Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  I don’t exactly think about Don while he is away. I don’t have to. He is with me. He is part of me and I am part of him. Some of the inner rage he feels against me is because of the fact that I am going to leave him. He feels that this is a trick which I shall play on him—have, indeed, already played, by involving us so with each other. Any sign I show of illness, even of fatigue, makes him intensely nervous; he behaves as if it were a kind of bitchery on my part.

  Enough of that for today. . . . There are two things I want to put down, and that’s all, till next time.

  April 8. I didn’t put them down because, almost at that moment, Don called from New York. He told me that Lincoln Kirstein has had a massive heart attack. My immediate thought was, will he now feel he wants to make it up with us?

  Here are the two things:

  Paul Sorel called yesterday, to tell me that the doctor says that Chris Wood’s X-ray pictures show that there is cancer in his pelvis. According to Paul, Chris doesn’t know this yet. The doctor must think that it will develop slowly because he still says Chris can make the trip to England which he has planned for next month. Meanwhile, Chris has no more pain from his hip and is becoming more and more able to walk around.

  A short while ago, Paul felt he had to have a holiday from the strain of looking after Chris, so he arranged to go to the San Francisco Bay area for two days. Other friends promised to look in on Chris during this period. Chris was perfectly agreeable, and indeed everything went off without a hitch. But, when Paul called Peggy [Kiskadden] to tell her what he was about to do, she told him he had no right to go, and she slammed down the receiver. “It was then,” Paul told me, “that I understood for the first time what you have against Peggy.” Paul also told me that he and Peggy had spoken about Don and me, quite recently, and that Peggy had said to him, “How was I to know that he (Don) would stay—the others didn’t?” Poor wretched woman, she really is incredible in her arrogance. Her attitude is exactly like that of a government. She is prepared to “recognize” a new regime in a foreign country, but only after a suitable interval and only after the new regime has proved that it is worthy of recognition—as Don has now done by becoming a known and exhibited and praised artist!

  Three days ago, Stephen Spender called me from New Orleans. He was there on one of his lecture tours; but the tour doesn’t include southern California. He wanted to tell me that he and Ed Mendelson are about to write a life of Wystan—well, not a life, exactly, but a book about Wystan in various aspects—as a poet, a teacher, a Christian, etc.8 He wanted to know if I would help them in this project—by which I think he actually meant, would I endorse it? He is well aware that he is going against Wystan’s expressed wish, not to have his life written. But then so am I, on a much smaller scale. I am writing little bits about Wystan in my book. And, I must say, I can’t help feeling, wishes or no wishes, it is better if those who knew Wystan write now, instead of leaving it to those who didn’t know him, a generation or two later. So I didn’t discourage Stephen—not that it would have made any difference if I had.

  I then asked Stephen if it was true that he was rewriting World Within World—I had heard rumors that he was. He said yes, he was going to enlarge it, expanding the parts about Berlin, etc., and also bringing it up to date. He was very anxious to see the manuscript of my book. I assured him that of course he should see it before it was given to the publishers. In the midst of this conversation, I got a most uneasy feeling that history was repeating itself; Stephen is attempting to scoop my material, as he did back in the thirties. He doesn’t even quite know that he is doing this. It’s just that he’s so competitive.

  April 9. Last night I went to Billy Al Bengston’s party for the Academy Awards. He had set up T.V. sets in several different rooms. The rooms in Billy’s apartment keep changing, because he keeps knocking down and putting in walls and partitions. At present he has a very tall, very narrow door leading into one of the rooms which looks wonderfully sinister.

  There was a lottery on the awards. Each entrant had to fill out a form of predictions and it cost you five dollars. Don had done two different ones for the two of us. I hadn’t even looked at what he had written. The one he did for me won the lottery easily; no one else came near to the correct answers. So we won $290, as well as getting our $10 back. Such an odd coincidence: Don just received a prize which I had won and now I received one which he had won! My speech much amused the guests, it seems, but alas I can’t remember what I said, as Dobbin was somewhat juiced. I do loathe these parties—although I am really beginning to be fond of Billy. I used to feel ill at ease with him. And I like his new work far more than his earlier.

  Yesterday, John Preston, the editor of The Advocate, called about the piece I wrote for him in lieu of the awful ass-licking interview Don v[o]n Wiedenm[e]n did on me. Preston was very embarrassed and I had to say his lines for him, telling him that he didn’t really like my piece, thinking it too simpleminded. I urged him to show it to as many people as possible and then make up his mind—assuring him that I wouldn’t be offended if he decided not to print it. What I didn’t add was that, in that case, I wasn’t going to give them another interview, at least certainly not with Wiedenmen.9

  As a matter of fact, I feel I want to add to this interview with a paragraph about gay literature and its difficulties. More about this some other time perhaps. Right now I must go out, having spent the whole day working on our “Beautiful and Damned” outline. I fear I shall only just get it finished, if at all, before Don returns on Monday.

  Talking to my darling on the phone this morning, I mentioned that we are having so many rainstorms and that the wet front turned around and has come right back on us for the second time. And I described that supermelodramatic forecaster who acts out all the weather movements, miming this one. He’s on channel seven. We usually watch channel two. So Don said: “Faithless Dobbin! As soon as Kitty’s gone, Dobbin watches another channel!” I quote this because it’s so typical of our jokes.

  April 19. Today I hit upon what I believe may be a valuable psycho logical trick for dealing with my literary sloth. Yesterday I finished the war section of the “Beautiful and Damned” outline and said to myself that the job was practically finished. This morning I realized that there was a lot more to be written; a fourth act, as it were. And I felt a panic that I wouldn’t be through it before Don gets home. I sat down at the desk with all the paper spread around me and simply couldn’t make myself start and began wasting time. And then I got the idea of dictating it, in rough, to the tape recorder. Amazing how much easier this was! When I had finished, in about two hours, I made the recorder dictate it back to me and I typed it. This was an amusing game and a relaxation. I had recorded rather too fast, other[w]ise I could have easily kept up with the recorder on the typewriter as long as I didn’t worry about typos. I shall do better in future. As a result, I have a rough draft of the last part of the outline, seven pages, which shouldn’t be too much trouble to revise. This afternoon, I followed this up by dictating some of chapter 10 of Wanderings. I doubt if this will be as valuable, because I really do have to think hard about this; the narrative is so deadly flat at present. Still, I am pleased with myself.

  Two fan letters. One from a gay couple in Long Beach who have been together ten years, saying how our example encourages them. The other from an eighteen-year-old Canadian boy in Toronto, telling Don he is really beautiful, as well as a great artist. He encloses a drawing (terrible) which he made from one of Don’s photographs in The Advocate.10

  Last night, after having supper at the monastery and reading (but not seeing Swami) I went by to visit Chris Wood. He now knows about the cancer in his pelvis; Paul Sorel burst into tears and told him. Chris was wonderfully and I think genuinely calm about this. He was so sweet and cheerful. But he is terribly shrunken and thin; his arms like sticks. He doesn’t look at all “ill” though; he is the cutest little old man you could imagine. He said that his life at present is lived from day to da
y and is “most enjoyable—and when it ceases to be enjoyable, I shan’t want to continue it anyway, so that’s all right.” It seems that he probably will go to England with Paul, as originally planned.

  April 11. 9:15 p.m. Just finished the rough outline of “The Beautiful and Damned.” An odd day of gluttony and energy. I worked out at the gym, then ate two Toblerone bars and a bag of Turkish delight, then worked for about three hours. Now I’m going to fix some sausages and a steamed carrot for supper.

  Michael Laughlin called to tell me that Leslie had phoned him from Paris, asking him to come over and join her. She had been very depressed, disenchanted with Paris, even. Michael is delighted, of course. But he’ll probably annoy her all over again. He doesn’t seem to have the slightest idea of how to deal with her.

  May 4. The names of the senators who voted against the Willie Brown Bill (A.B. 489) are: Democrats: Ayala, Collier, Holmdahl, Kennick, Presley, Stiern, Wedworth, Zenovich. Republicans: Berryhill, Carpenter, Cusanovich, Deukmejian, Grunsky, Nejedly, Richardson, Russell, Schrade, Stevens, Stull, Whetmore.

  The vote was twenty-one to twenty approving the bill. The tie was broken by Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally.11

  Two jokes by Ivan Moffat: I said that I thought Frank Langella had overacted his performance as one of the lizardlike creatures in Albee’s Seascape. “In other words,” said Ivan “his performance needs scaling down.” Then he said that everybody seems to want to forget about Vietnam—“to let Saigons be Saigons.”

  My back has been bad for a week, now. I suppose I shall have to see a doctor soon.

  May 26. Memorial Day—three months to my seventy-first birthday. Watchword: The night cometh, when no man can work. So hurry up, Dobbin. I have been criminally slow, getting on with my book. Still fussing with chapter 10. But the Beautiful and Damned screenplay should be ready on time—the end of June.

  Causes for anxiety. A little black spot which my darling may have to have removed from the top of his skull. It could be something bad. He sees a doctor—recommended by Billy Al Bengston—tomorrow. This is for a second opinion. Dr. Maxwell Wolff has already said it should come out. Other causes? Well—none, now I come to think of it. My back, after being very painful, is now much better. The only other cause is political. Police Chief Ed Davis’s almost certain success in getting together a petition to put an antigay proposition on the ballot next year, in order to stop A.B. 489 from becoming law.

  Otherwise we are so happy and both working well. But Nick Wilder must come and look at Don’s painting soon, or Don will begin to lose confidence in the new ones he is doing now.

  June 10. Good news: The surgeon says Don’s black spots were benign—that infuriating word; as if they had done him a favor by costing him money and both of us anxiety!

  More good news: Harry Rigby and a favorite director of his, Marshall Mason, are wildly enthusiastic about our Meeting by the River play. Now they are trying to get Michael Moriarty to be definite. But can they?

  We are getting along pretty well with the “Beautiful and Damned” script but this is only the rough draft; we have to get it revised and typed up before the end of the month.

  I have been crawling slower and slower on my book; still only two-thirds through chapter 10. So today a resolve. I will raise my morale—or come to some kind of definite decision—by trying to do another rough draft of the remainder of book 1 (the first half ). According to the existing rough draft (from which I’ve been working) that would be about another 120 pages—making about 280 pages altogether for the first half of the book.

  Last time I saw Swami (on the 4th) he said that he had refused the application of a lesbian girl who wanted to be a nun. The next day he called me specially to assure me that he hadn’t refused the girl because she was a lesbian but because she had attacked one of the girls at the convent (Santa Barbara?) and was also over age! A sort of apology to me, as senior gay-lib representative!

  June 26. On the 24th, we finished our draft of “The Beautiful and Damned.” We were both really pleased with it. Don is fixing up some last-minute alterations. Then we’ll send it off to Cramer and Baumes,12 tomorrow morning. We have asked Perry King if he’d be interested in playing Anthony Patch. He got wildly excited, so much so that I feel a bit nervous, for we have no voice in the matter and he may easily be turned down for all kinds of movie-political reasons.

  Poor Asaktananda! It now seems that he will receive a dishonorable discharge, instead of being merely downgraded by the arrival of a senior swami from India. One of the girls at Santa Barbara accuses him of having taken her in his arms and a married woman in the congregation has complained of his behavior during a private interview. I suppose this must be true and yet I doubt it, or rather, I feel that it is somehow not his fault but due to the psychic power of those ball-cutting religious cunts.

  Some miscellaneous notes[.] A dream, a few nights ago: Don and I had spent a night in Swami’s room, looking after him. (It wasn’t literally Swami’s room because we had been sleeping one on either side of his bed which wouldn’t be possible there, his bed being against the wall.) When we all woke, we were spattered with tiny dots of gold which was Swami’s shit. (I immediately remembered that Layard used to maintain that shit signifies gold, in dreams.) Anyhow, it was quite odorless and not at all disgusting in any way. I woke feeling that we had been blessed—and that Don had been much more blessed than I, because there was much more of Swami’s shit on him than there was on me.

  On March 17, Mort Sahl, on his T.V. show called “Both Sides,” made antihomosexual remarks, against which Cici Huston, who was one of his guests, violently protested. Here are four of Sahl’s remarks (addressed to Cici and some other women): “They despise you because you have the real thing,” “They dominate classical music,” “Do you know a poor faggot?” “They’re your enemy.”

  Two kinds of death reminders I often have. A realization that I shall never be able to learn something now (e.g. Spanish). A poignant memory of the pleasure and the hope for the future with which we bought some item of household furniture (e.g. a chair) which is now, like me, nearly worn out and ready to be discarded.

  Sometimes, not often, I get strong chills of senile depression. But they can—so far—always be countered by making japam. However, I still have no idea what it will be like to begin to “fail” physically. I was a bit scared, today, when my lower lip had fits of trembling. It has stopped now.

  August 21. Another attempt to restart this. So much has happened that I won’t bother to try to tell it right away. This new beginning is chiefly because we’re now free again: we sent the revised script of “The Beautiful and Damned” in to the studio two days ago. They—that is, the NBC people—wanted narrations. So now they’ve got narrations.

  On August 4, Dr. Dayton told me that I have a small cataract in my left eye. He added that about thirty percent (I think) of people over sixty-five have them, and that this one might not have to be removed before I die. (He had, as it later came out, actually seen this cataract the last time he examined me, but hadn’t mentioned it.) At present, this doesn’t bother me much. But I can tell that it’s there.

  A note, which arrived this morning, evidently by hand: “To Mr. Isvewood, from a kid on Mabery Rd. From you complaining your a sourbud of the year!!!!!! If you don’t like the noise down here on Mabery, than go away! You can’t stop a whole street of kids, just cause of you! Take your books and move away, far away.”

  I can’t help feeling that the kid must have been encouraged to write this by his parents. When I first read it, it rattled me in a curious way. One yells at those kids, or rather, at their toy dog with its tormenting bark, but one is amazed that they answer back—because, I suppose, they are part of what seems a purely subjective, psychosomatic environment. For example, I have nearly come to believe that, whenever we go to the beach, ball-players and dogs are psychosomatically compelled to come and annoy us. Often, they seem to appear out of nowhere.

  August 28. I read the
note to Judy Davidson—Gordon Davidson’s wife—since they live on Mabery Road, in the Viertels’ old house. She too thought one of the parents must be involved. Her curiosity was really aroused but she wanted to see the note itself, hoping to recognize the handwriting; and I doubt very much if I shall ever have the energy to take it down and show it to her.

  Now, today, we see that the neighbors immediately below us, who have several kids and entertain all the others on the street, are about to move out. It’s like asking for new cards in a card game; the new ones may well be worse. These people, at least, had a relatively nonirritating dog and they did their best to keep it quiet.

  Krishnananda was suddenly overcome by a stoppage of the bladder—which, characteristically, he had been trying to ignore—and was sent to St. John’s Hospital. I saw him there on the 21st, and Don and I saw him, very briefly, on the 26th. On the 21st, he was lying doubled up, in great pain, but being with him was marvellous. Not in the least because he was noble or sweetly suffering. He was grunting and muttering to himself like any worldly impatient patient. But the vibrations which he gave off were beautiful and exhilarating. After being with him for about ten minutes, I felt so uplifted that I went into the hospital chapel—since any sacred place is better than none—and knelt before its hideous arty modernistic altar.