The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  It’s hard to make out exactly how Richard spends his time. “I know,” he said, in his mock-worried tone, “that I lead a terribly selfish and useless life.” But he doesn’t really feel guilty about this, I think; and why should he? (Yes, he should, I guess—he is a nuisance, a liability, a bit of driftwood which occasionally gets in the path of oceangoing vessels. But it’s a very small bit of driftwood. And there seem to be plenty of people quite glad to devote time to him. And he is employing labor. And he isn’t in the least stingy.)

  He plays the piano more than he used to and even learns new tunes. He was laboriously and slowly playing “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now?”230 over and over. He reads the books of the German Garden “Elizabeth”;231 most others he condemns as “depressing.”

  I wanted to bring back the first editions I gave M. of Sally Bowles and All the Conspirators; also the letters I wrote her. So we looked through the drawers for them. We found many of the letters—though certain batches were missing and may turn up later. Also a Victorian black-edged mourning envelope, inscribed in Granny Emmy’s handwriting: “My dear Father’s hair.” Richard thought this as funny as I did and he screamed out like a macaw with laughter.

  On the morning of the 25th, Richard and I walked down to Disley. When I exclaimed at the beauty of the woods at Jackson’s Edge, Richard said that all this landscape depresses him. For him, it expresses the contrast between the past and the present. He says of himself that he feels “left behind.”

  All this sounds very poignant, but my overall impression is that he is making a good recovery from the shock of M.’s death. (“You must try not to mind too much,” she told him, right at the end, when she was having slight heart attacks which left her breathless.) I think he dreaded my visit because he thought it would precipitate a big emotional scene which would upset him all over again. But I was much more prepared for this than he supposed and played it very offhand when we met; no brothers-in-bereavement stuff. I only embraced him when I left, and by that time we had established a very satisfactory post-M. relationship. I think, in fact, that he was really quite sorry to see me go. Quite sorry—not violently.

  M. is buried, as he had told me, in the mound which is to your right as you come out the front door. There is no sign of the hole; the grass has grown over it again, and there is no marker. Though there are two—for two of the several cats which are buried all around her. It’s admirably Buddhist in feeling. Only it’s a pity that her ashes are in an urn. It will be dug up one day by strangers; and whatever they do with it will be inappropriate. I went out in the windy morning of my last day there and tried to dedicate the spot with mantrams to Ramakrishna.

  Down in Disley, we drank beer at the pub. Richard drinks a lot of beer in the course of the day, but he was nowhere near getting drunk while I was there. He sometimes drinks ten bottles a day, he says.

  As I mentioned already, he gave me his diary to read. Here are some items which pleased me:

  Jack Smith’s friend Roger is very untidy and has a way of “sprawling” in the chairs and putting his feet on a footstool. This offended Richard (and Mrs. Vince). So, when Roger came next, they hid the footstool!

  During the night, it was discovered, the taps in two of the wash-basins had mysteriously turned on and water was running. Richard half-seriously wondered if the Pussy could have done it. True, the Pussy seemed to have an alibi—that he had been sleeping all night on Richard’s bed. But had he, really? And this bit of social moralizing:

  According to many people, Dr. B. is rather snobby and favors his wealthy patients—of course he and Jack are probably the same class really, but it is for the most part those who are recruited from that class who are the snobs of today.

  Riding down on the train from Stockport back to London, I finished Angus Wilson’s The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot—with great difficulty. I had liked the first part, and Wystan, the so-easily-bored novel-reader, had recommended it strongly. But it seemed to me Angus does nothing with the character of the brother. It all pales away to nothing. And to compare, as one critic did, Mrs. Eliot to Madame Bovary! He must have been sick.

  One detail about last night which I’d forgotten to put down: When they played “God Save the Queen” before the curtain went up, Alan Sillitoe,232 who was sitting right in front of us in the first row, remained seated; but Ruth Sillitoe233 stood up. There was something very pleasing about this. I felt I should refer to it later, but I didn’t. Don and I agree that Alan is one mass of aggression. The way to get along with him is simply to be aggressive; that’s all he asks of other human beings. It’s Ruth who goes in for culture and intellectualism.

  (Don just got home. He saw Harry Miller today, and his show at the Redfern is definitely fixed for October 3—till the 27th. The main exhibitor is Nicholas Georgiadis.234 Don only knows his theatrical designs and says they’re awful. But we hear that Georgiadis is “delighted” that Don is exhibiting with him. We met him, it seems, at a party.)

  July 31. I really quite enjoyed the weekend with Angus and Tony. Angus is amazingly the country lady—perhaps the widow of a knight, or better still a dame. He enters into all the social life, belongs to the tennis club committees and the committee to save the old theater in Bury St. Edmunds, etc. And he devotes a great deal of time to social visiting. He feels he is learning provincial life and will soon be able to write about it.

  His rather high voice causes telephone operators to mistake him for a woman. When they call him Ma’am and he corrects them, “Mister Wilson,” they obediently repeat after him, “Miss de Wilson.”

  He tells how, when he was working at the British Museum, a mad Frenchman came to see him and announced that he had discovered how to understand the language of animals. Angus asked him what they talked about. Oh, said the Frenchman, nothing at all interesting—rien que des bêtises.235

  A neighbor had been annoyed by the noise made by U.S. planes from a local airfield, and his little son had been scared. So he phoned the airfield to complain. “And do you know, they had the cheek to answer me in American!?”

  We got home last night. This morning Dick Gain arrived; the American dancer from Jerry Robbins’s ballet whom the Burtons invited to share this house with us while the ballet is here. He is very young, simple, sweet, gossipy and domesticated, and I feel much reassured. I think we’ll get along.

  Don took more of his drawings down to Harry Miller at the Redfern, this morning. Huge enthusiasm. A gallery owner from New York happened to be visiting and promptly said Don must have a show in his gallery! Don, the eternal pessimist, puts this down to the number of celebrated sitters in the collection, not to the quality of the drawings.

  August 4. On the eve of the Bank Holiday weekend, with rain threatening. It seems cruel to wish for it, and yet the Heath will be hell if the weather is fine.

  The Berlin crisis stews on and on. Now an article in The Spectator says that Kennedy and his advisers don’t expect “a great confrontation” on Berlin this year or even next.236 On the other hand, Bertrand Russell, in a half-page advertisement in the New Statesman, says:

  Most people in this country as well as in other countries, appear to be unaware that the Governments of East and West are solemnly preparing by mutual vituperation to create a general state of mind in which the public will acquiesce in a large scale nuclear war.

  A large scale nuclear war, as almost all experts are agreed, means not only the extermination of nine-tenths of the population of Russia and the United States, but also what for us in Britain is peculiarly important, the total and complete extermination of the whole population of Western Europe and Britain.

  Perhaps, to be scrupulously exact, one should make one small exception. If it should happen that throughout the few days of the war the wind blew continuously from the West there might be a few dozen survivors in the Outer Hebrides. . . .237

  A nice man named Kenneth Allsop238 interviewed me this morning for The Daily Mail. I have had quite a bit of notice taken of me lately. A
BBC television interview offer, a BBC radio offer, an interview impe[n]ding from The Yorkshire Post, an offer to write about lust for The Sunday Times in their Seven Deadly Sins series— this last I declined, for obvious reasons.

  Have got started reading for the Ramakrishna book. But it is very awkward working so far away from Swami; I need to keep asking him questions. However I can at least do a rough draft of the next chapter.

  Don has been making a whole lot of drawings of me, for Methuen. Alan White wants to put one of them on the book jacket. He is also very much sold on the idea of an illustrated front. Don and I are dubious, rather. I’m sure the mirror idea is good, but making the faces look like me makes the whole thing somehow indiscreet.239

  Great happiness with Don at the moment, and general harmony. As for Dick Gain, he couldn’t bother us less. He stays in bed most of the day, resting up for the performances; and is most good-natured and friendly whenever we do meet.

  Books I’m in the middle of reading now: George Moore’s Avowals, Humbert Wolfe’s George Moore, Cecil Beaton’s Diaries.

  August 5. So far, I love the Beaton Diaries:

  Papa observed about a horrifying residence surrounded by a hedge of repugnant shrubs. “That doesn’t look a bad sort of place.” I nearly went mad.

  How I abominate English seaside towns! When I’m on my own I shall never subject myself to such squalor.

  . . . The smell of Daddy’s filthy pipe insulted my nose. . . . an old woman who arrived here yesterday. I thought her pert and perfect, an inspired little bird in smart London clothes. . . . She’s almost bald but, clever little darling, doesn’t wear a wig, simply parting her thin moth-eaten hair very slickly.

  Heavy rain this morning. We always get up so late. Anyhow, I had a bad hangover-headache after drinking too much with Al Kaplan and his friend Christopher [Lawrence], and Don. Nicholas Eden was there at the beginning of the evening, such a great frozen monument to his Father and the Suez Crisis and the Old School; it is truly shocking to see one of these young British fossils. They are older than all their ancestors, and they will breed sons even older than themselves.240

  Dick Gain is the psychophysical polar opposite of Don and me. He is goony-vague and utterly relaxed at all times. (He claims he has stage fright but I can’t believe it.) He sleeps about twelve hours a night, with a photograph of his friend Dick [Kuch] beside the bed. When we get home at night, he’s sometimes writing to Dick—telling him, he says, what a “wonderful relationship” Don and I have. We’re so “warm and human.” Around eleven in the morning, he takes a long long bath, then goes off to the theater. He won’t eat any of our food unless urged to do so. Richard Burton told them, “You make a very handsome pair.”

  August 6. Heavy showers have completely doused the holiday weekend so far. I was glad of them this morning, but now we have to go along to the [Donald Ogden] Stewarts’ and it’s a bore, and on top of that I left my raincoat at the Café Royal last night. Had supper there with Tony Richardson. (Don was out for the night.) I began telling him about my idea for an interview play; the basic idea of the Mexican Down There on a Visit.241 I got quite excited and so did he, but I know that I don’t really have any sound basic idea. I’ll work on this.

  Later we were joined by Al Kaplan and his friend Christopher. And we all got to watching a very brash large plump but rather cute young man at another table, who was entertaining a dark younger handsomer boy who was obviously very ill at ease and very drunk. Tony dared us to invite them over, and we finally did; and then they came back to Al’s house. The brash young man [. . .] told us he was secretary to Lord Boothby.242 He cross-examined each of us in turn with drunken rudeness. He had never heard of either Tony or me; and his questions were chiefly designed to make us admit we’d “sell out” under pressure. Tony was rude to him right back. Al and Christopher were chiefly concerned lest the other boy, a rather charming cockney, should throw up all over their beautiful carpet. He didn’t, but he slept all through our visit. It was a stupid evening, really; and once again I drank far too much.

  August 8. A tearing wind today, with branches breaking off the trees. The air is very clear after all this rain. Shopping in Hampstead this afternoon, you could not only see St. Paul’s but the hills on the other side of the city. A little girl said to her friend, “Look, you can see England!”

  This morning, Don and I went down to Methuen’s, where Alan White said they’ll not only use one of Don’s drawings of me but also one of his designs for the jacket—and pay him twenty guineas! The drawings were chosen and the whole matter settled in no time at all.

  Very good relations with Don all this while; full of joy. He is staying in town tonight, and this is really a good thing; only I get annoyed when he makes dates at the last minute and I can’t do the same. Jonathan is going to the theater tonight.

  Lunch with poor old Edith Sitwell243 yesterday. Most of the time she is perfectly logical; then she rambles off into an amazing tale of how her publishers, Longmans Green, (since abandoned) put workmen to boring holes in the wall next her bedroom, and how this caused an infection of her middle ear, and of how she called Scotland Yard and was with difficulty restrained from going around and slapping the faces of all the twenty-three workmen in turn. . . . With us at lunch was a trained nurse, an Irish girl; and a young writer(?) from Portugal, a bit of an ass-licker. Don joined us later. He hopes to get to draw her.

  Tonight I shall stay home and eat fish cakes and string beans and read several books—Quatermass and the Pit,244 Avowals and maybe start John Gunther’s Inside Europe Today. The news is kind of fair and foul. Mr. Khrushchev talks of calling up reservists but pledges no blockade of West Berlin. And of course the papers are full of Major Titov and his seventeen turns around the earth.245

  I have often intended to write something about this house, and I never have. I don’t know if Ivor Jenkins was responsible, but whether he was or not it’s really a disgracefully shoddy job. The woodwork is rotten and shabby already and the plaster is cracked in many places. The light fixtures couldn’t be worse. Pairs of sham candles with crimson shades projecting from a fancy gilt fixture made to look like ribbons with tassels and bows. And there are wretched little miniature chandeliers. No coziness at all. But one must say one thing—the hot water’s always hot!

  We see very little of Dick Gain. His only offense is that he never cleans the ashtrays and so I have to keep doing it. But he’s a good-natured sweet boy.

  Architectural note which I failed to put down in its proper place. The walls of Angus Wilson’s cottage are done with what’s called “knapped flint.”

  Yesterday, I started playing at interviewing Don.246 “What would you tell a young man who wanted to be an artist?” “Don’t go to school.” “What would you tell him to do, then?” “Never do any kind of work you don’t want to do.”

  I’m so proud of Don sometimes that I could burst. And so, on an occasion like this morning at Methuen’s, I put on a rather disparaging expression, like a parent who fears to show his pride. Of course, I know it’s the most monstrous egotism on my part to be proud, to claim any part in what he has made of himself. Just the same, I do.

  August 10. Another feature of this house; the absurd smallness of the upstair rooms. Two of them are barely more than closets. The whole place, with the ugly trashy rather theatrical unconvincingness of the downstair “living” rooms and the snug down-to-earth womblikeness of the upstairs, designed to hold nothing but double beds, makes you think of a very small whorehouse.

  Am writing this waiting to go off and do a short interview on BBC television.247 Don has gone to draw Margaret Leighton.

  A party last night at John Lehmann’s, ostensibly “for” me, but actually just a catchall. Oh, these seedy sophisticated youths! Of everyone there, I really only liked Joe Ackerley. We had him to dinner afterwards. But unfortunately an old friend of his, a French art critic who is a son-in-law of Matisse,248 was sitting at the next table and had to be asked over. He was a sur
ly old bore. When he talked about the painting of the young, he made a face like a spoiled gourmet in a restaurant who knows in advance he won’t like anything they offer him.

  Another triumph for Don. He went yesterday to see the art editor of The Queen, and they are going to publish three of his drawings in September, just before his show.

  Have finished Cecil Beaton’s Diaries. What a sad book! Not that it isn’t amusing and entertaining. But it’s sad because you feel—at least I felt—that this whole safari of Cecil’s in search of The Real Right Set is in itself a frustration; and throughout it, he seems so agonizingly lonely. He is an extraordinarily heroic figure. In the last resort, he has nothing except his work. No friends. No alleviating vices. No real faith. Nothing. And he knows that.

  And this brings back to me, once again, my own marvellous luck and underlying happiness. This is a wonderful time with Don; the best in months.

  August 12. Une Vie.249 I got a sudden presentiment yesterday and cancelled the date with Jonathan. The whole thing is getting too sticky, especially since Dick Gain told how he’d been to their dressing room and talked about me on T.V. It is too silly to describe—all this. . . . Anyhow, here I am, alone; because of course Don had meanwhile made himself a night in town. So I am bored and restless. Why? Because I bore myself. I don’t really want to be alone. I shall make a terrible old man, I fear! So now I’ve called Oswell Blakeston,250 because he sent me a note the other day suggesting we should get together for a drink, after all these years; and I’m going to see him after cooking myself a supper of sausages and peas.

  Don told me the other evening I am sly. I said, “I suppose the truth is, I’m exactly like Dracula, and I want to suck your blood and make you one of the Undead, too.” “If only I could believe that,” said Don, “everything would be perfectly all right!”

  Reading Avowals. I couldn’t be less interested in the opinions of Moore and Gosse about the various English novelists. What I like about the book is its atmosphere: the atmosphere of Moore’s sitting room on Ebury Street; the fire, the slippers, the books, the maid and the tea. And the atmosphere of the book itself—it is the privately printed, signed edition with grey and white binding and uncut leaves. The book is numinous and makes me feel very close to the presence of the author. I don’t think I could read it in a cheap edition.