The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  August 15. Yesterday the East Germans closed the border in Berlin. Maybe by this time something worse has developed. I haven’t been out to look. Rather than mope in crisis-jitters, I took a Dexamyl and wrote a draft of my catalog note for Don’s exhibition, a draft of my description of Down There on a Visit and of my biography, both for the jacket.

  Also walked out to Parliament Hill on the Heath. Marvellous view with sky threatening rain. Made a lot of japam.

  We saw the Youth Theatre do Richard II last night, and soon left. They aren’t even young.

  We now have seats reserved on a plane to take us to Nice next Wednesday; God knows if we shall go. Tony Richardson admits that they have a water shortage at his villa because of the drought. And we also hear that Willie Maugham is dying. So presumably we can’t go there.

  Well, anyhow—Don is still being an utter angel. And that’s something!

  August 20. This morning I have been going over the jacket descrip tion of my novel, my autobiographical note and my catalog note for Don. The first two are all right now; the note for Don stinks. It’s arch. I simply do not see how to do this. I can’t hit the right tone.

  The crisis roars on, with the dear Germans trying their hardest to pull the entire house down over their heads and ours. John Osborne has added his scream of defiance to the uproar: “There is murder in my brain, and I carry a knife in my heart for every one of you. . . .” Shelagh Delaney and John Braine agree with him. Trevor-Roper and Priestley are snooty. Wesker slyly straddles the fence.251 As for me, I warm to John for writing it; but why confine himself to the English politicians? The Russians are chiefly to blame, anyhow. And that swine de Gaulle. And old gaga Eisenhower. Osborne should say to them, too, “I [would] willingly watch you all die for the West.”

  Meanwhile Jerry Robbins still plans to take his ballet into Berlin this coming week. (Dick Gain now gets so on my nerves, with his thick-skinned sweetness and light and failure to empty his own dirty ashtrays, that I can hardly bear to be in the room with him.) We are still supposed to leave for the Richardson-Osborne villa at Valbonne next Wednesday. Don is still at his very sweetest.

  I’m beginning already to love Ralph Hodgson. His Collected Poems have just arrived. I love him while I’m reading his bad poems; that’s the test.

  At the beginning of last week, a journalist from the Daily Express called, wanting an interview. I said[,] No—your paper breaks confidence, and journalism’s impossible if you do that.252 He said, You’re very hard; I’ve read everything you’ve written. (When they say that, I long to have them arrested and dragged into my presence for a viva voce examination; failure to score eighty-five percent minimum would be punished by a sound flogging.)

  We had lunch with Chessy-cat253 Cyril Connolly the other day. His bland talk of literary stocks and shares, relating to the sale price of one’s manuscripts and first editions at the University of Texas. “If the libretto of Elegy for Young Lovers gets to America, Wystan won’t be able to ask such high prices.” Cyril says he’s making a complete collection of everything written in the thirties. “One day, it’ll be like having a collection of the Impressionists.” He feels that his book reviewing is a sort of alternative oeuvre; something as good, in its own way, as the novels he might have written. But he doesn’t believe this.

  August 21. Don told me at breakfast that he had had a dream: he looked in the mirror and saw that his hair was long, down to his shoulders, and he thought that he wished he could dress it and fluff it out properly and then go to a masquerade ball. He said he was sure this dream had nothing to do with any desire to turn into a woman and thereby get a male partner. He said his fantasies are never connected with other people. I said that mine aren’t either; they all have to do with travel. Having a yacht of my own, for instance.

  This morning, Tony Richardson phoned from the South of France to say that the villa is much smaller than he had supposed and that it’s full of women guests. He suggested we should stay at a village eleven kilometers away, and come to the villa every day for food. Don indignantly rejected this idea, as I was hoping he would. So France is off. Of course, Tony says that we can come in two weeks, when all of these people have left. But one can no longer rely on him, I fear. He just doesn’t care, and he treats everyone like an employee.

  Supper with Amiya last night. She had been having a terrible time with George, so we took her to Kettner’s to cheer her up. I do wish, though, that she wouldn’t keep ascribing everything she achieves to Holy Mother’s help. It makes us squirm. Actually she seems most at her ease with people like the man who owns the garage where she keeps her car. (He used to be an amateur actor and says he was in a production of The Ascent of F6, with Jimmy Stern’s brother.254) He is brash and non-U, and though he calls her Lady Sandwich, you feel, as Don says, as if they might at any moment quite suddenly have sex, on the carpet.

  August 25. Don has gone out for the evening and I’ve been eating at home alone. Tomorrow we go down to Essex to see the Beesleys; Monday we are supposed to go on to Cambridge to spend the day with Morgan Forster. But he’s so vague that one just cannot be sure if he’ll really be there.

  The crisis is worse again; because the Russians are threatening to prevent the West from bringing in or supplying West German civilians in Berlin. It all seems too crazy even to record, but one must record it.

  I am very bad. I do no work at all. I really must start, as soon as we get home from this weekend. Don is marvellously active and he has persuaded the Redfern to give him a bigger and better room for his show. Now we have sent off his second set of designs and portrait of me for the jacket of the Simon and Schuster edition of my novel.

  Lunch with John Lehmann today. We discussed how much one should get from Texas for manuscripts, and similar matters. John says that Henry Yorke is now quite gaga. But John himself is becoming vague in a rather senile way. He tells me that Beatrix [Lehmann] won’t see Don because she overheard him saying something awful about John at a party! I can’t tell Don this; I promised I wouldn’t, and it would only send him into a tailspin. I’m not sure I believe it, anyhow. I must find some subtle method of sounding out Beatrix—except that the whole problem couldn’t interest me less. Is this my particular way of going senile—becoming so indifferent to so many people?

  Do I have any birthday resolves? Work and pray. That’s all there ever is. I am at least glad that I’ve kept up my japam pretty nearly completely since I made that decision on the beach at Santa Barbara.

  Dick Gain left on the 23rd with the ballet for Berlin. I broke a tooth out of my bridge and Mr. Mackenzie-Young efficiently repaired it. Don profited by not having gone to France: he got to draw Lotte Lenya, and a Count Maurice D’Arquian who owns a gallery in Paris255 and who paid him for a drawing. And on Monday he’ll draw Forster, we hope.

  August 30. I made an entry yesterday which I decided to scrap, because, after all, let’s face it, Don, you are most probably going to read this one day, and it simply wasn’t fair. I have no objection to making you feel ashamed of or embarrassed about certain bits of behavior, if that’s going to help you in the future. But this was just a squirt of senile venom from me, which might as well have been aimed at de Gaulle or Tony Richardson or anyone else I don’t or do know. It would only have pained you without reason. And so that’s why the bottom of the preceding page has been cut off.

  The venom was really all about my birthday. I suppose it is symptomatic of something, the way I always want to have a marvellous one and almost never do. This weekend was one of the worst in years. We should never have gone to Dodie and Alec’s. It was sad unfun, and we overate, and I got crisis-blues and felt just utterly miserable. All Don did was to be tiresome, as when isn’t he, about getting to the station; whenever we travel together, it is always a rush and this gradually rubs and rubs my nerves until I’m ready to scream. So I was hateful to him and then when I wanted to make it up, he wouldn’t, at least he had that residual sneer-smile on his face. And then next day there was
all the fuss of his drawing Dodie. He did a frank drawing of her, and she put on such an act—talking about not wanting to let her public see her like that. It was really insane. Don behaved very well and did a bad flattering one of her, which she loved.

  Then at Cambridge, which we went on to on the Monday for the day, Morgan got drunk and dozy at lunch and refused to let Don do more than one drawing, and so there were sulks about that, which I could hardly blame Don for. And Don kept saying that he would go stir-crazy there, and of course I agree, but we only had the afternoon to get through, and it would have been better not to fuss. We came home in a train with a prehistorian named McBurney who lectured us quite interestingly about caves in Africa.256

  One of Dodie’s neighbors said to her—after they’d talked about Autumn Crocus and her other early successes—“And you still plod along, eh?”

  Must dash out now. More tomorrow.

  August 31. This morning, we hear that Russia is to resume bomb testing.257 Altogether, things couldn’t look more ominous. Yet no one seems in a hurry to negotiate.

  Don has a bad stomach upset. He couldn’t be sweeter. He is working frantically, and now he is doubtful about taking any trip to the South of France. Theoretically, we go next Wednesday, with Tony Richardson, who’s returning to London sometime this weekend. The possibility of seeing Truman Capote in Spain is off. He wrote today saying that he and Jack [Dunphy] are taking off at once for Switzerland. This may or may not be an excuse.

  It’s heartrending, how well everything would be going for us, if these were ordinary times. Why shouldn’t Don have his little London success under an unclouded sky? He is doing so well. Everybody admires his work. He would so enjoy himself. So the old War Uncles have to step in and grimly spoil everything. If we are all blown up in the next few weeks, well, at least we shall never know the difference. But suppose we aren’t? As I said in my diary at the time of Munich,258 it’s impossible, ultimately, not to loathe the Disturbers—all of them.

  My tentative plans are, to leave England, about the second week in October, after the opening of Don’s show. Otherwise, I shall have to pay British income tax. But if things look very bad then, or if Don wants me to stay on, then I shall.

  Meanwhile, I have done at least one constructive thing: yesterday I restarted the Ramakrishna chapter. This is the ideal work for a crisis period.

  September 2. Very true, but yesterday and the day before yesterday I failed to do any, and I doubt if I shall do any today. I’m in the grip of crisis sloth; psychologically, it’s all exactly like 1938. Except perhaps that this time it’s even more passive; the idea of an H-bomb makes one almost relax, in the miserable slaughterhouse-passive way you try to relax before an operation. The chief sensations of the past three days have been: Russia’s restarting of tests, the note from the stealers of the Goya (“Query not, that I have the Goya”),259 and Mary Ure’s baby. (Elaine Tynan tells me that Osborne is now trying to ditch Jocelyn Rickards in favor of a new girl in Venice.)260

  Don went up to Stratford today, to do some more drawings of John Gielgud. Our relations are very good again, since we got back from the weekend. Yesterday evening, we went to see The Best Years of our Lives, and I think the scene between Myrna Loy, Fredric March and Teresa Wright about marriage “spoke to his condition.” He said to me, “Am I fun to be with?”

  Dick Gain sent us a postcard from Berlin. Not one word about the “situation”—only that the weather was good and Jerry Robbins had let him do [Afternoon of a] Faun and The Cage, which made him very happy. And, honestly, isn’t his a much more psychologic ally healthy attitude than mine?

  Thick fog today which cleared around noon. Don drew Ivor Jenkins and Ivor drove him down to the station, to go to Stratford.

  I am mulling over a scheme to publish a book of my bits and pieces—short stories, articles, book reviews. I think I could link them together with some short autobiographical notes. It might be quite amusing.

  September 5. What an absurdly jittery passage in my life this is! The crisis is quite bad enough, with Russia blandly popping off bombs and everybody else protesting, and East Germany about to be recognized at any moment. And the weather is depressing and cold and grey. And, on top of this, we are creating extra tension for ourselves by messing around with Tony Richardson, who is Mr. Unreliable of 1961, or any other year. We are still supposed to go to France tomorrow. But shall we? Tony tells me this morning that he has something he must warn me about—he can’t say it over the phone—and I think it’s probably that George [Goetschius] is coming. George has just returned from America and seems to be rarin’ to go. And then Don himself may be delayed because of a new job which has cropped up—another garment magazine in New York; this time they want men’s fashions drawn. And so we go round and round. . . . And really, do I want to go to France? Willie Maugham is sick and can’t see us—in any case, he has his daughter and her family coming. We get back to the ridiculous proposition that I am merely going to France in order to be able to stay longer in England. But, if this crisis blows up, I shall stay on anyway—income tax or no income tax—because I am not going to be separated from Don at such a time.

  September 6. What Tony had to tell me was merely that there is tension down at the Valbonne villa because John Osborne had been cheating on Jocelyn Rickards with another girl, a model. I replied that I couldn’t care less; Don and I were coming to get some sun. So here we are, committed to go this afternoon. At least, I am. Don may still decide to stop here because of the man from New York. And of course Tony is quite capable of backing out at the last moment. Well, we’ll see.

  Elaine Tynan, who is leaving for New York today, says she thinks Mary Ure’s son really is Osborne’s! According to her calculations Mary hasn’t known Robert Shaw long enough.

  These last days have been a specially totemistic period. Don said, “Do you think the Animals are withdrawing too much into their basket?”

  Last night, a mysteriously happy dream. Just wandering about in a landscape. How seldom my dreams are absolutely free, as this one was, from anxiety!

  America to resume underground atom tests, after third Russian explosion.

  Bye now.

  September 18. We got home two days ago, on Saturday. It’s characteristic of modern jet travel that we spent two hours in the air, between Nice and London, and three hours being transported to and from the airfields and just plain farting around with officials and waiting. I must say, it is good to be back in London, with rain and cool winds and autumn setting in. The whole visit was a strain, especially as long as Tony was around, and what with the detensioning and some pills Pat Woodcock has given me my pyloric flap has ceased.

  Today, I called the travel bureau and got a reservation on a BOAC jet out of here on Sunday October 15. That will just get me under the gate, as far as British income tax is concerned.

  Here is the substance of some notes I took while I was at Valbonne:

  (September 6.) Don drew H.E. Bates261 in the morning. This was a commission arranged by the Redfern. We left for the airport at the last possible moment, after several drinks, with Tony, driven by his Polish driver. But all the speeding was of no avail; we were told we’d missed our flight. Tony called for the most important official available and proceeded, quite cold-bloodedly and with theatrical relish, to make a scene. “The BEA is the worst airline in the world.” “In that case, Sir,” said the official, who was big and uniformed as if he’d just stepped off a battleship, “perhaps you’d rather book on Air France.” So we did, and got a jet which, leaving later, made so much better time that it arrived only twenty minutes after the British one. We had narrow seats, a kicking child in our rear, and no refreshment but tea and sugar cakes, but Tony was determined to be pleased with everything. And he was right. Because they could easily have gotten us on to the BEA plane.

  La Baumette is a tall stone farmhouse with blue shutters, surrounded by vines and olive trees. It stands in a hollow with woods of pine above at the back of it;
but from the highest point of the property, where the swimming pool is, you can see the sea.

  Jocelyn Rickards came out to meet us, slaphappy with sufferings. John Osborne still away, with the girl. She told Tony and us, rather complacently, how she had cried on the shoulder of the old man, the grandfather of the French family which lives here and runs the farm.

  Supper on the round stone table on the terrace under a mulberry tree. The table has a surface like cirrus clouds seen from a plane. We drank heavy red wine, and I snored and Don was furious and there were mosquitoes. A very tall cactus has grown right up and looks in at our bedroom window, like a phallus.

  The French family consists of the old man, who is nearly always drunk, his daughter and her two charming early-teenage sons. They make the most uninhibited noise at all hours, clattering up and down the stairs—they live on the top floor; and, as Don says, it is they who are living here, not us.

  (September 7.) We drove down to the beach at Cannes. The huge ornate white hotels. The very expensive private beaches with their bars. The shark-faced hustlers. This is one of the eternal places; the gold coast which knew Cocteau and the twenties. Awful depression, caused by/causing pyloric spasm and stomach sickness. Misery, sulks. Cuthbert Worsley and John Luscombe are here.

  When we got back to La Baumette, John Osborne had arrived. He seemed very cheerful, and so did Jocelyn. Later we heard that they had both, on meeting at the airport, wept for an hour.

  Back into Cannes for supper at a restaurant up the hill above the harbor, the d’Arbutau. We had grilled sardines and a fish called dorade. Christopher Lawrence, Al Kaplan’s friend, had a nationalistic outburst; he is from South Africa. Tony Richardson said, “I am of the People” and talked about the two sides of the barricades. Felt more miserable than I can remember for a long time.