The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  This morning we went on the beach and discussed The English-woman, and Don, after hearing all my difficulties with it, made a really brilliant simple suggestion, namely that it ought to be The Englishman—that is, me. This is very far-reaching, but I shan’t go into it here, I’ll write an analysis of the idea within a day or two, in my big flat planning-book.

  September 22. The day before yesterday, I got a black Volkswagen sedan, and the day before that Don got a Corvair, very handsome, a kind of wine red, black upholstery with silver buttons. They fill our little carport and Don has to park diagonally because I have the jitters about backing out and have already scraped my whitewall tires and made a tiny dent in the wing. But I am very pleased. The Volkswagen and I understand each other. It reminds me of the Consul, which I used to describe as a very loyal little car. The V.W. has the bouncy loyal eagerness of a small dog. It doesn’t really care how you treat it. It isn’t very bright but it is cheerful and that’s such a relief after the gloomy neurotic moods of the Simca. You never knew how it would be feeling from day to day. It hated me, and I rather hated it for its French sulks. But it was sad to part from the Sunbeam Talbot which had shared so much with us. Those first spins with Don up the coast highway to the beach where we used to be able to swim naked, and the Monument Valley trip, where it figured in several early photographs. And how beautiful it was when it was young and horizon blue!

  A few more of Don’s drawings have been sold and Henry J. Seldis wrote a good notice of the show in the Los Angeles Times of yesterday. He said: “It is an impressive appearance by a highly skilled and perceptive draftsman who captures the personality as well as the appearance of his sitters with elegant lines.” So Don feels better. But he is still wrestling with post-exhibition lassitude. He resolves to start going nights to art school at the beginning of next week; also to paint during the day.

  And I resolve to get the hell on with the Ramakrishna book and restart my novel. I should never have stopped it; but now that I have this different approach I can’t go on from where I left off.

  The Cuba-Berlin crisis continues. And there will be a crisis like this every year until we blow each other up, or the deadlock is broken—by England’s declaration of unilateral disarmament; an act of political genius which is nearly but perhaps not utterly unthinkable, since it would satisfy at least one national appetite, the desire to be nobler than thou.

  September 23. This morning we went over to Gavin’s to look at John Hart’s441 interview with me on T.V., and instead, although it had been announced in the papers, there was an interview with a Negro comedian named Dick Gregory.442 Not one word said about the interviewee for next Sunday.443

  Last night we went to the theater at the Uplifters—it’s actually a gym with folding metal chairs—to see two plays by John Mortimer, The Lunch Hour and I Spy. Ghastly, and made ghastlier, as usual on such occasions, by Don’s jitters and fury. He can’t help taking such things personally. It is he who has been insulted and injured.444 Moyna Macgill445 was very good however. And an actor named Ben Wright446 gave the evening an unusual distinction by falling right off the stage during the blackout between the last two scenes. In the darkness, we heard this awful crash and then a great groan. But he had only sprained his wrist. He rather touchingly begged the audience’s pardon as he was helped out.

  The weather has much improved. Today, and four times during the past week, we have been on the beach and in the ocean. Blazing hot sun, dirty water. Don has a stomach upset and sore throat. During lunch at Ted’s, we discussed what he should do. Russell McKinnon has hinted to me that he would produce more money for Don to go back to England. But Don says he doesn’t really want to go. He doesn’t want to go to New York either. And he most decidedly doesn’t want to go to Rome or Paris. So then I had to point out to him that the logical alternative remaining is for me to go off somewhere while he stays here and works. I could tell at once that this was what he wanted. But where shall I go? I probably could get enough work in New York; maybe even in San Francisco. But that would mean compulsive drinking and running around. Suppose I went to Trabuco for two months? Hideous boredom and loneliness, but maybe the meditation and lack of liquor would work wonders, and I should get on, faute de mieux, with the Ramakrishna book and maybe also with my novel. (Remember how I had that extraordinary breakthrough with The World in the Evening when I was at Trabuco in January 1953, shortly before my life with Don started.) Well, I’ll give this idea serious consideration.

  September 29. I certainly won’t be able to go away in October, because so many things have come up for me to do. Lectures at Riverside, Garden Grove, and UCLA (a discussion with Jerry Lawrence) and another public reading of F6. As far as Don is concerned, I can’t make out how much he minds. He sulks, rushes off and spends the night out, and then is quite nice. He says he is in despair, but this only means what it means for most artists of any kind; he doesn’t know what to do next. I’m sure he must go out much more alone. He says he wants to go out dancing with girls. I say, well how marvellous. And then he says, but I don’t know any girls and I can’t dance any more—seeming to imply that I am stopping him. When, actually, one of the earliest things I urged him to do was take dancing lessons, and he did, but then lost interest.

  One thing I realize, I must stop being even in the least bit altruistic; because that is false anyhow. I must not make big gestures; just good-humoredly nudge him into greater freedom.

  Harvey Easton is dead. The guy who runs the gymnasium in his place is so sloppy that he still uses the sign Harvey used to use: Harvey will be back at. . . . And then a clock face, so you can indicate the time. The day after the funeral, the sign said: Harvey will be back at 3:30! This is one of the most striking examples I have ever heard of the startling horror which can be achieved through quite simple normal “harmless” insensitivity.

  Akhilananda of Providence and Boston also died a few days ago.447 His assistant, Swami Sarvagatananda, is out here now, taking refuge from the madwoman who has dominated the centers for years, and of whom they are all terrified. When I was up at Vedanta Place last Wednesday, a woman named Dorothy Louis (Shraddha) was raving against this woman and also goading Swami Prabhavananda, saying that he was afraid of her, rather in the manner that women in the Icelandic sagas goaded their men on to under take a killing by jeers at their cowardice. It was viciously ugly and one of the very few times I have seen Prabhavananda really rattled. You realize how a woman like Shraddha could degenerate into just such another domineering madwoman as the Providence one. There are women like that wherever a religious group gathers. The only person who can hold them in check is the priest or minister or swami in charge.448

  We have had all our planting done now. It was done by Mr. Graef of California Flowerland and two assistants (one called Angel) at the beginning of the week. On the days when all the shrubs have to be watered, it takes more than an hour. But the place is really beautiful now. The hanging boxes of plants give such style to the balcony.

  Yesterday I went to the Cedars for the second time to see Laughton. He seemed weaker and he is starting to get hallucinations again. He told me that he believes the doctor is practising witchcraft and is trying to get control of his (Charles’s) mind. “Of course,” said Charles, “he could only have it for very short periods”; and I realized that Charles was mixing up his witchcraft fantasy with show business. This became more evident when he asked me, “How much do you think I’d be paid as a witch?” I told him, a great deal. This seemed to please him.

  On September 25, I restarted my novel. I have absolutely no idea how this will go yet. But I feel I am nearer the mark, calling him William449 and writing in the third person.

  October 3. Last night we went to the Ringling Brothers circus, with Barbette. It was in the huge new sports arena, way downtown, and the place was not one quarter filled. It had never struck me before how the Circus is a symbolic play about Life. That sounds heavy and Germanic; what I mean is that the Circus is exactly like
Life. The Circus audience is much less attentive, generally speaking, than other audiences. It crunches and munches and slurps soft drinks and talks to itself, and its attention—like the attention of The Others in Life—is only momentarily captured. Indeed, it is made almost impossible for the audience to attend properly, because different things are happening most of the time in the three rings; you cannot concentrate. A sexy girl with long blonde hair is balancing outstretched on something, in a not very difficult pose; but she is watched. In the meanwhile, a dear little Japanese has a billiard cue on his chin, and a chair on top of that, and his wife sitting on the chair (no longer young), and he is twirling colored rings around one arm and juggling flaming torches with the other hand, and keeping a rubber ball balanced on the toe of one foot. It has taken him his whole life to learn to do this, no doubt; and maybe he can do it better than anybody else in the world; and who gives a damn? There was one act in which a young man rushed around setting plates spinning on pointed rods; and when they were all spinning he rushed around catching them before they slowed down and fell off. (One of them did fall, and shattered.) And this was a perfect symbol of the Rat Race, the Age of Anxiety. And then the disorganization and irrelevance, the sheer chaos of Life, expressed by the sudden invasion of the clowns, the frantic hurry in which many of the acts are performed, the meaninglessness of most of the animal acts—why should bears ride bicycles?—and the abrupt exit of even the star performers, walking quietly away, unfollowed by the spotlights, but perfectly visible to the onlookers, who nevertheless don’t applaud, and indeed pretend not to see them. The clowns are a curious mixture; half of them wholesome nursery types, like Popeye the Sailor Man, the other half abominations from the world of nightmare—things with snake-necks and tennis-ball heads, heads which are cut right off, creatures which split into halves and walk off separately. (They would be even more abomin able if their designers had had the genius as well as the intention of a Francis Bacon.) And then there are great engines, absurdly imposing when you consider the idiotic tasks for which they are made; the cannon, for example, which shoots two people into a net—why? The animals which seemed best adapted to the mood of the Circus were the elephants—and yet their monumental poses are a kind of parody of all classical sculpture.

  As for the trapeze artists, their art is something else again: high camp about Death.

  The wire walker who makes fake slips (and some real ones); that’s one approach. His wife was watching, and wincing each time he seemed about to fall. Attendants held a miserably small net underneath him.

  The other approach is the classic style and grace of Gerard, the aerialist. He swings by his heels. He wears a magnificent cape, more feminine than masculine in style, which he takes off before going aloft, in tights with a diamond belt, naked to the waist. Barbette introduced us to him. An utter lack of vanity. No notice able nervousness, although we met him first before the act. A blond, fairly good-looking, unremarkable, muscular boy in his middle twenties, I guess, who had put on a certain amount of fat. His friend Cesar, a Filipino. Cesar was in college when he met Gerard and joined the circus. Gerard taught him to do a low-wire act and to juggle. He is so good that he was featured in Madison Square Garden; there is no room for him on the program here. Cesar is Gerard’s assistant in his act. He has declared that, if Gerard falls, he will throw himself underneath to break the fall as much as possible. They have been together two or three years. (Once, Gerard slipped and only caught the trapeze with one heel and had to swing right back in that position. He thought he would fall, but he recovered himself. He earns $550 dollars a week. Barbette says he is going to teach Gerard some new tricks when they are in Sarasota, Florida, for the winter. He says that the circus is so big that it requires very big showy movements.)

  We took Barbette out to supper afterwards at a Mexican restaurant he recommended, the Taxco, on Sunset.

  When we were talking the evening over this morning, while having breakfast on the deck, Don said that, if the Circus symbolizes the meaninglessness of Life, then it follows that to have a job in the Circus is the most meaningless work of all.

  We watched the unattractive wife of one of the neighbors on Mabery Road go out and look in the mailbox. Don said, “What can she be expecting, except bills?”

  October 9. We had a picnic with Gerard (Soule)450 and his friend Cesar, and Jack Larson and Jim Bridges and Gavin on the beach yesterday. It wasn’t rewarding. Gerard was remote, and only responded to Jim, who has the unfortunate mannerism of creating “secret” conversations. Speed used to do it; and there’s no doubt, it always indicates a certain amount of bitchery—in this case, bitchery of Jack. You manage to suggest that your talk with the other person is a sort of conspiracy, even if you are discussing the weather. You talk to him in a low voice, so you can’t be heard by anyone else in the group, and if possible you draw him aside, take him for a short walk or retreat into the middle distance, but always (this is most important) remain in full view of the others. (My writing this suggests that I’m beginning not to like Jim. I think this is true.)

  As for Gerard, he was passive; he merely let it happen. I found it quite impossible to talk to him without awareness of his predicament—i.e. that he could easily be killed that very day. In other words, I thought of him as someone incurably sick. They were moving the circus to San Bernadino and giving a show that even ing.

  Cesar has a kind of Asian wriggly femininity, with a cruel little giggling laugh. He giggled scornfully over Barbette’s scheme to found a permanent circus here, with real style and red velvet seats. The circus, he said, is for children, who eat popcorn. Was his bitchery partly jealousy of Barbette, because of Barbette’s influence over Gerard? Probably. Cesar would be jealous like a real Asian wife, who puts poison in the rival’s food.

  Don said afterwards that he had disliked the picnic because he feels “One should take the beach seriously.” We were ignoring it and all the beauty of the fall day—although Don and I did go in the water. We turned our backs on it and ate greasy precooked chicken and drank wine.

  The chore of watering all our plants is coming to an end. We get the gardener tomorrow. But the boxes of geraniums and the hanging wooden baskets have to be watered every day, and they drip all over the deck and wash away the blue paintwork.

  October 11. Spoke too soon. Mr. Shikiya showed up but had misunderstood what we wanted and merely rooted up a few weeds without watering any of the shrubs. And now his next visit is postponed till next week because his truck has broken down. Maybe he will be no good to us.

  John Zeigel called this morning from the airport on his way to Mexico to tell me Ed Halsey was killed last weekend near Yuma in a head-on car collision. He died instantly. John is already studying at Cal. Tech.451 and all I could say in the shock of the moment was that we would meet when he got back. He is living at Claremont and commuting. Also today I get a strange rambling tactless letter from Bill Robinson, telling me this news too and saying that he hopes I will help John, who was in a bad state even before this happened because his relations with Ed had become “grim.” I don’t quite see Bill’s motives in writing this.

  Two gloomy future threats, one short-term, one long—: even the New York Times (which we now get) admits that there will very probably be a major Berlin crisis within the next few weeks; Edmondson452 has told Jo and Ben that there is a plan to make an overhead freeway above the existing highway, with a cloverleaf at the Canyon entrance. This would make the Canyon “uninhabitable” from Jo’s viewpoint. But anyhow everyone agrees that this can’t happen, even if the scheme is passed on, within the next ten years. . . . And meanwhile—?

  Meanwhile, get on with your work. I must say, though, Ed’s was an excellent end, under the circumstances. He probably didn’t even see it coming; and was spared all the dreariness of the break with John.

  At the Mission Inn, Riverside, where I went yesterday to lecture, there was a convention of air force officers. It was sad, how ugly they were; big pie-faced men with
misshapen bodies. Visitors to a phoney-antique establishment like this one have a curious air of reverence, they are so anxious to admire, but always from a distance; the past is utterly remote from their consciousness. I suppose everything pre-twentieth century seems to them a little mad. I saw one couple who had achieved such a state of alienation from their surroundings that they were watching the pool attendant as though he was a South Sea island savage.

  Just for the record—my tongue still burns quite a lot of the time, and my jaw is still sticky.

  October 16. In my last entry, I forgot to mention something I heard while spending the evening at Vedanta Place on the 10th. It seems that there is an Englishwoman who has just written a book about her search for a guru in India and her failure to find one. In this book, which has apparently been accepted already by Gollancz, she mentions Ramakrishna, saying that she was much drawn to him and to the Ramakrishna Order but that, of course, he was “a homosexual pervert” who had to struggle violently before he overcame his lust for Narendra. (All this, I repeat, I heard at second hand, and it is probably quite [a] bit distorted.) Any how, this Englishwoman was staying up at the house across the road from the Santa Barbara convent which is used as a retreat for female visitors, and somehow Swami got to hear about and then read the manuscript and of course he hit the ceiling and the English woman was terrified and withdrew the offending passage and implored him to be her guru. . . .453 All this would be merely another funnyish story in the Vedanta Society tradition and hardly worth recording; but I do so because false or true, it made me think and see something which I had never seen so clearly before. Which is—

  When Swami used to teach me that purity is telling the truth I used to think that this was, if anything, a rather convenient belief for me to have, because it meant that I didn’t have to be pure but only to refrain from lying about my impurity. Well, that’s the minimum or negative interpretation. But, thinking about it in relation to Ramakrishna, I saw this: that the greatness of Ramakrishna is not expressed by the fact that he was under all circumstances “pure.” No. And even if he was pure, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t capable of anything. You always feel that about him—there was nothing that he might not have done—except one thing—tell a lie. So, when I hear this story about him and Naren, I do not say to myself, “He was incapable of it.” I say to myself, “I know it isn’t true, because, if he had felt any lust for Naren, he would have been incapable of not telling everyone about it.” This seems to me basically important.