The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

April 27. Woke this morning with a miserable head and back-of-neck ache. I feel really sick—jaw, gums under a kind of pressure, and also the pylorus flap. The misery of getting old and worn-out. Weariness and longing for dead sleep. Have I got cancer of the jaw, or a tumor, like Jerry Wald, pinching nerves in my spine? Or is it just a new acting up of the old broken-down machine?

  The creative writing class yesterday. Nick Barod very militant about the Un-American Activities Committee, and triumphant because CBS had favored the pickets in its reporting and shown most unflattering pictures of the counter-picketers, who looked, said Nick, like a Little Rock, Arkansas antisegregation crowd.365 One of the women wrote a piece about an intrepid lady racing-driver who was feminine and petite and this set the boys off talking about the typical lady racing-driver who is masculine and dikey. Don Vucetich talked about “fag hags.” I think he’s a trifle crazy. He seemed aware of the impression he’d made, because he stopped me later and explained that all this semester he has been suffering from amoebic dysentery.

  Then I had a long talk with Michael Rubin, with sweet blue eyes which are out of alignment and a Jewish profile. He has a quite exceptional air of innocence, likes e.e. cummings and body-surfing, writes poems, wants to be a marine biologist. His father is a dentist. He admires Kennedy but disapproves of the crackdown on U.S. Steel, because he believes in free enterprise.366

  On my way back, I stopped into the Beverly Hills Martindale’s and was told that the novel is doing well, picking up fast. A very young boy, not more than thirteen, was asking for Dante; recommended the Ciardi translation—just as if I had studied the whole thing dozens of times.

  Party given by Frances and Albert Hackett, because they are going away to live permanently in New York. They have sold their spacious non-home to Ray Milland.367 One of the female guests enthused to me about England. Their next-door neighbor there was a market gardener who was imprisoned for the theft of scaffolding. He had been doing it for years. To all this and much more I listened in an almost unbearable non-daze of utter sobriety. The misery of having a clear head!

  Don has just heard that the Cassini job368 is on again and he may very well have to go to New York. He is sad about this, doesn’t want to leave here. We are very happy again now.

  April 28 [Saturday]. Very depressed yesterday, because I felt terrible and because I had been so negative: I said no to three dif ferent people—a Newsweek journalist wanting “anecdotes” about Stravinsky, a woman who wanted me to appear on a panel with Gavin Lambert and Dorothy Parker, and a girl from L.A. City College who wanted “quotes” from the lecture I am to give there next Wednesday. In each case, I had definite reasons for refusing—I have decided never to supply journalists with anecdotes about my friends, especially over the phone; I was irritated by the woman’s approach and her endeavor to make me feel a heel for refusing; I don’t think of myself as giving lectures with quotes in them and anyhow the girl was just being lazy, she wanted to save herself the trouble of actually going to the lecture and listening to what I was saying. Still and all, I felt guilty; a mean grouchy old thing. And I disliked myself.

  At six-thirty in the afternoon we picked up Jo and Ben from the airport and gave them a fish supper, barbecued red snapper. We both felt the trip to New York hadn’t been a success, but there was very little to be found out from either of them. Jo rattled on about Julie and Manning and the plays they’d seen and the heat and the shops, etc. etc. Ben said very little. One had the impression of him lurking around the bars during the daytime while Jo was working.

  After they’d gone, I unwisely said how worried I am about my health, and this merely alarmed Don; he fears becoming nurse to a permanent invalid. He told me angrily to go to the doctor. This morning he was sorry, but I did go anyhow. The prostate infection has cleared up. When I told him about my throat and jaw and the back of my neck he arranged at once for some X rays to be taken; they were done this morning. So on Monday he will be able to tell me something.

  April 30 [Monday]. Not long after I wrote the above, I glanced at my appoint ment memo from Dr. Allen’s office and saw that he isn’t seeing me again until a week from Monday. I took this to mean that he doesn’t regard my case as serious, and was correspondingly relieved. And now today I have just been talking to him on the phone. He has looked at the X rays and says the whole thing is arthritic. Not much to be done, except for heat treatment and massage. No surgery is indicated.

  Today has been glorious. I got the car serviced, then came back here and lay in the sun for an hour, reading James Hogg’s Memoirs of a Justified Sinner369—the first on my first list to read. Also included are [Stendhal’s] The Charterhouse of Parma, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg,370 Restless House (Pot-Bouille),371 [Gertrude Stein’s] Three Lives, [Faulkner’s] The Wild Palms, [Hawthorne’s] The Marble Faun, [Virginia Woolf ’s] Mrs. Dalloway, The Stranger,372 [Djuna Barnes’s] Nightwood. Only two of these—Parma and The Stranger—have I already read right through, and that was ages ago. I am liking Hogg very much.

  And now I have finished another page of the fourteenth Ramakrishna chapter, two more pages (to 9) of my novel, and some notes for my lecture at L.A. City College on Wednesday. And when this is written I’ll take off for the gym. Then home to fix myself fish cakes and beans. And then Don will be back from a long day’s drawing—Dorothy Parker, John Dall(?)373 and his group of colleagues.

  Felicidad.374

  The night before last, we went to a party at Alan Pa[k]ula’s because Don hoped to get Myrna Loy to let him draw her again. This didn’t seem to work; she was evasive. Kate Moffat alone in the middle of the room, embarrassed yet not wanting to go back to Ivan’s side—an admission of failure. So I talked to her and we mimed having marvellous intimate fun. Of such is the kingdom of earth. The guests included four famous wrecks, Eddie Fisher,375 Tony Curtis,376 Troy Donahue,377 John Stride (the Old Vic Romeo).378 But Rock Hudson looked good.379 And there was a strikingly handsome boy who was Preston Sturges’s son.380 A little too nobly independent and boyish-manly to be quite quite true, however. . . . And, speaking of that, Arlene Drummond, who has come to clean for us in Dorothy’s place, is too spiritual to be quite true either. One night, she heard Jesus speak to her.

  May 4 [Friday]. On Monday morning (probably) some people (probably boys) came into the house and took—three pairs of slacks, one of Don’s, two of mine; an opened bottle of scotch, ditto of vodka; a silver coin from Thessalia, Thessalonic League, 196-146 b.c. (Double Victoriatus. Head of Zeus with oak wreath to right. Reverse: Pallas Itonia to right.) The coin was given Don several years ago by Harry Brown, and neither of us ever liked it. Also missing, a pair of nail scissors and an old and dirty jockstrap. Our doors were all open of course, as usual. Maybe if they’d been shut the thieves would have busted in anyway and smeared the walls with shit and wrecked the place as they so often do, apparently.

  Today I finally reported it to the police. Had to lecture on Wednesday, so no time before.

  Don gloomy and cross last night. This morning he said all the things he’d been feeling seemed quite unreal. He has just finished Vivekananda’s “The Real Nature of Man.”381

  Have been piddling around today getting nothing accomplished but tiresome chores. So now I can’t go to the gym. Must work instead on the Ramakrishna book and if possible the novel. We were to have had supper with Gavin and he has just called it off. I’m afraid Don won’t like that and be cross again. Patience.

  Wilbur Flam came to my lecture on Wednesday—it was at L.A. City College—so did Mary Herbold. I saw both of them later. Wilbur first. I drove up with him into Griffith Park and we sat under the trees. Such meetings consist largely of speeches for the defense. One justifies one’s life since last heard from. Wilbur and his wife Bertha are going to live [abroad], because they can live with Bertha’s mother there and it will be cheaper. Wilbur hasn’t been a success so far at his artwork—he does collages. But now he hopes to do better with children’s books. He complains of lack of sexual inter
est, but fears [living abroad]’ll stimulate him again, and in the wrong direction. There was little comment I could make. Naturally I feel that he has fouled up his life. But maybe there wasn’t much to foul up.

  Mary Herbold, curiously enough, doesn’t seem nearly so fouled up. Of course she is a screaming bore, but she’s a lively old thing and has kept in touch with the world and other people, and I respect her. She dwells a great deal on her sex adventures, which must have been mostly in the mind.

  Yesterday, at L.[A]. State, they had chariot races; the chariots pulled by boys. One of the drivers was in drag; a girl’s bikini. A fat student was overturned at high speed from a bathtub mounted on three wheels but wasn’t hurt.

  May 9. The day Daddy was killed in France—or was it? I have forgotten. Is this awful? No—not particularly. But at least I’m remembering him today.

  Have finished a rough draft of the fourteenth chapter of the Ramakrishna book today, and am on page 16 of the new novel. I still don’t know what to think of that. But today a Japanese girl character whom I’d introduced for no reason apparent to myself, just as a friend of Colin’s, suddenly acquired symbolic status as another Foreigner, stuck midway between being a nisei in an America she despises and the alternative of going west and being a Japanese in a Japan she doesn’t know. This is promising.

  We heard from Ted this morning; they let him out of the Honor Farm382 in the small hours. He was rather sweet about it. He said, “I even got a kick out of riding home on the bus.”

  The night before yesterday, we had supper at Michael Barrie’s, and Gerald was there in his greatest form. He went on at great length about Aldous’s tongue cancer and the genius of Cutler the surgeon. He is sure Cutler could have saved Maria.383 He says that Maria, just before she died, told him that she had no idea if Aldous really loved her or not. Then Gerald got on to the subject of Europe and the Common Market. He owned to have been quite wrong about Europe. Now he believes Europe is going to be great again. The Russians missed their chance by being too clever and sly and suspicious. Only Europe could take it—it being “the religious, the political, the economic and the psychological revolutions”— “without going mad.” There was much much more which alas I have forgotten because I got drunk. I got drunk because this was the first time I was allowed to drink (grudgingly) by Dr. Allen after exactly one month. Having x-rayed me he has found a lot of arthritis in my spine and neck, but there’s nothing to be done about that, except suspend me in traction like Swami.

  Don agreed that the evening with Gerald was a real success. “It’s so seldom,” he said, “that you feel you’re in the best of all places you could be.”

  May 11. I’ll try to remember to note down here the various pairs of linked events which keep happening to me. Partly because I want to see if they do, in fact, keep happening. One’s memory plays tricks and the only way to be sure is to list them. Here are three recent pairs:

  Following the burglary at our house, in which three articles of clothing were stolen (i.e. the three pairs of pants) there was a burglary at our laundry, in which a lot of clothes, including a box of ours, were stolen.

  In my last entry, I mention that I have had an idea for my novel about a Japanese girl character who might play quite an important part. That same evening, I picked up a hitchhiker—a thing I very seldom do nowadays—and he was a Russian-American boy who had lived most of his life in Japan and even spoke English with a Japanese accent; in other words he, like my projected character, was a sort of nisei. What made this coincidence odder was that the boy didn’t look in the very slightest Asian, so I can’t have picked him up because of any subconscious association of ideas.

  This morning, at the Department of Building (where I finally got a provisional permit to build our balcony, subject to the approval of an inspector on Monday), I was accosted by a man, a builder presumably, who knew my face from seeing me on television. I left the building and had just reached my parked car when I was accosted by a young man who knew me from television and had been listening to my Santa Barbara lectures on the radio.

  Gerald calls these pairs of events synchronicities, because one of their characteristics is that they must happen right after each other. He thinks that they are parts of a cosmic pattern which we thus glimpse but can never hope to understand.384

  May 13. Cold windy weather, although the sun shines. I wish I could get out in the sun, but it’s too chilly and there is so much to do. Yesterday I slipped badly; I should have pushed ahead with the revision of chapter 14 of the Ramakrishna book, and I also failed to get on with my novel just at a time when I ought to be doing something every available day. During this part of the “climb” there’s a great danger of freezing onto the cliff face if I don’t keep moving.

  Ted and Vince are here right now, looking at Don’s drawings. Ted remarking on the recent dearth of new movies, said, “I couldn’t have picked a better month to go to prison.” I complimented him on his pretty shirt, and Vince looked slightly quizzical, which made me wonder if Ted had stolen it!

  Last night, Don and I went to supper at Henri Coulette’s apartment in Pasadena. A disaster. We started late, because Don got back late from drawing the Bracketts, having spilled a bottle of ink on the floor, and then we ran into a huge traffic jam on the Sepulveda Pass, and then Don wanted to see “In a Lonely Place” on T.V., so we left early. There weren’t enough martinis, there wasn’t enough food and there were too many guests. I don’t think heterosexual parties are workable, anyhow, just as conversation groups. If women and men mix, they should dance and flirt; they have very little to say to each other. An unmixed group of men or women would have been far livelier. And, oh dear, the academic atmosphere with its prissy caution! One man said that very few people in America “had the background” to be able to appreciate The Brothers Karamazov. WHY? If this were really true, it wouldn’t be a criticism of America but of Dostoevsky.

  Sure, I am prejudiced, but I feel always more strongly how ignoble marriage usually is. How it drags down and shackles and degrades a young man like Henri, who is really sweet and bright and full of quiet but powerful passion. The squalid little shop, the little business premises, you have to open, and the deadly social pattern which is then imposed on you—of dragging some dowdy little frump of a woman all around with you, wherever you go, for the next forty years. Not to mention the kids. It is a miserable compromise for the man, and he is apt to punish the woman for having blackmailed him into it.

  Must reread Strindberg on this subject, and read his Confessions of a Fool. Have just finished Camus’ The Stranger, which irritates me merely; Camus is such a dreary mind. Am enjoying The Charterhouse of Parma.

  May 18. The building inspector came this morning and met Mr. Haslam our contractor here, and it really looks as if the balcony and even the studio may be started before too long. Don was inclined to be sad about his birthday—he was mad at me last night because I hadn’t told Jo and Ben, with whom we were having supper. But he cheered up a bit when I gave him a shirt, a tie and the kind of English oatmeal biscuit he likes. Now he has gone off to draw Dorothy Parker again and to have supper with his folks. We are supposed to meet for a movie later.

  I feel rather wretched about him, and yet I know there’s almost nothing I can do. This is a period without glamor. He blames me because his birthday isn’t marvellous, and I would blame him under the same circumstances.

  Two more pairs of linked events, except that one of them was a triplet—Don spilt his drawing ink on three different occasions during the last week; and two unlikely people have given me off-beat religious works to read—Arlene Drummond our new maid gave me Deep Meditation; A Very Simple System from the Ancient Vedic Culture of India Ideally Suited to the Tempo of Modern Times; Transcript of a Talk and Questions and Answers by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Mr. Haslam gave me The Book of Mormon!

  Yesterday, at our creative writing seminar, I tried reading bits of the Mexican version of Down There on a Visit. It seemed miserably
poor and thin. I don’t know how I am going to make it sound interesting enough for the writers’ conference.

  May 24. Another pair of events: yesterday, I got two film offers—from Zachary Scott385 to do a film about the life of Lafcadio Hearn or based on one of his Japanese ghost stories, and from a man named Julian Lesser,386 to write and speak a narration for a documentary on the life of Gauguin. The latter tempts me more than the former.

  Yesterday, I went to see Gerald in a small hospital on La Brea. He has had an operation for hernia, not serious. Of course he knew all about Hearn, how he had lived in a sewer (where?) and how he had become disgusted with Japan after the Japanese cut his professor’s salary in half because he had become a Japanese citizen.387 Gerald has a low opinion of Hearn’s ghost stories because they have no cosmology. He was in the highest spirits and only winced in pain when he coughed and it hurt something “down in the plumbing.” He expected to get out today or tomorrow.

  Up at Vedanta Place, Prema remarked that he wished things could go on just as they are now for years, because everything was very harmonious: Swami well and Prema is enjoying what he is doing now. Maybe this was an important confession psychologic ally, because I fancy Prema has been very restless until recently— yearning to get away or become a swami or something. Anyhow, “harmonious” isn’t quite the word I would have chosen, for mad Marlene388 has been sending more anonymous letters with torn-up photos of Ramakrishna or Swami in them, and the question “Is the farce still going on?” And Tito [Renaldo] lowers and glooms, and the other day at breakfast jumped up exclaiming that if somebody didn’t stop hexing him he would pack and leave!

  May 25. Am writing this after an evening of reading through the test papers and trying to grade my students—what dull work! Only Janvier and [Glenn] Porter stand out so far—Janvier because he is sincerely interested, Porter because he is simpatico-crazy. Now I’m going down for a late supper at Ted’s [Grill] with Don, who has been drawing with Jack Jones.