Manfred told me about Berlin’s bisexuals. They wear mascara and call themselves ‘Softies’. Manfred, whom I met at Bridgeport, was the first male friend of my own age who wasn’t gay. He was then studying for a doctorate in law, publishing a non-ideological Leftist paper Carlo Sponti (‘Carlo’ for ‘Karl’ as in Marx, and ‘sponti’ for ‘spontaneous’), seriously studying the modern film, counselling German and immigrant labour on their rights. He negotiated with my employer who failed to get me work papers. His mother kept us in cakes and viands.
Morgan taught philosophy and was writing on Kant. He had been homosexual once. He was a popular teacher. He was exploited: working far too many hours for too small a salary. He had undergone Scream Therapy. A Chinese woman just jilted by a German loved him, and they were happy together. Winnie’s lover had been lost to a Persian girl, so she was initially suspicious of me of me but I quickly put her at ease. When her German lover reappeared Winnie left with him for Paris and Morgan returned to the States.
A Thai student of mine had met his German friend in a Bangkok bar. My student had later rescued his friend when Saigon fell. In his turn the German invited the Thai boy to Germany when student riots broke out in Thailand. They showed me what gay friendship could be.
Dieter too was enamoured of Jurgen. As he gave me the description of his friend I suddenly realised he described the man I was smitten by. But I did not tell him lest it pain him. We made love: I reminded him of an Anglo-Indian friend of his in Cologne. He invited me to join the commune he lived in. Helmut, a blonde, bespectacled long-haired hippie, lived with Traute. They were the commune’s ‘parents’. Uli was a soft-hearted alcoholic. They all protected their patients at the old people’s home from rapacious relatives. They listened to Dylan and Theodorakis. They gave me kohl-dust from Afghanistan. They refused me LSD.
Rene took me to the Symbolist Retrospective in Baden-Baden: Bocklin’s ‘Isle of the Dead’, the golden Redon, Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’.
My German papers didn’t come through.
Human beings dislike each other and themselves. A physical stench is emitted from our skins that we and others can’t stand.
The unreconstructed Germany: Children of the warwounded with war wounds, Rene among them; he’d never forgiven his father for returning from a POW camp when he was five.
The hippies offered me Greece. I needed connection.
Astipalea: O Thalassa! In every window the sea. From starboard and stern boys crying ‘Dolphino!’ Husbands dreaming in doorways, black-veiled women against whitewalled houses.
Cos: Hippocrates’ platane-tree, the Aegean. Pannaghia, the autumn feast of Mary, once the many-breasted Ephesian Diana. Processional dancing in an endless chain, humankind itself coming from an arched cave and going out endlessly. Soldiers on alert against Turkey. The wail of violins. Dancing the Shiftetelli, a Turkish harem-dance with George: starting on satyr goat-foot, progressing to moth-like wing movements of the hand, ending with a single pelvic thrust.
The Greek Church.
Paula invited me to her tent before her husband. I assented and later regretted it. Had to learn to get along with people on an island.
The Villa des Mysteres at Pompeii. A satyr-like bearded Dionysus at the Naples Museum. The volcano and the Serene bay.
With what spirit, what heart,
What desire and passion
We lived our life: A mistake!
So we changed our life.
—Seferis, ‘The Denial’
‘When a person enters a new phase of life such as joining the world as an adult, he feels impotent and retreats into the family for strength. Dreams of sleeping with one’s parents or siblings are common at this stage.’
—Esther Harding
India. Mother was dead. I went looking for her. Wept again at the same window. Her kimonos, saris, polka-dotted kerchiefs, shoes, crutches, hairbrush, hand mirror, all disposed of. In every room a portrait of mother with a vigil lamp: it keeps ghosts from returning; more exorcisms of the guilt of the living. The sea outside. Birds still straying into the green house. The mango trees, the old rusty green gate, shed snake-skins. Gardener and watch-dog dead. Sunsets and flocks of parrots at dusk. A part of Eden changed and unchanging. I saw the moon set and the sun rise over the same curve of the sea one dawn. The heat and humidity.
Father lived on another beach. He made locks. Workers who had joined his factory as boys were now grown men, still at the same tasks. Once when I went to father’s home in his absence his servant refused me entry. Father had married his girlfriend: a doll in a doll’s house. I saw no feeling pass between them. She is Piscean. She told me of her life. She taught herself sewing to support a fatherless family. My father had taught her the alphabet. She longed for a child. She had become barren: after a miscarriage a quack had cauterized her with formaldehyde. Yet she forced my sister to give up her baby daughter. My father had made over his entire wealth to her. He had wanted elder sister to mediate disputes between him and his new wife as we had once done with our mother. Sister refused. He called his wife the same names he called my mother: man’s hatred of woman. Father spent his wealth whitewashing fire temples, towers of silence and wells of the dead. His wife was a delegate to the matrimonial court. He intercepted my certificates in the mail in order to keep me home. They proposed I marry. Kathleen Spivack called India’s family intrigues ‘Byzantine’.
My youngest sister, a Piscean, had been alone at sixteen by mother’s deathbed. In a delirium mother asked for her son, she called for her husband. Father who finally arrived after a whole day’s telephoning sat on the veranda calling out ‘Rosie, Rosie’ in imitation of a neighbour calling her maidservant instead of rushing mother to hospital. It was again youngest sister who found our sister in a pool of blood after breaking into the bathroom where the girl had locked herself. After mother’s death father starved sisters to break their spirit. Youngest sister played deceit with deceit. She went to a match they found for her in Iran, then broke the engagement.
My father rejected me because of my life.
Placid was not to be found again. He had given me a false family name and had moved.
My paternal aunt told me about their mother: One of twenty-one children, given away for adoption. Her new mother treated her well until she married and had children. Then the mother turned distrustful. Father was a dutiful son: I saw the sari border with peach, pear, pansy that he designed for his mother, the photo frames he made in carpentry class. ‘We three will live together always,’ he’d say. They had held him to his adolescent word. And confirmed stories of insanity in their family: an uncle kicked a cousin down a staircase to her death for rouging her face; grandmother poured boiling water on aunt because she eyed a boy. Aunt never married, living lifelong with childhood mementos: the Persian epic translated, in several volumes, her mother’s wedding furniture, her father’s British Dominion passport, my father’s dolls, his gold-framed baby photograph, even his baby potty. She showed me the Chinese silk, embroidered in white on purple, that her grandfather had bought her, a dollar a yard, a part of the family jewellery she inherited and my father’s boyhood watch, then one of two pieces in Bombay. She was in her brother’s shade and couldn’t accomplish much until he left. Later she trained in homeopathy: like to cure like. She accused my mother of selfishly luring a rich widow’s son. They had pinned all their hopes on him. My mother’s family accused father of irresponsibly luring a quietly married woman. She had left behind her entire dowry.
My natal chart:
Moon in Cancer, Pisces rising. Sign of the exile and the poet. Wealth is spurned. Success at thirty-six. Early death. Eccentricity lessens with age. Literary success, world travels, pilgrimages, a house by the sea. A twenty-year Venusian proficiency in the arts: aesthetic and sexual. Conventionally speaking a bad-charactered person but devoted to the learned, friend to society’s rejects, sacrificing, attaining wisdom after repentance at Eros. Last years in decline. Friends are progeny. Beloved of women.
Disappearance of an aged woman. Moon and Jupiter cushioning against poverty. Great faith in mankind.
Mother died intestate. Father refuses cooperation in freeing the estate from the law. My sisters quarrel; I fail to reconcile them. I dream mother cuts a golden snake into three: elder sister offers me her share of the legacy as ‘a tangible proof of love’. The estate still lies unclaimed.
Minoo doesn’t care any more for the theatre or for nostalgia. His father is dead: ‘Are you waiting for the death of your father?’
Giving away my books and clothes I journeyed to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. ‘Do not come to me in sorrow,’ said the teacher. He was fat, squat and jolly. He had written of his life as a myth: ‘When my mother was carrying me, circumambulating the temple she touched her forehead to the ground where sprang a flower.’ His pedagogic secret: ‘Do not give the Dharma to those not ready to receive it.’ He never spoke in self-defence, nor ever displayed any doubt about the teaching. Meditation was not egoistic; it freed others. The Buddhist myth lived meant the monk’s life. Religion was not aesthetics. Sonam, a young monk trained at Shantiniketan, helped me to reconcile myself to my self. They took away my pain: ‘There is no “Why?” It is. That’s Karma.’ There is no destiny, there is character. Compassion meant allowing others their idea of themselves.
They revered my father, who sponsored my religious studies. Each evening the novices sit in a rock garden. They chant the Manjushri prayers. Each deity has a syllable. Manjushri’s is ‘HRI’; he cuts bonds, suffering, illusion. The chant is the throb of the heartbeat. Youths chant in polyphony. They clap their hands to cut connections with the day that was; Manjushri’s single syllable articulated allows the soul flight just at the moment of sunset. It is a mortal sin to eye a monk. A hundred thousand prostrations. That is the beginning practice. How to dwell on earth. To see things as they are, to speak things as they are, to feel things as they are.
‘The Tibetans teach you how to die’—Antonin Artaud Kathak dancing with Leela. Lacked stamina but sensed a great freedom on tying bells to my feet the first time. I encouraged Leela to temporarily leave her master to perfect her dance in Delhi.
Mrs Nowrojee kept a sixty-year-old provision store filled with empty showcases and a whiskey ad, White Horse. A magnificent view from the store. Her husband kept old accounts, she somnambulated and an eighty-year-old mother-in-law wielded authority. They disapproved of the Tibetans and the travelling life.
An Indian doctor and I made love on trains and buses we rode out of town together to escape gossip. We had trouble establishing the male and passive roles. His society obliged him to ridicule me in public. Yet when he forsook me I followed him to the Punjab.
‘Sorrow is inauspicious.’
‘The cave of the heart is the seat of the intellects.’
‘Love, feeling, make time real.’
—Swami Chinmayananda, The Upanishads
After I broke up with my friend I dreamed of a broken watch.
Heard Subbulakshmi sing Meera and saw Vyjayanthimala’s recital of temple dances. Mrs Gandhi lost the election over sterilization. On my way home I stepped over the bodies of people sleeping on Bombay’s pavements. In front of my parents’ six-room apartment that the two of them used were thatched huts on the beach; entire families camped under the sky. ‘I did not get rich by stealing from them,’ father said.
Do something for the suffering people.
‘I can do nothing’: This is the artist’s position.
I shut out all contrary evidence to the beautiful image of India, its art, drama, music, religions.
The Taj by moonlight, a surreal dream-image. Below, musclemen built their bodies by the river. At dawn a peacock fan-tail on an eastern gateway.
Anaïs Nin died. ‘A healer lays hands on me and takes my pain away,’ she had written. Father had asked her to influence me into returning home; she in her kindness had obliged him. ‘May it all be a beautiful adventure’: her last words to me.
My mother’s father was stern. She wasn’t allowed to wear pastel colours, nor flowers. The first of five daughters, she had responsibility early in life. ‘She was ahead of her time. She wanted to lecture forty years ago when women kept to the house.’ She had to fight to go to college. Accused of wanting to meet men she enrolled in a Women’s University. Then she stood accused of befriending male professors. Women had to stay indoors during their periods, which were ritually considered unclean. Her neighbours kept exact count of mother’s periods and each time ritually cleaned their corridors throwing water after her as she came and went.
Tagore painted women at barred windows.
A younger cousin shows her sexuality refreshingly openly.
Gangtok: again the dancing lightning of the Tibetan Mass. A green rainforest light. Woman by the roadside breaking stones, her infant asleep on a pavement nearby.
Chitrabhanu—‘God is a perfect human being’—was a friend I had made in Chicago. He lectured on vegetarianism movingly. He had answered my questions on sexuality with silence. Now he was married with young sons. My friend told me he had yogic self-control and could suck mercury into his penis. He had become a Jain monk at seven. He blessed me.
My stepsister: a mother of five, white-haired, a grass-widow for sixteen years to her husband’s career in the merchant navy. She lived in phobic fear of ritual contamination and bathed compulsively. She talked of her parents’ divorce blighting her girlhood; no one would marry her. She feared society. ‘Mother was fearless.’
Nissim Ezekiel, an Indian poet, did not like my poems. He was courteous and kind.
A museologist, a teacher of mine told me: ‘Give up your life. You can never teach here.’ Invited to Tehran, I left India.
IV
Six yards of golden silk for Manfred’s mother; textiles, jewellery, sandalwood for the hippies; gold and red voile for Carmela.
The stretch between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush is fabled: Baghdad, Basra, Samarkand, Herat, Kandahar, Ghazni, Swāt. When my German friends returned from Afghanistan with photographs I dreamed of the seven lakes of Bandi Emir.
At last in an Arab dream-room hung with a saddle bag, a lamp, camelhair carpets.
I dreamed a tauromachia with my lover as the bull.
My friend wanted to sleep with both my sister and me.
Once sister brought over a lover of hers to my room. The Persian landlord evicted me: ‘This is not a brothel.’
Wept while reading ‘The Wasteland’ that same morning at a school. Later I read them from the Cantos:
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
The students wished me for a teacher but the American bosses would not hear of it: ‘Your accent isn’t right.’
I openly dreamed before the Persian boys I taught at college. They brought me their gifts and admiration. I read the Persian Epic of the Kings—Siavosh, the guiltless martyr.
A Persian film: The cure for a madman was marriage, to a prostitute. Tehran was full of them. They solicited trade in the streets. Once, a young Persian wished to sleep with me, but only along with a woman. He picked up three girls riding together. One sat with a child, another drove, a third haggled the price: Rls 3000 for all three, for the two of us for a night. I declined.
A visit to the brothels. The Madam auctioning off girls: ‘500, 400, 300’. No takers. The most expensive were young, dressed much as American coeds. A peddler came in selling clothes, jewellery. The women teased him. Wonder what happens to these men who live only with women due to reasons of business! A man and a woman sleep behind a green curtain. Let them be sinning forever!
A jealous co-worker spread the false story that I had slept with my students; something I never do, on principle. I did not deny my sexuality but was obliged to defend myself against false charges. I was dismissed with full pay for the remaining term of my contract. Rex (Reece), a gay liberation leader, wrote to me:
You say
I helped ease your lot for a while; you taught me to be pleased and happy to be gay. Just being with you I knew more than from all the rhetoric we used to spout. You are what it’s all about, and your being fired and having ‘to line your soul with steel’ is evidence of that reality. They still can’t handle your honesty, your simple truth. I feel humble knowing you, and honoured. Yes, Anaïs Nin is big (in Los Angeles). A friend (G.A. since he started with Architecture Digest—he’s lining his soul with steel also—before that he was ‘Morning Glory’) had records of her reading. He used to pretend to be her. So we often had Anaïs Nin to dinner.
In my student room I wrote a book on Anaïs Nin in sixteen days. My sister, a stewardess, who had afforded me all my travels sent me books. For years I had thought I was Anaïs Nin. ‘I is another.’
When a soldier visited me my Islamic students asked me to leave: ‘You are worse than a bitch. You should live with wild animals in the mountains.’
Gregg Fitzgerald, a student of mine, published his haiku, ‘Rain In Her Voice’. He speaks of the daily suburban reality of love, hurt, violence, repression, the changing prairie seasons, return of the beloved, a friend’s death. He has modernized and Americanized the Haiku.
I made love to three Armenian boys. Read their history: the long bloody trek to Baghdad, their loss of self-respect due to persecution, the mass burial of a mountain of skulls topped by a bishop’s hat.
In the dream the Other is the Self.
The Indian doctor got married.
My letter to Rene was undelivered. He had moved to Cologne.
My German friends sent me addresses of Tehran bars from the Gay Guide.
On a visit to the Bazaar saw almost a child’s impression of the Quaj’ar king, Fath-Ali Shah with navel-length beard, and a moustache, hand painted on wood: ‘I want to be feared as a king and debauch in my youth and when I die I want to be revered as a saint.’
Heard of an Amman Sufi order from travellers: They concentrate on Allah’s name (a mantra), they whirl and dance, and the Shaykh hits you on the chest, gently, on the left side.
The Man Who Would Be Queen Page 4