Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  As for the party referred to above, it was given by Alan Shane and Norman Sunshine at their house on the top of a hill . . . overlooking Rock Hudson, which gives you a rough idea how high it is. I think Shane and Sunshine are a pair of gracious livers and ashtray emptiers; they start tidying the place up almost before you’ve left the room. Hugh Wheeler had come to Los Angeles for the opening of A Little Night Music. He was a bit greyer but as charming as ever. I find it impossible to have an intimate conversation with him unless we’re alone together. It’s something to do with our both being English. Tony was a little bit absent. He’s worried about himself. The doctor—to whom he went supposing he might have rectal clap—told him that he didn’t have clap but did have a cyst which may have to be cut out.

  The day before yesterday, I got up early and left in the car at 7:10 a.m. It was a perfect cool blue morning. The road was fairly empty and the dreamy flat ocean had that beautiful Californian look of remoteness, far-stretchingness. I made japam nearly all of the way to Montecito. The mantra soon began to say itself aloud until I became quite hoarse and had to switch to saying it mentally, lest I should lose my voice before my afternoon talk. I was in a good mood, no hate fantasies, no anxieties, nothing but happy thoughts, chiefly about my darling, including memories of him— as for instance when I passed the Point Mugu state beach (now unrecognizable) and remembered that first outdoor lovemaking in the cove.

  Reached the Sarada Convent just around nine, too late for breakfast with the nuns but not too late to be given some, as I’d hoped. Saw Swami briefly. He was constipated and uneasy in his room—he now dislikes spending a night anywhere except his room at Vedanta Place. He gave his lecture sitting down and in his western clothes; he says that he is apt to trip over his gerua robe while walking from the car into the temple. He looked marvellously remote and carven and Chinese, one eye nearly closed. But then he was funny and we laughed. At the end, after pronouncing the formal blessing, he blessed us all and then made a gesture toward the shrine, saying, “Who spoke through me.” I didn’t find this particularly mysterious but several people did and asked me what exactly had he said. I think they supposed it was a question—that Swami was asking, as a ventriloquist’s puppet might, which of his manipulators had made him speak. Honestly! Swami didn’t feel up to seeing me afterwards. But Krishna sent me away happy by giving me such a deep smile and warm handshake. I felt at that moment that he really loved me.

  Then I went to speak at the writers’ conference which was being held at the Cate School, up in the back country, looking out onto the mountains of the Los Padres forest. Ray Bradbury was there, acting youthful in shorts; I’m fond of him. Also James Michener,170 rather professiorial but trying to be friendly. We embarrassed the living shit out of each other, and I think my talk shocked him. It was questions and answers. I have the impression that I was quite good, an A minus. It was very hot. One of the disadvantages of being so frank about one’s queerness is that everybody expects you to leer at attractive boys, so you try not to, out of perversity. There was one in the front row. He sprawled right back, wearing almost nonexistent shorts, with his legs naked to the crotch and wide apart. Whenever he asked a question, I had to keep my eyes high by a conscious effort of will.171

  The drive home was unpleasant as I neared Los Angeles. The San Fernando valley was oven temperature, with a fierce hot wind ruffling the golden teddy-bear hills. Scarcely was I home when Don called from Connecticut and then Michael Moriarty arrived with his girlfriend, Anne Martin(?). She was friendly but struck me as a bit arrogant, with a look of Princess Kelly; she’s a career girl, an executive in the telephone company. Much talk about Meeting. Moriarty is fairly silly and self-absorbed but I still like him and, what’s infinitely more important, still believe in him.

  This morning, for the first time this summer, I went in the ocean. First I had to clear the path below the house, it’s so overgrown that you can hardly get through; but I had to be careful to leave it still looking jungly, as a deterrent to trespassers.

  In a letter from Rolf Ekman, my Swedish professor fan, a perfect specimen of the Lord-giveth-and-Lord-taketh-away type of compliment: “In my opinion they should have given you the Nobel prize—many who got it were not so worthy of it as you. Or perhaps share it with some other British or American novelist. Such as Angus Wilson?”

  June 28. Angel is coming back today, I hope. He should be on the 2:25 plane from New York. This morning I got up early and inscribed all the uninscribed books of mine that I have given him; he was complaining that there were so many I hadn’t written in. But how impossible it is to write anything that doesn’t sound stupid or false or indecent. Inscriptions are for The Others.

  In Ezra Pound’s Cantos, there is a reference to the green flash; Canto 100: “a green yellow flash after sunset.” So he saw it too! I’ve nearly finished reading right through the Cantos. I only read them on the toilet seat. They are perfect for making you shit, because they give you a feeling of pleasant apprehension. It’s the way I can imagine the Ancient Mariner talking.

  I hear from Jack Larson that Jim Bridges went off to Spain to join Peter Viertel, either yesterday or the day before. Jack was rather bitchy, saying that White Hunter has nothing about Huston in it, only about Peter. And implying that the script Peter wrote is unusable.

  Bob Adjemian told me that Swami’s dismissal of one of the nuns—I think I heard all about it at the time, but I forget—had “turned the society upside down.”172 We were discussing (the day before yesterday) the peculiar behavior of the enlightened. Pavitrananda is at the center now and not looking nearly as ill as I’d feared, from the accounts; he has had two operations. Thank God, Swami has decided that it will be too hot and tiring to go to Trabuco on the Fourth, so I won’t have to either. Swami said that, when he told Pavitrananda this, Pavitrananda “jumped with joy.”

  Went to supper with the Hustons on the 25th. Tim Durant173 was there. At seventy-four he had just won a horse race and he was talking John into entering a race in Dublin and telling him how he had to get into training, doing a squatting exercise. Somebody stepped into the fish pool in the living room, trying this out. I got rather drunk (with no ill effects) and Cici got me to recite poetry. So I spoke it to the cat.

  July 13. Since writing the above, Cici told me that Tim Durant rode in the Grand National. He didn’t win it but he was one of the few who completed the course. That was a sufficiently astonishing feat, at his age. Cici also said that it was out of the question for John Huston to ride the race in Dublin. Right now, he and Cici are down in Mexico, at Puerto Vallarta. Cici wants us to come down and stay with them there, later. This might be a good idea, because Don is determined not to have Jack and Jim in the house and it will be difficult to avoid inviting them, when Virgil Thomson comes here in August. It would be amusing to see John in a Mexican setting but I dread the great heat.

  I keep meaning to write in this book and failing to. Mostly because of work which seems to go more slowly than ever before. I feel uninspired and stupid. Also I am so fat from gluttony and my eyesight seems dimmer and I have this chronic thing in my left leg and the ball (I never know exactly what to call it) of the foot. It feels as if it is something wrong with the veins. I hesitate to go to a doctor about it for fear it will mean some kind of operation.

  I think a great deal about death, nowadays. With apprehension, of course, but much more as a reminder. I mean, I try to think about death because that is the best way I can keep reminding myself of “our only refuge,” Holy Mother particularly. So the thought is really an inspiring, invigorating thought—as long as I don’t dwell on the negative aspect of it; separation from my darling and the probable dreariness and pain of dying.

  I’m at present rereading Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan, that marvellous masterpiece. I just picked it up and then couldn’t stop. There is a chapter in it called “The Last Battle on Earth,” in which Don Juan says: “Focus your attention on the link between you and your death, witho
ut remorse or sadness or worrying. Focus your attention on the fact that you don’t have time and let your acts flow accordingly. Let each of your acts be your last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will your acts have their rightful power.”

  What Don Juan means by “power” isn’t what I’m looking for. But that passage is still valuable for me as a meditation.

  Michael Moriarty has gone back to New York. Now he is going to show the play script of Meeting by the River to Edwin Sherin, who directed him in Find Your Way Home. He says Sherin is his guru, which I suppose means that if Sherin doesn’t like the script he won’t want to play it. It’s more or less taken for granted that Sherin will direct him in it if Sherin does like it. Am somewhat pessimistic about this, because I read Sherin as the kind of Jew who only admires “gutsy” material.

  Have just started a revised rough draft of chapter 5, which is to be the third and last chapter about Berlin, in Wanderings. Have also more or less finished the foreword to Chetanananda’s Vivekananda anthology on meditation. I do hope I don’t have to write any more of this stuff. I simply cannot help ringing false.

  Swami has been down at Malibu with Pavitrananda and Bhadrananda and Sat for about a week, now. No word from him. I wonder if he’s displeased with me about something.

  Don is painting quite a lot, I’m delighted to say. I think the work is excellent, but who cares for old Dub’s verdicts? I do wish he’d let Nick Wilder see it.

  July 26. Just beginning the last whole month before my seventieth birthday. I have a nagging soreness in the right side of my throat and altogether feel shaky and old, but not really unhappy at all. Vivekananda says we should think of death always, so I am trying to do that, and I know it will help when I get the hang of it.

  Meanwhile Don, journeying at my side, seems the very embodiment of life, alive every instant in his work and his anxieties and intense nervous strain and the warmth of his love. Despite his worries about the future, he seems all now, he’s got that instantaneity Gerald was so fond of talking about.

  Poor Nick Wilder has been sentenced to five days in jail for drunk driving and may get a further sentence later. So his inspection of Don’s paintings is delayed. Don continues to paint, however, and that’s all that really matters.

  July 30. Poor old Jo has been having shingles, in addition to her bad leg and the nervous tortures she goes through because of the dance hall which has been opened in what used to be Ted’s Grill. All the kids from miles around come to it and there is a band with singers blasting away from ten to two-thirty in the morning. Dozens of residents have complained but the police will do nothing. The place has been zoned as a dance hall, they say, and they can’t interfere until the law is broken. They would bust the place quick enough if it was queer, and plant some pot in the kids’ pockets, to make the bust stick.

  Jo complains so insistently that I feel it’s part of her psychological self-treatment. And today she admits to feeling better. But the pain must be truly awful.

  Steamy tropical weather. I wish my throat wasn’t sore. I long to go in the ocean. Dr. Allen says all my tests are okay so far.

  I keep slugging on at the book. Now I have finished the third chapter in its third draft. I feel so uninventive. I keep being reduced to quoting from Stephen’s autobiography—which has some marvellous descriptive phrases in it—or from Goodbye to Berlin. Richard is helping a lot, sending me extracts from Kathleen’s diaries. I love one of her exclamations: “That hateful Berlin and all it contains!”

  Swami and Chetanananda are both said to be pleased with my foreword to the book of Vivekananda’s teachings on meditation.

  Today, Elsa has gone to spend the night at St. John’s Hospital where she is to be x-rayed some more and the decision is to be made, operate or wait. Poor miserable old thing. How awful her remnant of a life must be.

  Am reading The Canterbury Tales, Pound’s A.B.C. of Reading, Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Claud Cockburn’s first volume of autobiography (In Time of Trouble). Have just finished the five Dashiell Hammett novels. I like The Dain Curse and The Maltese Falcon the best. The others are so densely plotty. And all of them I find displeasingly sentimental, macho-sentimental. I keep feeling what an unpleasant man Hammett must have been.

  August 11. Old Jo is in the orthopaedic hospital. They have taken scrapings from her bones and don’t think it is cancer but aren’t sure yet. Elsa is in St. John’s Hospital and will be operated on tomorrow. It may be cancer or it mayn’t. I’m going to see her this afternoon. What upset me much more is that Larry [Miller], the sweet little new monk up at Vedanta Place, has cancer in his back and only a fifty-fifty chance of getting over it. When I had supper at the monastery he seemed so cheerful and looked so young. It was heartbreaking.

  Only three days since Nixon’s resignation speech. Most of the commentators praised it. But he didn’t show the least awareness of his guilt. He talked as though his resignation was a big patriotic act of self-sacrifice—of “binding up this country’s wounds.” But he is The Wound. And he is being nicely dressed and bandaged by being given huge sums of money every year for the rest of his life, at the cost of the taxpayers.

  Don is in a great phase of painting. Now he doesn’t want Nick Wilder to see the work, lest he should make discouraging remarks. He’s right, of course. Not that I expect for one instant that Nick won’t admire the new pictures. But the great thing is to get them painted while Don is in the mood.

  I am gradually nearing the end of the Berlin section of my book. God, it is hard to put together and I have all manner of doubts and fears, but at the same time I know it is worth doing—oh, far more than that: this book creates a situation in which I can say things I have never—could never have—said in any of my other books.

  At present, I don’t look beyond what I now think of as the first volume: March 1929 to January 1939.

  I admire the first part of Claud Cockburn’s autobiography very much. But it hasn’t helped me at all in my researches. I can’t find the faintest allusion to Jean Ross,174 or indeed to myself either. I must get the later volume.

  August 19. The day before yesterday, I finished this draft of my Berlin section, and now I really have to get down to writing it, not just assembling the bits and pieces.

  I feel as if we were passing through a sort of minefield of disease. Elsa has had her operation and, yes, it was cancer. They tell her that they have got it all out but Elsa is rightly suspicious; she has heard all this before, when Charles was sick. She is very strong and calm and “British” about it. Old Jo is not. She keeps hysterically weeping and complaining. Her daughter Betty has got her back home in the apartment, but she is as miserable as ever. They haven’t told her definitely if the test shows cancer or not.

  A few days ago, Don and I were both being tormented by the noise of a toy motor horn on a child’s tricycle. So I walked down to the house where the noise was coming from and talked to the lady who lives there. It wasn’t her child but she promised to talk to the child’s mother. And then she told me that her husband has just died of cancer and that the husband of a lady across the street has just died of cancer. And then, when I was coming back from the beach after a swim, I met Madge MacDonald, looking the picture of health, and she told me she had had a colostomy two or three months ago—“I’ve got no rectum, thank you very much”—and laughed loudly and said she is going around reassuring everybody that it isn’t the end of everything. And then Roddy McDowall was here for supper on the 16th and told us that Paul Dehn is dying of cancer in London. Oh yes, and poor Swami got up in the middle of the night and felt dizzy and fell and cut his head, not seriously. So Sudhira has been spending the night in his room, so he shan’t be left alone. They are giving him oxygen to sniff from time to time, because the doctor says his dizziness was due to lack of it.

  August 23. When I went up to Vedanta Place the day before yesterday, Swami didn’t feel like seeing me, said he felt so weak. He is said to be in a strange state, partly with his mind in h
is early life with Maharaj, partly cantankerous about his food. He said on one occasion that he mustn’t talk about spiritual things and he turned on the radio news. Anandaprana told me that he came out of the bathroom and said to her, without any preamble, some words which Brahmananda had said, quoting from the Gospels; I think it is when Jesus addresses Philip and tells him that he has seen the Son of God, meaning himself.175 And then he told one of the girls, “I don’t scold you for now but for after I’m gone.” To hear Anandaprana talk, the girls are really acting in the most wretchedly self-indulgent manner. One of them is “shattered” because she had to cook three meals for Swami in one day, and the rest are so upset because he finds fault with their cooking. Good God, any faithful housekeeper of the old school would put them to shame. And then Avoya (I can never remember how her name is spelled and I have just looked right through this journal in vain to find it written176) in her matter-of-fact hospital-nurse’s dry tone told me: “Yesterday morning, he said something that didn’t sound so good—he said, ‘I’ve been dancing with Maharaj’”! Despite the seriousness of all this, I have to find the situation funny. It’s so like the Hostess in Henry V: “I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.”177 Only, in this case, “The Hostess” is a devotee and “Falstaff ” is her guru!

  Last evening, Don had a slight collision on the way to the gym. Later we had supper with George Cukor, who is quite enthusiastic about the prospects of working with the Russians in Leningrad on the filming of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird.178 But he admits that the food is awful and that he will have to take lots of books because there is nothing to do but read when you aren’t working. He finds Leningrad beautiful and nostalgic but also squalid and run-down and sad. He met a lot of Jews and doesn’t feel that they are all of them being persecuted. The other day, Cukor asked us if we would be interested in writing his biography. He seemed to think that Don’d be willing to do all the research—because of his interest in films—and also write a rough draft of the book itself, which I would then touch up! We declined politely. But we would be interested in touching up the Blue Bird script, if necessary. Partly because that might also earn us a visit to Cukor in Russia.