Swami is concerned about [one of the monks], who is always getting sick. [The boy] says he sees “little people.” Swami says these are psychic phenomena on a very low plane; they often appear just before death.
Adrian Wolheim467 objects to work. Does one have to work to be spiritual, he asks. Swami tells him, all right, walk around all day thinking of God. But don’t expect to get anything to eat.
Swami said to me, “Just think, you might have been a swami by this time.” But then he added, as he has never done before, “But perhaps you are more useful like this.”
Franklin [Knight] says the doctor is impressed by the way Vedantists die.
The boys seemed really quite pleased to have had me there. I must go again soon. There are seven of them at the moment— Franklin (the only brahmachari), Eddie [Acebo] the Mexican boy, Len [Worton] the British ex-sailor, Tom Battle (shy and quiet), Adrian Wolheim (rather crazy and unlikely to stay long, he hitchhiked all around India), Bill Bergfeldt the sickly boy and Tony Eckstein, a little Jewish ex-marine whom everyone likes, he is hardworking, friendly and quite bright.
November 19 [Monday]. The last few days, the weather has switched to dry and bright, with strong gusts of wind drying up the hanging plants on the deck. At least it’s much more cheerful than the fog. This morning, at breakfast on the deck, I kept thinking that gloomy old we didn’t deserve this view. Except that we can be very amusing about our gloom. Don made me roar by saying, “The view from the brig.”
I dread Mexico, though. There will be ghastly scenes and the most tiresome confrontations. On the beach yesterday John Zeigel showed up and was eager to arrange to meet us down there during the holidays. This would be just what the undertaker ordered.
On Saturday night, I was having supper with Bart Johnson and a friend of his who teaches at the same school, [. . .]. We were talking about [Katherine Anne Porter’s] Ship of Fools, and [the friend] asked what did I think of her writing? I said, “With many writers, one can instantly say how you imagine them dressed, when they’re at work—I don’t mean, literally, but ideally, symbolically, judging from their style. I see Miss Porter taking a perfumed bath and then sitting in front of the mirror for an hour, fixing her hair and making up her face, and then putting on an exquisite, very low-cut evening gown without sleeves, and then elbow gloves, and then earrings and necklaces, and rings over her gloves—and then sitting down at her desk to write.”
I did a big swatch of work on the novel, Saturday. I am still excited about it; in fact, I sat up till nearly four, Saturday night, with Gavin, talking about it—which meant that I was too hungover to work yesterday. But it does seem to me almost infinitely promising; that is to say, it is a possible form for a masterpiece, if only I could write it like a master!
Don has started using color in his drawings. Not coloring them, but working with brush and pencil alternately.
November 20. A good day—perhaps the beginning of a new epoch. Castro has given way about the bombers,468 Kennedy has called off the blockade, the Chinese have suggested a cease-fire with withdrawal. True, this last is thought to be a trick, but still and all it is sort of good.
Last night, I drove down to Long Beach to see Glenn Porter. He is staying with three other sailors off the Princeton in a flea-trap apartment house on Daisy Avenue, just back from the oceanfront. When I got there the scene was crazy and rather wonderful. The cheerful Jewish sailor was making love to a girl on the couch, the married (or anyhow involved) sailor was watching his wife/girl combing her/his/their little daughter’s hair. The reckless Swedish sailor was getting drinks from the kitchen. And Glenn and I talked about Rilke! They had been terribly drunk the night before, had smashed the mirror in the living room and poured beer over people descending the stairs. No—that was the previous night, I guess—because Glenn told me that, on the Sunday morning, still terribly drunk, they had driven into town—the Swede driving at ninety all the way—and made it to the Vedanta Society where Glenn (not the others) had heard Vandanananda’s lecture. As we talked about this and other things, a cockroach ran across the floor and was killed by the Swede. When we left to go to supper, the married sailor gave me a carton of cigarettes. His wife/girlfriend is Hungarian and speaks German; when we returned, she came out and spoke to me in German, saying she hoped we could talk German to each other another time.
All this was so old-fashioned! The girls I saw around the place were real floozies from any play or film called The Fleet’s In. And Long Beach didn’t seem to have changed since the war. Blazing lights and big buildings along the beachfront and then miles and miles of dark tacky shut-up streets, until you get to the lighted artery of Pacific Ocean Highway.469
Glenn looked marvellously well and healthier, although he spent whole weeks inside the carrier not even seeing the ocean. He said at first you got claustrophobia; now he rather loves it. But he said, without the least sarcasm, “I find it a bit difficult to write, in that house,” and he also has to endure constant prodding from his buddies to get drunk and get girls. He is a strange boy. He says he hasn’t had sex for the past year. When he used to study at the Pasadena library, he often got so tense that he would go outside and climb a nearby building, but he could never get quite to the top, because there was an overhang! He assured me that he hadn’t talked much about me to his buddies, but the Jewish boy said he had, and added, “I was expecting a little guy with a notebook.”
Another perfect morning. I went on the beach and in the water.
November 22. Here’s my twenty-fourth Thanksgiving in this country. Very very much to be thankful for. Things couldn’t be going better at this particular moment. We are saved from atomic war in Cuba. The Chinese and Indians have ceased fighting, as of this morning, at least temporarily. Swami is Swami. Don is Don; and our life for the past three days has been most happy. We are both well, though both weighing more than we like—Don 142, me 151. Don did some really stunning work yesterday evening, though admittedly not in color, as he would have wished. I creep on with my novel, or novelette as I now suspect it to be, and I know there is something there. Also, we have this beautiful house—and about $34,000 in the bank—before taxes!
About Christmas in Mexico, I feel: let His will be done. If there is no good reason not to go, I will go, and just pray that it isn’t a disaster—or rather, pray that I will be able to take it if it is a disaster.
As for San Francisco, that still isn’t certain but I would look forward to it. And I would quite look forward to Australia, if that were to materialize.
Today is hazy with pale sunshine. Yesterday night was the worst coastal fog I can ever remember.
Saw Gerald yesterday. I asked him about his great phrase, “the novel written in protoplasm,” but he was vague, said it was somewhere in his handwritten material which Michael hasn’t yet revised or typed out. This led to further disclosures about Michael’s possessive ness. Because of it, Gerald isn’t sure if we can have our tape-recorded conversations together, opening the way for a memoir. If Michael is asked to do anything which isn’t entirely his project, he just puts it off sine die or “forgets” it.
We talked about morality. How nowadays people tend to think of religion as meaning only a set of ethical standards. I said I don’t go to Swami for ethics, but for spiritual reassurance. “Does God really exist? Can you promise me he does?” Not, “Ought I, or ought I not to act in the following way?” I feel this so strongly that I can quite imagine doing something of which I know Swami disapproves—but which I believe to be right, for me—and then going and telling him about it. That simply isn’t very important. Advice on how to act—my goodness, if you want that, you can get it from a best friend, a doctor, a bank manager.
What does matter is to make japam and pray.
Up at Vedanta Place, Swami has become a true Kshatriya.470 Not only are the Chinese to be run out of the whole area; he demands Tibet. And an all-out military alliance with America and England. I think he’ll be really disappointed if this truce lea
ds to peace . . . Well, there you are: that’s the other side of the coin. I disagree with Swami’s attitude, ethically; but what does it matter? Not the least bit. That’s not what our relationship is all about.
And shall I confess? Deep down—no, not deep, about halfway down—I do feel a certain satisfaction at Kennedy’s stand on Cuba, the temporary disadvantage to Soviet Russia, the folly of the Chinese, the involvement of India with “us.” Yes, I feel it—but oh, what infantile nonsense it all is, really! Early yesterday morning, the phone rang, and it was a cable from the London Sunday Times: would I write five hundred words on what is best and what is worst in the United States? I replied no (thank you); because, the moment you try to think this out, you find that it’s easy to say what is worst but when you get around to what is best, the United States doesn’t own, isn’t responsible for, any of it. And this is true of all countries.
Our plants seem to have survived the windstorm of a few days ago. The hanging redwood baskets on the deck are trailing profusely with that pale green delicate wispy plant (what is its name?) and the geraniums in their boxes are thriving, although one is broken, and the bottlebrush trees below the house seem all right.
November 27. Hazy sunshine, after two more days of sea-fog. Am in a winter mood, waiting for some little nudge of spring to get me moving again. Mexico is a problem. I feel sure it would be a mistake for both Don and me to go there together; there would certainly be friction. Don can’t stand the least discomfort of travel, any delay, any boredom—and all of it would get blamed [on] me. I wish he would go alone, but he says he doesn’t want to. I would be prepared to go, but Don says he can’t possibly stay here. I am making him sound tiresome, and of course he is; but this isn’t a fair statement of his problem. He wants out—not permanently, but for at least several months. I, on my side, have resolved not to be noble, because that’s the most annihilating kind of aggression. I will not “nobly” leave this house just for his convenience. If he wants out then he must be the one to get out. On the other hand, I am ready to go when there is something interesting to go to, like San Francisco or Australia.
None of this is as tragic as it sounds. We are still deeply fond of each other and I quite expect we shall go on living together, after a period of adjustment. Most of the freedom Don is looking for could actually be achieved right here, living with me. He doesn’t realize that yet. Okay, he can find it somewhere outside and then come back.
The day before yesterday, Frank Wiley came by with a shipmate [. . .]. They seem to be having a lot of fun together. You got a sense of the intensely provincial atmosphere of the carrier; they might have been two spinsters living in a nineteenth-century English village—a monosexual village, however. [The shipmate] was pleased, after several gins and bitters, because he still remembered to say “wall” instead of bulkhead. Two expressions, “out of phase” (out of whack), and “scuzzy” (spelling?) meaning horrible, tacky, a mess; used for example of girls.
Charles is being moved back home today. He protested violently against this; I suppose he thinks Elsa is planning to murder him. Scott Schubach told us this last night, we had dinner with him and his friend [. . .], a sweet little boy, whose face twitches. Scott is an incredible bore; he talked all evening about his lysergic acid experiences. He lives in this huge rambling house which is stuffed with antiques. He sleeps on a bed with goat feet (Venetian). Lots of classical columns, busts, inlaid cabinets, lattice work from casbahs, marble tables, Moorish cushions, drawings by [Hans] Erni, Khmer buddhas, etc., etc. He does most of the housework himself, and cooks. He must be very very rich.
On Saturday, Stanley Miron was down here to see his folks and brought with him the sweater of John Cowan’s which [someone] gave me and I left with Stanley when I was up in San Francisco. It is very tacky and moth-eaten. Don didn’t want me to wear it, feeling that there might be some kind of a curse on it, but I thought, after all, what harm did Johnny Cowan ever do or wish me? So I wore it yesterday.
Peter Quigley has written an article called “A Glimpse of Isherwood” for the Irish Times in Dublin. Here are two of the “glimpses.”
Medium short and still boyishly well proportioned, he cuts a workmanlike figure. With his trim haircut, California suntan and much laundered “fatigue” shirt and trousers Isherwood in his fifties looks more like a retired Rommel than a widely read author. . . .
At the foot of the steep driveway we stop again in the cold wind. He looks very much alone, standing with shoulders hunched and eyes peering out at the wintry light of a dying day from beneath the sun-bleached and bushy eyebrows which are characteristic of his late fifties.471
November 29. After these last dull days of fog, the wind got up last night and blew in terrific gusts. One of our geraniums has been broken off and I don’t think the T.V. antenna will stand up much longer.
Today Don is drawing Arthur Laurents who is here for a few days about movie work. He loathes this town and keeps saying so, sometimes amusingly, sometimes merely bitchily. He described a party at a producer’s house at which he got into a discussion with a girl about Dufy. “What other painters do you like,” she asked him, “I mean, in the same price bracket?” No one else who was listening seemed to find this at all funny, Arthur says.
Yesterday evening, when I went up to Vedanta Place, Swami brought up the subject of Don’s initiation. He is ready to do this quite soon, on December 18. I’m not sure how Don feels about it; maybe a little uneasy and scared of getting himself in too deep. All he tells me is that he doesn’t want to have to meditate on Ramakrishna. I assure him that Swami won’t insist on this.
We are still undecided about Mexico. I think Don wants to go and he can’t really understand why I don’t want to go with him. (That’s natural, because he obviously can’t be expected to understand how inevitable it is that he will make scenes, as soon as something on the journey doesn’t suit him.) And of course, as always, I feel cruel and selfish and start saying to myself why don’t I go and risk it?
Yesterday, I showed Don the first twenty-eight pages of this second draft of my new novel. He was far more impressed, even, than I had hoped. He made me feel that I have found a new approach altogether; that, as he put it, the writing itself is so interesting from page to page that you don’t even care what is going to happen. That’s marvellous and a great incentive to go on with the work, because I always feel that Don has a better nose than almost anyone I know. He sniffs out the least artifice or fudging. He was on his way out after reading it, and then he came back and embraced me and said, “I’m so proud of old Dub.”
What still bothers me very much, however, and makes me hesitate to go ahead, is the problem of plot. How much should there be? How entangled should William be with Charlotte, and with her son Colin? The point is, there are two strands of styles interwoven in this sort of writing—the lyric, sub specie aeternitatis thing which observes William like a wild creature, an antelope, with his daily habits and his whole symbolic meaning as a type, and then there is the mere plot approach, which ties this particular individual William up with this particular individual Charlotte and Colin. Too much of the second is death to the first.
The day before yesterday, I think it was, Florence Homolka died. I feel really sad about this. She was a bumbling tiresome clumsy creature, but sweet and kind and quite talented, and I had known her oh so long, right back into the Caskey era, when we used to go to her house for evenings with Chaplin, etc. She seems to have died quite suddenly, of what the radio said was a “respiratory ailment.”
November 30. To see Charles at the Cedars yesterday afternoon. Elsa wanted me to go, to influence him if possible to agree to come back to the house, which he has violently refused to do. When he was told I was coming, he said that he had something he wanted to talk to me about. He was sleepy and in pain but quite lucid. He said, “The preoccupation is with death, isn’t it?” What he really wanted to ask, though he didn’t put it directly, was whether or not I approved of his having seen the pr
iest. I told him I certainly did. He said he would like to see another priest, a better one, but he didn’t make it clear in what way better. I tried to tell him that it didn’t really make all that much difference if he got to see another priest or not. He should speak to God, ask for help. Because God is there. “I know,” Charles said. And then, either before or after this, he said that having seen the priest had already helped “quite considerably.” He kept dozing off and I was holding his hands and praying to Ramakrishna to help Charles through his suffering and dying. I even said, which I have never said before, “Do it for Brahmananda’s sake, for Vivekananda’s sake, for Prabhavananda’s sake,” and somehow this was “put into my mouth,” it seemed. All mixed up with the praying—which moved me and caused me to shed tears—were the caperings of the ego, whispering, “Look, look, look at me, I’m praying for Charles Laughton!” and then the ego said, “How wonderful if he would die, quite peacefully right now at this moment!” It is most important not to make these confessions about the ego as though they were horrifying. They are not—it is mere vanity to pretend that the ego doesn’t come along every step of the way; it is there with you like your sinus and its instructions are no more shocking than sneezing.
The really important question is, why should one pray to Ramakrishna for Charles? Does it do any good? Granted that Ramakrishna is “there,” available, only waiting to be asked, shouldn’t one simply tell Charles to ask him, or ask Christ, or whatever avatar he believes in? I must ask Swami about this when I see him next.
Coming out into the world of the healthy, on Hollywood Boulevard that evening, with the chilly wind making the Christmas decorations swing from their moorings, I must say it did seem most horribly important not to have cancer. Even hustlers without scores, shivering at corners and maybe needing even the price of supper—ah, how lucky they seemed!