The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Morrie Blumberg was terribly upset last night because one of these right-wing fascist groups has actually been using a swastika on its propaganda, with the slogan “We’re back!” I said I thought it was a good thing, because by doing this they have overreached themselves and will surely alarm most people who might otherwise be impressed by them.

  Jo and Ben have Jo’s daughter and her husband with them this week. Jo and I had a talk about this on Monday, during a walk on the beach. It seems that she has never told her other friends here that she has a daughter (and a son); not even Peter and Alice Gowland. And now she is terrified that they will find out. “Not that I mind their knowing,” she says, “only to go back and open up all that old stuff again—Chris, I just can’t!”

  There seems much more in this than meets the eye. Why does Jo have to conceal this? Perhaps because of Ben; she says that he hates to have it talked about, and didn’t like seeing the daughter Betty [Arizu], though now he says he doesn’t mind. Is it because he has hated to admit to himself that he has married an older woman? Is he, or was he, afraid of being kidded about it? And therefore unwilling to have to admit to Jo’s advancing age by seeing how even Betty is getting older? [. . .] a delightful time must be being had by all.

  December 4. A time of uncertainty. Yesterday, Julie Harris called me from New York to ask, “Where’s Don?” Well, it turned out that in her vague actressy way she had never written him to say we could stay with her; so he had cancelled his reservation! Now we’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, John Zeigel is arriving the day after tomorrow, expecting to stay a couple of nights here before going on to San Francisco.

  I am uneasy and restless, as I always am when I am about to be uprooted. And yet of course I want to go to New York; or rather, I want to see Don and his show.

  Tomorrow, I should finish chapter 12 of the Ramakrishna book. The Laughton project hangs over my head, and it may well end with my backing out of it, one way or another. I think I would, if it wasn’t for the money, which would have to be paid back, or partly.

  I have a sort of Shakespeare craze; a real appetite for him, such as I’ve never had before. The more I read of him, the more I seem to want to. Have run through Richard III, Timon of Athens, Henry VIII, and now I think I’d like to reread Cymbeline, Pericles, A Winter’s Tale, maybe Titus Andronicus.

  Cannot lose weight. I’m at 153! And yet I exercise like crazy and am really putting on muscle and getting much stronger, even in this short while. As for my jaw, I don’t know. I don’t think it is any worse; but not really better, either. The basic difficulty is still there, and the only difference is in my attitude to it, on different days, in different moods.

  Yesterday evening—or was it the evening before?—I saw the green flash again. Vivid and sharp and localized.

  December 9. A week of uncertainty: where was Don? But this morning I got a letter from him. He is still in England and may not be coming over until toward the end of next week. He will cable me when it’s definite. Meanwhile, I can’t quite make up my mind—should I go to New York before he does, so as to be on hand to meet him?

  I have been very bad and not accomplished anything much. I did however get chapter 12 of the Ramakrishna book done. Now I am haunted by the Plato project. Can I really do it at all? I find it so hard to settle down to, when I’m apt to be leaving any time.

  John Zeigel was here, for one night, en route from Mexico to San Francisco, where Ed Halsey has bought an apartment house. This time, he seemed much less interesting, almost dull. Partly, perhaps, this was because I was worried about Don and so couldn’t give him my full attention. But I think I did detect the stultifying effects of Mexico and of Ed. John seemed much more political, and more argumentative, which bored me.

  Ben Masselink has been coming with me to the gym. Jo went too, yesterday, but today she has a bad cold. They won’t be leaving here until after Christmas, because of Ben’s T.V. story. I had supper with them last night, and they fixed a bouillabaisse, maybe the best anyone has ever eaten anywhere. Marvellous, anyhow. Jo kept moaning how she wished Don was there, went on so long about it I got quite depressed.

  Oh God, John Zeigel did make Ed sound boring! Whenever John steps out of line, Ed proceeds to get psychosomatically sick and lies in bed refusing to speak!

  Tentative decisions about my teaching next February: I will tell my writing class that I don’t want completed short stories, just passages of description, dialogue, etc. Also, they must all agree to having their work read out, with their names mentioned, in class. If they don’t want that, they can’t come. For myself, I’ll promise not to let anyone audit the class. Anyone who tries to sit in without having written something must leave the room.

  Gerald Heard praised Pepys and Sterne warmly, last time we were together. So I have started reading Pepys and I like him very much. This is only an abridged edition; maybe I’ll get the entire diary.

  On Tuesday (5th), Jo and Ben and I drove up to Chalon Road in Bel Air to see the fire damage. The hills burned grey looked like wrinkled grey elephant’s hide, and the burned bushes were like ugly black hairs on it. God, the ruins were ugly! A long winding street of houses burnt to their foundations, with only the brick chimney standing. Twisted water pipes and blackened cars and iceboxes and a huge litter of rubble and wire and smashed glass. Many of the lots have been cleared already for rebuilding, and their owners have planted notices, PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT, though there is still nothing to keep out of. After this, we drove up the Hollywood Hills because I wanted to show Jo and Ben the walk I took the other day with Aldous and Colin Wilson and Henry Miller, looking down on Lake Hollywood. We started out and suddenly, around the corner of the hill, came Aldous himself, just back from India, full of scorn for the [Rabindranath] Tagore centenary and of admiration for the non-neurotic way children are raised in the Orient; you never hear one cry, he says. He looked very thin, very grey and old, but he has the stiff-limbed energy of a stork. He walked up and down the hills, never stopping talking for a moment and never seeming out of breath.

  December 16. Here I am in New York. Without warning. For once I took off on a journey without leaving any “farewell” note in my diary. Chiefly because the departure was so sudden. On Monday morning last, the 11th—having still heard nothing from Don—I decided it would be best to get to New York anyhow that week, lest I should be prevented by the holiday rush. After all, I knew I could stay with Julie and Manning, and why shouldn’t I be there to welcome Don’s plane? So I went up to the travel bureau in Santa Monica and bought a ticket for Thursday 14th.

  But, no sooner had I got back home, than a Western Union boy arrived, grinning all over his face—maybe because the telegram he brought said that a stray kitten was wandering around mewing for a horse, and the horse should be fetched at once. It was signed “N.Y.S.P.C.A.”

  So I got my ticket transferred to that night, ate supper with Jo and Ben and took off a quarter past midnight, in a huge three-quarters empty jet as dull as a Statler hotel. Arrived here early on Tuesday morning, spent hours stalled in the morning traffic jam, in a grey drizzle, and arrived to find Don looking radiant and about seventeen years old, despite all his worries and infuriations. He fixed me breakfast in the presence of Peter [Gurian], grown larger and more spoilt, and his nurse [. . .], a false-sweet woman who bitchily pesters you to let her do things for you and then complains that she’s overworked—Manning had already warned Don of this. Manning is still Manning; I can’t see him ever changing, and that certainly is rather a relief in itself. As for Julie, when I caught sight of her for the first time later in the day, I saw her transformed, at least to some extent, into the French maid she is now playing;322 just as she transformed herself into Sally Bowles and Joan of Arc. She still looks wonderful. Her voice has assumed a slightly conscious mock-solemnity, somehow reminiscent of Garbo’s.

  Well, Wednesday it turned cold and clear. We bustled about, enjoying our being together, and Don bought a tuxedo, because the man who owns the
Sagittarius Gallery where he is going to exhibit, Count Lanfranco Rasponi, had organized a ball for the night of Thursday 14th, and had told Don he should come to it and meet people who it would be advantageous for him to draw. That evening, we went to a party given by Gore Vidal and Howard Austen. Gore was leaving next day to go to Hartford for the out-of-town opening of his play about Romulus Augustulus. The party was a crush, and the only good that came of it for us was that Don arranged to draw Myrna Loy. Then we went on and met Marguerite Lamkin. She looked older [. . .]. She took us off to a claustrophobically dull party and then arranged that we should be taken out to dinner with her by one of her admirers, a blond unpleasant man named Norman Hickman,323 to the Colony, where the food was nearly uneatable. [. . .] She went on and on about Freddie Ayer, the logical positivist, who, according to her, is in love with her and wants to divorce his wife and marry her. And she succeeded in maneuvering me into saying that I should refuse to meet him, because I knew she wanted to provoke an argument between us and, frankly, I thought his kind of philosophizing was a stupid and childish waste of time. Now, Marguerite had absolutely no motive for stirring up all this mud. It wasn’t even in any way in her own interests [. . .].

  Still, I wouldn’t have hated that evening with such positively metaphysical violence if I hadn’t been in a thoroughly toxic condition. That night, and next morning, I was in a high fever and everything in my throat was swollen. I went to see David Protetch, the nice youngish doctor who is a friend of Wystan and the Stravinskys and is said to be slowly going blind.324 Aside from feeling ghastly and shaking with chills—I would have sent for him to come to me here except that I didn’t want to scare Julie and Manning at the thought that I might infect and incapacitate her, not to mention their precious Peter—I was deadly scared because I thought this is the showdown; he’ll find that I have cancer of the jaw. When he said that he’d better take some blood and have it sent in to the lab for tests, I was so weak that I nearly fainted. But it was great to get back and into bed and let the shivers warm into fever. And the sore throat yielded at once to penicillin and antibiotics. I dozed through the day, feeling the most voluptuous appetite for sleep. Don came back at midnight disgusted with himself, saying he had behaved in such a feminine way, waiting to be shown what to do. Rasponi had said to him, “You should be dancing,” Don had answered, “I don’t dance” and Rasponi (who’ll be sorry for this later, if I have my chance, the old vicious snobqueen) said, “What else do you go to a ball for?” Don, quite rightly, feels it was feminine or at least naive or at worst masochistic of him not to have been prepared for all this to happen. But it was not for Rasponi to talk to him like that.

  The next day, yesterday, was better; because I felt better and because Wystan came and because Don discovered that you can buy boys’ suits, of a size that is exactly his, at less than half what men’s suits cost; so he went out and bought three and asked them to hold a fourth! Wystan told me that Lincoln Kirstein was offered and refused the Ministry of Culture (does this uncover another of Gore’s lies?), syphilis among New York boys has reached epidemic proportions (one boy infected 200 people!), he believes that Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to several quite different boys. His conversation always has this quality; information spiced with gossip and vice versa. Either one alone gets boring.

  In the afternoon, I called Dr. Protetch, who told me that not all of the tests had come in but that so far they showed nothing significant. Obviously, he wasn’t alarmed. Today I have been up and around the streets. It is bracingly cold. My throat is almost perfectly well. My jaw feels much the same as ever. I had very bad stomach flutters in the night and again today. And I notice how poor my eyesight is getting. I think I am in a deep dip physically. In California I staved off the crisis for a while by going regularly to the gym—we can’t seem to find one here that doesn’t cost a fortune—and being able to choose exactly what I ate and drank. But what really matters is, can I be of use to Don here? Otherwise I’d be far better off in California, getting on with my work. I very much doubt if I can work here, though I must try my hardest.

  December 22. This week has been spent rushing around, buying Christmas presents and addressing envelopes to send the catalogs in, for Don’s show. I have been in curiously good health. It’s as if my two days in bed merely provided a needed rest, and the penicillin cleaned out a lot of lurking toxins. Anyhow, I have been on the go every day without ill effects, and it even seems to me that my jaw is better. Don, however, is suffering from stomach cramps.

  Have met a lot of the people at Simon and Schuster’s, and won a battle to keep the jacket of my novel just as Don designed it.

  Julie is marvellous in her part, but what a crappy play! It is tragic to think of her confined in it for the next year. A disgraceful waste of her talent. If she were on the stage in England, she would have played at least half a dozen parts this year, and still done the same amount of television.

  Lincoln took us to the ballet. He was very funny about a command performance of Macbeth they did at the White House. The guest of honor was some ruler or other from Africa (or was it Arabia?); in any case, Lincoln was suddenly told that it wouldn’t be tactful to do Macbeth, because this man had murdered his predecessor in office! Lincoln told them he was sorry, that was the only Shakespeare available; so they did it, and the guest sat there quite unmoved and greatly enjoyed it. There was one crisis, however, when Lincoln found that the White House security police had confiscated the daggers, because no weapons are allowed in the neighborhood of the president.

  Needless to say, I have done nothing on the Plato project. But at present I’m excused by myself from that, until I have finished addressing all the envelopes. I hope to finish them off right now, before going to meet Don at the theater and see Daughter of Silence.325

  Tomorrow, we go down to the country to spend a night with Gore Vidal and Howard Austen; then back and to Wystan and Chester’s Christmas Eve party.

  December 27. It was quite beautiful at Gore’s, because, when we woke, the snow was falling and the river was full of grey waves and the bare trees had marvellous tints of pale pink and yellow, against the snow. Both Don and I felt a great warmth from Gore and Howard, though on very different wavelengths. Gore is always cool, Howard is the eager loyal spaniel who irritates him with his fussing.

  We made it back to New York in time for Wystan and Chester’s party, which was embarrassing for various reasons. The food was very badly cooked, sweet tepid venison and mushrooms that smelt of piss. And Chester had asked a lot of people Wystan disapproves of, so he wouldn’t talk to them; and this subtly pleased Chester. Then Wystan talked embarrassingly about theology. “We’re not told the size of Christ’s cock, but we know that it would have been the average size for that particular time and place, neither smaller nor larger.” Also, he refused to let Billy Vinson326 have a third cocktail, simply because he had decided there wouldn’t be time before dinner. I think Billy Vinson (who feeds lice off his bare arm for some scientific institute at Boston) is a spiteful bitch, who really loathes Wystan in his heart. But justice is justice.

  Christmas Day was pleasant. We saw a quite good film called From a Roman Balcony, with a sexy Italian boy in it327 who looked very like Ted Bachardy, and Graham Greene’s play The Complaisant Lover, in which Googie Withers328 was marvellous, and we went to two parties. Yesterday, we were to drive down to Philadelphia with the Paul Newmans and Howard to see Gore’s play Romulus. Don couldn’t come but I went. The play was charming and intelligent Shavianism, maybe the best thing Gore has written, but also very poorly acted and directed. I came back on the dreary late train, got home at 2:00 a.m. to find that Don, in one of his manic states, had been working for eight hours without a break, finishing off the last of the envelope addressing, writing-in, sealing and stamping. I helped him for about an hour; then we went out to an all-night post-office on Lexington and mailed them all and then had vodka martinis and Don ate. Today he went off early to a pair of sitters, Mrs. D
ouglas Fairbanks329 and Se[r]ena Stewart,330 and we are to meet later at Sardi’s with Tennessee, Frank [Merlo], and Tennessee’s folks, and all go to see The Night of the Iguana!

  This New York visit is even more madly rat-racy than usual, but I think I shall look back at it as a happy time. Don and I are getting along marvellously, despite all the strains.

  December 28. Rain, turning to wet snow. The town is as gloomy as a fjord. The lights from the great towers shine palely through clouds. Down on ground-level it is raw and dirty, and all the delights and promises of the metropolitan bazaar can’t conceal the fact that we’re on a wretched wintry island in a flat ugly land, too far north.

  Don’s rat race seems far more desperate here than it did in London. We staggered up from our beds dazed with sleep and already far behind schedule. There is just barely time for breakfast at the place around the corner on First Avenue, and then Don is off, darting through the traffic—the lights are always against him, it seems—with his awkward drawing board and his kit bag full of brushes, inks and pencils. He admits to the feeling that, if he were to stop rushing, he wouldn’t be able to work at all. This is probably true—at least, as long as he believes it.

  As always, however, breakfast is one of our best times together; the time when we really lose ourselves in conversation. At other times, Don is so apt not to be listening, because he is in a daze of thinking of three or four other things simultaneously.

  Last night, we saw the preview to Tennessee’s Night of the Iguana. Neither of us could make much out of it; it seemed just to wander along. Bette Davis was unexpectedly vulgar in blue jeans and a red hair-dye, but she added a bonus of disgustingness by having her shirt open and displaying the inner curves of her deflated breasts. Margaret Leighton was most distinguished, but without much character. Poor Tennessee was frantic as always; at openings he is like the character in Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club.”331 There was a strange scene as we left the theater: a drunk man who had been an assistant stage manager or something and was now no longer working there, stood at the entrance yelling at everybody. No doubt he had a grudge because he’d been fired. But Tennessee took this personally and shouted threateningly at him. And later, on the street, Tennessee bumped into a blind man, who got very mad, “Do you want the whole sidewalk to yourself?” Now Tennessee plans to leave for Jamaica, or Tahiti, or Europe, right after the opening, with an old friend who has just been released from an insane asylum.