When Roosevelt died, I was sad but thought, Goody, we’ll get the day off from the studio.550 This was quite different. Just disgusted horror. When I think of it, I keep being reminded of that time in Calcutta when, in the so-called first-class hotel, some kind of black slime began to ooze out from under the toilet. Also, there was the feeling—journalistic as it may sound to say this—that some sort of nationwide evil was functioning. It was something we had all done with our hate.
Aldous seemed an anticlimax; I suppose partly because it wasn’t our fault. He died without pain. At the end he asked for lysergic acid, and was given it. His mind was quite clear. The day before, he had finished and revised an article on Shakespeare and religion which Laura says is very good.
On the following Sunday, Laura and Rose, Maria’s sister,551 and Maria’s mother,552 and Rose’s son Siggy,553 and Matthew Huxley and Peggy Kiskadden, and a few others including me, all went for a walk down toward the reservoir—instead of having a funeral. It was Matthew’s idea. Peggy and I were polite but barely spoke.
I’m just writing down anything that occurs to me. . . .
Heard at last, this morning, that Methuen’s are taking my novel; but this was only from the agent. Meanwhile, the day before yesterday, I finished revising Ramakrishna and His Disciples, and shall take it up to the center tomorrow, just to get it out of the house. I know it’s not really right, yet, but I can’t do any more.
Don feels the president’s death passionately. He really burns with despair. This is partly because he is feeling miserable anyway. He can’t paint. And (I suspect) Henry is either away or they have had a quarrel. But I refuse to ask him about this.
I keep thinking: Well, the books are done now. Maybe I shall die soon, as the colored girl in New York said I would. If not, let’s wait anyhow till this Indian horror is over, and then see what gives. Life goes on, or stops. If it goes on, it will change for me.
December 11. Beginning of the countdown. A week from today we are off.
The usual sloth which follows finishing books. Now that I have got Ramakrishna and His Disciples out of the house, and there is nothing more to be done about A Single Man, I can hardly bring myself even to write a postcard, or to go to the gym or to walk on the beach, though the weather is heavenly, though cool. (Looking out the window, I feel, like the man in the Icelandic saga, “Beautiful is the hillside—I will not go!”554)
This morning, a blow. Roger Angell of The New Yorker has refused A Single Man, either whole or in part. “While I can believe this novel, I don’t find it particularly interesting.”
Nothing yet from Methuen.
Yesterday evening, we went up to see Laura Huxley and Virginia Pfeiffer. They are really nice, both of them; and now I feel our friendship will survive Aldous’s death and increase in strength. Also the children are enchanting. The only children, Don says, he has ever liked. Went over the proofs of Aldous’s last article (for Show Magazine). If some frog like Romain Rolland were writing his life, I’ll bet the book would conclude, “The day before he died, he wrote the last word of his last essay. It was— Shakespeare.”555 (Actually Aldous dictated the second half of the article, in a ghostly scratchy voice which we listened to on tape. Don said that, listening to it, you felt the great barrier between him and Laura; she sounded like a journalist.) But Laura spoke beautifully about Aldous, saying how ridiculous it was to suggest that his life was unhappy; he was always so full of enthusiasm. Virginia criticized Stephen’s article about him.556 (So did Gavin.) Stephen says that Aldous never got over Maria’s death and the burning of his house. The publisher had suggested John Lehmann should write the biography. Laura asked me what I thought of the idea, so I had to tell her that John disbelieves in, and is aggressive toward[,] the metaphysical beliefs which Aldous held. All he would describe would be a clever young intellectual who later was corrupted by Hollywood and went astray after spooks.
December 16. Gore says that once he was at a horse show with Kennedy, sitting beside him. He remarked to Kennedy, “How easy it would be for someone to take a shot at you—and, of course, if they did, they’d be certain to hit me.” Kennedy grinned and said, “That’d be no loss.” Gore thinks that Kennedy was beginning to lose his grip at the time when he was killed. After the death of his son,557 he became subject to crying jags; and he seemed to be losing his confidence that he could succeed in getting people to see things his way. Gore approves of Johnson but feels sure he won’t live through his full term if reelected; he will have another heart attack.558 Don is in New York. Talked to on the phone last night, he was very despondent. Why on earth had he come there, he wondered. And he finds Marguerite’s apartment so depressing.
Woke up in a big flap this morning; travel-dread gripping me. So, following Gavin’s advice, I have started taking Librium in advance. The idea is that I shall be riding high before the take-off. So far, it doesn’t make me sleepy, like Miltown.
Dorothy (who moves in here on Friday to keep house) said, as we embraced, “For God’s sake be careful!” I know she is having big death presentiments. “You do the travelling and I’ll do the praying,” she said.
This afternoon, I had a sudden desire for an ice-cream cone. This sucked the detachable plate out of position, and, before I could stop myself, I was munching it up. So now I have to fly to Dr. Stevens first thing in the morning. I strongly suspect the diencephalon of trying to give me appendicitis[,] because I swallowed the jagged corner of the plastic backing.
(What follows is transcribed from a pocket diary I kept during the trip. I should first say that we took off, as planned, on the morning of December 18 and arrived in Tokyo on the evening of the 19th, because you lose a day crossing the date line.)
It is no annihilating condemnation of the devotees—about fifty of whom had come to the airport to see us off—to say that they would have felt somehow fulfilled if our plane had burst into flames on take-off, before their eyes. They had built up such an emotional pressure that no other kind of orgasm could have quite relieved it. The parting was like a funeral which is so boring and hammy and dragged out that you are glad to be one of the corpses. Anything rather than have to go home with the other mourners afterwards!
Swami wouldn’t leave until Franklin [Knight] arrived; he had had to park the car which brought the boys from Trabuco. The fact that it was he who arrived last seemed to dramatize his role as The Guilty One, and his farewell from Swami was a sort of public act of forgiveness. He was terribly embarrassed, with all of us watching—especially all those [women] who know what he did.559
So we got into the plane at last and it took off. Swami said, “To think that all this is Brahman, and nobody realizes it!” I sat squeezed between him and Krishna; the Japan Air Line seats are as close together as ever. Despite my holy environment, I couldn’t help dwelling on the delicious doings on the couch, yesterday afternoon. I didn’t even feel ashamed that I was doing so. It was beautiful.
A fierce hot breeze blowing through the Honolulu airport. People looking impatient of their heavy loveless leis. Then the long long flight northwestward, passing from Wednesday to Thursday through the almost infinitely extended afternoon, with the red sun dying so slowly over the ocean cloudfield. Tried to read Cather’s Song of the Lark, but could concentrate only on Esquire magazine articles—Calder Willingham’s reply to Mailer; Mailer’s threats to write a novel; Gore on Tarzan of the Apes.560 Very good food on the plane. Swami took a drink, but I refused; determined to keep this trip dry. In the evening, there were steaks. When Swami and Krishna said they couldn’t eat them, they were given stuffed chicken from the first class.
December 20. At the Hotel Nikkatsu. Last night I slept more than ten hours. Swami slept badly and has spent most of today in bed.
Today, for the first time, I felt a real intimacy with Krishna as we shopped and wandered around Tokyo. He bought a camera and a tape recorder. I made an excuse to stay browsing in the Jena bookstore because I wanted to look at the U.S. physique magazines. The
re was a swarm of Japanese teenage boys giggling around them.
There’s a blizzard up north and the atmosphere is bracingly cold. I feel wonderful. Wore my new painful shoes to stretch them.
The city is being torn apart for the 1964 Olympics. Deep crevasses in the streets where a subway system is being put in. The workers still wear cloven socks and baggy knickerbockers, and you still see tiny old women in trousers toting huge loads of bricks. The traffic is as mad as ever. And the air around the palace is just as blue. And the dollhouse bars in the narrow lanes are just as inviting. I would like to live in this town. All the stores are sparkling with Christmas—more or less of a camp here, presumably, and for that very reason far more attractive than in the States.
December 21. Swami still feels unwell, fears kidney trouble, has fever and pains. He says he’d go right back to California if it wasn’t for all the people who’d be disappointed.
I don’t feel anything about anything, particularly; no doubt because of the Librium. If this is how “ordinary” people feel, well, good for them.
A brisk walk with Krishna, who slyly admitted he wanted to get a plug of some type for his recorder. His shopping has an air of juvenile naughtiness. We found the plug and then peeked into the Imperial Hotel. I felt a wave of sentiment for the old place. Wystan and I first saw it in 1938,561 and my memory clings to an improbably symbolic tableau: under a chandelier (which certainly isn’t there nowadays though that in itself proves nothing) stand two figures in uniform, a Japanese officer and a Nazi gauleiter; in fact, The Axis. As I regard them, the chandelier begins to sway— and this is my very first earthquake!
The Japanese genius for life is expressed by the perfectly harmonized tone and texture of blue doors and off-white ceramic in the men’s room at the Tokyo airport. But the Air India plane is crowded and shabby. There is also something squalid in the fact that it goes all the way from here to New York. Unchic.
A five-hour delay in awful Kowloon, with its bright trashy cleaned-up slums. Then the plane was filled so full that I thought we’d never get off the ground; most of them disembarked again at Bangkok. The Calcutta airport in the dead of night. Swamis, flower garlands, pranams, namaskars. Prema and Arup.
As we drove through the empty lanes and streets to the Math, I felt a magic begin to work. You both smell and feel the strange perfumed softness of India. Two men seated before a charcoal pot at the roadside. A booth, brilliantly bright and noisy, in which a kirtan was being held. People of the dust. Houses of the dust. Dust to dust.
December 22. Belur Math is far more delightful than I’d remembered it. The light is so soft.
At three-thirty this afternoon, the grounds are crowded. The people just sit on the grass or peer into the temples. The strollers don’t embarrass the worshippers or vice versa. Some of the women are in very bright saris. All kinds of craft pass along the swiftly flowing river; small steamers, high-prowed barges, boats with huge square sails like junks, galleys rowed by standing oarsmen which look as if they were straight out of Cleopatra’s Egypt.
Soft, soft brown, these people. Prema loves them. Says he never wants to go back to Hollywood. Arup isn’t so charmed.
Swami, enthroned in Shankarananda’s former room, seems like the head of the whole order562—more kingly, gracious and assured than any of the others. He showed us that exact spot—on the upper balcony outside his room—where he first met Maharaj. Swami had been looking into Vivekananda’s room, next door, and Maharaj said to him, “Haven’t I seen you before?” (Which, incidentally, was exactly what Holy Mother said to him when he met her as a young boy.) Swami told Maharaj, no, they hadn’t met. Then Maharaj told him, “Take off my socks,” and he asked, “Can you massage my feet?”
A small black cow walks by as I write this, sitting under a tree. Various groups shoo it away. They are not respectful at all. Ah, the horizontal evening light; it makes the pink and yellow houses on the opposite shore look like gaily painted toys. Children play shouting around the porch of the temple of Maharaj. The factory chimneys are old-fashioned and not ugly. Sitting on the grass, under this tree, I am almost absurdly in the midst of India; yet quite quite isolated.
I am staying at the guesthouse, just outside the compound, along with Nikhilananda’s party. Nikhilananda and Prabhavananda both eat with us. I foresee friction between them. A huge vegetarian lunch. Now that I’ve cut out liquor, my appetite is enormous.
Later—because at that point I was stung by several red ants and had to get up off the grass. . . . My room in the guesthouse is bare but clean, with its own bathroom. You are brought buckets of hot water to slosh over yourself and then shower with cold from a shower. It all floods over the floor, and in the morning you lock the door between bedroom and bathroom and open the outer door of the bathroom so the boy can come in and clean it. Many such precautions against theft; when the girls from Santa Barbara were over here, one of them had her clothes stolen through the window by means of some kind of a fishing pole.
The door of my bedroom is protected by a bolt like a Tower of London dungeon’s, with a huge padlock. Also, you can bar it with a wooden bar from inside. I take a peculiar pleasure in doing this, not because I fear midnight intruders but because the bar gives me a sense of snug individuality in the midst of all these surrounding millions of people. It is very snug to be barred in, and then get inside the mosquito curtains into bed, and read.
Nikhilananda’s party consists of: the Countess Colloredo, who is British-American, rich and known as Nishta (Nikhilananda, who is a fearful snob, always calls her “Countess”), she acts as his secretary-hostess; Mrs. Beckmann, a timid rather sweet woman, who is the widow of the painter Max Beckmann; Chester Carlson, who is the president of Nikhilananda’s New York Vedanta Society and has invented some kind of process for duplicating manuscripts which is used everywhere;563 Al Winslow, a young doctor, maybe queer, who blinks a lot and is utterly Nikhilananda’s slave. They are rather like characters in Forster.
To vespers with Prema and one of his special buddies, the young and dramatically handsome Swami Aranyananda.564 The singing was even more thrilling than I’d remembered. Prema is mad because someone here has prepared a list of all the swamis and brahmacharis of the order, omitting the American ones, as though they didn’t count! (I mean, the American brahmacharis.)
I have to sit next to Nikhilananda at meals, which I hate. He embarrasses me by making conversation. His face is ravaged with nerves. Yet he is admirably opposed to the Indian weaknesses; fatalism, love of chatter, and indifference to social abuses. He bullies Al Winslow and the countess with an arrogance which I have noticed already in several of the swamis—racial aggression toward the Westerner?
This time I am playing it very broad with pranams. As an elderly man, I’m not expected to show such respect to the young swamis, but I do it anyway. (My kind of aggression.) And I have to jump backwards every now and then to prevent someone doing it to me!
Up on the roof after supper. The sooty smoky night air. Plenty of mosquitoes. Air raid sirens go off at irregular intervals from the nearby factories, for no special reason.
December 23. Woke feeling wonderful, and did some exercises. No more Librium. Unicap vitamins. Still eating too much.
Nikhilananda is an anxious egotist. His behavior jars on Swami, though they say very little directly to each other. Swami said rather wistfully to me, “I can’t make conversation.” I think he was afraid Nikhilananda would impress me. This kind of jealousy is his “last infirmity.”
Visited Swami Madhavananda this morning. He was sitting up in bed, solemn with sickness, in his flapped cap. I cannot feel drawn to him or even respectful of his holiness. He just seems sulky.
Prema and I walked down to the little Howrah post office565 which is just outside the Math gates. Prema was grimly determined to get his letters registered there—and, by God, he did too— despite all those brown pushing hands with their letters. No one had the least sense of obligation to stand in line and take tur
ns. I think Prema was bent on proving that he can live in India on Indian terms. This is very much part of his attitude toward the immediate future.
Al Winslow is tall, slim, wide assed, boyishly pretty and eager beaverish, with curly hair and a pale face dark ringed under the eyes. Mr. Carlson is middle-aged, but has the smile of a brainy boy, a boy inventor in fact. He can fix anything, from the plumbing to the electric light. He once took lysergic acid and saw a man’s face change into different faces belonging to different historic periods. I walked down with them to the college which is right next to the Math. We were welcomed by Swami Gokulananda, one of the Pious Pig type, who made me promise to speak to the students.
We had to climb over the gate, because the gates into the Math compound are locked during the afternoon and at night. Getting the gates opened is going to be a constant problem, as the guest-house is outside.
The wonderfulness of Prabhavananda is that he seems every bit as much himself here as he does in Hollywood. He doesn’t make any concession to the environment.
His room, like most of the rooms around here, has the glamor of Victorian Hindu; the funny old photographs and stuffed furniture. The Leggett House, in which both Prema and Arup are staying, has charming old fanlights of colored glass, bottle-green louvered shutters, doorhandles made in the shape of hands.
Great care must be taken to avoid getting your shoes stolen from outside the temple.
Mosquitoes not so bad as last time I was here; but they bite. Mylol is said to help.
Nishta is nice; a big woman, handsome and friendly toward me with a mannish good nature. Maybe she’s lesbian and has a thing with Mrs. Beckmann, who is certainly the most feminine of creatures.