The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  August 15. Jo, on the phone this morning, told me how depressed Ben is, these days. Everything he writes gets turned down; and even when he has a relative success, like the novel or getting that television job, it never really pays off. He feels he ought to give up writing and get a job. Meanwhile, Jo’s knee, which she injured skating with the Ricky Griggs[es], has swollen, and so she has to go and get sonar treatment and sit with her legs in a bath of whirling water. The girl who had been operating this for her, asked her about her shark’s tooth ornament and this led to descriptions of Tahiti and the revelation that Jo is a designer. And the girl was thrilled. “Those poor girls,” said Jo, “don’t have any glamor in their lives.”

  Meanwhile, Don succeeds and succeeds. He even made Merle Oberon clap her hands and call in the servants to admire one of the drawings he did of her today. And this week he has made—I think it’s around five hundred dollars! And he is about to draw Charles Boyer for his play.429 On the other hand, deep deep gloom. But I have resolved not to dwell on this, unless it’s something out of the ordinary. This is a bad month, for both of us.

  Don’s studio is nearly finished. We are considering going to New Mexico, in order that Don shall draw Igor before they leave. That would mean we’d have to go there this weekend.

  I have failed to get on with my work. Stomach flap and depression. Uneasy sleep, in which my dreams consist of rigid objects without any apparent significance, like sticks. This is very disagreeable; it verges on the frightening discomfort of actual delirium, when your thoughts hurt.

  A sweet letter and a very warm and understanding review of Down There by Dachine Rainer430 for a British magazine called Anarchy.

  August 18. Vera Stravinsky put us off going to Santa Fe by telling us how hot it was and how crowded and how she and Igor and Bob were beset by journalists, agents, etc. Evidently she thought we would be a nuisance, but I didn’t resent this, particularly as I didn’t really want to go.

  It is warm and beautiful. Today we went on the beach and in the ocean; both are dirty, but we are getting good tans. Don has been to draw Boyer, who was pompous and uncharming and limited him strictly to one hour. So Don didn’t do well. When Boyer was asked to sit again, he made difficulties. However, Don has just reported the whole thing to Janet Adrian, who will report back to Paul Gregory,431 who will maybe put the screws on Boyer.

  Temporarily, at least, I am down a little below 150 lbs., the first time in ages. I have passed page 50 in The Englishwoman and did a big swatch of the sixteenth chapter of the Ramakrishna book. Also an analysis of all the slips and mistakes on the first page of Bart Johnson’s novel. Nearly three pages of them! I’m afraid he will be shattered. But he shatters rather too easily, anyhow; and sloppiness must be treated drastically if it is ever to be cured. Now my next distasteful task is to tell William Hoopes what I think of his novel.

  August 22. This morning the man has come to put in the drapes in the front bedroom and in Don’s studio; and other men are putting mirror into the wall of the dining area. And tonight, Jerry Lawrence, Larry Paxton, Jack Larson, Jim Bridges and Max Scheler432 are coming to dinner, and Gavin is coming in later. Gavin leaves in a couple of days for England because he is going to write The Night of the Iguana screenplay. (They have decided to make the picture in England and so they want a writer who has a British passport; this is the reason given for letting me out, and I daresay it is really the true one.) This afternoon, Wyatt Cooper is bringing Gloria Vanderbilt for Don to draw. Wyatt is thought by Don to be scheming to marry her. This means that I may have to keep him entertained while Don is drawing her.

  I have said I won’t complain until things become really unbearable. So I won’t complain.

  A pair of linked events: after silence from my ex-students all summer, I hear today from Glenn Porter, Frances Yampolsky, Nick Barod. Also, I discover that Glenn and Frank Wiley are both on the Princeton!433

  Reading Mrs. Dalloway, which is one of the most truly beautiful novels or prose poems or whatever that I have ever read. It is prose written with absolute pitch, a perfect ear. You could perform it with instruments. Could I write a book like that and keep within the nature of my own style? I’d love to try.

  A fan in Oregon named Jack Rosen has sent me a hand-drawn birthday card with greetings from the characters in my Berlin novels—“to our ‘Poppa’ . . .” Of such is the kingdom of heaven.

  Harvey Easton definitely has cancer. It is in his liver. He won’t see anyone. His wife June is pregnant.

  To live every day as if this were going to happen to oneself. And yet not to let it happen.

  Great satisfaction from working out at the gym; but I’m barely losing weight. I still can’t get down below 150 and stay down. But my hips are much smaller.

  August 24. What was wrong with the film John Huston and Wolfgang Reinhardt made about Freud?434 (We saw it yesterday evening.) Just exactly what I had expected would be wrong. Freud’s lifework is presented in the pat terms of a neat logical discovery. “If that is that and this is this, then that-this must be—No, that’s wrong.” (Something happens, and the discoverer gets a flash of insight.) “Ah, now I see. The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is—” And the discovery is discovered and remains discovered, forever and forever. . . . This would be perfectly all right if you were describing the invention of a certain kind of corkscrew. But this method (which has been the method of all Hollywood biographical films dealing with scientists) utterly belittles the greatness of men like Freud, who were not inventors or necessarily discoverers, even, but explorers. They dared—that’s what matters. Scott dared to approach the South Pole. Freud dared to descend into the Inner Night. If they really discovered anything, if they succeeded or if they failed—that’s secondary.

  Afterwards, Jack Larson and Jim Bridges took me to supper at Frascati’s. (Don had to go to a party at Romanoff ’s, given by Gloria Vanderbilt.) As soon as we sat down, Jack went and telephoned Monty Clift in New York, because he was waiting to hear how he had looked in the film. Jack has to call him after every one of his films. As a matter of fact, Clift didn’t disgrace himself. He had very little to do, except to be seen watching the patient, or asking him, “And then?” or, “Why?” And talking of why, why must non-Jews play Jews nowadays? It is the most bogus kind of liberal nonsense—that we’re all the same really. We fucking well aren’t.

  Then Jack Larson talked about Paul Kennedy, whom he’d known quite well, for many years. How Paul was AWOL from the marines for months and how he finally gave himself up and was thrown in the brig. And then his life of poverty in Hollywood, sleeping in all-night movie theaters. I should have asked more, if I hadn’t been sleepy and sluggish. I do like Jack and Jim more and more, the more I get to know them. But chiefly Jack. Jack seems to me a genuine man of goodwill. And he is a great authority on old Hollywood. I wish I could see more of him but there’s never any time, it seems.

  Was horrid to Don this morning, blaming him for getting me into the Freud showing and the consequent obligation to write to or telephone John Huston. I told Don that he is the real tyrant, not me. This is the kind of talk which is neither true nor false. We are both tyrants whenever either of us gets the upper hand. No need to get nasty about this.

  August 26. My expectation of life is now seventeen years. But how well aware I am that it may end any time now. That aggressive Negro girl I met at the party in New York at Christmas said I would die after writing one more (very successful) book; a year or two after writing it, I think she said.

  Am I afraid of death? Yes and no. I am terrified of going over the edge, knowing the illness is terminal, knowing the doctors and nurses have got me in their cruel kingdom of insufficient pain-killing. But I have faith, too. I believe that I shall be somehow sustained. If there’s an afterlife at all. And that’s still a little bit of an if for me. Not a big one.

  I am not pleased by the way I’m growing old. My face is ugly with tension and resentment and lust. It is not beautiful at all. Old and ugly,
and I am plump around the middle, despite all my exercising. I have got to curb my resentment somehow; it is wearing me out.

  Do I hate Don? Only the selfish part of me hates him, for rocking the boat. When I can go beyond that, I feel real compassion, because he is suffering terribly. I still don’t know if he really wants to leave me, or what. And I don’t think he knows. Last night, he had a drunken fit of crying, over in the studio, so loud that I could hear him in the house. I went over and he said to leave him alone, he liked to cry. I really felt he was on the edge of a breakdown. But then, this morning, he appeared with birthday presents inscribed in the Dub and Kitty idiom—two shirts, white socks, a watchstrap and a beautiful Japanese model horse, white with trappings of orange, green and gold. Now he has gone off to draw Selznick.

  Last night, Hope Lange and Glenn Ford came to supper. I burned the steaks (which were anyway far too small) on the barbecue. It is so symptomatic of the gloom we live in that this accident, which would seem merely funny to happy people, became a disaster like something in an Ibsen play. Hope and Glenn were as constrained as ever, despite their alleged get-together. You felt Hope was his prisoner. So that was depressing, too.

  I had looked forward to a day on the beach, to freshen up my tan before I leave for San Francisco on Wednesday. But it’s one of those maddening days of beach fog with blue sky a mile inland.

  Have just finished Mrs. Dalloway. It is a marvellous book[.] Woolf ’s use of the reverie is quite different from Joyce’s stream of consciousness. Beside her, Joyce seems tricky and vulgar and cheap, as she herself thought. Woolf’s kind of reverie is less “realistic” but far more convincing and moving. It can convey tremendous and varied emotion. Joyce’s emotional range is very small.

  Am on page 56 of The Englishwoman, and yesterday I finished the rough draft of chapter 16 of the Ramakrishna book. Now I must write to Olive Mangeot, one of the very few who remembered my birthday. The others: Glade Bachardy, Jerry Lawrence.

  This from a Chinese fortune cookie I was given at the House of Lee in Pacific Palisades a couple of nights ago: “Don’t write curt notes to people who have failed you”!

  September 10. I had meant to begin a new volume after that last entry and after my trip to San Francisco. But somehow this isn’t the moment to do it. I would like to open on a happier note, or at least on the sensation or illusion of a new start.

  Things are bad with Don, but at least we had an air-clearing talk the other day. I ought to go away, of course, for several months and leave him here to find his bearings. Not to do this is to force him to go away, and this is wrong because he is the one who didn’t feel really at home in this house, and now that he has his own studio he should be free to enjoy it.

  Then why don’t I go away? Because it is such a lot of fuss and I don’t want to leave my home and above all my books. I want to stay here and get on with my work, in my own tempo. I can leave him alone now, of course, much more easily than before; we have much more privacy. But not enough. Our life together is all off on the wrong foot and I am not at all certain it can get back off it.

  Aren’t I bad for him, now, under any circumstances? Probably. He only needs me in his weakness, not his strength; and he hates me for supporting his weakness. But meanwhile I am useful, and the show is beginning at Rex Evans’s gallery a week from today; in fact we are in the midst of an emergency, which makes an excuse for doing nothing till it’s over.

  Today he is getting a new car, a Corvair. I am trying to get a Volkswagen as soon as possible.

  All this time, my tongue has been burning. Now I’m told by Dr. Allen to see a specialist about the little tumor in my ear. It looks slightly larger to him. So I’m going tomorrow, maybe to have it cut out. Otherwise my health seems good. At the gym I feel very strong, but I still can’t lose weight.

  Only yesterday did I make a very faltering restart on the Ramakrishna chapter.

  I was in San Francisco from August 30435 to September 4. Had meant to write about this today, but Anthony Brown436 just called to tell me about his book on the British wartime propaganda newspaper, and now I have to go out.

  September 12. About San Francisco first. I really don’t have much that I particularly want to note down. This strange guy [. . .] gave me a sweater which had belonged to John Cowan.437 I had a little bit the feeling that, in giving it to me, he was passing on an unlucky object—the way you are supposed to have to get someone to accept the runes which have been cast on you. Anyhow, I left it, unintentionally, in Stanley Miron’s car.

  Then the trip I took with Ben Underhill to the White Horse Ranch, up in the hills near the Napa Valley. It belongs to Wakefield Baker and Ted Sheridan. (A sort of Maugham story there: how these two most eligible bachelors in San Francisco disappointed so many mothers by setting up housekeeping together. And then the misery which crept up on them.) In the night, a doe fell in the swimming pool and one of the ranch dogs dragged it out by the throat and killed it and partly ate it. The doe’s screams were horrible, like a human’s.

  Thom Gunn and his leather jackets and his bar life. He hasn’t written poetry for nearly a year, but he doesn’t seem rattled. There is something very tough in him. There is a bar called the Why Not which has a boot party on Thursdays.

  Maybe I’ll think of other things. Not now. . . .

  A beautiful day, and I am so relieved because the specialist—a Minnesotan Swede, I think, with a brutal face and a certain effeminacy of pose—told me the thing in my ear isn’t a tumor at all but an exostosis, and that it won’t have to be operated on unless it interferes with my hearing. The hearing test; sitting with headphones on in a soundproof room. Gradually you hear the delicate tiny fairy jingles. So pretty. You could write music for them.

  But Laughton is probably dying. The kidney is too far gone to operate on. I talked to Elsa today and shall most likely go to see him on Friday. And Harvey Easton is certainly dying.

  The pursuit of publicity for Don’s show. Don was saying this morning how revolting this is. He says he’s getting sick of doing portraits. Or rather that he wants to find another way of doing them. “So they’ll look like me instead of looking like the sitters.”

  The Cuban crisis is cooking up big.438 Don has turned down Anthony Cave Brown’s idea that he should be commissioned by NASA to cover the next American earth orbit at the recovery point in the Pacific. What they needed was a sketch artist, of course.

  September 14. Yesterday I reread my novel, the fifty-six pages I’ve written so far. I am discouraged; very little seems to be emerging. Maybe I really have to sit down and plot a bit before I go on. I do not have a plot and I don’t even know what I want to write a novel about. . . . No, that’s not quite true. I want to write about middle age, and being an alien. And about the Young. And about this woman. The trouble is, I really cannot write entirely by ear; I must do some thinking.

  Supper with Tom Wright yesterday. Gavin was there. Tom leaves soon for a two-year stay in Mexico, Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America. There is something very Beatrix Potter about him. He is like a self-contained eccentric animal, very much alone and quite satisfied to be so. You can imagine him puttering around the rain forest and the Mayan ruins, with his stammer and his stoop and his mild southern amiability, a creature altogether alien and yet quite able to take care of himself, avoid snakes and wild beasts, escape infection by the judicious use of pills, even cope with the most ferocious Indians—the kind who have killed many a trained anthropologist who spoke their language perfectly, knew all about their customs and religion, but didn’t have Tom’s saving, smiling adaptability.

  September 16. On the beach today; it was beautiful, though the beach itself is foul with the trash of the untidy summer. Tomorrow is Don’s show, and he is working frantically now trying to do a self-portrait of himself because Rex Evans wants to put one up outside the gallery. Meanwhile I have been writing letters, to Frank Wiley, to consumptive Paul Taylor in London, to Amiya. What a weary labor! And really it is nothing
but slamming a ball back across the net. Frank is maybe the only one who deserves a letter because he is stuck out there in the navy; and yet it’s precisely to him that I can’t write the things he’d want to hear, because of this prissy censorship and spying. So I sent a long literary chat about Faulkner and Woolf which I could barely finish for boredom.

  Last night, Don went out to dinner with the Claxtons and got drunk and fell on the way back to his car and raised a huge bruise on his thigh which is paining him dreadfully. So that’s one more cross to bear tomorrow. But he has been so sweet, the last few days. All that is such a mix-up. Perhaps I should just offer the whole thing up to God’s will and stop worrying. But I can’t help feeling that refusing to worry is somehow a betrayal of Don. (I’m tired and writing nonsense, I think.)

  Elsa still makes excuses for me not to see Charles. She may not even realize what she is doing. And of course I am not madly eager to see him. When I do it will be sad and painful. Japam, japam; there is nothing else to be done about anything.

  September 18. Don feels that the opening of his show last night was a great disappointment, because only one portrait was definitely bought—Lotte Lenya, by Gavin Lambert. But Glenn Ford publicly declared that he intended to buy the portrait of me (a strange, rather leering one, which Don finished only about an hour before the show opened!) And today we hear there is a buyer for the Huxley, and a nibbler after the Tennessee Williams.

  The party was certainly well-attended, though there were a lot of freeloaders and queen-bums. Gladys Cooper came, and Dorothy Parker, and Shelley Winters, and Glenn and Hope. But that cunt Oberon did not come, after tricking Don into hanging the picture of her that she likes, and Connie Wald didn’t come, because of some mysterious disaster, and Lee Gershwin439 and Doris Dowling didn’t come. And that bastard Mike Connolly440 didn’t come, although Jerry Lawrence even asked him to dinner to get him. The greatest gaffe of the evening, on my part, was to inscribe a copy of my novel to “Tyler,” because I had gotten Keats Tyler’s name turned around. Don followed my example. So we have decided to send him another copy, properly inscribed. (I had thought of doing this and dismissed the idea, and then Don suggested it, on his own.)