The day before yesterday, I finished revising chapters 16 and 17; there was very little to do to them. Am now well started on chapter 18.
Beautiful warm weather. Last night, Jack Larson made our flesh creep with tales of the coming economic ruin of the country. Oughtn’t we to put money in Swiss banks while it’s still allowed? But we don’t know how to. And Robin French, whom I asked about it today, isn’t nearly so pessimistic.
November 1. 6:30 p.m. Have just finished my second draft of the two last chapters, 18 and 19. The next time around they should be pretty much as I want them—though you never know; I have a feeling that I might get some last-minute revolutionary notion.
Have been talking to Hunt Stromberg, who still thinks they will want to start on “Frankenstein” very soon. Am glad at least that the book is as far along as this.
The day before yesterday, we drove down to San Diego and saw John Lehmann who is teaching at the State College and his friend from Austin, Texas[,] Chick Fry.44 Quite a nice homely little boy. But John is a menace. He wants to come and stay here at Thanksgiving. Don thinks he has no feelings at all and is only interested in symbolic events, like meetings with well-known “old friends.”
Heard on the car radio yesterday: The “Zodiac Killer” in San Francisco has sent a Halloween card to a newspaperman there, saying, “Peekaboo, you are doomed!” The newspaperman (for whom I felt very sorry) came on the air and said, quite seriously and as though this were surprising, “The police interpret this as a threat against my life”!
A notice from One Incorporated to say that they are appealing to all us queers to buy lots of Hamm’s beer during this Halloween weekend because Hamm’s have bought advertising in The Advocate and we ought to demonstrate Gay Purchasing Power. So we bought a six pack.
Don is eagerly awaiting the end of my book so we can start the house painting. Meanwhile we are going to get the hallway properly lit so one can see the pictures. Also the living room.
Swami is taking off at the beginning of this week for a holiday in Arizona, Oak Creek Canyon. Nothing is settled yet about an assistant. They offer to send one but Swami suspects he won’t be suitable. So now it’s we who are stalling, not they! When I took the dust of his feet he said, “You don’t have to do that every time!” so I explained that I am trying to fix the image of him in my mind as The Guru. This seemed to amuse him.
I jog nearly every day. My weight hovers around 147, though I seem to be awfully hungry and eat an awful lot. Hardly drink, though. It is weeks since I had hard liquor or more than a couple of glasses of wine at most.
November 23. On November 17, I finished revising the last chapter of Kathleen and Frank. (It was chapter 19, but Don advised me to change its title to “Afterword,” pointing out quite rightly that the Frank–Kathleen narrative ends with Kathleen’s death at the end of chapter 18.) On the 19th, I got the manuscript xeroxed (at the Pacific Palisades stationer’s, Sanders’, which does quick and fairly efficient work and has a very sexy assistant, the manager’s son). On the 20th, I mailed the copies off to New York and London. There is lots more to do, but I had to get it off.
This is the history of the book. The first draft of it, called Hero-Father[,] was begun on January 2, 1967 and never finished. On June 15, 1967, I began copying selections from Kathleen’s diaries and Frank’s letters for the book and finished doing this on August 5, 1968. I began the book itself on September 19, 1968. There were big interruptions, of course, throughout all of this work. Indeed, I think it went rather quickly, considering.
What remains, aside from corrections, is to get permission for all my quotes and check a couple of research points. I still don’t know what “siche” meant on Frank’s disk. And I don’t know about the false Judge Bradshaw’s activities in Maryland.45
John Lehmann came to stay with us for the night on the 21st and left yesterday. Throughout all of his visit, my nerves were in a constant state of irritation and tension. He is fantastically thick-skinned and so selfish. You have to wait on him without ceasing and he never offers to pay for anything. There is more to say about him than this—I’m merely letting off steam—but I’ll do that tomorrow.
November 24. One thing John told us is nearly incredible but obviously true. While teaching at San Diego he met a woman professor who has spent three or four years already comparing published versions of Virginia Woolf ’s work with actual manuscripts in some college collection. And this professor told him she has found that Leonard actually made alterations in Virginia’s diary and in her fiction and essays published after her death! John doesn’t find this impossible to believe, because Leonard was so envious of Virginia and so arrogant and convinced of his own genius.
John himself certainly isn’t arrogant in that way. He is very complacent but I don’t think he really believes all that much in the value of his own work. He believes in his position in the literary world and his “services to literature” (which no one denies) and his CBE.46 Don thinks he is really quite desperate, beneath all this.
Perhaps John’s best quality is his capacity for feeling literary enthusiasm and for doing something about it. I showed him the story Morgan wrote in 1957, about the two boys who fell in love with each other on the ship going to India.47 John immediately resolved to publish it, if he can get the permission and the money to do it. He has just succeeded in getting his publishing firm back under his own name, after years of legal tie-ups.
Which reminds me, I have had several calls already from publishers in this country, about Maurice; also two applications from students who are writing Forster theses and want to read Maurice before publication and include comments on it.
I think it must have been because John had got us both so rattled that we made an idiotic mistake, the day before yesterday, when we drove him up to Santa Barbara to have lunch with Bill Brown and Paul Wonner. We set off over the Sepulveda pass, meaning to take the inland freeway route to Ventura, and drove and drove up into the hills. Soon we began remarking how amazingly everything had been altered; they seemed to be building new freeways everywhere and tearing up the landscape, so you couldn’t even recognize it. And then at last we were confronted by a sign which said Bakersfield and another which marked the turnoff to Ventura via Santa Paula—so we had made a huge detour and arrived more than half an hour late. Although we know the Sepulveda pass like the inside of our hats, we had stayed on the San Diego North freeway instead of turning off onto the Ventura freeway!
Don is leaving for San Francisco for his show48 at the weekend. I still don’t know if I shall go up with him. Then a fearful period of upset impends—the repainting of the inside of much of the house and the refinishing of the hardwood floors; this will mean taking down all the books in my room!
We’ve heard nothing more about “Frankenstein” from Hunt Stromberg.
Last night, going into a movie, we met Renate [Druks] coming out and she told us that she’d heard Ronnie Knox has been put in Camarillo by his parents. The last time she saw him he was rather crazy, she says. Am going to call the head psychiatrist there, Dr. Benjamin Siegel, and find out for sure. Evelyn Hooker, who has now settled in Santa Monica and is in practice as what she describes as a homosexual-marriage counselor, gave me his name; and it now turns out that I have talked to him before this, about Michael Leopold.
November 25. Dr. Siegel was absolutely charming, remembered my calling about Michael and didn’t even act too busy to talk (what a lesson to cross old Dobbin!). He did however tell me that there is a new law which forbids him to give out information about his patients. This morning he called back and in an indirect way indicated that Ronnie had been there at the hospital but only for one day; also that he had either insisted on leaving or had actually escaped—but Dr. Siegel had to be very vague about this part of it and I’m not quite sure what he meant.
Today I took the three folders of my Kathleen and Frank manuscript over to Gavin to read. Have had a cable from Richard that he has received the last two chapters. Not
hing from New York, but that probably means that Curtis Brown has got the manuscript.
In the paper this morning there is this hideous news about Mishima’s death, as a demonstration against Japan’s no-war constitution:
. . . Mishima drew out a samurai sword, bared his stomach and pulled it across his middle, drawing blood. A youthful disciple standing beside him then chopped off Mishima’s head in the approved samurai hara-kiri tradition.
Then [Masakatu] Morita, twenty-five, a leader in Mishima’s private army, plunged a short sword into his own abdomen. One of the other three severed Morita’s head . . .
Mishima had been closely tied to the Japanese army in recent years . . . his eighty-man Shield Society spent some time training with the self-defence forces. Mishima had outfitted the tiny force in uniforms of his own design and written a song for it.49
I suppose he had become completely crazy. I just cannot relate this to the Mishima we met.
November 26. Thanksgiving this year is particularly for having finished the book. Now that it is finished I am terribly at a loose end, however. What shall I write next? The idea of a novel about Swami and me no longer seems so appealing. Surely it would be better from every point of view to do this as a factual book? Well of course there is the difficulty of being frank without being indiscreet; but that difficulty always arises in one form or another. For example, it is absolutely necessary that I should say how, right at the start of our relationship, I told Swami I had a boyfriend (and that he replied, “Try to think of him as Krishna,”) because my personal approach to Vedanta was, among other things, the approach of a homosexual looking for a religion which will accept him. Another difficulty, far more serious, is that the book couldn’t be truly complete until after Swami’s death. (But that’s no reason why I shouldn’t make a rough draft of it now. Then, if I die first, there will at least be something left behind which may be of interest to others.)
I have also had the idea that my memoir of Swami might be published with a memoir of Morgan, based on his letters to me. So that the book would be a Tale of Two Gurus, as it were.
Then there is a fairly big chunk of diary fill-in which I might do, covering the scantily covered period between January 1, 1945 and February 1955—or maybe February 1953, when I met Don, because that’s the beginning of a new era. This would be quite largely a sexual record and so indiscreet as to be unpublishable.50 It might keep me amused, like knitting, but I should be getting on with something else as well.
Have I given up all idea of writing another novel, then? No, not necessarily. The problem is really as follows: The main thing I have to offer as a writer are my reactions to experience (these are my fiction or my poetry, or whatever you want to call it). Now, these reactions are more positive when I am reacting to actual experiences, than when I am reacting to imagined experiences. Yet, the actuality of the experiences does bother me, the brute facts keep tripping me up, I keep wanting to rearrange and alter the facts so as to relate them more dramatically to my reactions. Facts are never simple, they come in awkward bunches. You find yourself reacting to several different facts at one and the same time, and this is messy and unclear and undramatic. I have had this difficulty many times while writing Kathleen and Frank. For instance, Christopher’s reactions to Kathleen are deplorably complex and therefore self-contradictory, and therefore bad drama.
Well, I just wanted to think aloud for a while, even though it hasn’t gotten me anywhere.
Last night we left in the middle of the new Julius Caesar film because it was so bad.51 Driving home, I happened to notice that Ned Kelly is on at last. The script is awful; you have no idea what is happening, and there is no clear progression. The photography is sometimes marvellous but mostly foggy. I did get a terrific feeling of Australia and even of period Australia—though that’s partly because we could recognize some of the film locations we had actually visited last year. I still think Mick Jagger is very interesting as Ned, though he is obviously quite miscast. He isn’t nearly big and strong enough and he doesn’t have the right sort of Irish warmth (or much warmth of any sort for that matter). But he does seem aloof and dangerous. There is one scene, when they try to put handcuffs on him, in which he really is like some wild animal, perhaps a bobcat, when it is fighting with pure instinctive savagery against being trapped. Don felt that Tony Richardson shows a kind of inattention, a lack of real interest, throughout. He says he really wonders if Tony will ever make another film. Still we have to remember that his Hamlet film is quite recent and certainly one of his best; Don thinks it the best Shakespeare film ever made by anyone and I guess I agree. Perhaps the truth is, Tony should never be allowed to mess around with the script; in Shakespeare’s case he doesn’t of course. But then, a director ought to mess around with the script. Otherwise he’s merely a putter-on-scene, the film isn’t fully his work.
We had supper with Chris Wood, still wondering if he shall stay here or go back to England when Gerald dies. For some reason he seems unwilling to accept the obvious common-sense suggestion that he should go over to England on a trial visit and see what he thinks of it. His nature demands an either-or.
An absurd predicament I got into, last night, after I’d parked my car to go to the theater where Julius Caesar is playing. I absent-mindedly locked both doors (as you can without a key by pressing down the buttons on the windows and then slamming them) and then found I’d left my key in the ignition and the engine still running! I knew I had an emergency set of keys hidden in a magnet box somewhere by the engine, but I couldn’t remember where. I groped frantically around the running engine for what seemed an age, before I found them.
November 28. It’s raining and I’m unoccupied and therefore blue, but not very. Have just been reading through the entries in my diary between April 1948 and February 1953, the Caskey period. Such desperation! Surely in those days I was suffering in a way I can hardly even understand, now? And what got me through? Grace. And work.
Camilla Clay is ready to produce our play, she says. On the understanding that we begin with a rehearsed reading of it, to see how it goes in front of an audience. She doesn’t really believe in it, yet. The reading is Jim’s idea; he suddenly came up with it yesterday. Now the problem is to find our two leads.
Don leaves for San Francisco the day after tomorrow. If he gets any commissions after the show opens, he will stay on there; but this does seem awfully doubtful. I’m not going. I should have nothing to do and only be in the way.
Every morning when I wake, I dread the disturbance of the upcoming painting and floor sanding. It will be utter hell and probably last at least three weeks.
My next chore—however much I loathe the prospect: to produce a “definitive” version of Black Girl which can be shown to the Shaw Estate, passed, published and then, we hope, performed all over the world in all possible languages.
November 29. We had a very heavy rainstorm all night and this morning. Now it looks as if it might lighten but you can’t tell. Don’s father came and they took up all the matting in the front and back bedrooms and hallway, a terrific job, five hours’ worth, which would have cost sixty dollars if the floor finishers had done it. Now that we see the nice hardwood floor again we wonder why we ever had it covered!
During the rain, two leaks developed, one in my workroom, one in the living room. This was one of those providential disasters, because it warns us that the roof must be fixed before those ceilings are painted. Irving Blum just called Don to tell him he can’t come up to San Francisco with him tomorrow because the storeroom at the gallery here has been flooded, damaging a large number of paintings and prints which aren’t sufficiently insured. Don says nothing will go right for him until the middle of January because Saturn is fucking things up; Jack Fontan told him this. Negative astrological predictions make you philosophical. You expect no good, but at the same time if good does come you have the added satisfaction that the astrologer was wrong.
December 1. Yesterday started by raining,
then cleared, but it’s still damp and more showers are expected. This weather is exactly what I fear for our house painting. Everything will be moved out onto the deck and then it’ll pour.
That event still impends like major surgery. A very nice man named Norm Berg came by to arrange about fixing the roof. He said not to worry about the cracks in our pavement outside the house; he thought the land on this side of the Canyon is pretty firm, on the Palisades side it is unsafe. He says he has inside information that the building at the end of Adelaide will begin very soon, and that the two towers will be only seventeen stories high. Only! But that’s a reduction of seventeen stories on the original estimate!
Meanwhile we are preparing to get rid of all kinds of junk. The St. Vincent de Paul people52 are seemingly ready to take away the carpets, and we’re trying to wish all sorts of other items on to them, including the broken wicker chair from the kitchen, my globe of the world and the statuette I won in a Save State Beach lottery. Then there are artbooks from the bookcase in my room which Don has now moved into his back room. The grimmest deed (which I performed myself ) was twisting up Henry Guerriero’s horrible mobile, ramming it into a carton from the market and leaving it out for the trash collectors. I still feel that it is a Crime Against Art to destroy any kind of artwork.
The removal of the second bookcase alongside my couch (Don was forever objecting to it) really has improved the room, making it much lighter and more spacious. I think I wanted to cut the room in half because of my memories of Emily’s sitting room in Buckingham Street; I thought it would be snugger that way but actually I only made part of it unusable.