The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  In the 1960s, as in the 1920s and 1930s, happiness and good health continued to be proof to Isherwood of right living. Illness resulted from dishonesty, from being out of harmony with one’s true self. Ramakrishna and Swami Prabhavananda had replaced Homer Lane and his disciple John Layard (who taught Lane’s theories to Auden and Isherwood), and Isherwood had progressed to seeking spiritual liberation through their version of self-knowledge. According to one diary entry, what he admired most about Ramakrishna was his honesty, although he notes that Ramakrishna’s honesty is not transparent to everyone, because it sometimes takes an exaggerated form, which Isherwood identifies as camp:

  When Swami used to teach me that purity is telling the truth I used to think that this was, if anything, a rather convenient belief for me to have, because it meant that I didn’t have to be pure but only to refrain from lying about my impurity. Well, that’s the minimum or negative interpretation. But, thinking about it in relation to Ramakrishna, I saw this: that the greatness of Ramakrishna is not expressed by the fact that he was under all circumstances “pure.” No. And even if he was pure, that didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of anything. You always feel that about him—there was nothing that he might not have done—except one thing—tell a lie. . . .

  It’s funny that I, who am steeped in sex up to the eyebrows, can see quite clearly what Ramakrishna’s kind of purity is capable of, and that most people just can’t. I suppose it’s having been around Swami so much and understanding camp. I am privileged; far more than I realize, most of the time.36

  In The World in the Evening, Isherwood’s character Charles Kennedy explains, “You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.”37

  When relations were bad with Bachardy, Isherwood didn’t like to write in his diary at all, preferring silence to the risk of prevarication or of articulating indelibly a situation he hoped might improve. In June 1963, struggling to cope with the current lover constantly around the house, he records: “Diary keeping at this time seems definitely counterindicated. . . . Part of Don wants to run me right off the range and wreck our home beyond repair; part wants to keep on and see how things work out.”38

  Isherwood, too, was waiting to see how things would work out, and he was barely coping. He could not feel content with his longstanding refusal to come more closely under Swami’s tutelage if his life at home as a householder devotee was the failure that his misery suggested it must be. And he was in no position to proclaim his shaky beliefs to anyone else, or even to read aloud to them from holy texts. And so his voice deserted him in the temple, and at home his diary-writing pen fell silent. The ménage à trois with Bachardy’s lover certainly wasn’t working: “Have now definitely said I don’t want to have to meet [him] any more. I should never have done so in the first place. That kind of thing is messy and was messy in the days of Lord Byron, and always will be messy. Unless one simply doesn’t give a shit.”39 He continued to be racked by jealousy: “Jealousy: Not what they do together sexually. But the thought of their waking in the morning, little pats and squeezes, jokes, talk through the open doorway of the bathroom. For that one could kill.”40 A few months later, he had to tell Bachardy again and more fully just how he felt, because nothing had changed.

  Airing his feelings strengthened Isherwood, but however much he suffered, he was little interested in advice. From Swami, he wanted information about his spirit and some understanding of what was going to happen to him when he died; he did not want a set of rules on how to behave. As he told Gerald Heard:

  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, 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.41

  However devoted Isherwood was to Swami, he often felt cramped and frowned upon by the congregation. He had many individual friends in it, but, for Isherwood, whenever individuals gathered into a group, they were transformed—into a crowd, a mob, something alien and impenetrable with which he could have no individual rapport, no private conversation. Groups imply a norm; Isherwood was temperamentally disposed to deviate from any norm, to make an exception of himself. He was enormously uncomfortable with the group trip to India. He made his speeches in front of the crowds at the eternal sessions of the Parliament of Religions, ate the mass meals seated on the floor in the halls and under the vast temporary canopies, but one day, exhausted by a traveller’s tummy, he was suddenly revolted by what he had been saying and by the way he had been conforming to what others expected of him. He felt an urgent need to express who he really was:

  Just before going to bed, I started to get the gripes and shits. I shivered a lot and couldn’t sleep all night. Lying awake in the dark, I was swept by gusts of furious resentment—against India, against being pushed around, even against Swami himself. I resolved to tell him that I refuse ever again to appear in the temple or anywhere else and talk about God. Part of this resolve is quite valid; I do think that when I give these God lectures it is Sunday religion in the worst sense. As long as I quite unashamed ly get drunk, have sex, and write books like A Single Man, I simply cannot appear before people as a sort of lay minister. The inevitable result must be that my ordinary life becomes divided and untruthful. Or rather, in the end, the only truth left is in my drunkenness, my sex, and my art, not in my religion. For me religion must be quite private as far as I’m publicly concerned. I can still write about it informatively, but I must not appear before people on a platform as a living witness and example.42

  Like Bachardy forcing Isherwood to acknowledge his lovers, Isher-wood insisted that Swami recognize his whole personality, all his inclinations and all his loyalties. How could he accept Swami’s assurance that he was saved unless Swami knew exactly who he was? In the diary, Isherwood tells how he built up to a confrontation with Swami as to a climactic moment in a play. “I realized I was going to make a scene and I needed time to rehearse it.” He had to exaggerate his feelings in order to bring home to Swami just how strongly he felt. “Some instinct told me that this ultimatum must be drastic or it would make no impression at all.” It was, in this sense, camp, and although it was generated by deeply serious feelings, it was also very funny:

  “. . . the Ramakrishna Math is coming between me and God. I can’t belong to any kind of institution. Because I’m not respectable—. . .

  “I can’t stand up on Sundays in nice clothes and talk about God. I feel like a prostitute. I’ve felt like that after all of these meetings of the parliament, when I’ve spoken. . . . I knew this was going to happen. I should never have agreed to come to India. After I promised you I’d come, I used to wake up every morning, feeling awful—

  “. . . the first time I prostrated before you, that was a great moment in my life. It really meant something tremendous to me, to want to bow down before another human being. And here I’ve been making pranams to everyone. . . . And it’s just taking all the significance out of doing it—” . . . I felt that everybody knew a scene was taking place. I felt that I was acting hysterically. Indeed, I couldn’t have looked Swami in the eye while I was saying all this. But I didn’t have to, because I was wearing . . . dark glasses. . . .43

  Exaggerating his feelings was a way of making them seem justified. It concealed his self-consciousness and his guilt about failing to live up to what Swami hoped for from him. And it freed him from any further constraints on his behavior. By Swami’s lights, it would always remain possible for Isherwood to become the saint who could sit on the dais and give the lecture without needing to lie about or co
nceal an unacceptable personal life. Well into the 1970s, Swami occasionally teased Isherwood about the possibility of returning to the monastery, and Isherwood several times records this in the diary. But Isherwood had decided when he left the monastery during World War II that he could never follow such a strict and narrow path. He shaped the conclusion to Prater Violet around this decision, and he reaffirmed it at several cruxes later in his life. He moved among many worlds, pursued many relationships, and explored many imaginary alternatives in his fiction. As a writer, and simply as a human being, he wished to remain available to all varieties of experience.

  As Isherwood must have known he would, Swami met the premeditated tantrum with unconditional love, despite bewilderment and wounded feelings: “Swami had barely understood a word. He was quite dismayed. ‘I don’t want to lose you, Chris,’ he said. I told him there was absolutely no question of that. That I loved him as much as ever. That this had nothing to do with him. But still he didn’t understand. He looked at me with hurt brown eyes . . .”44 The dialogue might have been spoken between lovers, for instance, between Isherwood and Bachardy. But then Swami himself fell ill, as Isherwood reported in the diary:

  Swami . . . in bed with a cough; very rumpled and sad. . . . The country dust is blamed; but I got a strong impression (later confirmed by Prema) that the sickness has a lot to do with me. This is perhaps the only respect in which Swami can be described as sly; he is absolutely capable of getting sick to make you feel guilty, though I doubt if he realizes this—and it is purely instinctive.45

  Swami’s body now loaned itself to the playacting, building their confrontation up to melodrama and reducing it to comedy at the same time. His illness, like Isherwood’s illness, is a bodily manifestation of camp—the psyche’s exaggerated, theatrical account of its distress.

  Underneath the playacting was something in which both Isherwood and Swami wholeheartedly believed and which was far more important to either of them than who would win this immediate power struggle. They loved one another, and beyond—or above this—they loved Ramakrishna and believed in the possibility of spiritual liberation. Their egos battled, but on a higher level, they were at one. In the end, it didn’t matter whether Isherwood made the speeches or the pranams. Such actions occur only in the “as if ” world of maya, the cosmic illusion of material reality which veils Brahman. Susan Sontag once wrote, “Camp sees everything in quotes.”46 In a sense, maya itself is camp—it is the “as if ” world—all in quotes. The dynamic at work between Swami and Isherwood was also at work between Isherwood and Bachardy: they both believed in their relationship, their love, over and above any relationships with others; their egos battled, but they were at one. This is what Bachardy realized and confided in Isherwood when he told him the bond between them was a mystical one that could not be broken by other love affairs. And Isherwood was to offer Bachardy the same unconditional love that Swami offered him, the same freedom to do almost entirely as he pleased, whatever suffering it caused, rather than break this bond between them.

  Through the mid-1960s, Isherwood and Bachardy lived apart a great deal of the time, with Bachardy in New York or London for long spells. But their relationship survived. In his diaries Isherwood from time to time remarks upon the sense in which their day-today life together was camp, a symbolic enactment of something sacred and hidden, something veiled in the safety and humor of exaggeration, yet made evident by it. It was a world for which no words existed, but its speechless, creaturely innocence and warmth was partly embodied in the identities they adopted for themselves as animals: Isherwood a stubborn, hardworking old horse, Bachardy a skittish, needy kitten of irresistible softness and with sharp claws. As Bachardy departed at the beginning of 1965, after spending the Christmas period in Santa Monica, Isherwood records, “I told him that this short time together has been the best I have ever had with him. He said, ‘Lately I’ve been thinking that the Animals haven’t seen anything yet; they still haven’t had their golden age.’ I said, ‘They’d better hurry.’”47

  Meanwhile, Isherwood occupied himself with other friends and with money-making film jobs. Through the mid-1960s, he worked for Tony Richardson on scripts for The Loved One, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Sailor from Gibraltar. Each of Richardson’s projects generated a new and complicated domestic ménage, with family, friends, and co-workers crammed into a rented star’s house in Los Angeles, a remote farm, a yacht, or, when breaking from work, a villa in the South of France. Isherwood was fascinated by these households and by Richardson’s many partners of both sexes, although he never allowed himself to be fully drawn into the circle. His diaries observe how Richardson’s obsessive genius for manipulation produced plays and films of psychological intensity and sensual revelation, and how destructive this genius could be when set loose upon friends and acquaintances. Wary though he was of Richardson, Isherwood always accepted his offers of work, just as he had done earlier with Charles Laughton when Laughton was aging, mortally ill, surrounded by a retinue of young male chauffeurs, masseuses, bed companions, and a wife who wished to demonstrate that she was more important than any of them.

  A third gifted Englishman, David Hockney, settled in Los Angeles in 1964. His paintings of light-struck swimming pools, palm trees, and beautiful young male bodies reveal clearly enough some of the things which drew him, just as they drew the others. Hockney was young enough to have grown up in the privation of wartime England, as well as its cold, dark climate. There was money in America, in the form of patronage and teaching posts, for example; and plenty—of just about everything—meant that projects could be accomplished quickly. Even in 1961, when he was living in England with Bachardy, Isherwood had been struck there by, “The utter fatalistic patience of everyone when a line has to be formed or a train or a bus waited for. . . . You feel the wartime mentality still very strongly here. . . .”48 Hockney loved to work, and he was ambitious. For him, as for Isherwood, the hedonism and glamor of southern California were a subject as well as a way of life, and he retained a strong degree of analytical detachment. Even during the trips they occasionally made together, Isherwood describes Hockney carrying a camera. Isherwood grew to love and admire him without qualification, for his energy and his impulse to experiment, and for his natural, unstinting generosity.

  In 1965, Isherwood began teaching again, this time at UCLA where he was Regents’ Professor and, in 1966, visiting professor. He had always relished the animal spirits at large on the Californian campuses; he felt invigorated by his students, and he spent large amounts of time reading and commenting on their work. In almost every class he taught, at least one talented young man was writing about his homosexual yearnings and handing his work to Isherwood as a step toward coming out. But Isherwood’s colleagues tended to be conservative, and they brought out his toothed hatred of bourgeois married life. After one long evening spent among professors and their wives early in the decade, he wrote:

  There weren’t enough martinis, there wasn’t enough food, and there were too many guests. I don’t think heterosexual parties are workable, anyhow, just as conversation groups. . . . And, oh dear, the academic atmosphere with its prissy caution! . . .

  Sure, I am prejudiced, but I feel always more strongly how ignoble marriage usually is. How it drags down and shackles and degrades. . . . The squalid little shop, the little business premises you have to open, and the deadly social pattern which is then imposed on you —of dragging some dowdy little frump of a woman all around with you, wherever you go, for the next forty years. Not to mention the kids. It is a miserable compromise for the man, and he is apt to punish the woman for having blackmailed him into it.49

  Isherwood had close friendships with women writers, artists, designers, and film stars, but he was less comfortable with women who chose a domestic role over a career or a serious personal occupation. Not only was he distressed by the unequal enslavement to financial necessity, but also he sensed in housewives a repressed bitterness. They seemed unable to avoid
turning sacrifices made for their husbands’ professional success into longterm silent accusations, such as his mother might have lodged against him: that men failed to recognize or care how much women were denying themselves. Committed as he was to the private life and to the inner life he felt it should nourish, Isherwood didn’t believe it was necessary for either party to remain personally unfulfilled.

  There were many contrasts to square faculty get-togethers. He still enjoyed the well-protected gay party scene in Hollywood; even though he had already found the boy with whom he wanted to spend his life, he sometimes attended playwright Jerry Lawrence’s all-male evenings peopled by good-looking young would-be actors. The diaries also wryly report on many star parties. And at the height of the sixties, he describes a gallery opening for Bachardy which was successful to the point of hysteria, with actors, directors, playwrights, and monks cramming in, and art work flying out:

  Anne Baxter started the buying. She rushed across the room into Jo [Masselink]’s arms screaming, with a kind of tearful triumph, “I’ve bought two!” Vidya was there, viewing the scene with the amused world-weariness of a swami about to depart forever into the depths of India . . . and Elsa Lanchester looking almost ladylike in a dark dress, gracious and bitchy-grand; and Jennifer Selznick in white, about to leave alone to drive to Big Sur . . . and Dan[a] Woodbury quite drunk, saying it was a shame Rex [Evans] didn’t exhibit Don’s nudes of him, and then taking a fancy to Jim [Charlton] and leaving with him; and Gerald Heard and Michael [Barrie], bitchily arriving dead on time . . . and old King Vidor being encouraged by his wife to paint again; and John Houseman, a little worried because he liked Don’s work so much, almost more than he felt he should; and Cukor sly but friendly, planning a memorial supper for Maugham . . . and Bill Inge terribly depressed about his life, sitting glum like a bankrupt on a couch. . . .50