Liberation (69 page)

At least Chester was with Wystan in the hotel the night he died, although they had separate rooms and Chester knew nothing about it until next morning. Now (on the 4th) Wystan has been buried, at Kirchstetten.

Heinz wrote about it in a way that made me laugh, because I could just hear Heinz saying the words. After saying (in German) that he was sad about Jean Ross's death, he went on: “Weil wir schon mal beim sterben sind, W.H. Auden hat es auch erwischt in Austria . . .”
¹¹²

John Lehmann writes the usual Lehmannese: “I was just going to write to you about William's death when the second hammer blow fell . . . Wystan was much closer to you than to me, but his death made me feel as if a chapter, our chapter, was coming to an end, and an icy chill seemed to be in the air. . . .” He goes on to say that William Plomer had his fatal heart attack at night in the middle of a thunderstorm and that Charles [Erdmann] had to rush out and phone for a doctor, who didn't arrive until two minutes before William died.

Upward wrote too, saying that he felt sorry he had never written to Wystan praising his
City Without Walls
—or rather, that he had never sent the letter: “I suppose I was inhibited by the unhappiness I felt about the remarks he was reported to have made on the Vietnam War, though I never checked up on the reports and half tried to hope they weren't true or that if true they had been made in some semi-ironic or deliberately provocative way. And also I had never quite recovered from his having removed, in a subsequent edition, his dedication to me of that poem beginning “What siren zooming.” I was happy to see he had restored the dedication in the recent reissue of
The Orators
.” Another letter which is just as characteristic of its writer as the two above!

Incidentally, John adds, “I would like our last exchange of letters to be forgotten altogether”—which merely means that he reserves the right to go on sulking till the end of time.

 

October 9.
Tonight the sun made its first complete descent into the ocean—last night, the tiniest smidgen of Point Dume was visible against its rim—and so the blessed work season of autumn, according to our private calendar, begins. There's certainly a lot of work in prospect: my autobiography of the first years in this country, the reconstruction of my diaries (I'm still only at the beginning of 1950, but I am quite pleased with what I've done), our screenplay of
A Meeting by the River
to be rewritten (before Jim Bridges gets back from a tour of personal appearances with his
Paper Chase
film, in two or three weeks), and also possibly the beginning of a treatment for George Cukor—either of the life of Virginia Woolf or of Schnitzler's
Casanova's Homecoming.

I would be feeling excited and happy about all of this, if it weren't for the cloud of Wystan's death and the growlings of the Israeli–Arab war, which is obviously going to create an international crisis, if nothing worse. Already the kids on the UCLA campus are fighting about it.

We had supper with John and Cici Huston on the 7th. He's like a sly old king with his women all around him. Don says he's sure Huston can only live with women who fight each other and have bad characters—and the domestic animals are subtly being encouraged to act up, too. A drunk woman named Stephanie Zimbalist
¹¹³
went on fussing with the chicken belonging to Cici's [. . .] son Colin until it shit all over Don's jacket. Then the two dogs—who are adorable—suddenly attacked and very nearly succeeded in killing the adorable kitten belonging to Cici's archenemy Mrs. Hill, John's secretary. And somehow, although he never ceased talking to me with the utmost charm about Kipling and
The Man Who Would Be King
(which he is about to film), John was aware of all this and was sanctioning it. After supper, he retired to his bedroom and watched T.V. reports on the war. Cici told us that he is passionately on the side of the Israelis, but he didn't say one word about this. John is so much of a sultan that he makes you feel you are part of his harem too—a eunuch at best—and so he can ignore you if he's in the mood to do something else. And yet he's polite like no one else in the world.

 

October 11.
Yesterday was Resignation Day. The immaculate Agnew had to stand up in court and admit that he had been guilty of income tax fraud. He had said he would never never resign, and he has resigned. He had assured the Republican women that he was innocent, and he has admitted that he lied. He had also assured them that he would never let his lawyers make a deal with the prosecution, and he has let them make a deal; in exchange for his resignation and his admission of guilt, he is not to be prosecuted on all the other charges against him.
¹¹⁴
These creatures, with their sickening patriotic mouthings, are all turning out to be crooks and perjurers, and yet, even after all that has happened, Agnew's representatives are trying to make his resignation sound like an act of patriotism, he is doing it “in the national interest”!

We saw Swami yesterday evening. Last weekend, he was up at Santa Barbara; they had the Durga puja there on the 6th. While Swami was offering a flower at the shrine during the puja he was suddenly overwhelmed, thinking how gracious Mother had been to him. He burst into tears. Chetanananda had to help him out of the shrine into the little office room at the back. Chetanananda said to Swami, “This is a sign of the great grace Mother is showing you”—at which Swami began to cry again and couldn't stop for some time. He begged Chetanananda not to mention Mother's name. When he had finally got control of himself he went back into the temple and blessed the congregation, lest they should think that he had suddenly been taken sick. After this, he was “very jolly.” The nuns told him that his face seemed changed. It was flushed. Swami seemed very well when we saw him, though perhaps a bit tired. Now they are getting ready to celebrate the Kali puja, here. Anandaprana, that compulsive fusser, spoke to Swami about the hiring of a boat at Newport Beach for the immersion of the Kali statue after the ceremony. Swami immediately got angry: “I don't want to hear about that. It's like arranging the baby's funeral before it is born.” It seemed to me that Swami's indignation was due to the intensity of his experience at Santa Barbara. I suppose, to him, it actually is apparent that the Divine Mother enters the statue.

 

October 28.
The sun has just gone down on one of the most perfect days we've had this year; the whole bay visible out to the headland, the ocean cold but warm enough to dip into (I did) and the mountains standing out clear, nearly smogless, all around the city. But my darling Don has gone to New York. Today at noon.

Ten days at least he'll be away; this year with him has been so beautiful and near and tender; we seem to grow together. And he himself feels this, I know. He went off in his usual style from the airport, late and heavily laden. He had written a letter to Bette Davis (about drawing her while he is back east) and he dropped it three times and had to have it picked up for him, because he was trying to hold a portfolio, a couple of drawing bags, a suitcase and a copy of Nigel Nicolson's book about queer Harold and Vita and her girlfriend.
¹¹⁵

And now old Drab is alone and full of good intentions; chiefly to get on with his autobiography.

Last night, at about 11:30, we finished our revision of the
Meeting by the River
screenplay. Scene stretched into scene—I thought it would never end. And Don, who practically retyped the entire manuscript, told me this morning that he felt sure we wouldn't make it before he left.

Don's objectives: to see about his show in New York—which is now to begin next February—and to bargain for at least some money for its catalogue; to draw Davis; to meet Alice Faye at a ball to which he has been invited and if possible draw her; to go to Avon and find out what version of our “Frankenstein” screenplay they are using for their forthcoming paperback—if they are using the Stromberg–Smight butchered version, then we will take our names off it.

Swami had a slight infection in his lungs this week, so I didn't see him. When I saw him last, on October 19, he told me that he had had a repetition of his experience at Santa Barbara (see my last entry) but not such a powerful one. It was one morning, when he was preparing to meditate in his room at Vedanta Place. He was walking around burning an incense stick before the various sacred pictures. When he got to the picture of Maharaj over the fireplace, he felt “a wave of love” and began to cry. Krishna didn't at first know what had happened. He helped Swami to a chair.

Swami had just found out that married couples indulge in partner swapping! This sincerely amazes him. One of the girls who comes to Vedanta Place has admitted that she used to take part in it. And Swami says that—before he knew this—he saw her, just after his return from Santa Barbara when his experience at the Durga puja had made him “become very subtle,” and felt at once that there was something wrong with her. (I often wonder, when I help him on with his shoes or otherwise make physical contact with him, if he doesn't have similar feelings of uneasiness and have to conceal them out of politeness!)

 

October 29.
Was up soon after six and now it's nine-thirty and I have finished fussing with chores—phoning around, getting Don's bathrobe in the washer, shaving, making the bed, taking vitamins etc.—and now there is absolutely no reason not to begin thinking about my problem; how to start the autobiography.

What I have written so far is no good at all. It's the wrong tone and the wrong rhythm. It is dull, prudent, cagey. (One can be as frank as Allen Ginsberg and still sound cagey if the rhythm of your narration is cagey, if you seem to be playing with your cards held tight against your vest.)

My difficulty is that I want to have this book start with our departure for America. But I have now realized that I can only put our departure in perspective if I begin with Germany—why I went there—“to find my sexual homeland'—and go on to tell about my wanderings with Heinz and his arrest and the complicated resentment which grew up out of it, against Kathleen and England, Kathleen
as
England. This is such a long story in itself that it seems absurd to begin with our departure and then immediately go into a long flashback.

I'm also much bothered by the first-person–third-person problem. I thought I'd tell the story as “I” when I'm speaking as the narrator and as “Christopher” when I'm talking about myself in that period. That worked in
Kathleen and Frank
, because Christopher in that narrative is just one out of many characters and not an important one. But this is a different situation. “Christopher” is such a cumbersome name to keep repeating, and the use of it has a dangerous cuteness. I think I'll probably end up by writing “I.”

Later. After going to the gym and doing quite a bit of thinking while driving there and back, I have come to a different idea about the autobiography. I feel that it must start with my going to Berlin—not with my first trip out there to see Wystan, or with my visit to Wystan in the Harz Mountains that summer, but with my real emigration sometime later in the year. (I can't even remember the date but maybe Richard can find it in Kathleen's diary.)

So this book will be a record of my wander years, taking up more or less where
Lions and Shadows
left off, and carrying on, with jumps over the periods which I've covered elsewhere, to a time in the States when, for one reason and another, I had accepted the fact that California had become my home, and that I was therefore no longer a wanderer. The provisional title of the book will be
Wanderings
.

Jack Larson made me laugh a lot this morning, as he described how he had to take charge of the fifteen-year-old son of a friend of his who had run away from home (Lake Tahoe) and had to be sent back there. This little boy, who Jack says is “adorable and sexy,” had gone to Palm Springs and become involved with a pair of male lovers, in their early twenties, who were painting a house. Having (presumably) had sex with him, they decided that he should be restored to respectability; so Jack was contacted and Jack contacted the boy's father, who said that he would only pay for the boy's bus fare home. The two housepainters were generous, however. They volunteered to make up the difference between that and plane fare. The only difficulty was, they were going to a drag ball last night and they couldn't very well take the fifteen-year-old along. So Jack had to pick him up outside the drag ball—trembling with fear that he and the drag queens would all be arrested for corrupting a minor. And then, since there was time to kill before the plane left for Lake Tahoe, Jack decided that the boy should suffer for his tiresomeness by coming along to a concert of baroque music which Jack had been planning to attend!

 

October 30.
This afternoon, a fire somewhere back in the opposite hills is rolling a cloud of purplish golden smoke right out to sea and across the sinking sun. I hope the Alexanders are all right. We were threatened with strong Santana winds, but there isn't a breath at present, luckily.

Altogether a beautiful day. I was up at five-thirty. Vera Fike appeared, a bit weary, but quite up to cleaning the house and doing the laundry. She is so sweet and uncunty; very proud of her son who came down here to play against UCLA for Berkeley and got all the applause although his team lost. I talked to Don twice, once very early, about our strategy with Avon and the publication of the “Frankenstein” screenplay and once this afternoon, when he called to say that Avon has agreed to print our version. He thinks they checked with Universal in the meanwhile. But I'm not so sure. I called George Santoro about this but he says I must talk to a man named Steve Adler, and I can't get to him till tomorrow.