Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  Meanwhile, much talk about our book; Don’s drawings and our memories of the sitters. But we are standing pat on the demand that they must first find us someone who can make satisfactory repro ductions of the drawings. If the artwork is to be substandard for commercial reasons, then we won’t go along with the book at all. Still no actor to play Oliver in our play, but that does seem to be at least probably about to get produced. Harry Rigby has been here.

  I love my darling Kitty so. Am I living off his vitality? Yes, to some extent. But he has plenty to spare. I still have some of my own. But my old left eye is getting dimmer, and I’m losing my hair, and I don’t suppose my knee will ever really recover. Keep calm, Dobbin, and make japam, and prepare for landing.

  March 26. I meant to write an Easter Statement, but have spent nearly all day fussing around with the end of chapter 6, to page 61; I think it’s nearly right now. And it’s time to go and see two friends of Paul Bowles who may or may not be a good idea. One of them has the disadvantage of a difficult Basque name, Leonardo Arriza-Balaga(?)[.]46

  March 27. While “meditating” this morning, I began to think of that unsolved problem, the postscript to my Swami book. And it came to me that I should point out that this book differs in kind from books on other subjects because there is no failure in the spiritual life. This sounds trite, but I feel there is a very valuable statement to be developed here—namely that one cannot make a statement. I can’t say that my life has been a failure, as far as my attempts to follow Prabhavananda go, because every step is an absolute accomplishment. So I have neither succeeded nor failed, and I am always the Atman anyhow. More to be thought about this, I hope.

  While getting breakfast ready, I created a poem:

  Ten kittens came in crowns

  From different towns.

  Don capped this without hesitation:

  Ten dobbins came in gowns

  And looked like clowns.

  April 6. It is highest time that I pulled myself together. I have let days drift by, and with so much to be done. Am now only at page 64, and really I am just delaying myself by being picky. I condemn sentences because they are too verbose and yet fail to rewrite them. Stephen is coming to see us next week and I would have liked to be able to show him some of the book; but I know now that I can’t reach a suitable spot to stop reading at. Anyhow, I feel that he can’t like it—it isn’t at all his kind of thing.

  This is really a work-impending period of my life, and I ought to be pressing on and not moaning. Because there are at least two major chores ahead, our play and our picture book. Albert Marre phoned yesterday from England to say that Simon Ward wants to play Oliver. Albie is greatly in favor of him, and he loves the play, and is a former pupil “of Upward”—this could mean either Edward or Mervyn47— and Albie saw him on the stage and he was very interesting. We are planned to open at the University of Tennessee in the late summer, then Kennedy Center, then New York.

  Meanwhile, after so much foot dragging, everybody has accepted enthusiastically the idea that the reproduction of Don’s drawings for our book could be done here—thus solving all the problems of Don’s having to go to New York or elsewhere to supervise them. And, what do you know, Nick Wilder’s friend Jack Woody (only a friend now, alas, we are told) found us two firms within twenty-four hours, and Don has interviewed them both and found both seemingly suitable—so now comes the test: both must submit specimen reproductions.48

  Oh yes, and some people (talents and financial status unknown) are interested in getting the film rights to “Paul.”

  Storm clouds: Don has more spots on his face, to be examined today for possible malignancy. We await the income tax bill, known already to be supermalignant, because of the sale of the Hilldale property. My old Mr. Right Knee is still a mess, but I begin to think I shall just let it alone until it utterly collapses under me. Left Eye is a bit worse too, but I let it ride.

  At a party, two days ago, we saw the Garretts. Jean is now in a wheelchair; the cancer is spreading and she hasn’t long to live. I am about to get involved in this, she wants me to go over and read to her. At the party, she made a point of having me eat off her plate—saying she wasn’t hungry and didn’t want to waste the food. I couldn’t help remembering how Larry Holt half-seriously accused me of not wanting to sit too near him on the couch lest I should catch his cancer. Was Jean testing me? I used her fork.

  Tonight we have to go to a David Bowie concert, which I look forward to about as much as a puja. Courage.

  April 16. Don’s spots were serious but were removed in time. The income tax was very serious—about $22,000, including federal plus state plus first federal and state payments of estimated tax. All one can do in the face of this persecution is earn and earn and earn. But what when Dub gets real old?

  Bowie’s silent acting, in the midst of the noise made by his assistants[,] was again impressive. Afterwards we were photoed at a party, but not one word was said about the project he proposed to us when we last saw him.49

  Stephen has just left, after two nights (only) staying with us— how short and yet how long! It is utter bliss, having my bathroom free again. Don really hates him, and I think Don is right in saying that Stephen doesn’t really like either of us, or anybody else, and that he’s guiltily antifag. I am however basically sorry for him because, devoured as he plainly is by both envy and ambition, I see little prospect of his producing a masterpiece before curtain-fall; the drafted scenes for his new Trial of a Judge play seem to me stodgy and dull.

  At the Bowie party, a palmist told Don he is good and me that I am lucky. He also said Don is coming into a lot of money somehow, and that I shall have an affair next year!

  Oh, if only I could get along faster with the Swami book! I have the most brutal block, and terror whispers in my ear that that’s because there is something wrong with the whole project.

  As for my relations with Don —beautiful most of the time BUT the truest of all sayings, “Nothing burns in Hell except self-will,” is still true for both of us, and our self-will seems practically fireproof.

  May 12. The block has continued, all this while. What I’m also aware of, and this rather alarms me, is that my brain is clearer when I use Dexamyl—I still keep this down to every third day, however. Some days I feel really a bit nuts, I cannot concentrate, and I cannot write one line which I don’t begin to pick to pieces as soon as it’s written, a truly fiendish and sick sort of perfectionism. I ask myself, have I maybe had some very slight strokes. However—today I did finish chapter 7, to page 77, and now I begin the account of my life at the Vedanta Center, which means that a whole section of the book is finished, and probably more than a quarter of it.

  Tongue has been sore for days, and my knee is acting up, but fuck all that if only I can function. The play will apparently go ahead unless they fail to agree with Keith Baxter on his terms. Billy Abrahams is still farting around with his silly cunt of an art director in New York, about our picture book. And now there’s a nibble on the line for a T.V. version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover!

  Am reading Wordsworth, The Prelude. The marvellous things are nearly all bits that I know; the bald spots are very very bald.

  June 2. Tongue very sore again, despite treatment. Left eye a bit dimmer. Right knee acting up, but I persist in running it down to the beach. Old age is still a sort of camp about the ailments I used to have when I was young. I chatter away chirpily about death to interviewers and am aware that it isn’t all quite real to me. But, oh my God, how thankful I am for my good spirits, so immensely increased by my angel and his life going on beside me.

  Have just finished two real downers, the biography of Monty Clift, by Patricia Bosworth, and Robin Maugham’s Conversations with Willie. They would cheer one up on one’s deathbed. Especially the Willie book—that awful determination to be miserable. I think Willie put everything of himself into his plays and novels; there seems to be nothing left over. Whereas Virginia Woolf, only four months before suicide,
burns so brightly in her “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being. The optimism there is in first-rate writing, no matter about what!

  Keep crawling on with the Swami book. But still, nearly a third of it is now revised, and later there will be many journal extracts. It now seems we really are going to start soon on our book of Don’s drawings and our combined memories. And Harry Rigby wants us to come east at the end of this month and look at the designs for the set of Meeting.

  June 7. First anniversary of Adoption Day. Oh, I am so happy with my darling, when I don’t have to watch him being tortured by the red tape of his executorship and Glade’s immense passive nuisance-presence and Ted’s selfishness and the worry of finding them somewhere to live.

  All I fear is becoming gaga, when I need to work more than ever and have so much work in prospect. Just wrote an outline of our play for Harry Rigby to use in some publicity or other. And today I finished chapter 8, to page 89. I do feel a lack of energy. Elsie Giorgi says I may have pernicious anemia, which causes the tongue to become “denuded,” i.e. unnaturally smooth. But the only treatment she prescribes for this is B12 shots. Had the first one today.

  Tonight we go out to celebrate Billy Al’s birthday—which is also Gauguin’s, and Forster’s deathday.

  June 22. Day after the solstice, full of resolves and temporary energy. I have finished page 100 of the Swami book (still haven’t got a good title for it). Now I must get ahead.

  A depressing dinner with Paul Sorel, last night. His steady squandering of the last of his money is like the ebbing of a life; he’s on his financial deathbed, it seems. We simply cannot imagine what will happen to him and he knows this and it pleases him. But has he really thought about what the rest of his life is going to be like? No. And I somehow admire him for it. This is a sort of parody of the life of a holy pauper whose whole religion is not to think about the future.

  Now we have Harry Rigby in town, with Albert Marre due to arrive soon. Then the play will have its other main parts cast here, or else we shall have to go to New York for the casting. Neither of us wants to do this.

  Also, we await the go-ahead on the book of Don’s drawings. This could arrive at any moment—or not at all.

  August 27. My birthday was celebrated in bed in the evening watching T.V.—Senator Briggs in dubious battle with Troy Perry over Proposition 6, each side quoting the Bible, such a mistake. Scobie thinks Briggs will win. The real danger are these parents, who hate the schools anyway because they, the parents, think it is their right to tell their children what “values” they should have.50 Two bottles of excellent Mumm, which left no hangover whatsoever, and delicious kedgeree fixed by Don.

  Major breakthrough on Pussns’ civil liberties front: we switched places in bed and slept with the second window also uncurtained; which will be permanent, I guess. Actually, the light didn’t bother me.

  From a birthday greeting from a fan: “Our gay pride is built upon the dignity of your life and work. Our love finds honesty in your words.” This should poultice my smarting vanity because of having lost some writing award by USC to—Joan Didion!

  Very important decision (if kept): To make japam with beads, no matter how briefly, at noon as well as morning and evening.

  Nearly a decision: not to write foreword for Vividishananda’s book. It is quite quite unreadable.51

  August 28. Shed tears as I read Masefield’s poem “Biography” this morning while shitting. Perhaps the saki hangover helped to make me “tender” (in the Quaker sense).52 We had supper with Nick Wilder at the Imperial Gardens, with three others; it’s an unsnug Jap clip-joint. One of the many sinister features of this period is the fantastic amount of money spent by most of the people I know on restaurant meals. This period isn’t—I mean, in its feel—a prewar period like the thirties. It’s much more a pre-disaster period. One expects some huge single catastrophe with a very short timespan—an earthquake, a collision with an asteroid, a rocket attack which wrecks everything instantly. This is much less depressing.

  Noon japam made today.

  August 29. A reaction to my At One With interview with Keith Berwick:

  Dear Mr. Isherwood: I had nightmares all night. I was so disappointed to find out that you are a faggot. How do you think you got here, because your parents were faggots? You have the power to lead many, the pity is that it is in the wrong direction. God will get you for that. Sincerely, Bonnie Purchase(?) P.S. There’s still time to change.53

  Dumb Dobbin on the beach irritated Kitty because Kitty started discussing Tony Sarver, whom they’d seen the night before, and Dobbin thought they were talking about Tony Richardson. Dobbin said, “I think he’s the most difficult person I know”!

  Noon japam made today. Henceforth I’ll only remark on it if I miss making it.

  August 30. A colorblind model from Bolton, Lancashire, who has just become Miss England in the beauty competition, is named Beverley Isherwood.

  Last night, Don said that he really doesn’t want to do this book of his drawings and our comments on the sitters, because he feels that it is the wrong way to appear before the public as an artist. I think he’s right, but we’re going to discuss it some more.

  August 31. I meant to mention yesterday a good example of a really “in” joke. On the evening of the 29th, we went with Rick Sandford to see The Sound of Music, which Rick admires greatly and we very much didn’t. As we drove home, I was saying how Rick’s enthusiasms are always to be respected because they are so earnestly held and supported by so many impressive arguments. Don said, “Yes, he really believes in Diana.” I wonder how many people in this whole city would have recognized the allusion to [Shaw’s] Androcles and the Lion?

  Edward writes today to say that his son Christopher has multiple sclerosis, and that he himself is having attacks of vertigo which prevent him from working on his short prose pieces. In fact he is going through another period of block, just as he did when he was trying to finish his trilogy—only this time not so violent. As for Christopher, that’s too cruel to bear thinking about, and I would be really upset about it, except that I scarcely know him.

  The seventh volume of Byron’s letters and journals has just arrived and I’ve started to read it.

  September 1. When I asked Elsie Giorgi about multiple sclerosis on the phone today, she told me that it is sometimes wrongly diagnosed because there is a tumor (benign) which sometimes forms in (?) on (?) something called the foramen magnum and produces symptoms of sclerosis until it is removed. She claims that she once detected such an error in diagnosis and that the doctor who had made it would never forgive her for it. Am writing to tell Edward this. There is just the mad millionth chance—and I keep thinking how he has so often said in the past that I’ve brought him luck with publishing his books—

  September 2. Starting to read John Lahr’s life of Joe Orton,54 in a ready-to-become-hostile mood because, in his foreword, he says of his wife Anthea: “. . . her insight into the neurotic patterns of Orton and Halliwell are (sic) present on every page.” So we are to bow to the authority of this cunt. Well, we’ll see.

  I have missed two writing days, disgracefully. And all because of a problem which has cropped up again and again in writing this book—the brute problem of arrangement: which bit of information comes where, how should information be fed to the reader. I suppose historians have this problem all the time, and indeed I have been a historian before, but here it seems particularly irritating and acute. And am I, also, in writing this book, continually making an apology for the subject matter to Edward? Maybe so, and maybe this is as it should be. Most writers about holy men just go ahead, taking their own devotion for granted and not giving a shit how it will impress the unbelievers.

  Harry Rigby called and told us, this morning, that Keith Baxter now has his “green card” and could therefore play in New York. But nothing has yet been settled for Simon Ward.

  September 3. I have been toiling all day and am exhausted, but at least my book is restarted
, after an absurd block caused by difficulties over a time question—should I or should I not refer to a later event in the same sentence. Really, such nitpicking seems scarcely sane.

  Tonight we have a huge dinner party which was really begun in order to prove to tiresome Tony Richardson that we are not “neglecting” him, as he told Gavin. Well, offer it up. Don has been drawing “Divine,” who is an enormous soft-voiced charming curiously dignified roly-poly pudding.

  September 4. A bad hangover after a grimly dull party. Every body seemed dreary, including the usual drears. Gavin gallantly tried to make conversation, telling how he went to a man who told him about his previous incarnations, he was a dolphin, a hater of Jews, a lover of a sea captain. Gavin was impressed because the man said he had very often been born in Africa, which would explain his love of Morocco, he thinks. Oh, I am so depressed, and Don is too but won’t tell me why, yet. And this should be a wonderful day, hopeful and positive, Labor Day the start of the working season of my year.

  Tony said he doesn’t like Orton’s plays, finds them “thin.”

  September 5. Another night of disaster. A Chinese restaurant downtown, the Changsha, tables all crowded together. Cukor weary and old, feeling his bad back. Two dragged-in guests, an assistant producer and his boyfriend. Kitty ready to explode with resentment, nervous irritation, and the strain of driving us all when he was at the limit of exhaustion after last night. Also, the airless wet heat had a lot to do with it. Today it’s raining.

  Have introduced another bit of self-discipline: to do Wittenberg’s alternate isometric program every day.55 (Will mention whenever I miss it.) The ankle press I must omit, however. I did it yesterday and it hurt my bad knee a little.