Liberation by Christopher Isherwood Page B

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.
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    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.
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    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