By yesterday’s mail I got a letter from Richard Simon of Curtis Brown in London saying he likes the book very much but feels the first (pre-marriage) part is too long. Then Perry Knowlton53 phoned from New York to say Peter Schwed has read it and wants to publish it, but feels it will only do well as a hardcover and be difficult or impossible to sell as a paperback. So some cutting seems indicated. I have told both Simon and Knowlton that I’m ready to consider this but want to have the publishers make their own suggestions about cuts before I decide.
Don put off going to San Francisco yesterday and is flying up today with Irving Blum, just for the opening of the show, and coming back by the midnight plane tonight.
December 2. Don had a horrible experience coming back; the plane took off in a rainstorm and lurched about and groaned and struggled until everybody was scared and Irving got terrified and kept saying he was going to be sick. This was all the more sinister because the cunty stewardess had just caused a drunk passenger to be removed from the plane right before takeoff, which made it seem like one of those Ancient Mariner stories (as Don said). He would have spent the rest of his life bragging about how his crime caused him to escape death and destroyed everybody else—by making them late and thus get caught in the storm!
Don doesn’t think the show did him any good at all. Irving apologized to him for the failure of the Los Angeles show but said nothing about doing anything for him in New York.
Meanwhile I puttered around, took books to Needham54 to be sold, got our driver’s licenses for 1971, etc. etc. My only worthwhile exploit was to jog from the gym all the way down to Olympic [Boulevard] and back, a record. But this was maybe unwise, because since then I’ve had several severe twinges in the upper buttock!
Gavin called to say he’d finished the book. He seems to like it but doesn’t rave. Admits parts were too long. However he does like the end, which is important.
Poor old Jo has now definitely heard that Louis [Gold] is going to build on his parking lot very soon, thus driving her out of her apartment. She wept and told me she couldn’t move into her own house because she was afraid to live on the ground floor and because she wouldn’t get a view of the sea, which she has to have because she has always had one.
December 4. St. Vincent de Paul’s people, a young Negro and a rather terrifying old man with one eye, who looked like Jean Genet, refused to take away our carpets and then refused the rest of the stuff saying they had a rule that they either take everything or nothing! So today we are trying the Salvation Army.
John Bleasdale can’t come and paint until December 18, because he has to redo some work for Lon McCallister;55 the rains ruined the first job. So the floorers, a Mr. Cvar is one of them, are coming in first, on the 14th. We are still waiting to hear when Mr. Berg can get our roof leaks fixed.
The weather is cold but absolutely classical in its beauty; that rose-golden desert light on the palms and white buildings and on the mountains. [Mount] Baldy is under a heavy snowfall.
(At this point Glenway [Wescott] called about Maurice. He is longing to write a huge piece on Forster to be published at the same time as the book. He said of himself that he has a terrible habit of jumping onto bandwagons. I am encouraging him to write a foreword to the book because I know that if I write one myself I shall offend the touchy and devious Furbank; yet Furbank’s foreword, alone, simply isn’t right for America, it is too inner-circle. We shall have to publish it with something else by an American writer.)
The day before yesterday I saw Swami, for the first time since his holiday in Arizona. He seemed tired and is still engaged in this tug-of-war with Belur Math about the demanded assistant. It will have to stop before so very long, however, because he doesn’t want to be on bad terms with them when Len [Worton] and Mark56 and Paul [Hamilton] go over there in February to take sannyas. He gives me the impression that he is play acting his indignation, a bit; and he has written a very warm note to Gambhirananda, whom he regards as his arch-opponent, appealing to him to cooperate. I asked him if he had had any spiritual experiences while he was away. He said no. While I was sitting there I tried to meditate on the fact that I was in the presence of The Guru. I find that I can now meditate on the memory of having done this, just as I meditate on the memory of having sat in front of the shrine.
Peter Schneider has now applied for reclassification as a C.O. This last-minute move is really shameless and I can’t believe it will work. But he is so cute. Jim Gates has strangely obliterated himself by shaving his head and wearing glasses. He told me after the reading that he wants to talk to me. I wish he would. I’m curious about him. I want to know what he’s up to.
December 8. Swami is sick, up at Santa Barbara, but Ananda doesn’t think it’s serious.
Have just finished the second folder of Kathleen and Frank (through chapter 13) which I’m rereading for possible places to cut. The most obviously cuttable part is chapter 9, which consists largely of wearisome details about Frederick’s financial demands on the Isherwoods; these are undramatic because Frederick is really only bluffing anyway, as I finally have to admit. I think a lot can be taken out here, but even so it is very little in relation to the size of the book.
No news from either Methuen or Simon and Schuster.
On Saturday next, the 12th, Mr. Lemke the carpenter is scheduled to come and take the big bookcases and my desk apart, so they can be removed from the room before the floorers come on Monday. So that’s the beginning of chaos—for at least three weeks (during which time, a heavy rainstorm could fuck us up, but good)! All we can do to prepare for it is to collect cardboard boxes, lots and lots and lots of them, from markets etc., to put the books in.
Seth Finkelstein gave me my dolphin clock back yesterday. He only wanted ten dollars for all that work; I insisted on his taking fifteen. It now runs beautifully again, but it’s slow!57
Don has heard nothing whatever from San Francisco about his show. It might as well never have happened. He’s disgusted, naturally, and says what’s the use of going on with this noncareer as a portrait artist.
Yesterday I called Hunt Stromberg for news of “Frankenstein,” having heard nothing for weeks. To my surprise, Dick Shasta answered the phone, so apparently they’ve made it up. Hunt told me that now someone else is trying to finance the “Frankenstein” project and that he’s to hear news this week.
December 11. This may be my last entry for a while, because tomorrow this desk will probably be moved and the top taken away to be refinished and I shall lose touch with most of my other possessions.
Got a contract to sign from Simon and Schuster; am to be given an advance of seven thousand five hundred dollars, which is good. But no word so far from Peter Schwed, or Michael Korda.
Saw Evelyn Hooker yesterday. She wants me to work with her on a “popular” book on homosexuality. She seemed very emotional still; once she actually shed a few tears while describing the goodness of her sister to her during her breakdown. I am doubtful about the project. It seems that I shall have to read through sixty case histories and then write about them—which really means retell them, and what the hell is the use of that? Nonwriters never understand what writers can and cannot do. They think they can tell you exactly what to say and that you will then somehow magically resay it so it’s marvellous. However, I didn’t want to refuse straight away. I’ll read some of the stuff first and try to find out more exactly what it is that Evelyn expects. She is a very good woman and her intentions are of the noblest and I would like to help her, if I can do so without becoming her secretary.
After threats of rainstorms, the weather is brilliant; you can see the whole arm of the bay in clearest detail. I feel we are “wasting” this weather; it ought to be saved until we really need it, during the repairs to the house. The roofers are supposed to come in and do the job tomorrow.
Gavin and Mark Andrews are going to Tahiti for Christmas. Gavin saw an ad for a round-trip on the French airline; you get a week on Tahiti and a week on Moore
a with hotels and food, plus the fare, for six hundred dollars—cheaper than staying at home! We wonder if they won’t be terribly bored, however. (This reminds me that Jim Bridges had an outburst, quite violent for him, about the relationship between Brian Bedford, Gavin and Mark; he said he found it disgusting that they call each other by women’s names—Gavin’s is “Dora.” “It offends my dignity as a homosexual,” Jim said.)
Jim is busy trying to organize this reading of our play for after the holidays. Yesterday we saw a young British actor named Ter[r]ence Scammel[l]; but he isn’t right. Scammell told us he has read the script of the Cabaret film (because he’s up for the part of Chris) and that “Chris” (now called Brian) is queer, that’s to say he can’t make love to Sally at first and then later he can and then Sally does it with a mature but very attractive baron and Chris is jealous and makes a scene about it with Sally, and Sally exclaims, “Oh, fuck the Baron!” (meaning that he’s unimportant) and Chris replies coyly, “I do.” That’s the kind of thing which offends my dignity as a homosexual. The queer is just an impotent heterosexual; that’s what these Jews keep saying, over and over again.
December 24. Just to record that I am sitting down at my “refinished” desk today for the first time since this upheaval began. My workroom is now painted. So is Don’s little back bedroom and so is the hallway. That is all. John Bleasdale works very slowly but he is pretty thorough it seems and easy to get along with. The girl who did the desk isn’t much good and she still hasn’t delivered Don’s desk and his chair. Her name is Carol Palermo. Cliff Lemke, the carpenter recommended by Lon McCallister, is no good at all. The work he did on my bookcases had to be redone by another carpenter, Bob Main, whom we like. The floors look beautiful but they will mark easily and occasion much sweeping and polishing. My room seems staringly white at present but no doubt I’ll get used to it.
Today, I got the advance money from Methuen and the money from Simon and Schuster is promised before the New Year. Both contracts are signed.
So far, this has been an unexpectedly happy period, despite the discomfort. It was snug sleeping out in the studio. And, up to today, we have had our mattress on the floor in the front bedroom instead of on the bedframe.
There is much more to say, but time is slipping by and I must get on with tidying the desk and stowing everything away again in drawers and cupboards and on shelves.
December 28. From December 14 until the 21st, while the floors were being done, I didn’t get to meditate at all, and meditation is still badly disturbed by this sense of house, this preoccupation with endless domestic details—the sanding, the painting, the light fixtures, getting rid of unwanted furniture, fussing over this and that. It’s more alienating than lust or pride or vanity or anything else. I have got to evolve a better way of making acts of recollection. In the mornings there is always the problem of getting the show on the road; if Don has finished his meditation and gone into the kitchen, then I ought to hurry up and get in there too, to help him.
Yet this has been such a happy time and my health has been good, thanks to jogging and perhaps also the endless vitamins we take, and my weight has been down sometimes as low as 146, which would have seemed miraculous at the beginning of this year. Don and I seem to come closer and closer together, in between spats. Sometimes the sense of our togetherness is terribly painful because it gives me such a sense of human impermanence.
Don is bothered by the sense of house quite as much as I am. While we were grappling with the mattress of our jumbo bed, trying to erect it again after the painting, he said, “There must be something desperately wrong with one’s life when one has huge pieces of furniture like this.” We have discussed getting a proper Japanese bedroll which we can spread on the floor and stow away in a chest.
We had Christmas dinner with Jennifer Selznick and her children, including Bobby Walker58 who has decided to settle with his wife and children on one of the islands of the Seychelles group. They are going to get back to nature. He is humorless and a bit too holy but admirable and he said one thing which impressed me a lot, that in a situation like that you have to learn to accept boredom and make it part of your life.
Swami’s birthday party was rather a success, less embarrassing than usual. He is exactly the same age as Mao Tse-tung! They are still waiting for news about the promised swami.
At Jennifer’s we got a lot of presents, all unwanted except for a gaudy but pleasing waistcoat with great silver buttons and tassels on it, made of leather dyed in various colors. The rest of the stuff, plates, red glasses and a huge useless thing to hang on the kitchen wall in order that cups, corkscrews, knives, etc. may hang on it, we hope to trade in at Van Keppel Green’s59 today.
Yesterday a Michael Silverstein came to see me—he had interviewed me a few years ago for a student paper at UCLA. He is active in Gay Lib. I liked him. He is very intelligent, in a belligerent Jewish way. He dislikes the idea of presenting “normal” queers to the world (as Evelyn Hooker wants to do in her book) because he says how can any of us be normal as long as we are subjected to this persecution. He believes that a revolution is inevitable. He says that psychoanalysis is ultimately political because it judges the patients according to the standards of the establishment; those who are for it are “normal,” those who are against it are “neurotic.”
December 30. One effect on me of Silverstein’s visit is that I have rewritten a couple of sentences on page 279 of Kathleen and Frank, making them much more aggressive. Instead of:
Without even trying to decide between the relative disadvantages of alimony and police persecution, he is now quite certain that heterosexuality wouldn’t have suited him. And he has always felt content and well-adjusted, being as he is. . . .
I have written:
Despite the humiliations of living under a heterosexual dictatorship and the fury he has often felt against it, Christopher has never regretted being as he is. He is now quite certain that heterosexuality wouldn’t have suited him; it would have fatally cramped his style.60
Incidentally, Silverstein’s personal “discovery” seems to have been that you could go to bed with your friends, not just with one-night stands from bars. He was quite astonished when I told him I had done this all along!
Don is in a fury against Carol Palermo, who, he now finds, left his desk out in the rain and ruined it and then didn’t dare tell him so and stayed away from home on the day when he picked it up. He left a note on her door, telling her what he thinks of her.
Yesterday evening I had supper with Swami. Telling me the familiar stories about Maharaj, he shed tears. How amazing he is! In one respect I find him much more wonderful than those first disciples, who lived together and helped each other and who had all known Ramakrishna. For Swami has lived all these years in an alien land, amidst the most alienating people and surroundings, and now he is an old man and all alone—for however much we love him we can none of us really understand him—and behold, “The inner life has paid,”61 his faith is its own absolute reward. What else need any of us do but meditate on him and his achievement? He told me that if you think about Ramakrishna you are thinking about God, even if you don’t regard Ramakrishna as God. When you think about other people, you have to think of them as God, consciously.
1971
January 1. First lines of New Year dialogue on waking:
“Beautiful Kitty.”
“Dobbin always notices Kitty’s beauty when he hasn’t got his glasses on.”
“From here, his profile is so beautiful.”
“Dobbin likes half a cat much better than a whole one.”
We didn’t get home till nearly four this morning, from a nice party of young things, mostly stoned Buddhist boys, to which Jack [Larson] and Jim [Bridges] took us to see the New Year in. The only jarring note was Jack’s enthusiasm. Dear Jack! He would make heaven absolutely intolerable by raving about it.
The reading of our play is now definitely off, because a Patrick can’t be found. However
, Camilla told Don over the phone, from Mt. [K]isco, that she has “a new idea.”
Yesterday Hunt Stromberg called to make an appointment for us to talk to the new boss of Universal about the “Frankenstein” project.
January 11. The “Frankenstein” project now seems to be sanctioned by the head of Universal, Sid Sheinberg, who is not too bright but quite pleasant—he has a mad idea that the story should be written in four [one-]hour sequences! Personally I am still doubtful if the story can be written at all. Have been reading Jim Bridges’ treatment which only shows up its weaknesses. When people say it is a “classic,” they really mean only that the makeup is a classic, as long as Boris Karloff wears it. But now Hunt has another project which appeals to me far more, to do a film about The Arabian Nights.
Yesterday I went to see poor old Charlie Locke, who is in a convalescent home in Santa Monica. He had a heart attack after his wife died and also I suspect a nervous breakdown, but now he is fairly all right except for lapses of memory and a state of anxiety which reminds me of Granny Isherwood;62 he kept asking me if there wasn’t something I was looking for, had I ordered “something from the kitchen” or was it a telephone call? The room where we talked was crowded with old men and women listening to some ghastly-colored golf tournament on T.V., mostly lilac. The old women were like greedy seagulls; one of them swooped down and carried off the ashtray from right under Charlie’s nose. Poor Charlie talked cancer solidly for an hour and a half, and how it is increasing everywhere. At the same time, he seems to understand quite well how psychologically dangerous it is to dwell on it. The surgeon had told him, “It tries to scare you to death.”
On the 14th we shall have been involved in this house decoration for a whole month, and it seems unlikely that John Bleasdale will finish the painting by the end of the week, even. He is still not through with the service porch and has much of the outside trim of the windows to do. He is slow and tactless and infuriates Don, but his work seems to be fairly all right. Don says he looks like an old koala bear.
Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983 Page 20
