The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  December 30. The Iguana got quite good notices, nevertheless; so Tennessee has postponed his departure until after the New Year. It’s cruelly cold again. How I loathe the cold and the heat, and more than either, the whole silly cult of “seasons”! Don says he hates New York. But he loves London, and I think we shall have trouble when we go back to California. Never mind, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. At present, all is harmony. I am very happy to be here with him, and very miserable to be here. I have a nasty sniffly cold, and I feel so lazy and tired. I don’t want to do any work. I sprawl on the bed, as soon as Don has gone out drawing, and skim through books that don’t really interest me, Hesketh Pearson’s book on Tree, Duggan’s novel about the emperor Elagabalus.332 Outside, behind this house, they have made a huge excavation for an apartment building. The men on the project start working with steam drills around eight o’clock and continue all day. At least they have been doing that—standing on a horribly narrow ledge about thirty feet above the ground and destroying their own foothold with the drills. Now I think they are about through and will start the building, which’ll probably be even noisier. This frantic building and tearing down is going on all over central Manhattan. The streets have great gashes in them, covered over with timbers or iron plates, so they can be used. And, as usual in winter here, the gratings in the streets keep fuming away volcanically. I am getting terribly slipshod again with my japam. One day, shortly after I got here, I missed doing it altogether; entirely forgot. This forgetfulness, which is really a sick resistance to japam itself and all it stands for, makes me so mad with hate that I could actually flog myself, the way those crazy old monks used to. But, of course, that’s exactly what “it” wants. The only way to deal with it is to remain calm and peacefully determined to continue. One night, I had to make japam after we’d turned the lamp out, under the bedclothes.

  Dashed down to the framer, Mr. Ohms,333 this morning, to wheedle him into framing Don’s stop-press drawing of Tammy Grimes.334 He was sulky, but quite easy to handle when we found we had both lived in Berlin. Then up to the Sagittarius Gallery to deliver a batch of envelopes to Mr. Nuti, who is supposed to be looking after it. He arrived to do this just as I drove up in a taxi, at 11:15! I have a feeling that this whole operation is unspeakably sloppy. And I’m already preparing the row I propose to have with Count Rasponi, just as soon as he can be of no more use to us. I plan to tell him, “You’re just another of these wop closet-counts!”

  December 31. Well, here we are at the end of this year. As far as Don and I were concerned, it was certainly a good year; one of the best. It was also a year in which the world came quite near to blowing itself up. One of the most experienced Western diplomats in Moscow, when asked what he thought was the most significant development of 1961, answered (according to The New York Times) “we survived.” And 1962 is just the same in prospect. Don and I have every reason to be optimistic. We have more money than ever before, or shall have: maybe as much as thirty thousand dollars when all of M.’s legacy has been paid off—not to mention our three-quarters-paid-for house. Don’s show won’t be town-shaking, but it is sure to add to his reputation, and I hope my novel may do well, too. Our relationship has never been happier. (Don even said, yesterday evening, that he had “a wonderful life,” and that’s something he very very seldom admits to, since the earliest days of our being together.) On the other hand, all this tiny private world, like billions of others, may quite easily be destroyed before the year is over; and it’s probable that total war will, in any case, not be avoided in the course of the next ten years. Indeed, the chief hope for survival is in the development of apter weapons which will localize destruction and keep it down to the measure of purely military requirements!

  Having said all of which, the answer, as always, is Forster’s answer: Get on with your own work, behave as if you were immortal.335

  1962

  January 6. Rain today. Dark sad weather. I wasn’t able to make any ’62 entries before this one because of preparations for Don’s show and the breakdown of his typewriter, which has only just come back from being fixed.

  On January 1, we saw The Play of Daniel which is beautifully done and I guess enjoyable if you like twelfth-century religious drama with quaintness and chanting in Latin. It was in a church. Wystan, who had written the narration, luckily didn’t appear and embarrass us.336 Don ate candy—his early movie upbringing makes him quite unable to see that eating candy in a church, or a theater for that matter, is different from eating candy in a movie. He left early in desperate boredom. I felt I had to stay and was rewarded by getting a ride home with Pavitrananda (of all people!). Later, Julie and Manning showed us the kinescope of her T.V. performance in some of Housman’s Victoria plays.337 I thought Julie was marvellous—until the makeup in the old-age scenes got so thick that she simply could not act through it—but Julie put on a strange almost hysterical show of self-disgust when it was over. She said she was “vapid” and “shallow.”

  On the 2nd, Don’s show opened. We stayed on duty at the Sagittarius Gallery from two-thirty till seven, lunchless. Count Rasponi showed up, but he obviously didn’t give a damn. He is surprisingly undistinguished, prissy and languid and clerklike, like some unpleasant official at a passport office. Wystan, Chester and Lincoln showed up right at the start, followed by Julie and Manning. But in the middle of the afternoon there was a horribly dead period and my heart began to sink. Then, an hour and a half before closing time, Marguerite appeared, bringing with her socialites and journalists; and cameras flashed. Betsy von Furstenberg338 was cross because her portrait wasn’t hung. But the day was saved. One way or another, Don has now sold sixteen drawings! There are about thirty-five altogether.

  I met Freddy Ayer at a party given by George Weidenfeld. (I didn’t want to go to it at first but decided I should in case it was somehow helpful to Don.) I was so intrigued to know what he had told the Cabinet in Washington about philosophy that he promised to tell me, and he did, yesterday, at the apartment of a girl named Jean Hannon,339 who fixed lunch for us and also listened. Freddy is very lively and argumentative and pleased with himself, and he can be surprisingly lucid about his ideas. There was really nothing he said that I’d disagree with, and I do see that his kind of semantic analysis of keywords like Honor and Justice and their implications would be enormously useful to a group of politicians who were seriously trying to do their best. Freddy attacked the favorite Washington cliché that, “We have to find a valid and inspiring philosophy which will be our answer to the philosophy of communism. . . . etc. etc.” “Nonsense,” he says he told them, “You don’t need any new philosophy, you’ve got a perfectly sound one already, good old-fashioned liberalism!” Jean Hannon put in her oar and said didn’t Freddy believe that everything was really for the best, and this gave Freddy his cue to denounce Christianity, which he did with huge gusto. But, really, all that stuff is so utterly beside the point, or, at any rate, just first base. Either you can know God or you can’t. What in the world matters beside the question of the validity of the mystical experience?

  As for Don and me, there is a cloud on the horizon: the return part of his airline ticket back to Los Angeles, will expire on January 19. So Don says I should take it, pretending to be him, and he should take mine when he wants to come home, pretending to be me. When I resisted this, because I don’t want to leave so soon and because I rather hate the embarrassment of possibly being found out, he became furiously angry—that was the night before yesterday, and admittedly we were both very drunk—and said he didn’t want to see me any more if I wouldn’t do what he said. Now he is sort of sorry and yet he can’t bear to think of sacrificing the whole cost of this part of the ticket, as we might possibly have to, according to the girl at the Pan-American office I talked to yesterday. As for me, I feel more and more that I must just sacrifice self-will, even when it is “justified,” in my dealings with him. If he says I should go on the 18th, I guess I’ll go.

  Certa
inly, being here depresses the shit out of me. Because I have nothing worthwhile to do. I fill up my time by fetching and carrying for Don, and I don’t begrudge that, but it’s nevertheless a sort of laziness. I cannot see how to handle the Socrates material. The idea of having a theatrical group like Laughton’s doesn’t work, because there is no script for them to keep referring back to. Taken as a whole, the evening wouldn’t mean anything. They seem to be setting out to discover how Socrates should be acted. But do they ever in fact discover this? Could they? Isn’t the question meaningless?

  January 12. My face is healing up nicely now, from the marks of where Don slammed the taxi door on (in?) it, the evening after I wrote the above entry. This has been one of our very worst weeks ever, and I am still quite uncertain what he really wants—as indeed he is himself. Well, never mind all of that. I have every intention of surviving somehow. I shall return.

  Meanwhile, I’m definitely planning to leave for California right after the meeting of the Institute of Arts and Letters,340 on the 24th, and I’m seriously considering going by train. “Nostalgia enters the train somewhere about Albuquerque,” Gore warns me, “disguised as an Indian.” But I would prefer those kind of blues to the stark despair of riding out to the airport and climbing into a jet. Besides there is the rather tempting prospect of being met late Saturday night by Prema, driven to Vedanta Place, put up for the night and reading the Katha Upanishad at Swamiji’s breakfast puja. At least that’ll be an auspicious start.

  January 20. We seem to be sailing into calmer waters. Partly because my day of leaving approaches. I am going by train. I hope this isn’t a mistake. At any rate it will be an experience.

  The day before yesterday, I got the first copies of my novel. It looks very attractive, except for the ugly little colophons which American publishers love so dearly.

  That evening we had an extraordinary supper at a restaurant, as the guests of Alan Pryce-Jones.341 To start with, he hadn’t figured out that there would be thirteen of us, so he had one of the tables separated by a couple of inches from the rest, and put Don at it, face to face with a very dull young man whom he had to try to amuse all through supper. This made Don furious. When a French Rothschild baroness tried to talk to him, he told her, “We’re at separate tables.” Then, the French, who included that Belgian politician Henri Spaack (Spaak?),342 were lumped together in a mob, then came Wystan and the wife of Ian Fleming,343 and the [. . .] girl who entertained Freddy Ayer and me to lunch, Alan Pryce-Jones and myself. Wystan, who was in great spirits, held forth against the French. (The ones at the table certainly all understood English.) Their language is hideous, he said, and should be forbidden. They have no critics—except Valéry and Cocteau. Their whole outlook on life is wrong. This rather scandalized our neighbors—the French pretended not to be listening; but the women were excited and pleased when Wystan said that all administrative posts should be handed over to them, because they were “on the side of life,” and that men should devote themselves to the sciences and the arts. Wystan also very much interested me by saying that he woke up every morning delighted to be alive!

  I think this was the most ill-assorted, idiotically arranged supper-party I ever in my life was at.

  January 23 [Tuesday]. I don’t imagine I’ll have time to make another entry after this one, before I leave. In any case, I have to return the typewriter. So goodbye to one of the nastiest, most miserable phases of my life. I hate this city anyhow, and I’ve hated being here this time because of the way Don has acted. Right now, he is nerve-strung almost to screaming point and it is misery to be with him. I’m sure he hates me and I rather hate him, I mean on the surface. Underneath, things are more or less as they’ve been for years. Whether we shall go on living together, and whether we ought to if we do, remains to be discovered. There is absolutely nothing to be done about this, as of now. We must both sweat out the time till I leave on Thursday. The crisis is acute and yet I really do not know how serious it is. For that reason, aside from any other, I could never go to anyone else and say, “Don and I are splitting up.” If we do, I think almost everyone who knows us will be sincerely amazed. Which is good.

  The Stravinskys arrive here this afternoon. I doubt if we shall see them, as Igor is said to be exhausted and maybe seriously ill. David Protetch is even going to meet him at the station.

  Yesterday, Marguerite interviewed me, because she may get a job if she sends in some specimen interviews to some editor. Meanwhile, a boy named Andy Warhol drew my feet344—he is preparing a book of foot drawings of well-known people! The drawing was too chi-chi stylized (rather Cocteauish) to have any kind of scientific interest, I should think. I liked him, though.

  Lunch yesterday with Max Schuster, Peter Schwed and Sean O’Crairdain the Simon and Schuster publicity man, in a private dining room in a club at the top of the RCA building. Talk about the man who wrote a book claiming he’d been to Tibet and had his psychic third eye surgically opened by lamas. One New York publisher had said, “We need that book like a hole in the head.”

  January 28. Just to record that I’m back at last here in my beloved Adelaide Drive. It has been a perfect day, except for the hot desert wind and even that I have enjoyed. It has given me the beginnings of a tan.

  I got to Los Angeles at 11:15 p.m. last night on the Chief and Prema met me and drove me up to Vedanta Place, where I spent the night in one of the apartments of their apartment house. This morning, just before six, I saw Swami, and then we went into the shrine for Swamiji’s breakfast puja and I read the Katha Upanishad; vain, I have to admit, of my rendition. Then I had breakfast with Swami—he has been pestered by another of these madwomen; she broke into his room in the middle of the night and later wrote letters accusing him of forcing her into samadhi against her will, and of teaching her masturbation by remote control. He gave me mahaprasad,345 a grain of rice from Jagannath Temple,346 which, said Ramakrishna, is, like Ganges water, Brahman made visible. Swami has a whole store of these grains and takes one first thing in the morning, every day.

  I left New York on the Manhattan, at 1:35 p.m. on Thursday last, the 25th. After we got out of the city, there was snow all the way, right across the Plains and the mountains, until we began to descend toward Needles.347 Chicago was like some awful raw-black stark snow-slushy city on the tundras of Soviet Siberia. But how snug it is to shit in your roomette, watching the land roll by! I tried very hard on this trip to enjoy everything. I sat for long spells in the vista dome, just watching. But alas, I feel that I have dulled the organ of my delight. Only occasionally nowadays will it respond.

  Read O’Hara’s Sermons and Soda Water, which is readable but somehow grubby, and Ian Fleming’s Dr. No, which I really enjoyed until the boring tortures at the end, and finished off The Scarlet Letter, with effort but a certain respect.

  Yesterday evening, at sunset, in the midst of my first scotch, as we rolled through the California desert, I wrote this draft of a letter on the envelope of my ticket:

  Won’t write a Dobbin and Kitty letter. That’s sentimental. Though it’s a beautiful poetic sentimentality. But I think we can still talk to each other by our own names—I mean, even when we’re not mad.

  I realize I am deeply selfish. You admit that you are. But that doesn’t stop me loving you. And perhaps we would get along better on the basis of being admittedly selfish. I said a true thing when I said I didn’t like being “good” any more than you like being “bad.”

  You are so much the reason for my life—my writing, the house, my teaching. You say, that’s just accident. Anyone could have been the reason. No. You know that’s not true.

  My selfishness is that I want you to stay with me. Your selfishness is that you ask yourself, couldn’t you do better; considering you are young. So my selfishness is really much more sinister than yours.

  Am writing this halfway through my first scotch of the evening, in the vista dome, going through the desert beyond Needles. But I’ll copy it out if I mean it tomorrow. .
. .

  I did mean it but I didn’t copy it, because this afternoon Don called from New York. He now plans to come home in two weeks instead of a month. (I find that, as of now, I am ever such a tiny bit disappointed, but that will pass, I know.) Also, he is considering buying six chairs for the dining room at the cost of six hundred dollars. So he certainly seems to mean to stay!

  A Jew on the train [. . .], in advertising. He sells advertising spaces. And studies biology on the side; cell structure. And writes poems. Is married, for the second time, to a two-time-loser wife, and has six children (I think). He judges, Jew-like, every man, including all the poets of the past, who didn’t settle down into a well-adjusted marriage. Doing so he calls “finding youself.” This is the great heresy of the psychiatrists, and it has brought us to the population explosion. He bored and bored me. I hid from him in my roomette. But he caught me at meals.

  February 12. I have been bad, drinking too much and staying out too late, and thereby knocking myself out next day and failing to work. Then there has been this massive rain storm: three days of solid downpour, plus the beginnings of it on Wednesday and the considerable parting showers yesterday. Now the sun’s shining—at least, down here at the beach. But we’re threatened with another storm in a couple of days.