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 Zimbalist113 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 pic
tures. 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.
Today is Dostoevsky’s birthday. So I decided to restart my autobiography—the version I call Wanderings. I went down to the beach and went in the cold but bracing water, biggish waves, and dozed in the sun, feeling so thankful that this book is in my mind and ready to be coaxed out of it onto paper. Then, sitting on the deck in the hot midafternoon sunshine, I wrote the first two pages with the gold ballpoint pen Don gave me. Of course it will be weeks before I’m really sure that this is the right approach. But I’m very optimistic.
November 2. Of course it isn’t as simple as all that. I still don’t know how to narrate the book. Today I’m going to try beginning in the present tense and the third person singular, to tell how I met up again with Francis Turville-Petre in Berlin. But isn’t this third-person present tense a stunt? Shouldn’t I be better off just telling the whole thing from my point of view? And admitting that I don’t remember very much?
The whole project does excite me, though. It seems to contain everything I want to say—far too much perhaps for one book. And my chief worry is that I may be unequal to the job. When I reread my earlier work, I feel that perhaps my style may have lost its ease and brightness and become ponderous. Well, so it’s ponderous. At least I still have matter, if not manner.
Don called this morning from New York; he’s probably going to stay until the end of next week. Problem: shall he stay on at the Chelsea and spend money or shall he stay with Mario Amaya (as invited) where there may be tiresome leather parties? Since Amaya is the boss of the gallery, Don feels that it would be unwise to refuse his invitation.
Don has drawn Bette Davis and feels that they have become friends;116 but he doesn’t like his drawings.
The night of the 30th, the fire in Topanga Canyon got really big and there were flames a hundred feet high, jumping up the hillside. A huge crowd of onlookers gathered along Adelaide Drive, which made me nervous because a lot of them were smoking, and our bushes would burn like fire bombs. I find I am much more inclined to paranoia when living here alone.
Jim Bridges seems to like our new draft of the Meeting screen-play. He is worried because several lymph glands have become swollen in his armpit. He goes to the doctor today to hear if they have to be cut out or not.
Betty Harford and Alex [de] Naszody were evacuated from their house during the fire; they went to the evacuation center but only stayed half an hour. The astounding thing is that no house was actually destroyed, despite the huge range of the fire. Betty is greatly relieved. The tumor they took out of her uterus had been found to be malignant, but now they feel fairly sure that it was completely eradicated. They aren’t even giving her cobalt treatment.
The night before last, getting home from Vedanta Place, I had worked myself up into a state of acute tension about all the letters I had to answer—twenty-five at least. So I tore up nearly all
of them.
Paul Anderson went to see Jack Fontan about his horoscope, not long ago. This is what Paul told me on the phone about their meeting. Jack said that Paul shouldn’t try to hurry but “poke along at the rate you’re going”; that Paul has a personal magnetism which draws people of power and influence to him; that Paul would be drawn into writing, but that that didn’t mean he shouldn’t go on with his singing; that Paul “is a show-off but it’s very deep inside”; that Paul has always had to have people support him, first his grandmother, then his aunts, and now Roddy; that Paul should never refuse any gift because “no one will ever give you anything which you haven’t earned.” When I repeated this last remark to Don, he said he thought it was very good. I told Don that I have just the faintest suspicion that Jack and Paul went to bed together or came near to doing so.
November 6. I got up at 5:30 this morning—not deliberately but because I happened to wake then; while Don is away, I don’t use The Bee, I sleep as long or as little as my body decides.117 Did my sit—I’m ashamed to call it meditation—for the best part of an hour. I have less concentration than ever, it seems. The only thought I can anchor onto at all is of Swami. Occasionally I can get something by imagining myself in front of the shrine, but I can’t hold it. I keep reminding myself how soon I may have to face death. (But my expectation of life is ten more years; I just looked it up!) I feel dull headed but fairly healthy. Well, I say to myself, at least I am making this act of recollection, and isn’t that what really matters? I think of Bob Adjemian and Jim Gates doing the worship in their rooms up at the Hollywood monastery. Perhaps they’re thinking of me, and sending me helpful thoughts.
A beautiful day, but cold. The hills opposite are burned elephant gray by the fire.
All yesterday and again this morning I have been looking through Wystan’s letters and manuscripts—that tiny writing which I find I can, almost incredibly, decipher. He is so much in my thoughts. I seem to see the whole of his life, and it is so honest, so full of love and so dedicated, all of a piece. What surprises me is the unhesitating way he declared, to the BBC interviewers, that he came to the U.S. not intending to return to England. Unless my memory deceives me altogether, he was very doubtful what he should do when the war broke out. He loved me very much and I behaved rather badly to him, a lot of the time. Again and again, in the later letters, he begs me to come and spend some time alone with him. Why didn’t I? Because I was involved with some lover or film job or whatnot. Maybe this is why he said—perhaps with more bitterness than I realized—that he couldn’t understand my capacity for making friends with my inferiors!
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