The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Even if Elegy for Young Lovers had been a masterpiece, it couldn’t have made much impression on us last night. The getting to Glyndebourne, the getting a table to eat at, the bad seats (because we had to give up our good ones to Emlyn and Molly Williams whom we’d invited), the saying the wrong things to the right people and vice versa, and the getting home again; all this took up all my energy and attention. It seemed positively Mortmereish to be driving through summer afternoon countryside in dinner jackets. Don was furious because Natasha Spender kissed him and Stephen patted his back and called him Donny, without realizing how he feels about them. I think I offended Wystan and Chester by not gushing. Emlyn got a crick in his neck and drank most of the scotch out of a flask I had luckily brought with me. The set was the best part of the show; a nineteenth-century German Alpine engraving beautifully rendered, with spooky white Alps in the background and a carved wooden interior. As far as I was concerned, Hans Henze’s music reminded me of pangs of arthritis, sudden and sharp and unpredictable.

  Today, I’ve started working on the revision of the two parts in “Paul.”

  The war news is getting very bad. I’m only glad that I shall have the manuscript revised and with the printers before the real crisis starts. Because, then, I know I shan’t feel like working at all.

  Later: Stephen just rang up to ask me and Don to supper tomorrow night or lunch on Sunday. Got out of both invitations. No questions about Don’s attitude. In fact, Stephen had actually called to say how extraordinary it was that neither he nor I nor Cyril Connolly (with whom Wystan and Chester had lunch yesterday) had been invited to the big party after the opera.

  Stephen went on to say that he hadn’t really liked the opera. “This kind of writing is the place where Wystan and Chester meet. I feel it’s part of their contract with each other.” He feels that Wystan isn’t really interested in any of this material. “The young lovers” love is just what we call here in England “a tax-posture.” Then there was a bit of flattery. “I was saying to Natasha at midnight” (why midnight?) “at least, whatever Christopher writes, it’s always something he cares about.”

  July 15. Wystan rang up this morning from the airport to say goodbye. Luckily I’d called him yesterday at the Euston Hotel, so I wasn’t in the wrong. But there was a feeling of haste and constraint and I don’t think this was at all a satisfactory ending. Now he will be in Austria, and the obligation is on us to come there or not come there, as we choose. Nothing was said about the musical project; I guess it has been tacitly abandoned. Nothing was said about Glyndebourne either. I think I’d better write him a letter.

  A dubious day with probably some rain later; but Don has gone off to Brighton to get some sun and sea air. He wanted me to come but I said I must stay here and get on with the revision of the novel. Also, I have to see Olive Mangeot later.

  Worried about a cold sore on my lip which won’t heal. There’s no one here I know of or trust that I can show it to.

  Maurice Richardson214 called to ask if he might get me together with Gerald Hamilton for a talk on “Mr. Norris.” He runs the “Londoner’s Diary” in the New Statesman; and if poor old Gerald is mentioned in it, he will get five pounds.

  July 17. I keep forgetting to write how really dismal and depressing this period is. The Berlin crisis never ceases for one moment to advance, and yet it is so slow; as one newspaper said, its pace is “stately.” Neither Don nor I are happy. So we drink too much every night and eat over-rich food at restaurants and are strained and nervous. And yet I suppose we seem lively enough to most of the people who meet us.

  At least, for the moment, I have some work to keep me absorbed—the final revision of my novel. But that should be finished very soon. I have only the last scene with Waldemar in Berlin left to write. When it’s done, I shall be at a loose end.

  Yesterday, we went with the Tynans to see Mort Sahl on BBC television. He didn’t import very well. You felt he was firing in too many directions at once; anxious to hit all the targets everywhere. Then we went to dinner with them and Joan Littlewood,215 who is a pretty bogus down-to-earther. She likes writers who whore and fuck and bugger, and aren’t intellectuals. She thinks Shakespeare should be shelved for a hundred years, in favor of Ben Jonson. She urged Elaine Tynan to get out and see something of England and talk to real people. I objected that all people are real, if you can talk to them. She claimed me for an ally because I was born near Derbyshire, her favorite county, where they practise necrophilia more than anywhere else in the world.

  The day before yesterday, we had supper at 21 Cresswell Place,216 which is amazingly unchanged in its outward appearance. André was away. Olive, down from Cheltenham, was staying there. Sylvain [Mangeot] still lives there—they now have two bathrooms and are very comfortable. Edward [Upward] and Jean Cockburn217 were invited too.

  Olive is quite the old lady, in black; but she still exhibits her legs, which are still good. Sylvain is absolutely middle-aged, slow-spoken and sententious but well-informed and intelligent and interesting. Jean really looks very good. She has the appearance of a Hollywood star who has been made up for the twenty-years-after sequence; her oldness isn’t very convincing. Olive and Jean are both family-obsessed. Olive talks chiefly about Hilda [Hauser], Phylly, Amber, Amber’s husband, a “smashing” blond English policeman, and their daughter, who shows no trace whatever of Negro blood.218 Jean talks of her daughter Sarah, who has one degree in classics and is about to get another in law, and who is really quite beautiful and at the moment plans to marry a rich feckless Jewish boy of whom Jean violently disapproves. Edward and Hilda [Upward] have just heard that she will be able to get this disablement pension,219 and so they can both retire at the end of the year and Edward can get on with his next novel.

  July 20. Today, while giving our bedroom a cleanout, I found the gold tie clip I bought years ago in New Orleans. I lost it quite soon after I arrived here and I had sadly given up all hope of seeing it again. This strikes me as a good omen. I like to think it is.

  Don has gone off to Manchester by plane today, to draw Albert Finney. Then, I hope, he’ll find out whether Tony really means us to stay with him in the South of France. Also, we have to get definite word about Don’s exhibition at the Redfern, because we must renew our permits to stay in England. So a lot may be decided this weekend.

  The day before yesterday, I finished the revisions on my novel, and yesterday I took the typescript back to Methuen’s and sent a copy of the corrections to Simon and Schuster. I’m really quite pleased with them; I know I have cut a whole lot of sloppy stuff out.

  Now, forget the whole thing, and get on with Ramakrishna.

  Have seen Alan Bennett of Beyond the Fringe. We went to the show again and took him out to dinner afterwards. He is quite shy, with a non-U accent, and he doesn’t want to be an actor. His chief preoccupation is historical research; he’s preparing a book on the economic life at the time of Richard II. He was much hurt by Mort Sahl’s ungenerous remarks about them. Sahl told an interviewer that they weren’t funny, didn’t have any positive point of view, didn’t attack anything important, etc.

  Also saw Gerald Hamilton, who is as spry as ever; always referring to himself as “poor Gerald.” Also Cecil Day-Lewis, who is writing a Nicholas Blake play. Also Amiya, who described George’s increasingly gaga behavior, his passes at little girls, his lapses of memory, his exhibitionistic masturbation.

  Iris Tree now tells us that Ivan is definitely going to marry Kate Smith; but that they are waiting a while, to let Donna get used to the idea. Told Iris what I think of Donna. But neither she nor Don agree with me about this.

  July 22. A day of stolid misery. Don is furious with me. He won’t admit why, but it’s because of my not coming back home the night he returned from Manchester. He won’t discuss it, so I can’t tell him I simply fell asleep. And anyhow that probably wouldn’t make things any better. . . . It’s no use saying all this is babyish nonsense, that I ought to rise above it and think of se
rious things, like Ramakrishna or at least the Berlin crisis. The truth is that when we quarrel like this, and I think that Don might leave me, I feel the most utter forlorn misery. My life wouldn’t make any sense without him.

  Reading the last two stories in The Untilled Field has depressed me, too; they are so bitterly sad.

  Don said this morning that he feels he is losing all interest in other people; and he said that he now understands his mother and Ted much better. I asked him if he meant he thought he might go crazy. Oh no, he said, his danger would be too much self-control, not too little. When he is in this mood, he is absolutely black; there is no other way of describing it. You see in him such a terrible will to despair. It infects me. I sit watching him, all twisted up, feeling deathly sick.

  But now I’m going to pull myself together and later I’ll do some work on Ramakrishna, and eat at home tonight and try to get some sanity and balance back into me. When I ask myself, who would I like to talk to about all this, I find there is no one. That’s good, because it means I have never discussed or shared my problems with Don with anyone.

  July 23. After writing the above, I went to have tea with Paul Taylor, the boy with T.B. I once visited in hospital after he sent me a fan letter.220 Was really shocked by his appearance when he opened the door. Sunken eyes and a blackness around them. He looked much worse than when I saw him in hospital.

  He and his friend, who’s an architect named Ian Grant, have taken a house on Ladbroke Square and redecorated it.221 The staircas[e] wallpaper is purple. The dining room is black and orange. The drawing room is gold. They have pasted the walls with pictures of all kinds, portraits mostly. They are making a carpet, each panel different, with Victorian rose patterns. Ian’s bedroom is Biedermeier, with a fur rug on the bed. Paul said, “It’s so wonderful that we’ve got this place while we’re still young. We’ll have so many years to enjoy it.” I felt like I wanted to cross myself, superstitiously.

  Went back home, fixed fish cakes and frozen beans and then read all of Allan Monkhouse’s [play] First Blood, the rest of Arthur Calder-Marshall’s book for boys about Jack London, Lone Wolf, and quite a lot of Ainsworth’s Old St. Paul’s, which I got in a bookshop on Flask Walk. No work on Ramakrishna.

  This morning, Don returned early, after staying out, and was quite happy again and we lay on the roof and sunbathed and he read me Elaine Tynan’s short story in The Queen.222 Tonight we are to hear her play read aloud. And tomorrow I go up to Wyberslegh till Wednesday to see Richard. . . . No time to comment on any of this as I have to rush out and join Don.

  July 27. Just back from lunch with Stephen, William Plomer and Matthew Spender. Stephen incredibly bitchy as usual, claiming that the Redfern Gallery people are so dishonest that they tear prints out of books and sell them, and that he bought a Graham Sutherland from them incredibly cheap—their only stipulation being that he should take it away at once. He says he realized it must be stolen. . . . It’s really a miracle he doesn’t get sued much more often for libel. (In fact, I’m not sure he ever has been.)

  Yesterday, I got back from Wyberslegh. I went up there on the 24th, as planned.

  On the whole, the visit was a great success, I think. I found Richard and the house itself much more cheerful. The married couple, the Vinces,223 keep the house cleaner, of course; though not as clean as I’d have expected. There are still cobwebs everywhere, and the books are grimy with the dirt of twenty years. But, aside from all this, there is a sense of release from tensions and the dead weight of M.’s age and illness. I slept in Nanny’s old room, a little room overlooking the farmyard, and it seemed extraordinarily cheerful, joyful, almost, with a sort of childhood joy when I woke in the morning and heard the wind seething in the beeches, and looked out and saw the line of the moors, which is so different in different lights but has a sense of always-thereness like the sea.

  Altogether, I felt a very strong nostalgic thing about the country. Jack Smith, the little farmhand of the Cooper period and hero of the saving of the farm from Nazi incendiary bombs,224 drove us all around the Peak,225 the day before yesterday; and it was so wild and wonderful, despite the tourists. I feel I want to buy an ordnance map226 and pore over its place-names, as I used to when I was in my teens. (I found my old guide to the Peak, in a shelf, all white with mildew.)

  Richard has lately become quite thick with Jack again, and goes down to his bungalow in Poynton, by way of a very “rats” road that passes over a level crossing of a railway in the middle of a wood.227 Jack associates almost entirely with teenage boys—because, says Mr. Vince sneeringly, he’s immature. One of them is a sixteen-year-old boy named Roger who has a huge mass of curly red hair and is very tall and the illegitimate son of an American G.I. in the war. Jack calls him “matey” and they do gardening jobs for Richard together. Jack pronounces Derbyshire in the American fashion. He’ll say, “Will you have another drink . . .” of tea, meaning a cup of. He uses “Master” instead of “Mister”; and this not only in speaking of what he considers “gentry”—for example, he’ll say “Master Vince.”

  It’s curious to see how this environment affects Richard himself. He’ll use some of these expressions, but nevertheless he is strongly class-conscious. He still speaks of people being “familiar.” He feels that the Vinces are presuming; though often this merely means that they are bossing him—straightening his tie, urging him not to take so much beer or laxative—the former makes him drunk, the latter makes him leak shit into his pants and through them onto chairs. Mr. Vince is a bit smart-alecky and superior, born for better things, he intimates, than Mrs. Vince and his dull job in a Stockport store; he would “like to write.” (How coyly and graciously people say this!) Mrs. Vince is nicer; big bottomed, outspoken, Yorkshire. He’s from the South.

  One day, Richard had two silver candlesticks sold, on the lawyer’s advice. Later, he came into the house and overheard Mrs. Vince discussing the sale on the telephone, and saying how much he’d got for the candlesticks and how he was going to share the money with me. Richard was furious. Whom was she talking to? And how dared she tell anyone such a thing? He wrote in his diary (which he gave me to read): “Someone who is in my employ as it were; and someone in what is my house.” (The as it were and the what is are so symptomatic of Richard’s attitude, with all its humility-aggression!) He never did ask Mrs. Vince who she was talking to.

  He has almost no front teeth now; just three or four yellow stumps. He is lean, despite the beer, because he eats so little. He has this strange kind of scalded red complexion; partly windburn perhaps and partly ruptured veins. His eyes are a very clear innocent blue. He laughs his screaming laugh more wildly than ever. He twists his head about, mutters to himself. Often he mutters, “So sorry, darling,” as he used to, to M. He is full of the bitterest resentments. He has almost no interest in anything outside of himself and his world. He is not in the very least crazy.

  Most of his talk is about Alan Bradley, “my pal and best friend,” as he calls him in his diary. Richard goes to sleep at the Bradleys’ place on the Old Buxton Road at least a couple of nights a week, walking home in the dawn over Jackson’s Edge. Unfortunately the Bradleys were away in Guernsey while I was there. I would like to talk to them. Richard writes in his diary: “How I do love to see the constant demonstrative affection of the Alans for each other!” And he says, “Alan very amusing and splendidly light-hearted.” When Richard stays there, Alan comes and tucks him up in bed, after tucking up his own daughter. Richard gets along with the wife and daughter much better since M. died.

  (Don just got in and, rather than feel rushed—especially as I still have to make japam before we leave for the Court Theatre228 for the opening of Luther—I’ll stop here and go on tomorrow.)

  July 28. Luther, last night, had its anticipated success. I don’t think the play adds up to much. Don says he doesn’t really like it. (And he has the, so far, almost unique authority of having seen it four times!) He doesn’t like Finney’s acting either. It cert
ainly didn’t seem nearly as straightforward as at Nottingham; the mannerisms are creeping back. He is a very sly actor. Sometimes the slyness in his face is right for the occasion. It was right, oddly enough, during the early scenes in the monastery; giving him an air of being partially possessed—the Devil seemed to peep out of him. At other times he just wasn’t right, and his coldness became uninteresting. Now and then I caught such a startling glimpse in him of Laughton—that sly treacherous turnip-headed look which Laughton uses; a Halloween mask which might bite.

  A big showy party on stage later, with lots to eat and drink, and a band and dancing. Loudon Sainthill and Harry Miller were there, and they told Don that his show is definitely on early in October; Harry couldn’t remember the date. (This raises all manner of problems for me—and for Don—about British income tax; if you stay here over six months of any fiscal year, you may be liable. I won’t fuss about that now. I’m going to Somerset House229 to find out about our particular case, sometime next week.) John Osborne drunkenly friendly; calling me, “my dear friend!” Tony Richardson now talks about our coming to the South of France again, but probably not till later. (I phoned him this morning; he is quite pleased by the notices, but says that the real raves are only for Finney.)

  Tonight, we have dinner with Angus Wilson and Tony Garrett and then go off with them in their car to stay at their cottage in the country, near Bury St. Edmunds.

  Very good relations with Don since I got home. Only, this morning, I had to refuse to let him look in my little diary lest he should see Jonathan’s name. It is too idiotic for words, and yet it was better than letting him. Don was hurt about this. If he could only realize how utterly unimportant all that kind of thing is. But no one can be expected to, of course—no one.

  Well—back to my Wyberslegh visit. . . .