The Christmas Day lunch was at Gladys Cooper’s house, which Vanessa has rented. There really is something very sweet about her. She had taken the trouble to compose individual verses for each one of about a dozen grown-up guests—there were also swarms of children.
[…]
The children fired rifles and guns and rushed about. After lunch, David Hemmings and Franco Nero engaged in a gun battle, trying who could draw fastest. This gradually became comically serious, though not malicious. Franco has played in Italian “Westerns” so he probably felt a professional obligation to win; and David is a compulsive competitor.
Later we took Joe LeSueur to see Elsa next door and then on to a party at Jennifer’s. We are entertaining Joe because he entertained Don in New York. He is a faded prettyboy with a very thin veneer of talent. His manners are bad, he shakes hands with the left hand in his pocket, and is sulky in conversation. Jennifer had spent an alarming amount of money on unwantable presents. We got a huge candle glass on a fake marble stand and a glass bell for cheese on a fake antique pewter dish dated 1789.
On the 26th, I went up to Vedanta Place for Swami’s birthday. This was the first day that Swami didn’t eat in his room since his heart attack. All the monks and nuns were present, about thirty-five of them. Later I went into his room with the boys, and he talked—repeating what he’d said the other day, that one of the greatest signs of spiritual advance is when you think you aren’t advancing. At the end of the talk he seemed suddenly very tired. (At three that afternoon there was a really violent earthquake jolt in the bay area; Don says it shook our house. But in Hollywood I didn’t even feel it, although I was sitting on the floor.)
Yesterday evening, we had Joe LeSueur, Maggie and Michael Wilding, Gavin, and Tony Richardson in to eat some stew I’d cooked. Rex and Rachel Harrison had also been invited, but with characteristic theatrical rudeness they didn’t show until later, and then of course Rachel didn’t want to leave. Anyhow, today we had lunch with Tony and he told us how Gavin had driven him home and gotten drunk at his place and bored him terribly and sat up for hours—although he was leaving for Haiti in the morning. Tony said that he felt Gavin was at the end of his tether, that he had no more creative energy left and was in despair. Tony said he’d thought Gavin’s last novelfn636 was awful. He said he felt that Gavin was so aggressive and competitive … Don is inclined to think that all this was an account of Tony’s own attitudes and feelings, transferred on to Gavin. Tony certainly seems very unhappy on this visit, but that’s probably because he is staying at Vanessa’s and can’t get any night fun. Yesterday he made some very strange statements at dinner—for example, that he worships Katharine Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot.
December 29. I have bought a humid-heat electric pad, so I’ll try that on my hip for a few days before I decide to see Dr. Allen. I’m unwilling to see him, of course, because of the embarrassment of having to say something about his wife’s death. If I knew him better or cared for him less, the embarrassment wouldn’t be nearly as great.
Gavin has presumably left for Haiti, with or without Clint. No news of In Cold Blood, and now I have a growing fear that Clint won’t get the part.
It is always very hard to write about such things in this diary, but I’ll just record that relations with Don couldn’t possibly be better as of this moment. Yesterday was a day of joy.
I have now completed nearly two months (since my return from Europe) of almost unbroken laziness. The result is that I have at least twenty letters to write, two manuscripts to read, plus the introduction which I must write for Swami’s lectures.fn637 And as for all the books I want to read—!
1967
January 1. Just after seeing the New Year in at Nellie’s, I was hurrying to get into the Volkswagen with Don when I tripped over a gap in the sidewalk and hurt my toe. I don’t think it’s broken, but it’s badly bruised. Furthermore, I’m starting a cold (unless the Contac stops it) and I still have the pains in my hip and groin. So the New Year seems to be starting badly. Never mind, says my superstitiousness, this will correct any possible hubris arising from the happiness of my life with Don just now, and the financial success of Cabaret.
What I must do, right away, is get to work. I did some token work this afternoon on the introduction to Swami’s lectures. As for Hero-Father I still don’t see how to write it but I must keep making motions of the will towards a solution. Once again I must observe the parallels between the life of the spirit and the life of art. In both cases one is saying, “Reveal yourself to me.”
I was getting maudlin, because slightly drunk, the other day and talking about my death and its consequences for Don. He said, “Knowing you couldn’t ever be a tragedy.”
David Sachs and Charles Aufderheide came to supper. David proposed a game to Don—it was actually a psychological test: David pretended to fall, to see if Don would move instinctively to catch him. Don didn’t. I got the impression that Don didn’t move because he knew instinctively that David was faking.
This caused Charles to confess how ashamed he was about a fight he had witnessed, some while ago. One man had hit another over the head with his crutch, and Charles said he was ashamed because he could so easily have run in and grabbed the crutch and prevented it.
Parties last night at the Rex Harrisons’ and Jennifer’s. Mike Nichols told me how much he admires A Single Man, Tony Richardson told me that I am one of his few real friends and that he loves me, Rex agreed with me that the new razor bands make it impossible for you to cut yourself. Drank enough to get depressed on, though not drunk.
January 2. Woke in the middle of last night, apparently because I wanted a glass of pineapple juice and some vitamin C tablets for my cold; actually because the Muse had a very important communication to make to me about Hero-Father.
The book will not be written in the first person, although it will of course be written from my point of view. The chief characters will be called Frank, Kathleen, Christopher, etc., and the words father, mother, son will never be used. Each of the chief characters will be observed as George is observed in A Single Man, by a disembodied observer, and subjective statements about any given character will be made by another of the characters, speaking in the third person. (“I used to hate her,” Christopher says.) The whole book will be written in the present tense.
I have always longed to write my own version of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves; this book will be it, I think. I see it as a collection of scenes, jumping back and forward in time. Woolf’s “life-day” progression will not be used. The end of the book is probably the visit I made to the site of Marple Hall, last year.
What is important to me in this plan is the idea of not insisting on the relationships. This sounds naive, since it will be made perfectly clear that Christopher and Richard are in fact the children of Frank and Kathleen; nevertheless I believe that this method will involve them all much more closely and organically with each other, as part of a process.
Well, enough said. Now I’ll take a shot at it. As I decided back in November, I shall loose-leaf the material and not bother too much at present about the order in which the various episodes are presented.
Reading Garson Kanin’s book about Maugham. He is rather a sneaky little worm, but is interesting, though depressing. Willie appears as an old bell (no, not belle!) which clangs so predictably when it is rung. Kanin keeps darting out like a naughty little boy and ringing it, and then running off again. Kanin isn’t a nonvenomous worm, either. He has fangs, though he tries hard to avoid showing them.
January 12 [Thursday]. Just as I feared, Clint didn’t get the part of Dick Hickock in In Cold Blood. It was given to a younger actor named Scott Wilson, who is said to resemble Hickock closely.
Two days ago, we had supper with Swami at Vedanta Place. He seemed much better. He told us that he has been going to the shrine in the mornings, lately, which is something he hadn’t done in a long while. “I was there one hour,” he told us with satisfaction—and both Don and
I noticed the utter unself-consciousness with which he talks about himself. Before Don arrived, Swami also told me that, while he was ill in hospital, he had almost continuous awareness of the presence of Ramakrishna, Holy Mother, Maharaj and Swamiji. What he was saying was that they would always appear if his condition approached death, and that therefore he could never be fearful or even depressed, when he was sick.
Great happiness with Don—though he’s mad at me right now for getting drunk last night. There’s one scene which I can’t describe here, I don’t want to; we began to talk to each other in a way that was almost suprapersonal. If I write about it, I shall spoil something. I’ll only record that I said something to him about our quarrels and how unnecessary they seemed, and Don answered, “We have tiresome servants”! It was a bit uncanny. We seemed to be talking from outside of ourselves.
Don has a name for David Roth: The Mouse of Rothschild.
Lyle Fox has got married, to a girl named Rez (I can’t remember what that’s an abbreviation of, except that it’s a very unusual, biblical sounding name). They were married at a church in Westwood, last Saturday the 7th, and this wasn’t a sudden decision, obviously. Yet, that very morning, while I was up at the gym, I talked to Lyle about Eileen and he said that it was sad and that he had really intended to marry her and that now he didn’t suppose he’d ever marry anyone! That kind of secretiveness is the mark of very very stupid people, I think; it’s so utterly pointless.
However, all credit to Lyle for curing, at least temporarily, the pain in my hip. He did it by giving me two exercises, which I only did once. The pain disappeared about half an hour later.
One of our gym regulars, John Hoyt,fn638 has just been arrested in San Diego on the charge of having had sex with three boys from the Palisades, aged eleven and twelve. Lyle was quite decent about this. Poor man, he had been playing the local civic leader in a big way, which will mean of course that his fall will be all the heavier; probably he will have to leave town.
I must continue to record a disgusting inexplicable failure to do any work of any kind. I did make a start on Hero-Father, but stopped after one day’s work.
January 21. Still stalled on Hero-Father. Something is wrong. But I’ll only find out what it is by keeping on trying. Meanwhile I have corrected the British proofs of A Meeting by the River. Am stuck also on the introduction to Swami’s lectures—not that that’s so surprising. It will be almost impossible to write anything interesting about them.
On the 18th we went to a party up at Jinny Pfeiffer’s, for Timothy Leary. He really is a fake. The smile on his face was so slimy that you could hardly bear to look at him. Leary is going round with a show he calls “A Psychedelic Religious Celebration”—sometimes it’s about Jesus, sometimes about Buddha. Alan Watts, who was also at the party, was teasing him about this. Don overheard them.
Watts: “I don’t like seeing on the marquee, Timothy Leary in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ—it sounds like Father Divine.”fn639
Leary (with his coy smile): “But I am the incarnation of Jesus Christ.”
Watts: “Oh yes, I know you are.… But there’s a Zen story about the disciple who asked, ‘Are not the lines of the hills like the body of the Buddha?’ and his master answered, ‘Yes, but it’s a pity to say so.’”
(When we were talking about this at breakfast next morning, I said, “Maybe Leary really is an incarnation of Jesus—maybe it’s a trick to test us,” and Don retorted, “Just the sort of trick his Father would play!”)
Then, the next evening, we went to Leary’s show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. This one was about the Illumination of the Buddha. To quote the ad: “Re-enactment of the world’s great religious myths using psychedelic methods: sensory meditation, symbol overload, media-mix, molecular and cellular phrasing, pantomime, dance, sound-light and lecture-sermon-gospel.” I wish I could describe it adequately, but I can’t. There were projections on a screen by several magic lanterns, and there was singing and dancing by a group which calls itself The Grateful Dead; and Leary, all in white and barefoot, addressed us through a mike. A lot of it was asslicking the younger generation, telling them how great they were, and how free. Leary sneered at the oldlings and somehow tried to pass himself off as an honorary young man. He appealed to all the young to “drop out, turn on, tune in”—which means, as near as you could tell, drop all obligations imposed on you by your elders, take pot, acid or whatnot and thus tune in to the meaning of life. What was so false and pernicious in Leary’s appeal was its complete irresponsibility. He wasn’t really offering any reliable spiritual help to the young, only inciting them to vaguely rebellious action—and inciting them without really involving himself with them. But, of course, to many of the kids in the hall—and it was packed—the fact that Leary has a prison sentence hanging over him would be a quite sufficient guarantee of his sincerity.fn640
In the midst of this, a probably mad elderly woman threw several eggs at Leary and missed. A photographer (one of many who were there) marched her out. Whereupon she called the police and said he had assaulted her. So he came back down to where we were sitting—we had been very near to the woman—and appealed to Jack Larson and Don to testify that he hadn’t assaulted her; which they agreed to do. (In fairness to the police, I must record that I’d expected the auditorium to be surrounded by them, but it wasn’t. I saw only one officer, as we were leaving.)
January 22. We are in the midst of a rainstorm. It keeps beating in in waves, and the ocean is churned up brown near the shore.
This morning I asked Don to read the two bits of Hero-Father, the six pages I wrote in November 1965, and the two and a half pages of the new draft. I don’t know why it is that I so often delay so long before asking Don’s opinion; once again he was so helpful and illuminating. Briefly, after our talk, I have come to the following tentative decisions.
The book should be written in a simple narrative style, in the first person; this third-person-present-tense style is too arty for my purpose. The book should ramble, or seem to ramble, switching from point to point in time as required. The book should be preoccupied with the concept of autobiography as myth, following Jung’s remarks at the beginning of his autobiography, and there should be a lot of examples given of how myth is created out of the materials of experience. Therefore there will be quotations from my books, showing how different aspects of the myth were developed.
Obviously it will be very tricky, this “artless” arrangement of the reminiscent ramblings. For example, how soon do I reveal that my father was killed in the First World War? Probably such basic bits of information should be supplied right away, and then elaborated on and analyzed later.
One thing which Don found exciting was the idea that I really didn’t know my father at all, and that the myth about him was created for my own private reasons—i.e. that I needed an anti-heroic hero to oppose to the official hero figure erected by the patriots of the period, who were my deadly enemies. Therefore it would be most interesting to show how certain aspects of my father had to be suppressed, because they were disconcertingly square; e.g. his references in his letters to “real men” etc.
Now I must make a really determined start; there is nothing to stop me from writing at least a rough draft of the whole book (it won’t be a long one, I already know) before I go to England again and am able to do some more research among my mother’s diaries and papers. However, before I start writing, I must plan a bit; and I fear I must reread at least parts of The Memorial and Lions and Shadows. (How deadly boring that prospect is!)
February 13. Will just start up this record again before going to the airport to meet Don, who has been staying the weekend in Santa Fe with Anthony Russo.fn641
Am still poking along with Hero-Father and haven’t even finished the introduction to Swami’s lectures.
Swami seems much better, but he has a good deal to worry him. Now, just as the new swami, Asaktananda, is about to arrive (the 17th) Swami has discovered that Vandanan
anda has been applying to Belur Math for permission to leave here and return to India. He never told Swami anything about this. Swami says it must be because he wants to be put in charge of a monastery or center all of his own. It seems that Vandanananda had made some remarks about his dissatisfaction to one or other of the devotees. Gossip, gossip.… But what is really stunning in this situation is Vandanananda’s not having told Swami when he must have known perfectly well that Swami would find out, in no seconds flat!
If Vandanananda leaves, that will mean, of course, another swami being sent out from India. (Swami says he has one picked, already); and then Swami would be left alone here with two newcomers to train. “Well, Swami,” I said, “it just means you’ll have to live another ten years at least!” Swami grunted humorously and protested, “Not ten!” But I got a feeling that he did indeed somehow accept the duty of not dying so soon.
(Which reminds me that Ronnie Knox rang me up in the middle of last night and told me not to die, because he needed my fatherly influence—though he didn’t put it quite like that. He was very very drunk.)
A marvellous exit line: Dorothy, just as she was getting out of the car at the bus stop, two days ago: “Mis-tuh Isherwood, I hear they’re going to teach Black Magic in the colleges.… but we’ll talk about that next time—”
The Sixties Page 58