Liberation (79 page)

 

September 11.
This diary keeping is being done in a mood of desperation, nowadays—or perhaps I should say intense nervous irritation. There seems to be no time for it, and yet here I am sitting at my desk for at least five hours out of the day, often more. There is always something else; the book, now in chapter 4, and then a huge batch of letters which is being added to faster than I answer them, and then a sort of symbolic task—turning Swami's taped reminiscences into an orderly narrative—the value of the task is symbolic because all of this material has been written down already and much of it is in print; I am only doing it because Swami asked me to and because I can guess how frustrating it must be for him in his old age to keep worrying about such matters and being put off again and again by the lazy, excuse-making nuns. Oh yes, and there is also the reconstruction of my 1945–1953 diaries; a job I really enjoy but haven't worked on in a long while. Right now, I've reached January 1951. I would like, at least, to get the rest of that year recorded, particularly the production of
I Am a Camera.

Well, now Nixon is pardoned
¹⁷⁹
and Evel Knievel is alive after failing to jump the Snake River Canyon on his rocket.
¹⁸⁰
Newsweek
says that, in eight years, when all the planets align themselves on the same side of the sun, there will be major earthquakes, particularly in California.

Last night we had supper with Anita Loos, who is in town to promote her new autobiographical book, at that horrible restaurant in Century City, Señor Pico. Her big silly niece
¹⁸¹
was there with a rather dreadful decorator friend, Dewey Stengel(?),
¹⁸²
who was loudmouthed and drunk and quarrelsome. Anita is truly amazing. She had had four interviews that day and had also appeared on a T.V. talk show. She didn't seem a bit tired. She said, “The only thing that really impresses them about me is that I'm over eighty and that I get up at 4 a.m.” She also told us that “Miss Moore”
¹⁸³
has become boy crazy and is a bore. Anita is very successful and very very tough and seemingly quite unsentimental. She said that she wouldn't dream of living anywhere except New York. Her niece Mary disagreed, saying how horrible New York is. Mary's example of New York's horribleness was that she had seen, from the window of Anita's apartment, a huge black pimp wearing a fur coat and a diamond brooch drive up in a limousine to check up on his girls, who were working someplace opposite Anita's building.

Nick Wilder came down yesterday afternoon and took four of Don's paintings away with him, so he can try them out in various frames to see what kind of frames will be best for the show. Don has been working without models, this last week; and he has produced at least two paintings which seem to me as good as the best of his model work. Altogether, he does seem to be making a breakthrough. My only prayer is that Nick doesn't get himself jailed, doesn't have a heart attack, doesn't do anything to upset the applecart before November 5.

 

September 22.
This morning, we had gotten ourselves pledged to go to Vedanta Place, hear Swami lecture and have lunch with the nuns—which I almost never do, nowadays; and meet Sudhira there. Don got so upset at the thought of all this that his stomach became upset and I begged him not to come. He said that he has no role at Vedanta Place and that even I don't want him with me when I'm there. This is untrue, but I understand absolutely what he means about the role. I wouldn't have a role either, if I didn't read in the temple and do literary odd jobs for them. Probably even my visits to Swami are resented by some people. . . . Well, anyhow, I said okay and Don turned the car around and we started back home for me to get my car, and then Don turned around again and we went there and it was even worse than either of us had feared. It was a blazing hot day. And Swami gave a long talk about Holy Mother, and was heartbreakingly sweet at moments but often incoherent, not finishing the stories he told and leaving out the point. And then we were informed that Sudhira had called off coming to lunch because her old patient is sick. And then one of the nuns (Dipeka?)
¹⁸⁴
took us around the half-built convent compound and, as Don rightly said, she was so cunty that it was almost unbelievable. She kept saying over and over again that the nuns would have privacy and that they wouldn't be intruded on by visitors and that the new arrangements would save them from having to carry things—it was all so self-pampering, as though this place were a health resort instead of a convent. She sounded almost like Merle Oberon.

Larry [Miller] has left the monastery and gone back to his parents to be treated there. No doubt it's his mother's influence—anything to get him away from the monastery. Jim Gates wrote me a letter about it which was more or less a confession that he was in love with Larry:

 

Then he came, and without realising how deep it was, that kind of friendship grew, so easily that I hardly noticed it in a way. Now I'm really amazed and appalled at the grief that strikes me almost whenever there is a pause or quiet moment. . . . I was alone in the puja hall trying to do something, suddenly I actually started to cry. I haven't done that for a long time. . . . Well, obviously no one (maybe not even Swami) would understand this unnatural behavior of one monk upon the departure of another; I think you will and do and I already feel relieved to have been able to tell you this.

 

Bhadrananda says that, in his opinion, Larry won't recover.

 

September 28.
Since then, I have had a few words alone with Jim Gates—on the 25th, when I went up there to do the first reading of the fall season. Jim says he is feeling better about the situation. Nothing has been heard from Larry, yet.

Nature notes: On the 22nd, that irritating girl Dip[i]ka (I'm still not sure how to spell it) told us that the snakes have been very bad up at the Montecito convent this year. One rattler actually attacked two of the nuns, running them up onto a wall where they had to wait until help arrived. This sounds improbable but possible, I guess. She also said that rattlers can strike their whole length, which surely isn't so. They lie out on Ladera Lane, in the evening.

On the 25th, I finally heard from Michael Moriarty, after I'd called his answering service and left a message. He told me that he doesn't want to do our play until either the fall of 1975 or the fall of 1976, because of
Richard III
, filmwork and a musical based on
Merton of the Movies
. Furthermore, he doesn't want to promise to do the film after he's done the play. I fear this means a breaking off of relations between us. We'll just have to try to go ahead with the film. Ismail now says
The Wild Party
will be released in December.

Am now over a month into seventy. I am very much aware of this. At the same time, my health remains good—except for my bad left foot, which I don't want to have examined, for fear it proves to be something serious—and I am in good spirits, most of the time. Great happiness with Don. Steady work on the book. Today I finished chapter 4—a tiresome one, because it is just studies of the principal characters in my Berlin books. I'll be glad when the part about Germany is finished, but that's two more chapters ahead.

Elsa Laughton seems almost well again, after her operation. Old Jo grouses but gets around on a crutch. The weather is grey, foggy, dead. So is my meditation.

 

October 3.
On October 1, Don went to teach his first class (life drawing) at the Art Center College of Design. They offered him the job and I urged him to take it because I thought—and still think—that it was an opportunity for him to realize a whole side of himself he doesn't believe in; the side which could teach and be instructive and inspiring and marvellous. Well, he bitterly opposed me for getting him into the situation; and, as it turned out, the situation was impossible, because they had lied to him that he would have experienced students and then they gave him beginners. So his faint faith in himself was destroyed and he gave up the job. This was a disaster, from my point of view. But it was entirely their fault. I doubt if he will ever try anything like that again.

Now I'm worried about the Nick Wilder show because he has heard nothing from Nick and the framer has told him that Nick owes him a great deal of money and Don doesn't want to tell Nick that he has been told this. Nothing makes me more scared and savage than the thought that someone may destroy Don's self-confidence. It's like what Jesus said about causing the little ones to stumble.
¹⁸⁵
At the same time I'm sure that, as far as Don's painting is concerned, he really has come to believe in it, at last—but, oh my goodness, what we went through, and how Dobbin was blamed for being insincere and mealymouthed because he kept praising it!

Today, Edward sent me a cassette, with his voice reading the first chapter of his new novel,
Alan Sebrill
.
¹⁸⁶
I haven't a machine to play it on, so I must rent one and then record it on tape. But my little Uher recorder doesn't work properly, it seems, although Don's father tinkered with it. I have been experimenting with it all afternoon.

Strange half-mad Abedha (Tony Eckstein) has finally blown a fuse. He kept saying that the Hollywood monastery was a fake and full of hypocrites and that Asaktananda was “a bastard” (I don't know exactly why). So it got to Swami's ears and he came up to the monastery and called all the monks together and talked to Abedha and told him that he must go and live at the Vivekananda House in Pasadena and that the society would go on supporting him until he gets a job. Jim Gates says that Swami was most impressive; very firm and very sweet and full of love. He said to Abedha: “What I am doing is the best thing anybody could do for you. But you won't understand that until you reach the moment of death.” The remarkable thing is, Swami doesn't seem at all exhausted by the effort of conducting this showdown. Yesterday, when I saw him, he talked for half an hour or more, correcting the transcripts I had made of his tapes.

Jim Gates has heard from Larry. He has made himself a shrine and is meditating three times a day and feels very bad about leaving the monastery; but he didn't say anything about his physical condition.

A letter from John Lehmann, today, says, “Alas, I'm going to be away when Wystan enters the abbey next week.” I don't know if this means that he'll be reburied there, or have a memorial tablet, or what.
¹⁸⁷

 

October 11.
I borrowed a Japanese tape recorder from Bill Scobie (an Hitachi) and played Edward's cassette on it. Edward's voice sounded weird, and yet I'd have known it at once. There is a bit of British waffling—vague wah-wah sounds—and then Edward announces the title and the author. The way he says “Edward Upward” is so deprecatory, so charged with irony, that he might be that actor in the television commercial who says, “I'm Granny Goose.”
¹⁸⁸

I find it extraordinarily hard to get the flavor of the writing as I should while reading it. In one sense, Edward reads very badly; that's to say, apologetically. You are so conscious, throughout, that
he
has written this. On the other hand, his voice sometimes rings with the consciousness of the beauty of a phrase which makes it marvellously memorable. For example, the way he reads the words “my everlasting death.”

What is wonderful about this style of his is its reticence. He tells you everything in his own time. He isn't one bit worried about your possibly getting impatient. His deliberation is remorseless. He builds the structure of matchsticks with maddening patience. But it gets built, and what's more, the matchsticks are magnetic. They can't be blown over—no, not by a hurricane. They are locked together.

And then there is the tremendous, rigidly repressed excitement of the
mental journey
. Edward, in this Victorian drawing room in Sandown, is setting forth into the outer space of his own mind. Edward conveys the excitement of that in a way which makes me think of Zen.

Two days ago, we took Tom Wudl up to Vedanta Place. He had supper with us at the monastery and then came to the reading, where Chetanananda answered questions. I think Tom was interested, but we both suspect that he was also a bit put off.

Old Age notes: After a day of answering letters, writing checks to pay bills, etc., I am more than ever conscious of my incompetence. This could be described as senility, but is basically due to an enormous resentment at having to do these chores at all. Maybe old age is expressed in resentment. My left foot is always bad now. And my left eye seems to be clouding over. Yet I run every day. And I see well enough. My eyes don't smart any more than they always have done at the end of a day.

 

October 14.
Another name to add to the Cancer List: Larry Holt has had a malignant tumor taken out of his lower intestine. I haven't talked to him or seen him yet. And Dorothy Miller, she's also in hospital; because she has at last agreed to have her leg surgically straightened.

Don has listened to Edward's tape of
Alan Sebrill
and thinks that Edward is very near to madness. I think he
lives
very near to madness and perhaps always has; but I don't expect him to cross the line now. I believe that danger is over.

My meditation has never been worse. Sometimes I spend the entire period just rattling away to myself about chores or anxieties or my book. What I must learn to do now is live in the present— with one exception: I must dwell continually on my death until I am absolutely accustomed to the thought and not one bit scared by it. Otherwise I must live in my love for Don and in the work I am doing. And I must fill in every empty moment with japam. Never mind if I can't think of Holy Mother or Maharaj; I don't believe that that really matters, as long as I never cease to make the effort.