 

September 22.
A great “face the brute” drive this morning, against my accumulated mail. Not that I answered any of it, but by sorting it and tearing up quite [a] few letters, and noting that others could be answered by phone, I somehow reduced the pile from around fifty to around thirty.

Worried in the night—I was awake an hour or two, unusual for me—over my book. Have I explained to the reader enough about Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, etc.—and, if I haven't, does it matter?

 

September 23.
Worrying about the Swami book. To date, I have one hundred forty-two pages revised, which leaves one hundred eight pages of the first-draft typescript. Of these, the last forty-eight pages consist almost entirely of direct transcription from my diaries, so that very little alteration will be necessary. The real work will be on the next sixty pages, and even these contain a fair amount of transcription. So courage, Dobbin. Whether the manuscript will add up to being a book, that's another question.

This weather is too hot for me, I rather hate it, it is getting me down. Rectal bleeding this morning; hope it's just a pile.

 

September 24.
The “rectal bleeding” was merely the coloration caused by eating beets, it seems!

Very hot today, maybe the hottest of this hot spell. Decided not to go to the beach; a hot Sunday is intolerable there. But I often think romantically, on such weekends, that, by the law of averages, there must at least be two or three couples of boys who will meet for the first time and plunge into a real love affair, maybe
the
affair of their lives.

We saw Frederick Brisson yesterday, because he's considering becoming our producer for the play. Don thinks he's maybe queer. We both think he may turn out to be dictatorial and clash with Marre. For the first time, we heard from him of a possible alternative to New York or London for our opening—to go on a tour in this country, of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. and not come into New York until the fall of 1979.

Have just finished John Lehmann's
Thrown to the Woolfs
. All you can say in its favor is that it's a necessary document for the record. But does John really have to write so boringly? I don't say this merely as a put-down. He makes me ask myself, am I perhaps being more boring than I realize, in my Swami book? The writer of any kind of autobiographical book is in deadly danger whenever he is trying to get from point A to point B in a hurry—when, that's to say, he isn't interested in what he's immediately writing. Somehow or other, one must
make
such bridge passages interesting. There are many of them in my narrative, and that is really what's worrying me.

 

September 25.
This heat is really something! We neither of us felt up to running down to the beach today; there's quite a bit of smog in the air, even down here. The temperature
at the edge of the ocean
is said to have been 87 yesterday.

Last night, in deep heat, we saw poor old Vincent Price do his Oscar Wilde show down on the USC campus. We both felt he was wrong for it, despite his technical know-how. He certainly did not make you feel that Wilde was a very good man, really compassionate, although he had the lines to speak of this, and he didn't show Wilde's strength. Sometimes, his vanity was wrong too, it seemed the vanity of a man unsure of himself and therefore aggressive, more like Paul Sorel's.

 

September 26.
Don has gone out to see
Marie Antoinette
, but I can't face Norma Shearer, and this foul heat which continues. Have just been to dear old Dr. Maxwell Wolff, who pulled a little growth out of my nose, not serious but something, and Don was worried about it. It was surprisingly hard and long. Now, in an odd, somehow rather reckless mood, I am drinking a bottle of Superior (Mexican [beer]) before watching a segment of Jim's T.V. “Paper Chase.”

Last night, a truly dreadful party at Leslie Wallwork's—I can never imagine where he
finds
his guests, all middle-aged closet queens; maybe they're business associates. Really I do
loathe
nearly all parties. I don't think Don realizes quite how much I loathe them. It's because I am always being fed to someone or other and I am charming to him, her, them, and I
bore
myself being charming. The only exceptions are beautiful young men, and even with them I feel subtly humiliated by the energy of my performance. I am perfectly happy by myself, much as I love my darling and his furry nearness, and I nearly never want to go out on these social evenings. If only I could spend the last bit of my life alone with Don or alone.