The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  THE SIXTIES

  DIARIES, VOLUME TWO:

  1960-1969

  CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

  Edited and Introduced by Katherine Bucknell

  Foreword by Christopher hitchens

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Textual Note

  The Sixties

  August 27, 1960–December 31, 1969

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  Index

  Books by Christopher Isherwood

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  Why and when did we cease as a culture to divide time into reigns or epochs (“Colonial,” “Georgian,” and so forth) and begin to do so by decades? Very few decades really possess an identity, let alone an identity that “fits” the precise ten-year interlude. Thus, there were hardly any “forties” or “seventies”, whereas there really were, with a definitive definite article, “the thirties” and “the sixties”. And in both of these, albeit in different ways, Christopher Isherwood played an observant and a participant role.

  Decades are nonetheless ragged: the thirties probably start with the 1929 financial crash and end with the German invasion of France in 1940. The sixties proper don’t seriously begin until the Cuba crisis and then the Kennedy assassination, but they are still going on, in some ways, well into the mid-1970s. An emblematic book of the latter decade was Voices from the Crowd, a collection of essays against the bomb that came out in 1964 but had been provoked by the events of two years earlier. Among the contributors were Bertrand Russell, Philip Toynbee, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, and James Kirkup. One of them, Ray Gosling—then considered a literate voice of “the teenagers” —was very struck by the novel Christopher Isherwood had brought out that year: Down There on a Visit, and in particular by Christopher’s recorded reaction to the Munich crisis of 1938:

  E.M. went back to the country by a late afternoon train. Keeping up my mood of celebration, I had supper with B. at the flat. Since I was there last, B. has brought a big mirror and hung it in the bedroom. We drank whisky and then had sex in front of it. “Like actors in a blue movie,” B. said, “except that we’re both much more attractive.”

  But there was something cruel and tragic and desperate about the way we made love; as though we were fighting naked to the death. There was a sort of rage in both of us —perhaps simply rage that we are trapped here in September 1938—which we vented on each other. It wasn’t innocent fun, like the old times in Germany—and yet, just because it wasn’t—it was fiercely exciting. We satisfied each other absolutely, without the smallest sentiment, like a pair of animals.

  Having revered Isherwood as a radical oppositionist of the 1930s, the angry young Ray Gosling writing his piece—entitled “No Such Zone”—in 1964 felt that there was something rather escapist about this reaction. (He perhaps underestimated, as Isherwood never did, the usefulness of Eros as a means of warding off Thanatos.) Anyway, here is what Isherwood was writing on October 23, 1962, at the height of the crisis over the Cuban missiles and when the threat of actual annihilation seemed even more immediate than it had two dozen years previously. This time he was at the gym in California:

  If we are to be fried alive, it seems funny to be working out; and yet that’s precisely what one must do in a crisis, as I learned long ago, in 1938. I have also been prodded into getting on with both my novel and the Ramakrishna book today, and I have watered all the indoor plants. Now I must write to Frank Wiley and Glenn Porter, before I go to have supper with Gavin.

  Exceptional in point of its dating, this is otherwise very nearly a “typical” Isherwood sixties diary entry. (Though the type and style of “workout,” one is compelled to note, has altered or at any rate evolved since 1938.) But the themes are constant: a persistent register of anxiety about the outside world combined with a sort of fatalistic distancing from same, a permanent conscience about being behindhand with work, and a second-to-none commitment to friendship and socializing that forces one to wonder how he ever got any work done at all.

  Of course this summary of mine does not include the consistent, ever-renewing love and concern that Isherwood felt for his companion Don Bachardy, but that phenomenon is imbricated in and with every page of this diary, even when it is not explicitly so.

  Of the various types of “sixties” that were on offer—the political, the psychedelic, the black and ethnic or “identity” movements, the sexual, the newly uncensored musical and showbiz—Isherwood contrived to be a sort of quizzical Zelig at all of them. And yet, if you are a certain kind of British reader, you will not fail to notice that beneath all this hedonism and experiment there still remains a somewhat austere and self-reproaching English public-school man of the kind he’d sworn to escape,1 forever piously reproving his own backslidings, vowing to do more manly exercises—even when these involve the telling of japam rosary-beads—and (to annex a line of Auden’s) swearing to “concentrate more on my work.” In similar key, there are endless regrets about wasted time and especially about evenings squandered in drink and drunkenness. It’s often difficult to tell how hard on himself he’s being here, since unlike Byron he never itemizes his booze intake. On the sole occasion when I met him, at Marguerite Lamkin’s in Chester Square in the late 1970s, he sat with Don under the David Hockney painting of the two of them and appeared very lean and lucid. (That meeting led to a bewitching drawing by Don of my guest James Fenton. Incidentally, after the famous line that introduces his Berlin stories, it’s charming to notice how Isherwood observes that Hockney always carries a camera.)

  But then who else was around to notice that Aldous Huxley, who died on the same day in November 1963 as the assassination in Dallas, was being given regular doses of LSD to sweeten or to soften his end? Who else might have had a conversation with Mick Jagger, under the auspices of Tony Richardson, in the Australian outback, and elicited from him the gossip that the Beatles had abandoned the Maharishi after the guru had made a pass at one of them? (I wonder which one, don’t you?) And who else was still matter-of-factly saying “Jewboy” or “nigger,” depending entirely on how he happened to be feeling? Who else felt practically nothing at the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, refused to sign any petitions about Vietnam, and apparently didn’t even notice the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? This is an idio syncratic, unillusioned tour of the sixties that has few if any rivals.

  The dead-pan and matter-of-fact humor is also rather distanced, as though seen through a lens. Don reads in the paper that “Norman Mailer” has stabbed his wife and thinks he’s seeing the words “Arthur Miller,” which cause him to feel that Marilyn Monroe has been unfairly deprived of a mention: surely we are witnessing the birth of celebrity culture? Gore Vidal rings up and says: “Mole? Toad.” Even the famous Swami is not always treated with unmixed reverence, at one point scattering sacred Ganges water over his devotees “vigorously, as if he were ridding a room of flies with DDT.”

  If one could follow just two Isherwoodian threads through the labyrinth of this decade they would be (apart from the devotion to Don and the amazing willingness to put up with the Swami, and the slight weirdness of that “green flash” that he keeps on seeing at sunset out to sea) the agony of creative collaboration and the distinct but related hell of solitary literary effort. It is astonishing, for someone like myself who took such pleasure in the final production of Cabaret, to read of how bleak and sour were the original discussions with Auden and Chester Kallman, and how unpromising was the whole original scheme and many of its successive stages. Surely
the idea of a Berlin musical was “a natural.” Ah, but nothing of that sort does come “naturally,” and Isherwood was probably wise to understand that one only lives once but frets and worries enough for several lifetimes. His best maxim, taken from that other great English public-school and Cambridge queer “Morgan” Forster, was, “Get on with your own work: behave as if you were immortal.” These industriously maintained diaries, written at a time when many people were mistaking work for play and vice versa, and taking their own desires as realities, are at once a vindication of that Forsterian injunction and an illustration of its limitations.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Washington, D.C.

  May 30, 2009

  Introduction

  Christopher Isherwood had been pioneering the cultural trends of the 1960s ever since the 1930s. When Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley despaired of Europe’s future and took their pacifist vision to California in 1937, Isherwood soon followed them, and, emulating them at first, experimented during the 1940s and the 1950s with mysticism, Eastern religion, psychedelic drugs, and sexual freedom. As the black-and-white, buttoned-up Establishment of the post-war period was gradually overrun in the sixties by the Technicolor warmth of pop culture and youth on the march, he continued to lead the way in doing his own thing. He wanted not only to write well but also to live well. Yeats once argued that, “The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work”;2 Isherwood’s lifelong friend W. H. Auden retorted that “perfection is possible in neither”;3 but Isherwood never ceased trying for perfection in both. With great determination in the face of social disapproval and emotional difficulty, he forged a notably unconventional and, eventually, deeply happy personal life. At the heart of this volume are the intertwining stories of his continuing devotion to his Indian guru Swami Prabhavananda and his intimate and complex relationship with the American portrait painter Don Bachardy, who was thirty years his junior. If the 1960s was the decade of rebellious youth, the decade of the generation gap, Isherwood was living right on the gap. This diary begins on his fifty-sixth birthday, when Bachardy was only twenty-six and desperately trying to grow up. In a sense, Isherwood had to grow up all over again with him, and this pulled him all the more tightly into the central impulse of the time.

  These pages are thick with novel writing, script writing, college teaching, and Isherwood’s myriad friendships with the creative stars who shaped the sixties—Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, Leslie Caron, Julie Harris, David Hockney, Jennifer Jones, Hope Lange, Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Vanessa Redgrave, Tony Richardson, David Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and many others. His psychological insight often takes us right underneath the skin of his subjects, and in the background he unfolds, week by week, a concisely referenced sketch of the period. He records the mounting anxieties of the Cold War in Laos, Berlin, and Cuba, the end of the colonial age presaged by the Algerian war for independence, the space flight of Yuri Gagarin, the Kennedy–Nixon election, the eruption of assassinations and the burning of America’s inner cities, the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, the coming of Diggers, Hippies, Flower Children, Timothy Leary, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, the Summer of Love, the walk on the moon, and the changing fashions—for pointed winkle-picker shoes, minis, maxis, moustaches, Afros, the illustrations of Bouché, and the costume designs of Beaton.

  Isherwood began the new decade by completing his seventh novel, Down There on a Visit, about four earlier phases of his life when he was a tourist among the marginalized—eccentrics, neurotics, defective lovers, refugees—indulging himself in a long deliberation about possible modes of living. His title reflects a debt to Hans Castorp, the tubercular hero of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, who keeps saying on his arrival at the Sanatorium Berghof, “I am only up here on a visit.” Castorp stays for seven years, enchanted by his spiritual as well as by his physical condition. By 1960, Isherwood had lived with Bachardy for seven years, and with Down There on a Visit, he wrote himself out of possible alternative lives into the orderly and productive calm of his healthy present reality. He was a successful middle-aged writer, well-connected, widely admired, settled in his own house in Santa Monica with a young partner he adored, looked up to in his community as a part-time professor and literary personality. His geographical and spiritual wanderings were behind him. Since 1939, he had been a regular temple-goer at his local Vedanta Society, the Hindu congregation led by his guru Swami Prabhavananda. Isherwood was committed to his path. That year, he worked with Charles Laughton on a play about Socrates, and he taught at Los Angeles State College and at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Fellow writers like Auden and Truman Capote were to tell him Down There on a Visit was the best book he had ever written. Over the next decade, he would write two more novels and then turn away altogether from invention and fantasy to autobiography, writing only about real life.

  But a longlasting storm was about to break; Don Bachardy was preparing to make a bid for independence. In January 1961, he moved to London to study painting at the Slade. Although Isherwood joined him a few months later, their relationship entered a period of strain that was to evolve dramatically into repeating and intensifying crises. Over the next few years, Bachardy had debut exhibitions in London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere. He was courted on several levels by various different kinds of admirers, fell in and out of love, struggled to find his way forward as an artist, and felt more and more trapped by Isherwood’s self-confidence, Isherwood’s fame, Isherwood’s bossiness, Isherwood’s years.

  On June 10, 1961, in London, Isherwood records in his diary that Bachardy continues to seem “a sort of magic boy” as he had done since 1953: “I still feel that about him now and then. Yesterday evening, for example . . . he absolutely sparkled like a diamond. He seemed a creature of another kind, altogether.” But ten days later, Isherwood recognizes that while Bachardy needs bolstering as he prepares to launch his first-ever gallery show, he is constantly at risk of being sidelined by Isherwood’s presence. When Auden sat for Bachardy—for a work later acquired by the National Portrait Gallery—Auden talked over his head:

  Right now Don is drawing Wystan, who keeps talking to me as I write: Falstaff and Don Quixote are the only satisfying saints in literature, etc. etc. . . . I think [Don] would like me to go away for quite a bit of the time between now and his show, when he needs my moral support. It’s the old story: he can’t have any friends of his own as long as I’m around, because, even if he finds them, they take more interest in me as soon as we meet.4

  Bachardy could never fully participate in the lifelong conversation between these boyhood friends, however fond or well-disposed Auden may have felt toward him; yet he was riveted at the margin of the scene by the opportunity to witness and to portray Auden’s celebrated talent and extraordinary face. It was the same with many of Isherwood’s friends, and since Bachardy couldn’t risk sharing his own friends, he had to learn to hide them, an investment in duplicity with which he gradually became more and more uncomfortable. In New York six months later, for Bachardy’s second gallery debut, he and Isherwood were both made miserable by the cold, by the city’s hectic pace, by tight hotel quarters; Bachardy slammed a taxi door in Isherwood’s face, breaking the skin. Isherwood returned to California alone.

  Nevertheless, he knew that Bachardy remained the center of his life. He loved their house on Adelaide Drive and enjoyed being there alone for a while, but “the whole affair,” owning property, the routine of work and play, “would still have no reason to exist without him. He is the ultimate reason why it’s worthwhile bothering at all.”5 He was to write this sort of thing in his diary time and again in the years to come. Thus, Isherwood faced the greatest challenge of his personal life: to love Bachardy for Bachardy’s sake rather than for his own. This was the test of his maturity, and, in due course, he was to draw upon all his resources to meet it—his religion, his friends, his teaching, and his work
.

  When Bachardy returned from New York, Isherwood saw in him, “a reserve. He doesn’t seem so childishly open as before.”6 He also saw how hard it would be for Bachardy to go on painting now that the external goals of Slade course work and the first shows were behind him. They discussed creating a studio in the house so that he could do this in privacy. Some of the tension between them was sexual, although Isherwood is initially reticent about this in his diary. He had been the first to claim the right to have other partners, and he owed Bachardy the same freedom, but the practice caused them both considerable anguish as they struggled to find the terms on which it was possible in a relationship as intimate as theirs. Each wished to control what the other knew about him, but neither found it easy to settle on knowing only what the other wished to share. They were possessive and intuitive, and both drew their own conclusions with penetrating accuracy. As they grew older, Isherwood was to have fewer partners and Bachardy more; the changing dynamic between them called for continual and, for Isherwood, perhaps unexpected adjustments.

  Isherwood was Bachardy’s mentor and a father figure as well as his lover; like any child trying to break free from a parent, Bachardy still needed someone he could depend on, so even as he tried to establish his own autonomous identity, he clung to the old bond. In April 1962, Isherwood wrote: