The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Don said later that he hates to see me being resentful and aggressive like this; he wants me to keep my aggression for him, just as he keeps his for me. “I’m jealous of it,” he said. Don has actually been very sweet since last Saturday evening, when he blew his top—I forget why—and cut himself really quite badly on the ice tray from the icebox. We have had a talk. He says he wants an independent life but he doesn’t want to leave me; I urge him to go to New York and spend three months there, till the spring, and see what gives. At present, he recoils from this idea, but partly because it scares him, I’m sure. As for me, of course I don’t want him to go if he can be happy here; but better a thousand times he goes and comes back somehow reassured. Meanwhile, Don says that of course he’s quite well aware how much progress he has made toward independence and how much he has learnt, though he is always bewailing his ignorance.

  He has been reading Middleton’s The Changeling, because Tony Richardson remarked he’d like to direct it.

  Now, suddenly, there are two projects on foot: the Goodbye to Berlin musical and a possible film of The Vacant Room, written by Gavin and me and directed by Gavin.138 As for Laughton, he’s always a menace. Not one word comes to us from behind that avoirdupois curtain.

  Yesterday evening, Don said, “Kitty’s sick of his struggle—now he wants a triumph.”

  With one possible exception—I was so drunk that next morning I couldn’t be certain—I have told my beads every day since I made that resolve. True, I usually remember them at the last moment and race through them, thinking of something else. Never mind— the habit is being reestablished, and that is all that matters for a start.

  Compulsive Christmas letter and card writing. There is much aggression behind this; I feel I am slamming back the ball across the net and I think, “Take that—fuck you!” Don is so right; aggression is terribly bad for me. I may even kill myself prematurely with it if I don’t watch out. And watch out means watch out now.

  December 23. A new phase seems to have started. This man Russell McKinnon has offered to put up the money for Don to go to Europe, and this seems a kind of God’s-will intervention; something which has to be accepted. So now Don is definitely thinking of going to the Slade School as soon as possible and spending as much as six months in England during 1961.

  This, in its turn, has enormously improved our relations. Already we are living in the sad-sweetness of departure. I feel hideously sad whenever I think about it—especially when I wake in the mornings. I dread it and yet I know it may be the best, the only possible way for us to go on together. Don himself is afraid and anxious and terrifically excited. We only hope there won’t be red-tape difficulties.

  On the 20th, I started revising “Paul,” five pages a day. So far have kept up my schedule. It’s a kind of madness, but I must bust through, however compulsively, and get a big chunk finished this vacation. I want it to go off to Edward as soon as it can.

  Besides, Laughton will be breathing down my neck soon. Terry went back to England today; returning in February. Things look better there; Elsa has a New York booking and will be out of his hair for a long while.

  Beautiful winter sunshine—going to waste every day as far as I’m concerned.

  December 26. A frightful hangover, caused chiefly by my unwillingness to tell Hope Lange, Glenn Ford and the others what I really thought of Cimarron, last night; so I got drunk at Hope’s house after the premiere. Tried to cure myself this morning by going on the beach and into the water, which was deathly cold; also by taking one of the full-strength all-black capsules Carter Lodge gave me. This merely made me feel like death.

  Swami’s birthday lunch. Swami so angelic and radiant, all in white. “You don’t have to tell me that you love me,” he said to us, when the girls sang the gooey second verse of the Happy Birthday song.

  Gerald [Heard] on the phone yesterday was in the highest spirits. He’s just back from Hawaii. He says Aldous [Huxley] had cancer of the tongue and a surgeon told him half of it would have to be cut out and he refused; and then he went to Cutler139 who cured him completely with an X-ray needle. Gerald said, “We have lost the art of dying.” He is back on his favorite theory that “isophils”140 represent a new mutation.

  I have slipped badly on my revision of “Paul.” That was only to be expected, I suppose, on account of the holidays. I must relax and get on with it quietly and not be frantic.

  December 29. A tearing wind, yesterday and today, which I hate; it makes me tense.

  Yesterday morning, we called Stephen Spender long distance in London and asked him to ask Bill Coldstream if Don can be gotten into the Slade School without red tape, provided he isn’t trying for a diploma or any academic grades. Stephen thought this might be possible, said he’d ask Bill, but that he was going away for a week. If we didn’t get a cable from him within twenty-four hours that’d mean he hadn’t been able to contact Bill and that we should have to wait a week. No cable has arrived, so we have to wait. And now we are both getting nervous, feeling we want a move to be made at once, as long as a move is going to be made.

  But I’m still sick at heart, at the thought of his being away so long. My own life isn’t going to be that much longer that I can afford to spend six months of it without him. Never mind, what must be must be, and I will try to fill in the time with work and self-discipline.

  A new obstacle arises to my getting ahead with the novel. Laughton has suddenly decided to go on a reading tour and he wants me to help him prepare the material—including doing a specimen bit of Plato, the charioteer passage probably, from Phaedrus. He is an old man of [the] sea and would dearly love to spend every moment sitting on my back; and yet I can’t refuse him and anyhow I’m fond of him. He had me weeping with laughter the other day, imitating God the Father as a Prussian bully and Moses as a clothing-store Jew, having an argument about the manna.

  December 31. Just a word to round off the year. Tonight we are to go to three parties—Jerry Lawrence, Ivan Moffat and the big Charlie Lederer shindig, for which we’ve once again rented tuxedos.

  It’s a perfect sunshiny day. My chief resolution for next year, aside from the usual ones about work, time-wasting, needless anxiety etc., is to take more exercise, and especially to get on the beach and into the water more.

  Barring nuclear war or personal illness, I suppose I shall certainly finish my novel before June 1. The revision is going ahead slowly but well and I don’t think there are any great obstacles ahead. Indeed, the chief problem is how to begin the book—in other words, how to rewrite parts of “Mr. Lancaster.”

  This morning, Don—who has hurt his back at the gym—has gone to see Russell McKinnon and ask him if he could have the money to go to England right away, provided that Bill Coldstream says he may work at the Slade School. So all that will be decided one way or the other quite soon.

  So, goodbye, 1960. On the whole, an excellent year; unspectacular, but I got such a lot of work done and was happy a lot of the time. Certainly one of the best years of my later life.

  Later: 6:00 p.m. Since writing the above, I’ve been out and shopped; also written two more pages of “Paul.” And Don has come home after talking to Russell McKinnon, who’s apparently quite disposed to produce the money for him to leave for England in January, if this Slade School thing goes through. Also, a serious international crisis seems to be cooking up—Red troops invading Laos.141 I suppose there’ll be a lot of that, this coming year; even if this one fizzles out. One will just have to go ahead as if nothing but one’s own job matters. “We are in God’s hand, brother, not in theirs.”142

  Very good relations with Don, all this time. Yesterday evening— I forgot to record—we did something we haven’t done in ages; danced together to records on the record player. A Beatrix Potter scene—the Animals’ Ball.

  1961

  January 2. Yesterday was an almost total loss. Don and I didn’t get home till five-thirty in the morning. We slept till nearly one and then Laughton arrived to tal
k about his reading tour and, specifically discuss what parts of the Phaedrus he shall use. Elsa came by too, briefly. Their relations are tense, and Elsa had called me the night before, begging me to talk to Charles, who was becoming mentally sick and dangerous again, she said. Charles showed no sign of this, and of course I continue to suspect that it’s Elsa who’s the sick one—but you can never be quite sure. When Charles had gone, Don and I ate at Ted’s143 and then came home and read. Don is reading Willa Cather’s One of Ours. I read right through A Lost Lady,144 finished Confessions of an English Opium Eater145 and also read ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,146 which I finished this morning.

  Talked to Don about the doctrine of the apostolic succession as it applies to the status of the Pope. Don said he thought this was “rather marvellous.” He keeps repeating that I know so much and that he fears he’s stupid and plodding and will never learn anything. Which is ridiculous, because he has already learned an immense amount in a random, right-across-the-board kind of way. But I think he just likes to be reassured.

  We’re in a provisional phase. Don, I feel, is counting, rather desperately, on the Slade School project coming through. If it doesn’t, he won’t know what to do next. He writes a great deal in his journal and I would love to see what he’s written. But I would never dream of looking. Not from a sense of honor but out of a sort of superstition—a fear of opening Pandora’s Box. And yet, I must repeat, our relations are very good and I feel real love between us. It’s just that he’s desperately rattled.

  On New Year’s Eve, we went first to Jerry Lawrence’s, then to Ivan Moffat’s, then to the Lederers’, then back to Ivan’s. As far as I was concerned, the visit to Jerry was the most memorable, because I met there a very young blond boy named Mike Maffei, who is an acrobat and a champion archer, and has been a paratrooper. We started talking about the crisis in Laos, about which no one else seemed even to have heard, and Mike said how scared he was that he’d be sent out there. There was something about him, a kind of poignancy, which very few people have and which always moves me deeply. Don has it, and perhaps it’s what draws me to him more than anything else. When it’s related to youth and good looks it creates the aura of beauty. The merely weak are never poignant. Courage has to be part of it—the kind of courage which makes you feel its utter vulnerability. You feel how alone the person is, and how heartbreaking his courage is in the face of hopeless odds. I don’t mean that I felt all this about Mike. I’m really speaking more about Don, and others I’ve known. But I got a hint of it, and I feel I must see him again.

  At Ivan’s, David Selznick appeared to be the only other person who was worrying about Laos. There seemed something almost symbolic in this pair of worriers, Mike and David. Or there did while I was drunk. I also had a long talk to the Lederers’ young son, who was upstairs in his room with comic books all over the floor, and who showed me the rib of a whale, and a scale model of some prehistoric animal. Hope Lange and Glenn Ford were there; Glenn very kissy, as usual. I’m sure I talked a lot of crap. But the evening was a success, both Don and I agree. At least—and this is saying quite a lot in regard to such evenings—it didn’t leave a nasty taste in my mouth.

  Thinking over it from a Proustian point of view, I remember that Lance Reventlow, who seemed, at the Lederers’ party two years ago, almost the only attractive young male, now looked pouchy and sodden. Henrietta, Boon [Ledebur]’s ex-wife, still looked well, but her face had spread out and changed. Charlie Lederer was barely recognizable. There would be a Proustian sketch in my conversation with his young son—the polite but wised-up, maybe quite cynical little boy talking to the drunk middle-aged novelist. Both of them putting on an act—making conversation about natural history. The little boy of course getting a certain bang out of talking to any guest at this grown-up party from which he’s been excluded—and why, since he’s wide-awake and dressed. Because he hasn’t got a tuxedo? (I forgot to mention that we finally decided to rent ours. Don much disliked this and said several times, “I feel like you feel when you’re wearing rented clothes,” when people asked him, “How are you?”) As for my talk with Mike Maffei, Jerry tells me this morning on the phone that he was “quite intrigued” by me and said, “I don’t care if he’s a famous author or not, I like him.”

  I couldn’t resist calling Mike on the phone after writing the above; and he really chewed my ear off—telling me all his opinions about the futility of war, etc. He isn’t a bore, though, because all this has been seriously thought about by him, not just picked up out of a book. He is terribly concerned because all U.S. forces are now in a state of “red alert,” and he has a brother, eighteen months younger than he is, who’s a paratrooper and due to be sent off at short notice. This brother is his only living relative. So we ended up agreeing to meet sometime in the near future. I don’t suppose it will lead to anything particular. That’s not so important.

  January 3. Hope Lange and Glenn Ford came to supper last night. It was a fiasco. For the first time in my life, almost, I let the barbecue fire get too low. And then I tried to pep it up again with more charcoal and lighter fluid, leaving the steaks on the grill. They were absolutely covered with ashes and nearly raw.

  Hope was in an hysterical mood. She had cried in the car, coming down, and Glenn made things much worse by telling us this—adding that it was because of Don Murray and some decision he’d made about their children. Glenn wanted us to cheer Hope up. His idea of doing this was to clown around in the most embarrassing way. Then he got serious and talked about the crisis and how he had a bomb shelter. And how he was reserved, because he’d once shown a little bit of his real self to someone and had it smacked down, or sliced off, I forget which. (At Ivan’s party, it seems, I had told Jennifer Jones and Glenn that they were mysterious, and Hope that she wasn’t. This, for some reason, seemed to have pleased her.)

  Glenn has a lot of aggression in him. His description of the rude Texan who had dared to grab him by the arm while he was eating his breakfast and had tried to drag him out of the hotel “to shake hands with my little girl.” Glenn had told him to go to hell. The Texan had said, “We pay to see you, don’t we?”

  This morning I polished my “last lecture” (really, it might well be, if this crisis gets any worse) and worked on “Paul.” I now see that a very important passage still remains to be written: the change in Augustus after his visit to India.

  January 15. This afternoon, I’m to take part in the taping of the Oscar Levant program, then drive up to the Warshaws’ because it’s Douwe Stuurman’s birthday, and really the only tribute I can pay him is just to take the trouble to do this.

  Yesterday, Don got a frigid reply from the Slade School, signed by Coldstream’s secretary, saying that his work would be considered next month for admission next October and that meanwhile he would have to fill out the enclosed forms, etc. etc. So this morning we again called Stephen Spender long-distance, and he thinks the whole thing is a mistake and that Coldstream will certainly let Don into the Slade, and that if he won’t, then Don can most probably get into the Royal College of Art which is nearly if not quite as good. So Don’s hopes, which were at zero, have shot up again. And now he’s off to lunch with Russell McKinnon who seems about ready to produce the money for the trip.

  Despite Santa Barbara and Laughton, who’s been after me to work on two Plato bits for his reading tour, I have managed to write in the bit about Augustus Parr in India. It isn’t quite right yet, but it certainly was necessary; in fact, it is one of the pivotal episodes in the story. So now I really do hope to get faster ahead. Especially as Charles will have to go to New York very soon to be with Elsa at her opening there.

  January 17. The past four days it has been amazingly warm for the time of year; the temperature up in the eighties. Lots of smog in town; you could even feel it in your eyes down here. Tonight the surf is up, and you hear long menacing artillery-rolls from the beach. When I drove back from the Warshaws’ yesterday the high tide had flooded the highway,
along by Solimar Beach.

  I got back to find that Don had been just as drunk as I’d been. He had been out to dinner with Paul Millard and Gavin Lambert and had been so pissed that Paul hadn’t wanted to let him drive home. And when he did get home he left the lights of the Sunbeam on all night and the battery went way down to nothing; and today it stalled again and had to be fixed by Mr. Mead.

  As for me, I still don’t know what I did up at the Warshaws’; I only know that when I woke in the morning it was nearly twelve; something that almost never happens to me. I felt like death all the way home.

  Don was unimaginably sweet. It has suddenly hit him, what it will mean for us to be separated for six months. And now Russell McKinnon has definitely said that he will give Don the money just as soon as he can make arrangements about a school in London to go to. (We haven’t heard anything more from Stephen yet.) I’m utterly sick whenever I think about his going; but yet I know it’s the right, and even maybe the only[,] thing to do.

  Abbot Kaplan and a colleague named Haas(?)147 came around and talked about UCLA. They asked me to give three lectures there and they tried to get me down to two hundred dollars for each. I said definitely no, and they at once showed that they hadn’t really expected me to agree, and I’m sure they’ll go up to three hundred dollars. In fact, they’d probably have gone to four or five. Whatever anyone says, this kind of thing nauseates me; it is Jewy and vile and utterly shameful, coming from the representative of a serious institution of learning instead of an old clothes dealer.

  Laughton is leaving for New York on the 23rd, so I won’t have to go on with the Plato for a while. Yesterday and today both wasted and this is inexcusable. (Maybe I’ll at least recopy the two last revised pages right now—yes by God I will!)