The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  (Of course, there is always the possibility that he did confess to having had lust for Naren and that this confession has been suppressed by his biographers. But that is utterly unimportant. It has nothing to do with him. Anyhow, I don’t for a moment believe it was so, because of all the other statements he did make about Naren, and his attitude to him.)

  Much might be written on this subject—I should like to bring it into the biography but I doubt whether Swami will want me to. And yet, if I don’t write something, and leave in all these references to Ramakrishna’s getting into drag, etc., there will be the usual reviewers’ sneers. It’s funny that I, who am steeped in sex up to the eyebrows, can see quite clearly what Ramakrishna’s kind of purity is capable of, and that most people just can’t. I suppose it’s having been around Swami so much and understanding camp. I am privileged; far more than I realize, most of the time.

  The day before yesterday, a beautiful soft watering-can rainfall greatly helped our planting. Someone—probably the girls from opposite—pulled the Private Property sign off the tree at the top of our steps and threw it down the slope. I promptly got out the spare sign we had and nailed it up there. Let them get a glimpse of British obstinacy.

  That night we had supper with our next-door neighbor but one, James Covington. Unfortunately I got too drunk too soon, so I don’t know quite what to think of him. Don likes him. His stories of law and movie business, always implying considerable wealth; and of his persecution by thugs from the Mafia, because the producer of this movie borrowed money from them and wouldn’t pay interest. Hence his “bodyguard,” Frank, from the marine corps. He refers casually to two marriages, both broken up. He has a collection of third-rate seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drawings, which Don thinks have been sold him for twice their value by a crooked dealer. He is a strange creature.

  Yesterday, I finished chapter 16 of the Ramakrishna book. I think there are six, maybe seven more to write. The novel creeps along; I am merely treading water. And now I have to prepare for this reading at Garden Grove next Sunday.

  October 22. I don’t know why I’m starting a new volume just at this particular point.454 The day isn’t auspicious—nothing memorable but the death of Cézanne. And today is foggy. Rather snug, as foggy days always are in the Canyon, inviting to household chores. Don has movie clippings all over the bed in the back room—which has just returned there from the studio, because Michael Barrie said we could have the double bed in the front part of his house, so Don is taking that—I have just tidied out the two top drawers of my desk, anything to avoid serious work but it did need doing. The only thing is, Don is going into town for the evening, maybe the night, and I haven’t made a date and can’t make up my mind if I should or not. I weigh the possibilities of Jo and Ben, Gavin, even maybe Jim Charlton (whom I haven’t seen in ages) against the snugness of staying home and reading Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love and Laura Huxley’s Recipes for Living and Loving, etc., etc.

  Yesterday on the beach—which was warm and beautiful—John Zeigel suddenly appeared back again from Mexico. Ed was killed because he and their friend were in a Peugeot, the lady who ran into them wasn’t killed because she was in a Cadillac. John says he still can’t realize that it has happened. I chiefly sensed in him an anxiety not to be excluded by the rest of us—as we tend to exclude the bereaved. We are to meet soon.

  Someone—the daughters of the man who lives opposite?—has/ have torn down our Private Property sign for the second time; this time it has disappeared altogether. Question—what is the anthropological approach? Not to put up another sign and just wait to catch a trespasser, I guess. But the temptation to keep on putting up signs until you win the obstinacy match is very strong.

  A whole week of no work, except preparations for the reading I gave last night at the Garden Grove High School auditorium. (This was looked on by the organizers as a historic event, because it was the first lecture given under the auspices of the future Irvine branch of U.C., UCI,455 which has at present no buildings, no students, almost no faculty except the chancellor and some other administrators, nothing but one thousand acres of land.) I have got to get on with Ramakrishna. And I must keep at the novel, just for the sake of provoking a breakthrough. Don, meanwhile, is getting desperate because he cannot make himself paint. Jack Jones is being very sweet and helpful, encouraging him to do this. I think Jack regards it as a kind of therapy and feels good, because he has been the patient so often himself and wants to reverse roles.

  The nice red-headed carpenter, Bill Flinders, who is a member of Kim Haslam’s team, has just fitted in the new door. He is quietly pleased with himself because he made the lock work, after hours and hours.

  October 23. Despite what I wrote above, I couldn’t have picked a more momentous day to begin the new volume. Indeed, I had barely finished yesterday’s entry when Gavin told me on the phone about the decision to blockade Cuba.456 So today has had the all-too-familiar crisis atmosphere, listening to the news. There has even been the familiar kind of crumb of comfort—Khrushchev in Moscow seemed calm, went to the opera and applauded an American star in Boris!457 At the gym, it was admitted that the Cuban speech at the U.N. was clever and that there are two sides to every question.458 If we are to be fried alive, it seems funny to be working out; and yet that’s precisely what one must do in a crisis, as I learned long ago, in 1938. I have also been prodded into getting on with both my novel and the Ramakrishna book today, and I have watered all the indoor plants. Now I must write to Frank Wiley and Glenn Porter, before I go to have supper with Gavin.

  Last night, I went with Jo and Ben to see a show on La Cienega of paintings by Jack Dominguez.459 Dull little primitives, with the paint laid on very thick. A champagne party was in progress, and the room was crammed with boys in dark suits taking an immense interest in each other and no interest at all in the pictures—alas, their stupid sneering good-looking faces! Jo was appalled by the hypocrisy of it all and kept exclaiming that never never could she face the ordeal of exhibiting her work. She’ll face it, though—and why not? I’m sure Jack Dominguez would rather be bitched than unhung.

  Anaïs Nin is the most egocentric writer alive. She sees herself as such a dear darling tiny little thing, before whose charms everyone and every moral standard must give way. Because she has genuine power, this attitude seems fun and sympathetic; not in the least repulsive.

  October 28. According to the news today, Russia is going to remove the missiles from Cuba. This seems rather too good to be true. But of course it is just one move in the long wrestling match. I feel such a curiously strong loathing of Castro—something to do with his beard, his sincere, liquid-eyed beard. I should like to see him forcibly shaved in the U.N. I wish Groddeck were here to explain this to me. After all these years, I am reading [his] The Book of the It; Wystan used to rave about it in the twenties, but it was somehow “his” kind of book and I seldom if ever read that kind. Now I love it. He is just the right kind of psychological writer for me. Oddly enough, the statement which has made the most impression on me so far is that there can never be great love (on the human level—though he doesn’t make this qualification himself ) without great hate. Obvious, but how often forgotten, or rather, how often desperately denied by me!

  This fog has choked the Canyon all week, and it has begun to get us down. Yet we are very harmonious again. (In relation to this, I must say I think Don instinctively understands Groddeck’s proposition about love-hate much better than I do. I mean, I think he would be prepared to accept and live with it, if I would, too. But I am sentimental—in the worst possible way—the way my mother was . . . I have a great deal of that attitude which makes women say “not before the servants,” “not before the neighbors.” Only the “neighbors” in my case are some kind of an internal audience. It is all part of my playacting. I must try to keep thinking about this, thinking it out; maybe I shall discover something of immense value.)

  Don has been trying to paint—flowers f
rom Margaret Gage’s garden—with Jack Jones. He is in despair. He says that now he doesn’t take Dexamyl he only has downs, no ups. Yet a lot of the time he is as lively as he ever was. Sometimes I feel so strongly that I really do not even begin to understand him, and of course that is what has made living with him so fascinating, all these years. (Ted came in while I was writing this—and he said to me, in the tone of one “sane” person speaking to another, “You must keep him from getting depressed again, like he was a while ago.” Maybe we all see ourselves as healers nowadays, no matter how nuts we are.)

  Today I’m in quite a good mood, because (a) the crisis seems to be easing off (b) the fog is thinner, with gleams of sunshine (c) I have practically gotten over a short vicious cold with acute sinus-aches, which hit me on Thursday night. I felt miserable and did no work whatsoever. Tonight I have to appear with Jerry Lawrence at UCLA in a “public dialogue” and answer such earthshaking questions as Who am I as an individual / Who are we as a nation / How do I know who I am? I fear Jerry is going to gag it up in best radio style and make asses out of us both. He is terribly flattered to be in on this sort of thing—much more flattered than he’ll admit.

  November 1. Jerry did gag it up, as anticipated—oh he was indecent. But I didn’t really care, and a lot of the audience liked it. Jerry’s old Jewish momma was there, and told me afterwards, “When he was born, I was in heaven.” She also said she wanted to kiss me, so I kissed her. Jerry is provoked by her malapropisms: “They’ve given John Steinberg the Nobel Prize. I loved that novel of his, The Wrath of Grapes.”

  Fog again, and crisis again, because Castro won’t let in the U.N. observation team. Russia said to be going ahead with dismantling the rockets, however.

  Tea with Gerald. Talk chiefly about psychosomatic medicine, and the id.

  Supper at Vedanta Place. Swami told me he had had a dream in which Premananda had said to him, “If I had had you beside me, I could have conquered the world.” Prema is not going to Boston after all, because the swami there feels he can deal with this mad-woman who has been terrorizing them all.

  I feel that my novel is developing in a new way, as a much simpler structure, a day in the life of this Englishman. More about this in due course.

  I have asked Abbot Kaplan of UCLA to find out for me about the possibility of a lecture tour in Australia. This is one of those Lord’s-will things. If it develops, I guess I’ll go.

  Don this morning at breakfast on the deck, in the fog, wearing his dark glasses. I told him he looked like a photograph in one of the Stravinsky conversation books: “Bachardy at Yalta, 1901.” This pleased him, but he is in another negative phase, can find nothing to admire or like anywhere. Ted had depressed him by saying to him yesterday on the beach, “I’d have left Vince long ago, but I don’t know what he’d do without me.”

  Yesterday came the news that Nehru has removed Krishna Menon as Defense Minister, because of India’s unpreparedness for the Chinese invasion. Swami said, “He should have been lynched!” Swami is very patriotic about the crisis; thinks India should take a stand with the West.460

  November 4. The day before yesterday, terribly hung over after a night of drinking following the art show in the Canyon at which Jo showed her watercolors, along with Renate Druks, the girlfriend of Ronnie Knox the football star—she looks like Isadore From in drag with a long wet black witch-wig—I drove out to Trancas and went in swimming early. Haven’t done that in ages and ages. The same day, we went on the beach at noon and swam again. It was sunny and warm. But now the bad old fog is back and it’s Gloomsville. Don has several boys and girls drawing in his studio. Alas, the water isn’t working; the pipe burst, that same day, and won’t be repaired till tomorrow. Don in despair again. I have just written to Mark Schorer to find out if there’s any possibility of my teaching in the San Francisco area next semester. I wish he would go away, but actually, once I get myself off, I shall profit by it, I know that.

  Charles has been given some new drug, called something like leukocristine.461 So far it hasn’t had any effect on him, good or bad. But there is another cancer patient at the Cedars of Lebanon, a girl, who is said to have been in a far worse state than he is and who has now almost no pain at all, as the result of taking it.

  November 9. Well, all sorts of things have been happening. Chief and best, Dirty Dick Nixon has been flung out of politics. In defeat he showed his yellow poison-fangs.462 The Cuban crisis isn’t really over. But the government is keeping quiet at the moment— till the rockets are removed.

  Yesterday afternoon, I went to see Laughton. He looked at me with open blue eyes, didn’t know me. His brother Frank(?)463 and Elsa were there. And a Dr. Wilson came by to see him. This Dr. Wilson is approved of by Elsa because he doesn’t belong to the “Cedars of Lebanon Gang” and isn’t a Jew. He is a large pale man who seems to move under the shadow of death, but without being exactly sad or solemn. He obviously thinks Charles is dying. He says he is very close to coma. Wilson has, on his own responsibility, countermanded both the cobalt radiation and the leu[c]ocristine. I think this pleased Elsa very much. I kept watching her face. It was smug and sly. Wilson kept referring to Charles as “poor man.”

  Since it was no good my sitting with Charles, I had time on my hands and so I drove up to the Griffith Park Observatory to watch the sun set. Astonishing, how empty and wild the hills still seem. As I stood there I felt, as I have felt so often, why don’t I spend more time in awareness, instead of stewing in this daze? How precious these last years ought to be to me, and how I ought to spend them alone—alone inside myself, no matter who is around.

  Supper with John Zeigel. He still seems terribly shaken. He described how the highway patrolmen came in the middle of the night to bring him the news of Ed’s death. Before they told him, they said, “Don’t you want to sit down?” “Then,” said John, “I knew.” He is disgusted by [Ed’s friend] who came from the East to see him and expressed nothing but concern about his share of Ed’s money. John says that Ed was about to change his will when he was killed. He wanted to cut [the friend] out of it again.

  November 11. Mark Schorer has written back and says that I can get a Regents’ Lectureship (most probably) at Berkeley from April 15 to May 15. This might not be a bad arrangement, because it looks as if Don will be away quite a bit, anyhow, in the earlier part of the year. Certainly he’ll be at Santa Barbara for his show during part of January-February,464 and the Phoenix show may follow right on after that. He would have to stay at both places during the shows and maybe for a while after, to draw people on commission.

  At the moment all is peace and affection because I am leaving in an hour or two to go with Swami to Trabuco until next Wednesday. Now suddenly Don says he doesn’t know what he will do while I’m away!

  Last night, we went up to supper again with the Huxleys and Mrs. Pfeiffer and her charming adopted children. Laura is all excited about the publication of her book and I have had to write a blurb for it. Aldous told about his visit to Memphis and the southern aristocracy there. They still talk about darkies but claim that integration has been achieved without any fuss—except for public swimming pools.

  Gerald just got on the phone and told me that, during his six days at Long Beach, he gave fifteen lectures! The news that Laughton is dying sent him off into the usual philosophical meanderings.

  I have been disgraceful about work. Nothing done yesterday or today.

  November 16. Yesterday was a lost day. It was so freezing cold and I had such a shocking hangover after supper at the Larmores’—who are on the wagon!—that I wasted it feeling miserable and reading a very poor novel by David Stacton called Old Acquaintance. Only in the evening did the clouds lift and I had supper with Jo and Ben and persuaded them, I don’t know why much less how, to go to Ceylon next winter. I shall do no work today because I have chores and then we have to go to supper at Carter and Dick [Foote]’s and see their film about Bali, with, no doubt, Dick cavorting in the monkey dance.

>   Laughton’s brother Frank smuggled in a Catholic priest who gave Charles the last rites. Elsa is outraged—she suspects that he has signed away some money to the church. He mumbled something about having signed—but didn’t say what, and anyhow it surely wouldn’t stand up in court. He also mumbled, “I feel I want to join the mob,” and “Catholics are all alcoholics.” Elsa wants me to see him and try to find out what did happen. She is busy shopping for cemeteries.

  Don, bitching John Zeigel (as usual): “I suppose he gave you tart blanche?”

  And, talking of bitchery, someone described Connie Wald’s new marriage as, “A funny thing happened to me on the way back from the funeral.”465

  The visit to Trabuco was a great success—went there on the 11th, came back on the 14th. I found I could, if not meditate, at least sit through the meditation periods without getting the jumps.

  I took a lot of notes while down there. Most of them I can’t be bothered to transcribe. But—

  Vandanananda is accused of being much too interested in girls. Also, he shocked Santa Barbara by giving a lecture in which he said, “This is the meaning of tat twam asi466—if you’re a ballet dancer, then tat twam asi, that’s what you are—” This upset Sarada so much she went to bed!