The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  The only funny memory I have of the Warshaws’ party (which was dull on the whole and, worst of all, dull for Douwe himself because he wasn’t drinking) is of [a woman guest] whom I don’t much like asking Fran Warshaw about her behavior at an earlier party at which she had passed out. She asked, “I hope I didn’t do anything that wasn’t dainty?”; meaning, like getting her skirts up above her knees, while she was lying unconscious on the floor.

  Fran took me into the kitchen and showed me in horror that the cake had Douwe’s name spelled wrong; Fran herself actually wasn’t sure how it should be spelled! So I scribbled out the other letters of “Dowe,” leaving only the D, and then we stuck candles over the spot to hide it.

  January 20. Well now, suddenly, everything is fixed and Don is to leave for New York next Monday the 23rd. He’ll stay there long enough to arrange with McKinnon’s agent about the way his money shall be paid to him in London; then he’ll go on there. Stephen cabled two days ago to say that the Slade will take Don any time he cares to start work.

  Oh, I’m sick—sick with foreboding and anticipated loneliness. And Don is wretched about it too. We have never been closer to each other than during these past few days. There are moments when I think, can I bear it? But I must—not only that, but make something out of the experience; discipline and train myself. Not run around to parties getting drunk and looking for “consolation.”

  Japam, work—of which, God knows, there’s plenty—and also physical training. I must try to get back into better shape. Today I’m well under 150 lbs., but so flabby. And I must be prepared for an attempted psychosomatic coup; getting sick in order to be able to call Don home.

  Laughton leaves for New York on Monday, also; so I’ll have a real opportunity to get down to hard work on the novel. So far, I’ve written fifty-four pages of the revised version of “Paul”; this is only forty-five pages of the first draft, but I’ll be making very big cuts farther on, I expect.

  After all the glorious weather, yesterday and today were smoggy and sorrowful. This morning, Dr. Haas and two of his colleagues from UCLA came back to see me. They have capitulated; I get my money. And we planned three readings for March, under the heading, “The Voices of the Novel.”148 My general line will be that a writer can be judged to quite a large extent by his tone of voice—just as you already form a judgement of someone, rightly or wrongly, by merely listening to his voice on the phone. The old stichprobe149—reading the first, last and middle pages of a novel—isn’t so unfair as it sounds.

  January 23. Don went off this morning. We both agreed we didn’t want to go through the tension of an airport parting, so I just drove him up to the Miramar Hotel, where he caught a bus to the airport at 6:55 a.m. He should be in New York by now, staying with Julie [Harris] and Manning [Gurian].

  I don’t know how I feel. I’ve kept going all today on nervous energy and doing one thing right after another. Ideally, you could carry on that way for six months or until you dropped. I went to interview two gyms—Vic Tanny’s in Santa Monica and Lyle Fox’s in Pacific Palisades. I think I shall go to the latter, starting tomorrow. At Tanny’s, I was high pressured. And the atmosphere, though sexy, is squalid.

  Then I plan to get one of the bicycles fixed and ride it a lot. And of course there is my work, etc. I have even started preparing the material for another chapter of the Ramakrishna book. And I want to do a little meditating every day as well as the japam. And make an extra round of japam for Don.

  Yesterday was so hectic. Don went into one of his last-minute whirls. At about 3:50 we tore off downtown to the County Museum to see a show of art nouveau which closed at 5:00! We made it, too, and saw nearly all we wanted to, because the show was pretty small anyway. Then up to Hollywood where we were just in time to see Buñuel’s The Young One. Then for drinks with Paul Millard. Then, terribly late, to UCLA to see [Pirandello’s] Six Characters in Search of an Author. And Don damaged the Sunbeam while parking and we had to be towed away afterwards. I was a bit cross or rather madly rattled about all of this, but then he was so sweet. We stayed up all night. He tried to draw me for the brochure of my UCLA lectures, but he couldn’t do anything good. Then he packed and wrote letters. Our whole parting—all these last days—couldn’t possibly have been more loving. For once, I haven’t one moment of unpleasantness to reproach myself with. Don said, “One thing I’m sure of now—we didn’t meet each other by accident.” We both cried as the bus went off.

  January 24. I can hardly believe it’s still not yet forty-eight hours since he left.

  Of course I’m still very schedule conscious; that’s the first stage. Lots of japam—for Don too. And I got to the gym and had a good workout; and I worked on the Ramakrishna material and also (not enough) on “Paul.” And tomorrow I’m going to talk to Don in New York; I sent him a telegram today asking him to call me.

  Yesterday evening, I had supper with Jerry Lawrence. I told him that he is the only person I could think of to spend the first evening after Don’s departure with; and the funny thing is, it’s per fectly true. Nobody else would have been right—except Jo and Ben.

  Tonight it started drizzling. Had supper with dull but rather sweet Bill Inge, and John Connolly, whom Don and I met years ago at our first New York Christmas; it was at George Platt Lynes’s apartment and we all helped paint John’s body for some masquerade party he was off to. Tonight we went to a fearfully dull and bad Mexican restaurant called the Caracol, which is however the same building as the fish restaurant, Marino’s, where Jim Charlton and Ted Bachardy and Don and I had supper, that historic evening. . . .150 And, up at the Holiday House, where Inge and John Connolly are staying, there were three little kitties. . . . Well, I must get used to this sort of nostalgia. . . . What makes me feel bad and almost superstitious is that it’s all somehow so reminiscent of “Afterwards”151—but then why not, since I wrote it?

  The last two days, I’ve been wearing Don’s sneakers. I like to have on something of his. Am now sleeping in the back room. I plan to take the sheets off the big bed and not use it any more till he comes back.

  January 31. I haven’t wanted to write in this book as much as I’d thought I should. This morning, I got a cable from London to say that Don has already enrolled at the Slade and is looking for a flat. There is a very faint chance that I might be able to get the assignment to write the screenplay of Graham Greene’s England Made Me; in which case I could go there at the end of March or the beginning of April. Ivan Moffat is helping me try for this, because he knows [ John] Sutro, the producer of it.

  Sunday was bad—the day Don left for England. I let it get too late before phoning New York and then made desperate efforts to reach him through Pan-American at the Idlewild Airport152. There would have been lots of time to do this, but the people at the Pan-Am office were casual and careless beyond all belief. God help anyone who really needs to get in touch with a passenger! I never did get Don—only someone named Machardy, who wasn’t even on the same flight!

  After being stiff all over from exercising last week, I was better today and went back to the gym. I felt wonderful right after it; now I begin to ache again.

  There’s still an awful lot of “Paul” to do. I have revised fifty-eight pages of the original manuscript and this has turned into sixty-nine pages of the new version. If I could cover four pages of the old version every day throughout February, I could finish by the end, but this isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds; because I write in so much new stuff. I do think it’s pretty good, though.

  February 6. At present it’s a real effort and a bore, writing in this book. If I want to write anything about my life, it’s letters to Don. I had a letter from him from London; full of homesickness. But now comes the difficult part—I must manage not to mind when he gets over this, as he will. I must want him to be happy in England. And I must get over the most basic part of my possessiveness—wanting him to experience everything through myself as an intermediary. What he is about to experience now isn’t g
oing to have anything to do with me—and this, I’d better not kid myself, will be painful.

  Amiya and Prema down here to supper. Amiya yakked and yakked, retelling all her oldest stories. Prema sat rather sour, until near the end, when he’d had enough to drink and we told him he must become a swami and run a center on his own—not rush off to India when Swami dies.

  Can’t be bothered to tell about Monroe Wheeler’s visit, or Bill Inge or Marguerite’s party—though I must say I laughed a lot when Gavin told me that, after we’d left, Larry Harvey announced that he was secretly married to a British actor who’d come out to play Mutiny on the Bounty, and that John Ireland153 was his mistress. He really is sympathetic.

  Considerable excitement because John Zeigel is to come and stay with me. Well—

  One thing I won’t forget—driving up to the top of the hills with Monroe and Bill Inge and John Connolly yesterday, after Marguerite’s party, and looking down over the city. All the platforms cut out of the hillsides, ready for pretentious French chateau-style houses “worth” eighty thousand maybe, but no more than slum dwellings because so crowded and viewless and alto gether wretched. And I had such a sense of something spawning itself to destruction, spreading and spreading out until its strength is exhausted and then shrivelling up and dying, and then the rockets, or the new ice age, or the whole slab of coast cracking off along the earthquake fault and sliding into the sea; lost in any case. And the quickie promoters and real estate agents hustling to make their dollars before it happens. Such a sick sad knowledge that this is “Babylon the great city”154 and it can’t end well—and was never and could never be great, anyway.

  In the middle of Saturday night, after the party at Jerry Lawrence’s, Jim Charlton came blundering into the back bedroom drunk, just as he used to in the Rustic Road days155, mumbling about how he’d realized he was a fascist and had got scared. In the morning, he seemed to take all this behavior for granted; and I begin to wonder if he isn’t becoming a bit crazy like his mother. He certainly is full of the most dreary self-pity. Now he’s all for leaving Hilde and ducking out from under the mess he’s made—not that I have one particle of sympathy for Hilde herself [. . .]. I only know that I don’t want Jim around as he is nowadays. He is the most ghastly bore and nuisance. While Inge, Monroe and John Connolly were at the La Mer restaurant last night, Jim showed up there—I’d idiotically mentioned we were going—and sat around and created gloom and boredom and some sort of dull-dog reproach for his sadness, aimed at all of us.

  February 13. Bad. I feel sad, bored, impotent. I guess it is the dead of the year. The sun is shining here, but it’s somehow chilly and dull. I’m not exactly stuck in my novel, but am making very poor time. Got to page 78 of the rough draft manuscript, which is page 89 of the revised version. Let’s face it, I still have a good half of the thing to write. And now I have to devise this different setting for the seminar, in place of La Verne, the cabins on the Salton Sea. And it all takes so much time!

  Johnny Zeigel is a very sweet boy—intelligent, though on the prissy, academic side, and capable of serious love. He stayed the weekend here—chiefly talking about Ed Halsey (whose intentions I suspect) and what their life is to be together from now on: are they to live in the Caribbean, and if so doing what? Yesterday we saw Charles, just back from New York and Elsa’s show. He wanted me to tell him his scruples about calling Terry back were silly, so I did, so he called Terry, who was away for the weekend, and only succeeded in infuriating Terry’s London landlady, because it was one o’clock in the morning, their time. Then we went to Laughton’s house and drank and swam in the pool, and Charles sulked like a great baby and Johnny left feeling frustrated, and I went to see Paul Kennedy, which was a huge mistake, he is hopelessly sloppy and tacky and passive.

  I have kept up the japam so far, and the exercising, BUT I MUST GET ON WITH MY WORK. Nothing else matters. Until I have done that, how can I go to England?

  Don is supposed to be calling me tonight or sometime tomorrow, for our eighth anniversary.

  Courage.

  February 17. It’s quite late already, but I want to get this book written in before I go to bed.

  Today was the Ramakrishna puja and I went to vespers, which was an absurd mess, because Swami had decided that it would take too long, each one of us coming up to the shrine and being touched by the relic tray and given a flower and offering it. So he came around with the tray among the audience and touched us where he found us. Only the usual women wouldn’t budge after they’d been touched (Prema claims one of them was dead drunk) and so a traffic block was created, and some got touched twice and others not at all.

  Ritajananda is not going to Paris, and this rejoices Prema’s heart. Now he hopes Vandanananda will be sent off to run another center. Ritajananda came out after supper and asked me, in the garden, if there was a feud between the center and Gerald Heard!156 I think he is being wised up, fast; and he is very anxious to be loyal to Swami.

  I must say, I do love this house. I am really sad that I must go away and leave it all summer. If only Don could come back and we could simply stay here! I think it is the only place—except the garden house at Saltair157—which I have really liked for itself and rejoiced to live in.

  Jitters about the novel. Can I finish it? Of course I can, but I must get busy. Criminal laziness today—I lay around finishing off the Oppenheim158 thriller Chris Wood lent me. And now Dana Woodbury has lent me that de Sade book—The 120 Days of Sodom. But that looks like a bore—an ugly humorless French bore.

  Laughton was here again today and we worked on the “wings”159 passage from the Phaedrus, which Charles wanted to read aloud tonight to Taft Schreiber. We got it finished and he was enthusiastic. Now he talks about paying me extra for my work on the material for his reading tour. We shall see.

  February 23. Stayed home and ate alone tonight. The first time in such a long while. If you stay home at night, you get all sorts of offbeat calls of which there’s otherwise no record—like an offer of two free lessons with Arthur Murray’s dancing school.

  I’m sort of doubly lonely. Lonely for Don, as always. Lonely also a little bit for Johnny Zeigel. This is silly, but harmless and nice. I do feel he’s a wonderful person—anyone who can love, properly, is wonderful. People like that always get me romantic over them.

  When I went up there on Monday, I found him in a state of tension because Ed Halsey—who must surely be a self-centered ass—had sent him this cold, incredibly formal postcard, signed “your friend.” In fact, the coldness was such that it seemed almost like the act of a mental case. So Johnny was desperate, and finally he was able, the morning of the next day—after we’d sat up nearly all night waiting until the circuits were open and gotten pie-eyed—to contact Ed on, I think, Grenada in the Windward Islands. And by this time the Mexican cleaning woman had arrived and could hear the conversation, and the line was so bad John had to shout, but he didn’t care, he yelled, “Ed—I love you more than anything else in the world!” Ed seems to have pacified him, but somehow I didn’t buy it and I don’t think John did either, after he’d thought it over. He said, “I love him, and I don’t care how old he gets, or if his belly gets bigger, but I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with a bitter old man.”

  Today, Bart Lord called up and told me that Ted Bachardy has gone to the mental hospital again. He allowed himself to be hospitalized voluntarily; but now he’s in the violent ward, and the doctors want to give him shock treatment but his father refuses. The psychiatrist also says that he regards the outlook for Ted as being very black. Because the last recurrence came so soon.

  What John’s relation to Ed—or rather, Ed’s contemptuous under-valuation of John—makes me feel is “like the base Indian threw [a] pearl away”160 and I simply shudder to see this done, for Ed’s sake, not Johnny’s, because Ed is really the weaker and older and less likely to snap out of it. And that makes me resolve more than ever to look after my pearl. I had another long talk to Don
on the phone yesterday. All seems more or less well so far. But I must not take anything for granted.

  Am still rattled about the novel. Can I finish it in time? I must not mind if I can’t, and yet it will be a terrible pity. I do want to get this revision done and sent off to Edward. I can rework it in London later, if I’m there.

  A very eager-beaver period. I decided to quit drinking at least until March 2, when I go up to Santa Barbara with Johnny to stay a night at the Warshaws’. And now I’m eating celery like crazy, because someone said Kinsey161 discovered it was the only thing for potency. And then there’s the gym.

  February 24. Good work on the novel. I have now got to page 109 of revised version which is page 104 of the rough draft. The whole Salton Sea episode is written and it seems pretty solid.

  Poor Olga Fabian!162 I had her to supper tonight. She is so garrulous and such a bore. How awful to be old in that sense! Took her to the Serbian restaurant, where the English waitress had returned and made it quite impossible to eat, with her continued interruptions.

  No further news of Ted.

  Tonight I felt so lonely that I called John Zeigel. Some of my loneliness has spilled off onto him, that’s all; don’t let’s call it anything more. It only feels like love. And I must beware of annoying him with it. I woke him up tonight with my call, and he naturally wasn’t any too charmed. The lonely are a public nuisance. He has had a good letter from Ed, and all is well, until the next time.

  Now go to bed, foolish old Dobbin. I’ll let you read for a while, but you’re to be woken at seven. And given lots of celery.

  February 28. A good day of work. I drove right through the whole CPS camp163 section in rough, making quite a lot of inventions. And it seems that, owing to big cuts in the original rough draft, I’m going to end up with page 129 of the rough corresponding to page 129 of the revised version or pretty nearly. So I’ll have caught up with myself. And certainly the hashish section will be drastically shortened. So maybe about 160 pages will see me through.