I’m glad we didn’t fly over to Moorea but went by boat. The violently rough trip across the channel was the right preparation for the overwhelming experience of entering Cook’s Bay; the waves outside the reef create a dreamlike sense of gliding calm within the lagoon. This is a Garden of Eden but a very sophisticated one. The fantastic garlanded pinnacles seem contrived and campy and you gasp as if the curtain had gone up on a supreme theatrical spectacle; this is literally one of the most enchanting places I have ever seen in my life. We swam about in the warm water, gazing at it all and trying not to mind the other tourists. We did however miss seeing the Bay of Opunohu (which some say is even more beautiful) because we should have had to go there with a party, packed into a minibus.
This morning I drove Jim Gates and Peter Schneider to Acres of Books at Long Beach. All these years I have been meaning to go there, so in a minor way it was an accomplishment like getting to Tahiti. It was terribly hot and the whole area reeked of oil. I found a novel of Masefield’s which I didn’t even know existed, The Street of Today; it seems to be a sequel to Multitude and Solitude. Peter bought books by Stephen Leacock, Benchley, Thurber and [Heard’s] Is God Evident? Jim also bought a book by Heard, The Five Ages of Man, and Tagore’s Gitangali.
August 23. Bora Bora stands up like a little monument in the middle of the sea. It is beautiful but it doesn’t seem at all mysterious and for this reason one might well prefer it for a South Sea holiday of quietness to Tahiti or Moorea. We arrived in a heavy rainstorm after a rough flight in a small battered plane. Don lost his cool because of the delays and the crowding and the heat of the closed launch which took us from the airstrip across the lagoon and began one of his fuck fuck fuck outbursts. A woman behind him was sincerely surprised and whispered to her husband, “What’s he so mad about?” However we found a dear little hotel of grass huts called the Maitai and were quite happy, the tropical rain fell warm and soothing on the dark snug huts. Next day, the launch took us over to the airstrip. Having been deposited there we were told the plane would be delayed owing to engine trouble. It was delayed for ten and a half hours, during which time they kept us out at the airstrip rather than bring us back to the island and have the expense of giving us lunch at the hotel. Everybody got angry in different ways and formed groups. We were angry too but we didn’t want to belong to the groups. So we bathed in the lagoon and strolled about the beaches which have sand in very large yellow grains. We also ate coconuts, more as a protest than because we wanted them. We finally got back to Papeete just in time to board a big plane for American Samoa. It was full of the members of some huge tour, mostly Jewish. Pago Pago airport seemed awful and we resolved not to go to the Intercontinental Hotel where we had been booked in by our travel agent. So we found a driver and asked to be taken somewhere cheap and quiet. There was literally nowhere. He drove us to a house full of sleeping people, probably it was his home, and was told they couldn’t take us in. So we went to the hotel after all and got in a fight with the management because the air-conditioning made such a noise and the breakfast was practically uncooked. We had left Bora Bora without ever having seen Maupiti, the island which was the scene of Larry Holt’s long-ago love story. It lies over on the other side of Bora Bora and we had no opportunity to make the trip. But the fact that it was there, all the time, created a brooding tragic background which was just right as a contrast to Bora Bora’s sweetness and shining calm.
Last night I talked about all this to Jo, who has just got back from Brazil. Paul Wonner was sick in Chile and Buenos Aires and so he and Bill decided they couldn’t wait for her and went straight back home. So Jo decided to go alone, and she met some people who entertained her and all was well—rather grimly and heroically so; she has proved to herself—and to Ben too, of course—that she can make out on her own. Not that she enjoyed the trip but it taught her a lot. Poor old Jo, now her kitties are sick with a fever and have had to go to the vet.
August 24. I forgot to mention how, when we left Acres of Books and were on our way home, we noticed one of the two very impressive bridges—much more impressive, I think, than Sydney Bridge, and outrageous looking too, like roller coasters—between Long Beach, Terminal Island and San Pedro. I had never seen them before. Neither had the boys. So of course we had to drive over them. All around was this almost comically ghastly junk-landscape, reeking of oil. Jim delivered himself of a pensée which was so sententious and yet perfectly natural in the mouth of someone very young that I made him write it down on the notepad in the glove compartment of the Volkswagen, to his great embarrassment: “Man has finally created a situation in which it’s necessary for him to bypass his own colossal blunders!”
Talked to Don in London this morning. He now feels that we should sign a contract with Jim Bridges without delay, binding him to direct our play right after he has finished this film or else step down. Don seems to be disgusted with the London agents and backers. I don’t quite understand the inwardness of this but maybe I’ll find out more from Jim who is returning from England by plane this evening.
Pago Pago harbor is impressive but oppressive, with its very high walls of greenery all around. You feel you recognize the tacky-tropical wooden architecture of “Rain” and indeed the house where Maugham set the story is still standing, though transformed into a market.
We managed to get seats on the plane for Western Samoa that afternoon. It’s less than an hour’s flight. After Pago Pago we wanted to like it but the experience was much more than liking; joy and delight. The long road to Apia from the grass-covered airstrip runs along the coast through a succession of villages, and it was like entering a better land and Beatrice saying, “Don’t you know that here man is happy?”893 The cooking ovens were smoking and the open, pillared fales894 were full of people, and all the boys and youths, so handsome and gay with their beautiful golden bodies, were laughing and shouting and running about. It was a perfect evening, though, as always in the Pacific, there were great clouds piled on the horizon. I asked our driver if it was going to rain and he answered, with what seemed a good-humored irony, “Your flag is on the moon—how can it rain?”
August 25. Jim Bridges arrived and we are to talk to Robin French together this afternoon. There’s something about Jim that irritates me, he is so weak and so childishly eager to be a big shot; but let’s hope directing this film will stiffen him up a bit. Meanwhile, they are running into difficulties with Dogskin; the black actor, Booker Bradshaw, has had to go off to do a part in a film so they’re rehearsing a replacement. I keep thinking about Claudius, rather negatively. I do hope I’m not going to start hating it. Much depends on Don’s attitude. He has just written to say he thinks Graves is odious and his book a bore. But of course this can easily turn into an inspiration to do better.
Apia isn’t particularly picturesque but it’s open and cheerful and not dominated by a luxury hotel like Pago Pago. Aggie Grey’s hotel is comfortable and untidily built, a whole lot of buildings have been gradually added to it. We had a room without air conditioning; a fan was quite sufficient. And, at least at this time of year, this island (and all the other places we visited) appeared to be nearly bugless. We had no insect bites at all. Aggie Grey is a character and as such to be avoided; she belongs to the category of the gracious imperious lady-madam. Her place was a whorehouse during the war, it’s said.895 One evening we had a fiafia896 at the hotel—mostly very amateur—and she danced, with the airs of a very great retired actress condescending. Don’t know why I’m being so nasty about her. Surely I didn’t want her to make a fuss over me?
Stepping outside the hotel after dark we got involved with a bunch of girls—they were supposed to show us where the cable station was, as we wanted to let Tony Richardson know we’d be late arriving in Australia. Two of the girls turned out to be boys in drag. It seems that some boys “decide” they don’t want to live as boys in the Samoan culture, so they help with the housework and wear wom[e]n’s clothes. This doesn’t stop them from marrying lat
er. Several girls and some little boys accosted us. It was all lively, half-mocking. Sex seems very cheerful, uncomplicated and ambivalent here—sort of Andy Warhol primitive.
Of course I had to see the R.L. Stevenson house and tomb— particularly the tomb; it was sort of a funeral rite on Frank’s behalf, he would have so loved to go there and in a sense he sent me; the very last of his South African letters I copied out before leaving is about the Stevensons and how he wishes he and Kathleen could have visited them.
August 26. So far, I’ve spent most of my birthday recording poems on tape for Don; Fulke Greville, Vaughan, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Coleridge. Also I went in the ocean for the first time in months—except for our bathes during our trip.
Don called this morning, says he’ll come back early next week he thinks. Last night, we ran through the Dogskin selections at Theater West in front of an audience. Everybody was quite good—except for Burgess, who made a mess of the introduction. Julie Gregg was really touching and beautiful and sweet as Elaine; she has a kind of untiresome sadness which is just right. Peter Jason did the Dog with terrific sexiness. Ricky [Dreyfuss] was extremely good in the last speech of the chorus; he got a big laugh with “I am the nicest person in this room” and he said “act” in exactly the right tone. Elsa was quietly turning up her nose at the whole affair. She bitches Burgess because she says he will cast any cute young girl in anything, regardless of her talent.
August 28. Am feeling more than somewhat harassed; so much to be done either at once or in the near future. I had a charming evening on my birthday with Igor and Vera and Bob and Ed Allen—Igor very distant and deaf and nervous but at least he knew me and was friendly. However I got a bit drunk, not really but more than I like to be, and that depressed me all yesterday and stopped me from working. The only good thing was supper with Jeanne Moreau. She has style; in fact, she is very like herself on the screen. Probably she’s fat, but that was all covered by a flowing Hawaiian-type garment, and what you saw was quite beautiful in its own way—the tired restless face and the graceful arms and hands. An agent named Mike Medavoy897 was there too, a young not bad-looking Jewish wheeler-dealer, he seemed to me, rude and insecure and really quite anxious to please. I wondered if maybe he hadn’t been to bed with her; she might well have found him sexy. During dinner, cooked by her French maid, we heard noises in the trees and bushes beyond the patio—this was quite a lonely house, away up in the heights of Bel Air. All three of us were extremely conscious of the noises—indeed, Moreau asked me a couple of times, “Do you hear them too?” as though she thought they might be an hallucination brought on by murder fears. We kept repeating that they were obviously deer; and I’m sure they were. But it brought home to me how the ghost of Sharon Tate haunts people nowadays, especially in this part of town. (Incidentally, Moreau told me that she can’t smoke pot, it makes her paranoid.)
To get back to Robert Louis Stevenson. It was a very hot morning when we went to see his house—they only showed us the outside—and the policeman on duty advised us not to go up Mount Vaea. When our driver saw that we meant to, he produced a guide, a young girl. She was soon joined by at least nine others, an oldish woman, youths, male and female children. The beginning of the path was easy, then quite abruptly they told us, “This way,” pointing up a slope so steep that one could hardly have climbed it if there hadn’t been lots of bushes and vine roots to hang on to; the hill is entirely covered with trees and undergrowth. I struggled up somehow, panting like an animal and streaming sweat; even Don was soon exhausted and we kept stopping. Our “guides” pushed us from behind and dragged us from in front, laughing and encouraging us; when we rested they examined my face like doctors who are considering whether or not the patient will be able to stand the operation. So of course I reacted by showing as much energy as I possibly could. Don filmed my struggles with our movie camera. Actually, the absurd effort of this trip didn’t surprise me unduly because I remembered reading that, when they took Stevenson’s coffin up to the summit, one fat mourner collapsed and died soon afterwards! The campy fun of the climb was increased by our feeling of instant intimacy with the Samoans; they seemed to know everything about us at a glance and probably they did. “Is he your son?” “No.” “Oh, I am sorry!” “No need to be sorry.” “You are half boy, laugh like woman.” They had tremendous jokes about us. When we got to the top, there it was. It doesn’t look like much. But the view is tremendous—Vailima898 right below, and the mountains rising behind and, on the other side, the corrugated iron roofs of Apia, rusty red or painted blue, and the ocean. In a show-off mood because pleased with myself for not having collapsed, I recited Stevenson’s “Requiem” aloud; but this was also a ritual act offered to Frank899—not so much to Kathleen, who would have hated it all, I’m sure. On the way down we discovered what we might have guessed at once—this brutal climb is a trick to squeeze money from tourists; actually you can get to the top by a quite easily graded path winding slowly through the woods. The “guides” wanted a dollar each. We ended by giving them about six dollars eighty, which was absurd, but after all the climb was psychologically worth it. After this, we drove on around the island and picnicked on a beautiful beach where we could swim in the lagoon. (The only serious hazard on such beaches are the coconuts, which fall quite frequently and could lay you out or even kill you.) A beautiful Samoan youth appeared while we ate and rode into the water on a horse, which seemed symbolically appropriate.
Our first day on Tahiti, I said to Don that it had been one of the happiest days of my life. This was another. You get such a feeling of joy, in these islands anyhow. Don was feeling it too and our being here together made it perfect. One of those rare and perfect passages in the life symphony when one’s interior monologue, one’s psychological duet with the companion and one’s subjective sense-poem about the surroundings all relate and make harmony, and yet continue individually. One of them doesn’t drown out the other two, as usually happens. That’s what makes the passages so rare.
September 1. Was disappointed at first and rather mad at Don for deciding to stay in England another week. (The real reason why he wants to do this I still don’t know, but no doubt he’ll reveal it after he gets back.) However, I now feel that maybe it’s a good opportunity to get things squared away before his return. It is certainly a punishment for my idleness so far. What have I accomplished? I did get quite a lot of Swami’s manuscripts on Narada’s Bhakti Sutras900 edited (but he promptly gave me a lot more!). And I have done quite a bit of poetry recording for Don on the tape recorder in his studio. (But that’s actually play rather than work.) I have not done one page of chapter 9 of Kathleen and Frank. I have not started the article on David Hockney to be published in the book of his reproductions.901 I still have thirteen letters to answer. I still haven’t finished my notes on our trip in this diary. But what I’m really worried about is Claudius. I should never have told Don it didn’t matter his going to England, in the first place, because we really do need all the time we can get and he can’t possibly realize this since he has no experience of this kind of work. I’m now seriously doubtful if we can finish the rough draft in time—except in the sense of just fudging it. Well, maybe we can get Woodfall to let us have another couple of weeks; only I hate that too, I who have always surprised them by getting the work done quicker than they expected. The whole problem is, how to tell the story—how to get into it at all. That’s what I don’t see at present.
On the 30th we had the official farewell lunch for Vandanananda and it was a real success. A very large portion of the congregation showed up, the weather was perfect, not too hot, and the food was managed excellently. Swami rose to the occasion and made a nice little speech and put a garland around Vandanananda’s neck and Vandanananda made a genuinely touching, humble and dignified speech in which, without giving the show away, he in fact said he was sorry for all his indiscretions and involvements with these various women. I do see now that it would have been practically impossible for him to
stay on here—because, however careful he became, these bitches would never have left him alone; they are worse than any vice squad operatives when it comes to entrapment and enticement. Swami, when he and I were alone together, giggled and said, “It’s a terrible profession being a swami, even I, in my old age, a woman wrote me the other day and said, you are the star in my blue sky, imagine!” Jimmy [Barnett] and his fellow songsters sank even lower than usual to the occasion and produced some adapted farewell songs, based on “Auld Lang Syne,” “Dixie,” etc., which must have made all hell blush. (I talked to Jimmy later and he told me that Bob [Hoffman] didn’t leave the monastery so much for sexual reasons as because he couldn’t adjust to group living.) As for me, I made Vandanananda a very public pranam—the first time I’ve ever done this to him—and we embraced. I knew he would like it that I did this in front of everybody and it wasn’t that I didn’t “mean” it—I sincerely respect his attitude nowadays and was furthermore much softened up by his flattering remarks about me in his speech—but of course there was an element of playacting in it. I wondered if he’d read and remembered the end of A Meeting by the River!
About Auckland: you might walk quite a long way down one of the main streets before you realized that you weren’t somewhere in England—or Scotland, for the population seems overwhelmingly Scots; the girls fresh faced and homely, the boys often strikingly beautiful, hero types with narrowed eyes who seem to be facing antarctic blizzards. The bars are almost exclusively for men and one gets the impression that only lesbians and whores come out at night. The bar beneath our ponderously respectable hotel, the Great Northern, had a few queers also heroic, of the screaming pioneer fag variety. We saw quite a few hippies on the streets.
The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969 Page 75
