The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Two evenings earlier, he and Bachardy had spent the evening at home with Allen Ginsberg and a few others:

  Everybody got high, and Ginsberg recorded our conversation and chanted Hindu chants, and [Peter] Orlovsky took off his woollen cap and let his long greasy hair fall over his shoulders and kept asking me if I ever had raped anyone, and the boy Stephen [Bornstein] unrolled a picture scroll he had made, under the influence of something or other, to illustrate the Bardo Thodol.51

  However willingly he explored the trends of the time, part of Isherwood always stood back, sometimes mocking, sometimes soberly assessing. In response to a request to endorse the Vietnam Summer antiwar project in 1967, he wrote in his diary:

  . . . the whole Vietnam antiwar movement is something I must keep away from . . . as a pacifist I must deny the rightness of every war, even the most apparently righteous ones. This war is too obviously unrighteous—indeed it is even politically deplorable. . . . Therefore objection to this war is primarily a political objection. . . . I believe Aldous would have agreed with me. And Gerald Heard.52

  The painful episode with Swami in India was to lead to another novel, Isherwood’s last, which he began writing in 1965, A Meeting by the River. It is a story of two brothers, a good one who becomes a Hindu monk and a bad one who tries to prevent him. The two brothers are modelled on various real life people, but both are, in a sense, also Isherwood. The “meeting” of the title is a meeting with himself, an exploration of his spiritual convictions and his human attachments embodied in two opposed character types. The bad brother, Patrick, walks away from the encounter with a sharpened appetite for the duplicitous life he was already leading; the good brother, Oliver, is illuminated by a vision of his late swami, which reassures him that both he and his brother are included in the swami’s love. Isherwood wrote in his diary when he was drafting the book:

  . . . the main action of the book is temptation—the temptation of any saint by any satan . . .

  The key line is when Oliver says that he was inviting Patrick to come and judge the swami. He has to have Patrick’s okay. He doesn’t ever get it of course. What he does get is a spiritual intervention by the swami himself, proving to him that Patrick “belongs” whether he likes it or not, knows it or not. And this, in its turn, is sort of campily confirmed by Patrick’s taking the dust of Oliver’s feet.53

  The formal show of respect to Oliver, who is now a swami himself, is a Hollywood gesture—extreme, slightly embarrassing; but the ritual act of devotion also expresses a true and innocent emotion struggling to life in the arch-villain Patrick.

  While he was still working on A Meeting by the River, Isherwood also began a book about his parents, a new kind of auto biography, which he eventually called Kathleen and Frank. In 1966, he travelled to Austria where he worked on a Christmas T.V. special about the song “Silent Night,” and he combined this with another trip to England, partly to review family papers that he wanted to use for the memoir. The memoir is the first in the trilogy of personal histories, or what he also called personal mythologies, which begins with the courtship and marriage of his parents during the reign of Queen Victoria and his father’s death in World War I, moves on, in Christopher and His Kind, to thirties Berlin and life on the run from the Nazis with his first serious lover, Heinz Neddermeyer, then concludes, in My Guru and His Disciple, with an account of his religious conversion in southern California and his life as a follower of Ramakrishna. Many authors turn to memoir in middle age, and perhaps this was the natural progression for Isherwood, but it is a striking coincidence that he turned away from fiction once and for all and became newly interested in the facts about who he was and how he came to be that way just as Broadway attempted to assign him permanently to a sexually neutral destiny as “Herr Issyvoo,” a stage figure based vaguely on the invented narrator in his own Berlin stories.

  Isherwood had attempted a Berlin musical with Auden and Chester Kallman, but he had nothing to do with Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, which opened on Broadway in November 1966, and he was never able to like it. Bachardy went to New York without him to see it and to attend, on November 28, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. Isherwood was delighted to be allowed to stay home in Santa Monica. But his diaries show his satisfaction when Cabaret proved to be a hit, even quoting from reviews. In fact, Cabaret changed Isherwood’s life. It provided him with significant income, boosted in 1972 by proceeds from the film, and it made him, willy-nilly, a celebrity. The musical won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Director, and it was a hit all over again in London when it opened in 1968 with Judi Dench in her first-ever singing role. Later, the film made Liza Minnelli a super star. On February 28, 1972, she was on the covers of both Time and Newsweek dressed as Sally Bowles; that March, the film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor (Joel Gray). “Herr Issyvoo” is still the “role” for which Isherwood is most widely recognized. But “Herr Issyvoo” had never been the real Christopher Isherwood. It was to be quite a task to reclaim his identity for himself.

  Early on, Isherwood had an insight that Kathleen and Frank was “not about my father and my mother, it’s about me. I mean, it is like an archaeological excavation. I dig into myself and find my father and my mother in me. I find all the figures of the past inside me, not outside.”54 But the more he discovered in their letters and diaries about what his parents actually thought and experienced, the more absorbed he became by them. It was lack of information about his father that had led Isherwood to devise in adolescence an imaginary father who fulfilled his own needs but left him at odds with the real world in which he must live:

  . . . I really didn’t know my father at all . . . the myth about him was created for my own private reasons—i.e., that I needed an anti-heroic hero to oppose to the official hero figure erected by the patriots of the period, who were my deadly enemies. . . . [C]ertain aspects of my father had to be suppressed, because they were disconcertingly square; e.g. his references in his letters to “real men” etc.55

  He now had materials that enabled him to pick apart his youthful myth, and so better understand himself as its maker. And he entirely rediscovered his mother, the figure who in his youth represented for him everything against which he wished to rebel. At one time, he had feared he would be swallowed up in her grief and her longing for the past, now he regretted his unkindness in not asking to read her diaries while she was still alive: “There all the while, in the drawers of her desk, lay the rows of little volumes of her master piece.”56 He explored with compassion every nuance of her relation ship with her selfish and demanding parents who nearly prevented her from marrying and having a life of her own. And he recognized in his grandmother, Emily Greene Machell Smith, “a great psychosomatic virtuoso who could produce high fevers, large swellings and mysterious rashes within the hour; her ailments were roles into which she threw herself with abandon.”57 His own subtle and neurotic temperament beautifully fitted into the family portrait, and so did the all-absorbing mutual fascination he shared with Bachardy. Moreover, the Victorian atmosphere of tasselled drapery and ferns which was the setting for his grandmother’s magnificent camp—a full-time activity for members of a newly rich class very much at its leisure —chimed revealingly with the vestiges of India-under-the-Raj that still clung to Swami’s more earthly self.

  Towards the end of 1967, Isherwood began writing a play of A Meeting by the River with Jim Bridges. He also began adapting for the stage Bernard Shaw’s story “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God,” which led to a fiery production in the age of Black Power. Then, in 1968, around the time that Hockney began working on his celebrated double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy, Bachardy began to work professionally as Isherwood’s co-writer, first on the dramatization of A Meeting by the River, then on an adaptation of I, Claudius for Tony Richardson. They used the job to justify a trip in July and August 1969 to Tahiti and Australia, where Richardson was filming N
ed Kelly starring Mick Jagger as the outlaw. Jagger, two years after the notorious Redlands drug bust, had recently been rearrested for possession of marijuana and was in Australia by permission of the judge who had agreed to delay his trial for the filming; Marianne Faithfull, rearrested with him, had marked her arrival in Sydney by swallowing a suicidal dose of barbiturates as the airplane landed. She was in the hospital in a coma, from which she luckily recovered. Of his own arrival on the set Isherwood wrote:

  . . . Tony Richardson, looking like the Duke of Wellington, in a kind of Inverness mackintosh cape; we embraced in front of the whole crew and the actors, including Mick Jagger. It was such an improbable encounter, after these thousands of miles, like Stanley and Livingstone, rather. Mick Jagger, very pale, quiet, good-tempered, full of fun, ugly-beautiful, a bit like Beatrix Lehmann; he has the air of a castaway, someone saved from a wreck, but not in the least dismayed by it.58

  The ranch house where they worked with Richardson on the script was heavily guarded to keep away gangs of students who had vowed to kidnap Jagger. “[T]here were ten policemen sitting up in the kitchen all night, waiting for the students who never showed. Incidentally, without knowing it, they were guarding a pot party which was going on in the living room!”59 By December, the Isherwood –Bachardy script for I, Claudius had been dropped, though Richardson seemed to regret it. He wrote from London “that he wished we had been with him, implying that, in that case, we might have worked together.”60 In fact, Isherwood and Bachardy themselves had probably not spent enough time working on the script together; Bachardy had been preoccupied with a new and rather serious boyfriend. As collaborators, they were to have more success with later projects, though not for Richardson.

  Despite separations and set-backs, Isherwood valued more and more the privilege denied his parents of spending his life with Bachardy over the long term. On his sixty-third birthday, he admonished himself not to feel guilty about his happiness but instead to understand it as the very evidence he perpetually sought that he was living in the right way. Happiness was not a distraction from spiritual intentions, but the path towards self-understanding and perpetual bliss:

  My life with Don seems, as of this minute and indeed of the past couple of months in general, to be in a marvellous phase of love, intimacy, mutual trust, tenderness, affection, fun, everything. We have plenty of money and more to come, presumably, very soon from Cabaret. . . . My health is good. . . . And I am very lucky to have work to occupy me for many many months ahead. What is bad, as of now, is my apparent spiritual condition. . . . I do “keep the line open” and try, throughout the day, to make acts of recollection. I am of course terribly uneasy about my “worldly” happiness; fearing to lose it and yet knowing that of course it will be necessary to lose it before I can find ananda. (Having said this, I suddenly ask myself. . . . How can love be profane if it really is love? In my own case, hasn’t my relation with Don now become my true means of enlightenment?)61

  Throughout the 1960s, Isherwood continued to fight the spiritual dryness that had worried him ever since Swami initiated him in 1939. He hungered to experience his belief as an emotion, not just an idea. Early in 1968, Swami fell gravely ill and was put into intensive care; in April, when he had recovered, he told Isherwood he had expected to die. If this was the camp of brinksmanship, the very real possibility of losing Swami had an enormous effect on Isherwood, intensifying his love for him and also his faith. Swami reported that he had seen his own guru, Brahmananda, coming towards him twice during his illness; he told Isherwood he had decided that if he recovered he would meditate more, and he told him that he had lost all personal desires. Isherwood writes, “his face seemed to shine with love and lack of anxiety. I thought to myself, I am in the presence of a saint. . . .”62 Over the following year, Isherwood noted that Swami could now “convey, as almost never before to the same degree, an absolute spiritual guarantee: this thing is true.”63 Thereafter, Isherwood focused on Swami more and more as Swami grew older and frailer. Ever since the death of his father in World War I, Isherwood had had an enormous curiosity about death; he wanted to find out, in the most literal and specific sense against his own needs in the future, what would happen to Swami when Swami died.

  A different and greater address to his spiritual dryness was made by the youth and energy of Bachardy. If Swami, an old man, was his teacher, Bachardy, a young man, was the lesson set. By the end of the decade, Isherwood had indeed come to see his spiritual path as being made available to him through Bachardy. “[Don] wrote such a wonderful letter yesterday, and I realize more than ever that this is IT. Not just an individual. Or just a relationship, but THE WAY. The way through to everything else.”64 Thus, the conflict between his private emotional life and his spiritual life, which had reached its crisis during his journey to India, was resolved—his love for Bachardy and his devotion to Swami and Ramakrishna were one and the same.

  Textual Note

  American style and spelling are used throughout this book because Isherwood himself gradually adopted them. English spellings mostly disappeared from his diaries by the end of his first decade in California, although he sometimes reverted to them, for instance when staying at length in England. I have altered anomalies in keeping with the general trend; however, I have retained idiosyncrasies of phrasing and spelling which have a phonetic impact in order that his characteristically Anglo-American voice might resound in the writing. And I have let stand some English spellings that are accepted in America; Isherwood had no reason to change these.

  I have made some very minor alterations silently, such as standardizing passages which Isherwood quotes from his own published books, from other published authors, and from letters. I have standard ized punctuation for most dialogue and quotations, for obvious typos (which are rare), and very occasionally to ease the reader’s progress. I have usually retained Isherwood’s characteristic use of the semi-colon followed by an incomplete clause. I have spelled out many abbreviations, including names, for which Isherwood sometimes used only initials, because I believe he himself would have spelled these out for publication. Also, I have corrected the spellings of many names because he typically checked and corrected them himself. Square brackets mark emendations of any substance or interest and these are often explained in a footnote. Square brackets also mark information I have added to the text for clarity, such as surnames or parts of titles shortened by Isherwood. And square brackets indicate where I have removed or altered material in order to protect the privacy of individuals still living.

  This book includes some footnotes written by Isherwood himself, in particular in the diary he kept in London from April to October 1961. Had Isherwood himself prepared the diary for publication, he would almost certainly have incorporated such material into the text, rewriting as necessary. I have not attempted to do this on his behalf. I have occasionally added, in square brackets, to his notes.

  Readers will find supplemental information provided in several ways. Footnotes explain passing historical references, identify people who appear only once, offer translations of foreign passages, gloss slang, explain allusions to Isherwood’s or other people’s works in progress, give references to books of clear significance to Isherwood, sometimes provide information essential for making sense of jokes or witticisms, and so forth. For people, events, terms, organizations, and other things which appear more than once or which were of long-term importance to Isherwood, and for explanations too long to fit conveniently into a footnote, I have provided a glossary at the end of the volume. The glossary gives general biographical information about many of Isherwood’s friends and acquaintances and offers details of particular relevance to Isherwood and to what he recorded in his diaries. A few very famous people—for instance, Katharine Hepburn or Mick Jagger— do not appear in the glossary because although Isherwood may have met them more than once, he knew them or at least wrote about them essentially in their capacity as celebrities. Others who were intimate friends—Igor Stravin
sky or Aldous Huxley—are included even though their main achievements will be familiar to many readers. This kind of information is now easily available on the internet, but a reader of this diary should be able to find what he or she immediately wishes to know and to get a feel for what Isherwood himself or his contemporaries may have known, without putting the book down and turning to a computer. Isherwood has audiences of widely varied ages and cultural backgrounds, and I have aimed to make his diaries accessible to all of them. Where he himself fully introduces someone, I have avoided duplicating his work, and readers may need to use the index to refer back to figures introduced early in the text who sometimes appear much later. Hindu terminology is also explained in the glossary in accord ance, generally, with the way the terms are used in Vedanta.

  In any book of this size, there are many details which do not fit systematically into even the most flexible of structures, but I hope that my arrangement of the supplemental materials will be consistent enough that readers can find what help they want.

  The Sixties

  1960–1969

  August 27, 1960–December 31, 196965