The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  June 20. Right now, Don is drawing Wystan, who keeps talking to me as I write: Falstaff and Don Quixote are the only satisfactory saints in literature, etc. etc. Relations with Don are a shade better, but I think he 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.

  I am not going to comment on any of this, for the present. I shall try to write this diary like one of those French swine (RobbeGrillet) who write a-literary novels, without psychology. I shall try to abstain from philosophizing and analysis, and stick to phenomena, things done and said, symptoms.

  I forgot to record that, yesterday, a letter was waiting from Alan Collins of Curtis Brown, saying that he likes the novel and doesn’t doubt that Simon and Schuster will publish it. So far, so good. Nothing from Methuen, however.

  Yesterday night, we had supper with Joe Ackerley. His flat, on top of the Star and Garter Hotel building in Putney, has a view right up the river. One night, a gigantic table was blown clear over the balustrade, crashed down into the street and made a hole in the sidewalk. It happened at night, otherwise several people might have been killed.

  Joe grey and thin and so sad; his beloved dog Queenie has a cancer in her mouth and is very old and must die soon. Joe would like to go back to Japan. He has a low opinion of Bob Buckingham, whom he finds dull and stupid, but thinks May is a “great woman” who might under other circumstances have had a salon. Again, Don was offended. Joe didn’t pay him the right kind of attention.

  June 21. Reading Joe’s We Think the World of You again, so as to write a blurb for his American publishers. It is a truly extraordinary book, not willfully fantastic but out of the ordinary simply because of the way it’s felt and observed. It is also unshockingly frank, because Joe doesn’t know how not to tell the truth.

  Terry Jenkins, back from the States, called me. We had tea together and walked all the way from Gloucester Road to Sloane Square. I felt very much at ease with him. Terry enjoyed sitting in the square watching the people; he said he’d never done this before. He seemed unwilling to leave me, and I felt he was feeling terribly lonely for California.

  Supper with Don and Tony Richardson, with whom we are making all kinds of complicated arrangements, to go to Nottingham with him to see Luther and to go with him to the South of France in August, where we shall share a villa with John Osborne who is writing a play about homosexuality which he thinks is his best.199 Meanwhile, Heinz arrives, there are Wystan and Chester to be talked with about the musical, and today I’m having a drink with Truman Capote, and just this moment a note from Aldous, to say he’s in London!

  June 25. Yesterday we got back from spending a night with Cecil Beaton in the country. Very hot humid weather. It was nice when Cecil and Don painted and drew together in his studio, a neigh-bor’s little girl. And I enjoyed seeing Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Raymond Mortimer again. We also visited mad Stephen Tennant in his house, which he has painted in various shades of pink and decorated by scattering books, clothes, bracelets and rings all over the furniture and the floor, partly like arrangements for still-life painting, partly like drunken unpacking.

  Also, during our visit, Truman Capote, with whom I left my novel [on] Friday, delighted me by calling to say that it is the best thing I have ever written!

  The Berlin crisis announces itself, far far ahead, in the late autumn. Things are not good with Wystan and Chester and myself. It’s no use, I don’t like Chester, and he infuriates me by doing crossword puzzles while we discuss the musical. He is no use. And I don’t think we have a story. And I don’t really want to do it, anyhow. Maybe I don’t want to do anything for a while. I want to rest and daydream and think.

  I do not want to go to Glyndebourne to hear their opera,200 nor do I want to go to Weidenfeld’s party for Cecil Beaton.201 For both these functions we have to wear tuxedos. So we are going to buy them.

  Don very sweet, these last three days. How perfect if it were always like this. And, whatever he might think, I should never get tired of it. I have had enough fusses for this lifetime and the next.

  July 4. Once more, a lot of catching up to do.

  On the 29th, in the midst of a ghastly heat wave which has just let up, I went up to Manchester to take part in a T.V. show on Granada, with Stephen, Wystan, Cyril Connolly, Arnold Wesker, and three young critics, Alvarez,202 Hugh Thomas,203 John Mander.204 It was a mistake having critics, because we were separated from them doubly, by age and avocation. The general impression was that we old things were too frivolous and they were too serious. However, later in the evening, Malcolm Muggeridge205 kept buying us drinks in the Midland Hotel lounge and Alvarez made some girl and Thomas remained obstinately prune faced and I got plastered. Next day I joined Don in Nottingham and we saw Osborne’s Luther, which begins well, with a weak ending, and a really good performance by Finney.

  I’m not happy. I’m depressed, deeply. I hate this town and its climate. Relations with Don are bad much of the time; he resents my presence here and really would like me to leave, except that he knows I’ll be useful when he has this show. He is only happy when he is painting or drawing—he is now trying a most interesting technique of painting in black and white. I’m not exactly sorry for myself; weary of myself, rather. Hemingway is dead; he probably did it deliberately, suddenly sick of it all, including his legend.206 No wonder. I understand senile melancholia now. But I shan’t give way to it, I think. I shan’t abandon Don, though I may go back to California and wait for him. I know my path, whenever I think of it: I ought to get on with the Ramakrishna book and do my humble daily tasks. I’m really middle-aged now, and slow. I hate being rushed. I would rather be alone in the house, as I am right now at this moment, just slowly doing chores, check-signing, writing letters. The BBC called to know if I could say anything about Hemingway. No, I said.

  Have seen Heinz and Gerda. Heinz impresses me quite a lot. I guess he told me all these war stories before, but I didn’t take them in properly. He and Gerda went without food for eight days! And he stole beets from the fields. He made windows for the flat out of bits of glass stuck together. It is quite a saga. Heinz has a very deep voice, and he seems to have grown enormous—not merely fatter, taller and broader. He bosses Gerda around, but they seem happy together in a grumpy way. They talk mostly of saving money; how one can economize. Heinz says Gerda taught him to be thrifty. And apparently Christian is even thriftier than they are. They are much more like peasants than middle-class people. But Christian already has a car and they have an icebox and other modern contraptions. They describe Forster’s flat in Chiswick, which he has lent them, as “primitive”!

  One result of talking to them is that I feel I must rewrite the final meeting with Waldemar in postwar Berlin. I can make it much richer. Also—and this is really a consideration—I feel the present version would hurt their feelings unnecessarily.

  Berlin, Berlin, Berlin—the papers go on about that every day, bringing the crisis slowly and lovingly to the boil. They are so glad that it has to be done slowly. They can sniff at it and let it really simmer.

  After my resolutions, I’ve been belly-aching again. I am a mess, a querulous old man. Well, I’ve fucking well got to stop. No excuses are valid for this kind of nonsense.

  It is one whole month since I sent off the copies of my novel to Methuen and Simon and Schuster. No word from either of them. But, much more importantly, I have failed to do any work during this whole time. Have merely made a few notes for the next Ramakrishna chapter. Cecil Beaton is reading the novel now.

  I hear from Iris that Ivan Moffat’s engagement to Kate Smith still isn’t official. And now Donna [O’Neill] has gone back to California and will presumably try to foul it up!

  Delays over the payment of M.’s legacy, it appears. Something to do with my father’s estate.

  At
present, it seems as if our Berlin musical project is certainly going to be dropped. The last suggestions made by Wystan and Chester simply aren’t workable—that is, if I understood him correctly: they want it to be chiefly about an Englishman who comes to Berlin to find his boyfriend! The truth is, I suspect, that Wystan doesn’t really want to work on the project at all. Well, I am better out of it. Tony Richardson is disappointed. He dislikes Chester, because Chester was too casual in his criticisms of Luther. Just dismissed it, according to Tony, with a few campy jokes.

  Aldous, whom I saw on the 28th, was bitter about the misrepresentations in the Los Angeles press, reprinted by Time Magazine. Far from weeping or trying to rush into the flames, he and Laura, when they saw that the house was definitely [on] fire, simply turned their car around and drove away!207 The fire trucks didn’t arrive until much too late. When they did come, the T.V. trucks had already been on the scene thirty-five minutes!

  While I was in Manchester, I went into a chemist’s with Stephen. He wanted a certain brand of mouthwash. And the young lady behind the counter asked, “Is that for cleaning false teeth?” Never, never would you hear that in London, much less Los Angeles.

  Every day I manage to tell my beads. Usually at the last moment, in the toilet before going to bed, and once, in Nottingham, actually under the bedclothes in bed. I do it without feeling, compulsively, and yet I know that this represents the only thing I have that stands between me and despair. Trust to nothing else—ever.

  Evasive behavior by Richard. He doesn’t really want me to visit him at Wyberslegh, but he can’t and won’t admit this. His letters start off about how welcome I am. But then he says that he himself may not be present. And then that, anyhow, I can always come up if I want to take any of M.’s things—this is a bit of masochistic bitchery which recurs. Then finally there is a generalized outburst of resentment against the people who have made him play the “servant-host.” He doesn’t have to do this any more, he says, and he won’t. He refuses to. He doesn’t want to receive any more people at Wyberslegh; memories of the past are too painful. But he does want to see me—etc. etc.

  July 9. Just back from a walk on the Heath. I should do this far more often, in fact every day. And now it is high summer, with the trees all shades of green, and their leaves ruffling and fluttering and waving and dipping with that extraordinarily complex movement which makes up the effect of a leaf-ocean which heaves and subsides. How good it is to be alone and relatively calm and still! I made japam, and then I sat down on a seat inscribed “Elsie, 1890–1958” and prayed for us both. People all around, dogs, fishing rods, bicycles, clouds.

  I had a nice calm day two days ago, when I took Heinz and Gerda Neddermeyer on the river steamer up to Richmond. I wouldn’t mind doing this quite often, but not with the Neddermeyers because they talk so much. I do like them, though; her too, which is surprising, I suppose. Last night I had dinner with them and Wystan and Chester. That was an effort too, until we got drunk and sang a little. (Incidentally, we seem to have abandoned the Berlin stories altogether as a possible plot for our musical and our now toying with a story about a woman who keeps a bar!)

  I’m glad Heinz and Gerda came over, because seeing them again has made me take a much warmer view of the last episode in my novel; as it stands, it is cold and bitchy. The day before yesterday, I heard from Simon and Schuster that they are “really wild” about it but that they find “Paul” the weakest of the episodes. Still, they will publish it anyhow. And then yesterday John Barber208 called and left a message that Methuen’s are also very enthusiastic about it and will be sending me a letter. But why didn’t they write before?

  I keep catching myself humming; a senile habit.

  Today I worked through a huge batch of letter answering.

  How I love George Moore! It’s the calm he projects. Am now reading The Untilled Field. Here’s the last sentence of the story called “Home Sickness”:

  The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills.

  How does Moore do it? Chiefly, as far as I can see, by his repetition of the word “and.”

  At supper last night, Wystan reminded me how, at the Manchester T.V. broadcast, the three critic-boys, Mander, Thomas and Alvarez, had all agreed that they never read any books just for fun!

  July 10. Down to Liverpool Street this morning to see Heinz and Gerda off on the boat train. But they weren’t there. I still don’t know what happened to them.

  Then to see Alan White at Methuen about my novel. They don’t want any cuts or alterations at all. But Alan confessed that, much as he liked it, he liked World in the Evening better!

  Last night we took Ken and Elaine Tynan to supper, and as Arthur Kopit209 was there we had to take him too. This cost nearly ten pounds at a rude bad Hindu restaurant—or was it Persian?— called El Cubano. Didn’t like Kopit, who bitched Andrew Ray and his marriage, etc. etc.

  We got quite drunk in order not to be embarrassed while we discussed Elaine’s terrible play, which she gave us to read.210 Elaine herself wasn’t embarrassed in the least. Then Ken told us that Jonathan Miller of Beyond the Fringe had told him about a café on the north circular road called The Ace, which is a motorcyclists’ hangout. Miller claimed that there is a group there which gets orgasms from riding at top speed. You put on a black mask which leaves only slits for your eyes, tear off as fast as you can, have your orgasm and then throw yourself off your bike and get killed. You don’t have to kill yourself, so long as you have the orgasm. But most people do, sooner or later.

  So Ken took us all up there in a taxi, costing fortunes, and of course it was deadly respectable and the only crazy people around were us.

  July 11. This morning I have been putting in the corrections in the typescript of the novel which Methuen’s had and which I brought back with me after seeing Alan White yesterday. It is loosely written in parts, but I feel that that’s almost a virtue in this kind of autobiographical fiction. I still think it’s fun, and much less fakey than anything else I’ve written.

  Yesterday afternoon, Don drew Chester, bags under the eyes and all. He is curiously vain. Wystan fussed because they were getting late for a party at Stephen’s—to which Don refused to go. He kept walking around, reading aloud passages from an account of a murder trial.

  Later, Don and I had supper and went to see One-Eyed Jacks. Brando was mediocre and altogether it was a nothing picture. But some shots of the great Pacific surf smashing in over the beach made us both terribly homesick.

  July 12. Chester and Wystan have been here and we’ve had another of these futile talks about the musical. I simply do not see one. As soon as we begin to probe, out comes the sawdust. It is a sheer waste of time talking about it. And it will be a sheer waste of time going to Glyndebourne tomorrow to see this tiresome opera. Not to mention the money spent on the tuxedos!

  But what concerns me much more is that, reading through the typescript of “Paul,” I’m disgusted by the passage describing how Chris gets involved with Augustus Parr. It is so sloppy. I think I must rewrite it altogether, taking out the smugness and sick weepiness. I shall have to get after this right away.

  Last night a rather horrid little man named Bill Bridger, who is in the agency which employs Terry Jenkins, took us and Terry out to dinner. I don’t quite know what he wanted—was it just to show off his expense account?

  I was saying to Wystan how boring I found Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, and he told me a most significant thing about it—how, when they first move into the house where the orgies will be held, and draw up their rules, one is that you are absolutely forbidden to laugh!

  July 14. Yesterday morning, we went to Moss Bros. to get ourselves rented dinner jackets for Glyndebourne. Mine was a lot too large and gave me a sort of Empire waist, it was braced up so high. Walking through a department st
ore later, on the way to the barber’s, I suddenly came upon a schoolboy memory of how it felt to be going to get your hair cut, the connection with holidays and the excitements of shopping and the theater. London is full of memories like this, for me. They hang around in odd corners, just as smells do.

  Don had some of his fashion drawing to do in the morning. This is the season of the “collections.” We met Morgan for lunch at the Royal [College] of Art.211 Morgan seemed tired. He only brightens when talking about love-lust; it is characteristic of him that the two are inseparably connected in his mind. This is really what differentiates him from any dirty old man. We talked of John Minton’s picture of the death of Nelson, after Maclise, which hangs in the dining room.212 The dead sailors are indeed sexy, and there is a beautiful glimpse of blue sky between tattered sails and keeling masts in the background. But none of the bodies seemed to me to be really properly lying on the deck. Morgan told how Gerda Neddermeyer had run out of the room at Cambridge, because she had been left alone there and had thought someone was coming. Morgan took this to be timidity due to her war experiences; but I think she was simply afraid she would have to talk English to them . . . Morgan recalled how Heinz said at Ostend, “I have no objection to a plain breakfast, provided it is plentiful.”213 We talked about Heinz’s relation to Gerda. The good-humored bossing on both sides. Gerda has cured him of smoking, drinking and gambling. But he counters by being the old-fashioned husband in the home. He won’t help to prepare meals. “Let her do it; she’s a woman.” This is what I want to get into my revised version of the scene in “Paul.”. . . Curiously enough, I felt embarrassed with Morgan after Don had left. We seemed to have little to say. He had disliked Tony Richardson’s chauffeur who, he said, had made a sneering face when Morgan and I had kissed goodbye outside King’s, the day we visited him on the way back from Nottingham. I also gathered that he doesn’t like Tony much and resents Tony having been offered the job of directing A Passage to India. It seems Morgan has some other candidate.