The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Last Sunday, Gavin and I had lunch together out at Malibu, with Hugh French. James Mason was there and it seems that he is involved in an affair with a married woman.414 He arrived with her and her daughter. They went out on the beach together. Suddenly, a youngish, rather unattractive man appeared and, without even introducing himself or saying hello, walked right past us through the yard and out to the beach to find them. This was the husband. It seems there was quite a fuss. A good scene for a film; the man who is so preoccupied with his jealousy that he strides right through a big formal reception, say, wearing a bathrobe.

  Gavin and I looked in on Doris and Len Kaufman on our way home. Their horrible Johnno had a sick-joke syringe with which you can make-believe stick yourself and draw make-believe blood. While we were there, two women came in to look at the house with a view to renting it. (One thousand dollars a month! When they first heard this they left at once; but then they thought it over and came back again.) When the women went into Johnno’s bedroom, there were rubber horror-heads lying on the bed, and a big horror-hand trying to get out of the chest of drawers. For the first time, I rather liked Johnno.

  Have bought Calories Don’t Count and had a short spell of trying to eat three meals a day with hamburgers, etc., cooked in safflower oil. Now I am back on my old bad habits, though being a little more careful than I was, and eating gluten bread.

  July 22. Don got in from New York at 8:30 last night looking marvellous. I mean, lit up—not like a cocaine addict but like an electric light; positively brilliant with nervous energy. The moment he is back here I find myself being kept waiting, wasting time, not being able to do things my way. The only difference is, this house and the alterations and all the fuss and noise and dirt of the workmen, immediately begin to have a meaning and be worth the trouble. Yes, he is a marvel.

  A ghastly contrast to him was Charles Laughton yesterday. He had come down to the house next door for the first time since his illness began, with Elsa and the Australian nurse. And immediately on arrival he had started abdominal pains and had to be given lots of painkiller; by the time I got over there he was lapsing into open-mouthed snoring sleep. But later he woke up and we sat together for a while. I held his hand. He said, “Do you think I shall ever get well?” and I asked him, “Do you want to?” “Yes,” he said, “I don’t want to go.” I urged him to get Terry to come back here and stay. The tears ran down his cheeks. And then, in the next room, Elsa was telling me that she won’t sell this house whatever happens, only the Hollywood one and the one at Palos Verdes. And she discussed who should live with her. “I don’t want to run around looking for lovers.” She seems to think only of the future, after his death; and she is irritated by his “false hopes.” Charles kept repeating that he would keep coming down to this house and doing a little more each time and “spreading himself.” His fight for life may or may not be hopeless but it is perfectly natural, and I will never forget the obscenity of Elsa’s determination to see him buried. It would be amusing to see her change of attitude if she suddenly found herself in the position of the wives of the Peruvian Inca, who were always strangled when [the husband] died.

  Gerald, whom I saw on the 19th, says Max Cutler says we nearly all of us get cancer, only the system usually throws it off. He leaves for Europe on the 24th with Michael. He wants to do a tape with me, discussing his chief interests and so indirectly describing his whole life. An autobiography along the Stravinsky-Craft lines. He hinted slyly at Michael’s bossy possessive attitudes. But I’m sure he’s fond of Michael. As a matter of fact, this may well be one of the typical relationships of old age. There is a person, if you’re lucky, who fusses you and bosses you and hustles you around and thereby keeps you alive. You know this and are grateful to this person and at the same time you bitterly resent being pushed around. I am sure that Gerald would be really relieved if he didn’t have to go to Europe at all.

  July 23. I forgot to note one of Jim Charlton’s theories about Japan, namely that one of the chief differences between Japanese and Americans arises from their attitude to masturbation. The Japanese have no shame whatever about this, and Jim believes this is because they are capable of loving their own bodies and don’t think it’s shameful to do so. He theorizes that all this masturbation makes the Japanese incapable of aggression in their sexual attitudes. An English (or American) guest professor noticed that his students went to the bathroom regularly, almost every hour. He asked, did they have stomach upsets? No, they explained quite calmly, they had to masturbate, in order to relieve their nervous tension.

  I also should have written something about Ricky Grigg and his Chinese wife whom he calls Sandy. I met them at Jo and Ben’s last Friday. They go back to Honolulu in a couple of days. Although Ricky is such a great star among teenage surfers, he doesn’t give you the impression of a star personality. And of course he is much more than a star; he is a genuine hero. That rescue he did in Hawaii, of his fellow surfer, when no one else dared go into the surf and he himself had just escaped from it utterly exhausted and half drowned, would certainly have got him the Congressional Medal of Honor if it had been done in a war. He is quite disappointingly skinny; not at all an imposing physique with his clothes on. And though he is obviously intelligent, he is quiet and without projection. Oddly enough, he reminded me a little of another (lesser) hero, Dominguín.415

  [. . .] but, so far, she and Ricky have always made up again. This morning a James Simpson called me from New York because he has written a biography of a boy named Ramsey who was at the Mitre when I was at the Hall, at Repton. I couldn’t remember him and asked what he had done to get a biography written about him. Simpson said, “He’s Archbishop of Canterbury!” (Ramsey is slightly younger than I am.)416

  Still struggling on with The Englishwoman. Utter vagueness as to what it’s all about. Doesn’t matter.

  July 30. Sunshine at last, after so many cloudy days in the Canyon. Walked to Santa Monica and back along Ocean Avenue park with some guy (Jackson?) who is studying the history of the Ramakrishna Order.417 So no work will be done today. None was done yesterday, because we taped the recording of F6 at KPFK.418 The others seemed to like my performance as the Abbot, but I think I was pretty hammy.

  On the 24th, a woman ran into the back of the car as I was standing at a stoplight on Hollywood Boulevard. I got a slight back-jerk. I was absolutely furious, in a senile unhumorous way, which disgusts me to think of. I made her get out of her car and come over to mine to give me her insurance company’s address. (I don’t regret that part of it.) A synchronicity: on the same day, Jo hurt her knee ice-skating with Ricky Grigg. Also, on the 27th, another accident due to crass stupidity: an elderly man, who was shovelling dirt out of the vacant lot next door proceeded to shovel it all over my car and the seat. Again I was furious, despite the good resolutions I had made after the accident. This must stop. This kind of rage is the ersatz vitality of the elderly.

  We nearly but didn’t buy a bead curtain like a Monet painting, really beautiful, but costing five hundred dollars. We did buy a dining-room table, a chandelier and perhaps some chairs.

  The deck now has a railing around it.

  The Stravinskys went off on another of their immense voyages—Santa Fe, New York, Israel, Venice, Russia. Vera told me over the phone that she dreaded Russia. “It will be vodka, kisses, embraces, lies.”

  Drove down to Laguna for the “monks’ picnic.” Swami described how Maharaj once put him into a state in which he “talked and talked” without remembering anything he said. Only, right at the end of it all, he found himself addressing Maharaj in the familiar form instead of the polite form—the second person singular, as it were. Then he heard Maharaj ask him, “What did you say?” and he hastily corrected himself. He thinks that Maharaj was asking him about his former lives and had put him into a higher state of consciousness so that he could recollect them.

  July 31. Such a brilliant windy day, with everything sparkling. Elsa called to say that Charles went into
hospital last night in acute pain because the cancer has got in his spine. He had an operation on a disk which may or may not save him from paralysis. Afterwards, they could not get him sedated, even with morphia, for a long time. Elsa asked me, did I think Terry really cares for him. According to her, the doctor is unwilling for Terry to be brought out, because the situation shocks him. It is the wife’s place, etc. etc. I can hardly swallow this.

  Oh God, shall I have to die like that—and in the Cedars of Lebanon? The Cedars is the last horror but one. The last is Forest Lawn. “A dark hospital and a detested wife. . . .”419

  Meanwhile, life being as heartless as it is, I have had a splendid day so far—got five letters written, said my beads, did a page of Ramakrishna and a page of the novel, went to the gym, watered the kentia palms, talked to Mr. Haslam, decided with Don and Al Spar to call our business merger Bee-Eye Enterprises (so we can have a drawing of a bee and an eye as a trademark).420 Now John Schenkel is coming to talk about his writing.

  Reading Mrs. Dalloway—that wonderful passage about how Septimus Smith goes mad. And The Wild Palms. Faulkner’s sentences are beyond belief. You think it must be a parody. Finally, on page 76, I said to myself, really this time the Master really has flipped his wig—this makes no sense whatsoever; and then I found that pages 77 to 92 in my copy were missing!

  August 4. Another brilliant day. But I am blackly depressed. And as usual my depression demonstrates the insecurity of my toehold on sanity and happiness. All that has really happened is as follows:

  A cable from Time and Tide asks me to do a review of Edward’s novel,421 quick quick quick. I went to see Paul Kennedy in hospital yesterday. I had a talk with Elsa in which she expressed strong subconscious alarm that Charles might not be going to die yet. I took part in a reading of F6 in front of a small audience;422 Don thought I was bad. Don announced that he was going to sleep in the front bedroom. This morning I opened the door and he screamed at me. Kent Chapman is coming to take up the whole afternoon; then Florence Homolka is coming with photographs; then we have Bill Inge, Ned Rorem, and some young actor to dinner. Otherwise, everything is JUST FINE.

  It seems that Paul may really recover. The cancer has cleared up in his lung (I don’t really understand what this means) and in his liver. But he is having these agonizing cramps and his weight is down to 108, and he has been put on the critical list and got the last sacrament, and then more last sacraments from the hospital priest, who gave him what Paul describes as “a cheap rosary” and a little colored booklet of the stations of the cross and the various indulgences. At the same time, the doctor urges him to walk around! He is very weak, a jaundice-yellow, with dark blotches all over his body and the marks of hypos, and his eyes are brilliant blue in yellow eyeballs and when he looks at you his gaze freezes on you; this I suppose is the morphia. He was perfectly logical and didn’t seem scared, only quietly bitter that this should have happened to him.

  August 7. Am down at Laguna Beach, staying with Swamis Prabhavananda, Vandanananda, Satprakashananda, Pavitrananda and Krishna and Arup at the Camel Point house.423 Came down on Sunday night. It was a sudden decision taken Sunday morning, the day before yesterday. Don was still in his bad mood and refusing even to tell me what it was all about—I mean, specifically, this time; of course it was about our relationship and his freedom, as usual. So I said it would be much better if I got right out and left him alone to think things over, and he said yes it would. So I called Vedanta Place and suggested coming down here. Now, this morning, Don called me and said he wanted me back and suggested coming down and picking me up this evening. So that’s how it’s going to be, though Prabhavananda protests violently.

  Well, I have had two nice days in the sun and the ocean water and got some tan and wasted a lot of work time. I have however skimmed through Edward’s novel again and admire it far more than ever; I think it is a masterpiece, truly massive.

  Yesterday, three of Satprakashananda’s devotees from St. Louis came to visit us; mother and father and a twenty-six-year-old son, named Bergfeldt. The son was skinny and grinning-eager with pink-rimmed bespectacled rabbit-eyes. Swami Prabhavananda has decided that he shall be Satprakashananda’s personal attendant. He really appeared as a sort of demon matchmaker, and though I laughed like hell I must say it was a fiendish idea; the poor boy wanted to join Trabuco or the monastery in San Francisco.424

  Much excitement about Marilyn Monroe’s death.425 Everybody talks about it; from Ted Bachardy to the Swamis.

  August 11. Paul Kennedy died on the evening of the day I wrote the entry above. It wasn’t directly anything to do with the cancer. That was clearing up. But he was utterly exhausted and then he developed pneumonia. He died without pain, in his sleep. Vic Morrow, whom I talked to yesterday, says that when they saw him last Sunday he was more lucid and in a better mood than they had seen for a long while. The awful thing was, I never called the hospital on the day after I got back here from Laguna, as I certainly should have. This was partly because I felt like staying away from cancer a bit longer; I still haven’t called Elsa. But also because I genuinely believed Paul was on the mend, at least temporarily. So did everyone else. When I did call the hospital yesterday, the switchboard put me through to a nurse, who said, “I’m afraid the news isn’t too good; he was buried today.” So I even missed the funeral. I can’t pretend I’m sorry about this, especially as Vic Morrow told me they had wanted me to say something about Paul.

  Now we hear that Harvey Easton has cancer too.

  Jo and Ben have a weird story about Peter Gowland. Some time ago, he was given a plaster statue by Mae West. It was supposed to be of her, but it was actually a beautiful and far younger naked woman. Mae West wanted Peter to photograph it for her. He kept putting this off, until last Sunday the 5th, in the morning he decided to do it. He set up the statue in the garden with a suitable backcloth. Just as he was about to start photographing, out rushed his daughter from the house exclaiming, “We just heard on T.V.—Marilyn Monroe is dead!” And, as she spoke, there was a terrific gust of wind and the statue fell and broke into several pieces. . . . Peter mended it later; so well that he didn’t have to confess the breakage to Mae West!426

  On the 8th, Don and Aldous and I went down by helicopter from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration office in Santa Monica to the North American plant in Downey, to be told about the moon rocket which they are building there.427 Don and I chiefly accepted the invitation for the sake of the helicopter ride, and it was even more exciting than I had expected. The ease and abruptness of the ascent is like flying in dreams. It is as if you merely make an extra effort of the will—symbolized by the roar of the engine—and suddenly the ground tilts away from you and you are soaring. I was also reminded of Rembrandt’s drawing of the angel leaving Manoah.428 Several people who happened to be passing watched our ascent into heaven with expressions of pleased amazement.

  The city was shocking in its uniformity; all those roofs and little yards and bug-autos and occasional glittering green pools, so much of it, stretching away and away, you never saw the end of it. Only, in the background, the big mountains appearing behind smears of yellow smog.

  The eager-beaver executives at North American were intimidated by Huxley’s ghost-pale introspective intensity. He was like a ghost they had raised to speak to them of the future. And they didn’t much like what they heard. Aldous held forth with his usual relish on the probability that the astronauts would bring back some disease which would wipe out the human race. And then he described the coming overpopulation of the earth. You felt that these people had bad consciences. They were making a fortune for their firm because the government will aid and abet them in playing gadgetry. So they keep reminding all who will listen that if they can go faster than the speed of light, and if they can reach an inhabited planet, and if the inhabitants of that planet are ahead of us in technics, and if they are willing and able to communicate to us what they know—why, then we shall be able to make great
strides ahead.

  The expert from Texas who stumbled over his own technical vocabulary as though he were what he sounded like, an illiterate Bronx truckdriver. (He was much the nicest of them.) We were told how you “abort” the flight if it isn’t going right. How the nose cone will descend on the moon while the other section remains in orbit around it and how then the two will rendezvous. We walked through the plant; very hot. Security posters: a naked baby with his arm raised, saying, “I swear I locked my file!” A framed motto: “Remember: American ends with I Can.” We had to wear name badges in our outside pockets. The office of the director had stars in the ceiling; but on the wall was a collection of antique spurs and bits.

  The day before yesterday, I finished the review of Edward’s novel and sent it off. Not good enough but not bad.

  The house is nearly finished. The carpet laid, the front bedroom all painted, the studio ready except for the toilet and heater. I won’t say anything about the problems with Don. They are still acute. And my tongue still burns.

  I never seem to record anything nowadays about my “spiritual life.” That’s hardly surprising because it has never been less evident. I keep up japam regularly, with very few omissions. But I have no sense of being in contact with whatever is there. Even when I was down at Laguna and got to meditate in the shrine with Prabhavananda and Pavitrananda, which ought to produce a “field” if anything would, I still got no sense of contact. Ought I to worry? I don’t know. On the one hand I’m conscious of my own sloth and slackness, on the other I know that one mustn’t demand sensation—do your duties and have faith that they are producing unfelt results. Just the same—