Bette Midler was as always a success of the biggest and most symbolic kind, and she brilliantly managed to scrape her bare knees in a fall so that they bled and had to be fixed up with Band-Aids in full view of the audience. This, of course, made her seem gigantically human. But she really is very sympathetic.
As for Richard Pryor, his display of aggression puzzled more people than it offended. It seems he was probably zonked. I think maybe he was merely trying to point out how regrettable it is that the minorities don’t support each other properly. Anyhow, he ended by showing us what he called “my rich black ass,” but with his pants on.31 And then the real mistake was made. The producer, an ass named Aaron Russo,32 and the director, Ron Field,33 both got up and apologized for Pryor, as if he had been a blackout or a failure in the sound system—assuring us that they had no responsibility for what he had said. Whereas, a few funny civilized words at this point would have pulled the whole show together and given it political meaning.
Talking of politics, the miserable bunch of Baptists waving banners at us about Sodom as we came in seemed impotent and absurd—on this particular occasion. This was, in a way, to be regretted. Because they are neither.
September 25. Last night, driving home along the Santa Monica freeway after dark, we were hit by a car wheel, maybe a spare which had fallen off another car or truck. We were in the extreme left lane, and it whizzed across the freeway from our right and hit us. Don managed to drive over it without swerving too much, though the bump was terrific. We might easily have crashed into the divider or been suddenly slowed down so that another car ran into us from behind. We might, in fact, have been badly injured or killed. As it was, we got the underpart of the Fiat somehow damaged, so that you can’t turn the wheel far without scraping. And Don hurt his nose a little and I slightly grazed my shin.
Don’s show opening, on the 21st, was crowded, though a lot of people didn’t appear—mainly Hollywood and Movieland characters. Don thinks they were scared off by the catalogue, with its nude Rick [Sandford] and cocknude Mark Valen. Anyhow, the show certainly impressed a lot of Don’s colleagues, which is what really matters. There was a feeling that this show is his best to date. I felt great excitement and relief (you always feel that when you’re rooting for someone, and he brings it off )[.]
No critics yet. One sale only, but an impressive one. A collector named Taubman(?),34 who had come to the gallery to buy a de Kooning and an [Olitski], went to look Don’s show over and then and there bought his painting of Paul Sorel. (Paul’s reaction to this was negative, because he thinks it so unattractive. He asked Don not to divulge his name to the buyer! On such occasions, Paul’s vanity seems so grotesque that one suspects it of being a camp attitude.)
Yesterday I finished the twenty-first chapter of my book about Swami. This contains the last batch of journal extracts, ending on the last day of 1975. Which means that chapter 22 will probably be the last chapter. It will have to cover very briefly the first four and a half months of 1976, when I was here and saw Swami at least a dozen times if not more—all these meetings, alas, unrecorded because I had given up journal writing altogether under the pressure of finishing Christopher and His Kind—then our stay in New York, England, Morocco etc.—during which period Swami died and I have to quote secondhand reports—and then our return in July, to take part in the two memorial services. What will follow all this is still vague. It may be in the same chapter, or separated, as an afterword. Some kind of glimpse of myself and how I feel about the whole thing now, and about the prospect of my own death, and Swami’s relation to that.
Never have I felt as dependent on Don’s judgment and taste and intuition as I do now. But I am going to read this material through and make my own notes before I show it to him. There’ll also, anyhow, be quite a lot of research to be done up at Vedanta Place before I can start a rewrite.
By and large, the atmosphere at Don’s opening, besides being airless because of poor ventilation, was predominantly queer, very kissy. More kisses than handshakes, yet most of them purely social. After greeting some near stranger in this manner, I became aware that a lady beside me was slightly shocked. So I observed, in a bright conversational tone, “I sure wish I had a dollar for every boy I’ve kissed this evening!” This at least got me a laugh. Incidentally, this more-or-less socially accepted kissing between males is still apt to be more involving than kissing women. Woman kissing is mostly done on the cheek, to save their lipstick. But, with men, there is no reason not to kiss on the lips, so one often does.
Future prospects, hopeful or not so: After a long silence, George Weidenfeld says that Willie Abrahams, Caskey’s old friend who is now the Senior West Coast Editor of the publishers Holt, Rinehart and Winston, is greatly interested in our book of drawings and memories. Abrahams is coming to see us on the 30th. Harry Rigby has gone to England to try to cast Meeting by the River. Not one word from Frankenheimer; neither he nor Rick McCallum came to Don’s show. The lump on my right palm seems definitely bigger but no fingers are contracted. My left eye seems to be dimming appreciably. And of course there is the prospect of Jess Bachardy’s death, with all the problems it will bring.
Jonathan Fryer’s book arrived at last and I have just reread it. I was astonished to get a letter from Edward Upward praising it mildly: “It makes your life sound very exciting and extraordinary.” To me, it reads like a careless rehash of my own books; in order to avoid quoting me, he simply inserts other, less suitable adjectives.
October 5. Here are some extracts from William Wilson. His “Art Walk” column in the Los Angeles Times of September 30 reviews four shows. Don’s show is reviewed first and gets more words than any of the others—this, says Nick Wilder, is all that really counts. The others are Paul Jasmine, Allen Jones and Chris Burden.
Wilson is as weird as ever. He starts off with a paragraph saying that four galleries are showing work which “involves itself with some combination of glamor, exhibitionism, narcissism or self-conscious stylishness” and that these values are regarded in the art world as “ominous bellwethers of rigid stylization, auto cannibalistic self-indulgence and incipient kinkiness.” And he adds, “Please God, don’t let it be a trend.”
Now Don gets some not unkind words:
He’s always been an absorbing, virtually literary talent, despite a problematically slick style. Recently he’s opened up to allow his vision to flood with some of the shadowed, troubled side of this cultural enclave.
With this exhibition, Bachardy begins to look like our top probers into the psychology of people whose style of life threatens to turn them into cultural robots while eating them up from the inside out. He begins to remind us of Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, David Hockney or Richard Avedon. His subjects are as decorous as if they were posing for Ingres or Holbein, but each is haunted with contemporary malaise. . . .
Finally, Bachardy has committed himself to seeing the obsessive fantasies that can animate and destroy “interesting” people. Whether his insights are “true” to his subjects is as immaterial as whether a novelist’s characters are “real” people. Bachardy is finally using visual means to make sulphorous, painfully believable spectres.
The artist is as mannered as ever. There is ground for aggravation that his line refuses to be simple, his eyes are so big and glassy, mouths so consistently trying to be Mick Jagger’s big, sexy, crybaby mouth. (This is probably a reference to Mark Valen’s kissable lips. Did they turn Wilson on?) His expressionist watercolors’ apparent looseness, sometimes looks like conventional work passed under a water faucet.
Then, right at the end, Don gets the accolade: “All that said, Bachardy still makes the orchestration work in a way that demands we take him seriously.”
Wilson then grudgingly says a kind word for Jasmine which his show certainly doesn’t deserve, and is nasty to Jones, whose show we both liked quite a lot: “The work seems to assume that (a) we are kinky and too chicken to admit it or (b) he’s going to use sex to sell us good ar
t because we are too dumb to take it straight.” Wilson is very ready to take offence on behalf of the viewer.
And finally he’s quite horrid to poor little Chris Burden, “his public image is such a mess that everything he now does has its intentions and meanings blotted out by the name ‘Chris Burden,’ which has turned into an independent entity prowling in an omnivorous search for any limelight that will shine on it.”35
I’d meant to write a whole lot more today about various happenings but now I must get ready to appear at an NBC interview for the “Tomorrow” program.36
October 17. A good moment to pick up on this journal, because we’ve just been released from a formidable chore. One of the T.V. outfits had decided to do a really bang-up production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a darkly undercover project since the material is in the public domain and liable to be thought of by many competitors, after the huge success of “Roots.” Well, Keith Addis, Bobby Littman’s assistant and far more enterprising than Bobby, as it seems to us personally—either Bobby is pissed off because we keep turning things down or else, as we suspect, he has lapsed into his former alcoholism—called us and suggested we take the job. So I read the book, for the first time, and was quite charmed by it; it has a real Dickens flavor both for better and for worse—all the way from the “dead, your majesty” style to the death of Little Nell—and there are social ironies worthy of Shaw: Miss Ophelia the northern abolitionist who hates to touch black people; Phineas the Quaker, pushing the slaver over a cliff with the words, “Friend, thee isn’t wanted here.” But what a construction job to get it all together! And what a huge script it would have had to be! So I was relieved beyond words when Addis called up yesterday and apologetically told us that somebody else had already grabbed the job—before they had even interviewed us—and that he was getting a minimum payment for doing it.
So now I’ll try to finish off the rough draft of the Swami book as quickly as I can, so Don can at least get an impression of the whole thing.
Much more news, but it must wait till tomorrow.
October 23. It had to wait much longer, because of various distractions and preoccupations. Well, at least I have finished a rough account of Swami’s death, ending on page 257. Now comes the great problem of writing that afterword, summing everything up. When I began working on this book, on February 12, I wrote that the best thing about it would perhaps be its final passage. I thought I knew almost exactly what I wanted to say in it. I only wish I had sketched something out at the time, for now I really am at a loss. Yesterday evening, a young man named Don Slaikjer (pronounced Slaker, so why take all that trouble writing it differently?) was asking me about Swami—what his influence and teaching have done for me, and I found myself stumbling and faking defensively. I couldn’t say anything really clearly and I knew he was deciding that the whole thing was self-delusion.
What is holding me up? Is it that I feel an obligation to declare that Don and I are somehow “saved,” that we have been given “the pearl beyond price” and that we’ll never lose it and that death has lost its terrors in consequence? Obviously, I mustn’t end on a note of vulgar uplift, like the ordinary, self-satisfied “religious” writer. But surely I can make some statement?
This block which I feel is actually challenging, fascinating. It must have a reason, it must be telling me something.
Am I perhaps inhibited by a sense of the mocking agnostics all around me—ranging from asses like Lehmann to intelligent bigots like Edward? Yes, of course I am. In a sense, they are my most important audience. Everything I write is written with a consciousness of the opposition and in answer to its prejudices. Because of this opposition, I am apt to belittle myself, to try to disarm criticism by treating it with a seriousness it doesn’t (in my private opinion) deserve. I must not, cannot, do this here. I must state my beliefs and be quite quite intransigent about them. I must also state my doubts, but without exaggerating them. Yes, that’s it. I must give the reader a glimpse of myself in a transitional stage, between Swami’s death and my own.
The doubts, the fears, the backslidings, the sense of alienation from Swami’s presence, all these are easily—too easily—described. One mustn’t overemphasize them. What’s much more important is a sense of exhilaration, remembering, “I have seen it,” “I have been there.” For some absurd reason, as a sort of epigraph, I keep thinking of Arne Saknussem’s code message in Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth: “Descend into the crater of Yocul of Sneffels, which the shade of Scartaris caresses, before the kalends of July, audacious traveller, and you will reach the center of the earth. I did it.”37
As of this moment I feel that I must reread the whole of my manuscript before even trying to write another draft of that after-word.
The above-mentioned Don Slaikjer had come to drive me to a[n] ACLU garden party where I had agreed to speak. Oh, those liberals who think it indecent to mention and show interest in somebody’s racial background—saying that, “All that matters is what people really are,” and, “Why can’t you take people as you find them, without digging into their past history?” Some of the Jews present didn’t like it at all when I said that I had encountered very little anti-Semitism among non-Nazi Germans during the pre-Hitler period, but one old Jew agreed with me. Two others, in particular, reprimanded me, saying that the Germans had always persecuted the Jews. So, when it came my turn to be asked about my attitude to antigays, I said firmly that I was far more interested in justice than in being loved, that I could very well understand that some people just naturally feel a distaste for being with gays, that we are just another minority, a part of nature with a right to existence—“We don’t think we’re the chosen people,” I nastily added. I had a feeling that I left a faint stink behind me, though I was profusely thanked by many.
Heard from Joanne Carson that Truman got so drunk before leaving for New York and the Smithers clinic38 that they wouldn’t let him board the plane. He was persuaded to do so next day, but then, on arrival, he went to his apartment, not the clinic, and Jack Dunphy was unable to cope with him. He is at Smithers now, apparently, and is committed to stay there for at least twenty-five days; but Joanne feels that he’ll most probably go right back on the bottle as soon as they let him out. Her reaction to this is to get weepingly, self-pityingly sick—her “Baby” (Truman) is responsible, but of course she loves him, etc.
October 24. Returning to this problem of the afterword—how has Swami’s death affected me, what difference has it made to my life?—this morning I get a kind of Zen feeling: why should there be any difference if he isn’t really dead, if he hasn’t really left us? Coming from worldly self-indulgent old me, this sounds merely heartless, but it mustn’t be forgotten that Swami himself said of Brahmananda, “After his passing away I felt no void.”
What I’m getting at is this—isn’t it much more to be expected that there will be no immediately apparent results—that life will go on much as ever, on the surface? Perhaps until I actually die, or at least become terminally ill?
Anyhow, I think I’ll postpone trying to write the afterword until I’ve talked to Don and read his notes and myself read through the manuscript again.
November 8. This is a period of great pressure. Don’s father seems to be dying, at last, and the whole problem of what to do with his mother is unsolved. She can’t be left alone because she is really gaga in many respects. And Ted can’t be relied on. He might flip at any time—just to duck out of any responsibility.
Then there are our projects:
Albert Marre who’s to direct our play is a prima donna and a bore and we may have to say definitely that we don’t want him to do it. But Rigby is terrified of this because he fears that then the Kramers, who are his backers, will drop it. Tomorrow his suggestions will arrive, and we shall have to make a decision, will we accept them or not. We fear that he will try to get all the homosexuality out of the play, for openers. He says it’s “dreary.”
The book of Don’s drawings and
our memories of his sitters seems to be definitely agreed on. Billy Abrahams, of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, wants to do it. This will be fun, perhaps, but an awful lot of work.
Then there’s a man named Dick Clements39 who’s prepared to pay us out of his own money to do a treatment of After Many a Summer, followed by a teleplay if he can get the backing. One’s always suspicious of these freelancers. But I guess we’ll have to talk to him, at least.
Then there’s my book on Swami, which I’m very very slowly beginning to revise. Ordinarily, this in itself would be quite enough to keep me at work all winter.
And, in the background, in case one should venture to relax, is the assurance that we can’t much longer escape an important earthquake in the area. There’s some kind of a mound or ridge or small hill which is steadily rising, right on the San Andreas Fault near Palmdale. One’s nerves are probably on the alert for this, all the time, even during sleep.
Am reading—you’d never guess—Borrow’s The Bible in Spain and loving it. It is astounding how his magic personality makes these very ordinary adventures so magic. Am also reading Flaubert’s travel diaries of his visit to Egypt.40 Which are so consciously literary by comparison, interesting but unmagical.
My darling, under tremendous strain, is wonderfully active. He draws, paints, goes to the gym, runs miles daily, and finds enough surplus energy for mice.41 Our relationship is indescribable—though I guess I must try to describe it someday. It has moments which seem to blend the highest camp with the highest love with the highest fun and delight.
I have various ailments, and yet I find it unbelievable that I am seventy-three. I don’t feel in the slightest prepared for death— whatever that means. A lot of the time I am so marvellously, calmly happy.
December 17. Jess Bachardy died in hospital on the morning of December 7. He had been in great discomfort and some pain, vomiting, unable to eat; but I don’t think there was any great agony. Don, Ted and I all happened to see him the night before— I, because Don’s car stalled right in front of the hospital and I had to drive in and pick him and Glade up. (This in itself was kind of weird, because the Fiat was so very much Jess’s cared-for creature, he always looked after it when it went out of order—so this stalling on the eve of his death and as near as it could possibly get to his deathbed was like the behavior of some faithful hound which knows when it is going to lose its master.) Both Don and I privately said a Ramakrishna prayer over him.