The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  On the 25th, I’m to speak at one of the sessions of the Pacific Coast Writers’ Conference, at L.A. State College. This is from the pep letter addressed to all speakers by Leon Surmelian, who’s directing it: “I know you will do your share to create a relaxed, informal atmosphere, combined with high seriousness of purpose, with a bit of friendship and charity thrown in. You are a dreamer among dreamers.”

  June 23. Last night I got drunk at Bruce Zortman’s and sideswiped some car on the way home and bashed up the Volkswagen. I was too drunk to go out and look to see just what I did to the other car—it must have been one of those which were parked at the entrance to the lane leading to Adelaide out of San Vicente, or, horrors, maybe the one belonging to our neighbors, the Marion Hargroves! Some worry and guilt about this.

  But such a heavenly day today. Don and I went in the water and I rode quite a big wave.

  Prema was terribly upset by Rechy’s City of Night, which I loaned him. He said, “I was sick for two days.” Couldn’t quite make out if this was disgust or lust.

  The young Jewish boy who comes to the readings at Vedanta Place asked Swami earnestly had he done wrong—he gave a man at work ten bucks and the man spent it on liquor. Swami was amused.

  Swami was impressed because Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had gone to Victoria Station to welcome Radhakrishnan,530 which surprised me. But Swami said, “A few years ago, they’d have just said he was a native.”

  Don has started going to Gavin’s psychiatrist, Dr. Oderberg. He likes him, but has great difficulty telling his problems. Don says, “When I try to write them down, they suddenly seem so ridiculous.”

  The other day, Don found that his drawings of Paul Latouche and his friend Rob had been extracted from the closet in his studio. Paul firmly denies having had anything to do with this. So now we don’t see him around. And Don keeps the studio locked. (Note: one of Paul’s favorite expressions is “Are you ready for it?” He says this after he has told you something surprising. It’s equivalent to “Can you believe it?”)

  We have been trying to sell the Danish chairs, without success.

  I forgot to record Dean Campbell’s story of hearing a man yelling outside the window in the middle of the night. Two other men, who were with him and had presumably been threatening him or actually beating him up, then ran away. The man sat on the side of his car for a long while; then he got up and took off his pants and his undershorts and threw the shorts away. Then he dressed again and drove off. In the morning, Dean found the shorts were full of shit—presumably because the man had been so scared.

  July 26. Yesterday I finished, or rather, came to the end of the novelette—128 pages in this second draft, plus one line on page 129. Now I have put it away, and I hope I shan’t weaken and look at it again until both Don and Gavin have read it.

  As I was getting toward the end, I had the idea of calling it The Survivor—but this title has been used in various forms at least three times recently. Don suggests Making Do, which is a sort of Henry Green approach. I quite like it but am not sure.

  Beautiful weather, now, for this long while. Today I went in swimming, with Don and Henry Kraft.

  Beautiful news too, as far as it goes: the test-ban treaty was initialled in Moscow yesterday.531

  Talked to Aldous on the phone this morning and wished him a happy birthday. Largely because Chris Wood, who came to dinner last night, told us Aldous had said to Peggy Kiskadden that he has no friends. Also, I was concerned because Peggy (that’s to say Bill [Kiskadden]—who, amazingly, isn’t dead yet) thinks that they ought to have cut Aldous’s tongue right out, when he had that cancer, and that now he has it in the throat. Aldous admitted to being slightly hoarse still. But he leaves tomorrow for a trip to Europe, starting with some conference in Stockholm. He seemed quite cheerful and pleased I’d called. . . . Alas, I can’t help still hating Peggy and feeling that she longs for Aldous to have cancer, in order to prove that Laura has neglected him and in general to get one more recruit to her squad of dying men.

  Dorothy Miller, who now cleans for us every week—not that we need it, but she needs the money—is plagued by a bluebird when she goes outdoors. It swoops down and pecks at her hair. So she wears a handkerchief tied over her head. I have a hunch that she regards the bird as some kind of an evil omen.

  I have been bad about going to the gym but pretty good about doing my daily Canadian Air Force exercises. Have now reached A+ on chart one. I hope to reach C+, which is the ceiling for my age group, by my birthday. Of course I plan to go on beyond that, at least to the ceiling for the 45-49 year group.

  Another birthday target, to have a rough draft of the two final chapters of the Ramakrishna book. So far I have written six pages of the last chapter but one.

  August 2. Dorothy refers to Don as “Mr. B.” We were talking about Gladys Cooper. She asked, “Is that Mary Pickford?” (She was thinking of Pickford’s real name being Gladys Smith and no doubt supposing that people as “in” as Don and me would refer to her thus!)532

  Gavin has read the novelette and seems to like it a lot. But he is concerned about George’s identity. He feels that George’s way of speaking and his attitude to his college job are so absolutely me that one cannot accept him as an independent character. This may well be true. But I’m not sure that anything can be done about it. Perhaps it will be better to publish this as an admittedly flawed work than to try to create a fictitious George and end by losing all the madness and gaining only a completely convincing dull character study.

  In bed, on Monday night, Don was silent for a long while. I thought he had fallen asleep. Then he suddenly asked, “How about A Single Man for a title?” I knew instantly and have had no doubts since that this is the absolutely ideal title for the novelette, and I shall use it, unless someone snitches it.

  Don has been going steadily to Dr. Oderberg. He feels that progress is being made, though he gets bored talking about his dreams. Certainly his whole mood has changed. No more gloom. But this is no doubt largely due to Kraft, who is now quite an institution. Also to association with Paul Wonner and Bill Brown. Don paints away at their studio and says he is at grips with his great problem—can he paint and if so does he really want to? No solution appears in sight, but the point is that he is at grips. Before, he was only fearing to get to grips with the problem. Also, he keeps on with his japa and feels that this is producing results. (He broke his beads yesterday.) So, altogether this would seem to be a very crucial and on the whole productive period for him. As I tell him, he is one of the few people who are doing something about their problems on all four levels—physical (he goes to the gym), psychological (Oderberg), artistic (Wonner-Brown and his painting), spiritual (japa). Don’s only doubts are about earning money. Should he go to New York, and become the new Bouché? I say, get to a point with the painting first.

  And me? I’m melancholic. But more of that another time or never. What I have to do is finish the Ramakrishna and get started on my new project—a book of autobiography along the lines of the lectures I gave at Berkeley: the autobiography of my books.

  August 9. Have heard from Edward, saying that the novelette is “absolutely wonderful and it has made me extremely happy” but adding that the Charley episode is an anticlimax and that the Ronny episode, though much better, isn’t quite up to the first seventy-five pages and the ending. (Actually page 75 is in the supermarket scene, so maybe he doesn’t like that, either.) Then he says, “The book as a whole cuts the reader to the heart, and dazzles him too. And I think your new manner comes off 100 percent. One gets the feeling from the start that you are totally at home in it.”

  So now I must reread the book—that is, as soon as I have finished the twentieth, last-but-one chapter of the Ramakrishna book. All the time that I’ve been writing about Ramakrishna’s cancer of the throat my own throat has been sore and I’ve been hoarse. I hope ending it will cure me!

  Yesterday I got the release arranged by Ben Alston from Mrs. Helen Bu
rd, the lady whose car I sideswiped on June 22. Now it is over, I can admit that it has been a great worry to me. In fact, I superstitiously didn’t want to write about it before it was settled. It does seem to be, now, since the police have dropped the case and Mrs. Burd doesn’t even know now who did it. She has simply acknowledged receipt of the money to pay for the damage. She even told Alston to tell his client that he was “a fine upstanding boy” for coming forward and paying up! The fact remains that this little caper cost me nearly nine hundred dollars—damage to both cars and Alston’s fee of five hundred. And all I need have done was to sleep on Bruce Zortman’s couch, or for that matter take the most expensive hotel room in town—including taxi fare there and back to my car next morning, that would still have been at least eight hundred and some dollars cheaper!

  Frank Wiley is having to resign from the navy [. . .]. Much more about this, no doubt, later. He’s in San Francisco.

  August 16. There’s so much to say, but nowadays I am just too damn busy to feel like writing here. I am in one of those crisis states: I function but I’m far from well.

  My throat is still sore and hoarse, although I finished the chapter containing Ramakrishna’s death, this morning. Dr. Allen examined me, it’s true, the other day, but then I am inclined to think he’s much too casual. Gavin says he failed to detect Gavin’s amoebic dysentery.

  I went to see Allen because of the rib I broke in the car wreck on the 10th.533 He didn’t think it worth x-raying; didn’t even strap it up. Ah, well. Enough money has been squandered already on my foolishness—around $1,500!

  Edward wrote a second letter, however, saying that this novel-ette has “even outdone your best.” So that makes up for much misfortune and I really feel eager to rewrite it, now.

  Don followed up his invention of A Single Man by finding me an adjective for the cremation scene in the Ramakrishna book. I wanted to suggest that the waters of the Ganges kept flowing past and offering no security, as it were, to the mourners. So Don thought a little while and said, “How about—the inconstant waters?” When I asked him where in the world he got that from, he said Romeo and Juliet!534

  Am off to the monks’ picnic at Laguna Beach tomorrow. Sunday I have to speak up at Santa Barbara temple, repeating what I said about Vivekananda.535 Now I’ll get ahead with the draft of the last Ramakrishna chapter, but not rush too much. Am getting too compulsive.

  Don is very conscious of the existence of this “old black book,” as he calls it. He’s sure it’s full of criticism of him. I tell him, well, when I die, all he has to do is burn it. Very hard to tell how he is getting along. His mood is a sort of cautious pessimism, regarding his painting. As for Oderberg, he is being a bore right now, because he takes too much interest in Don’s parents.

  Lines composed while walking around the block, supposedly making japa:

  But, when so sad thou canst not sadder,

  Counting thine every vice and crime,

  Cry: I’m sure bad but these are badder—

  Goldwater,536 Teller, Life and Time.

  August 20. Have now gotten started on the rough draft of the last Ramakrishna chapter. Like all the other chapters, it turns out to be rather more difficult to do than I’d expected. Also it will probably be quite long.

  This morning I finished rereading Frank Wiley’s book [. . .]. It really is quite good. I’m going to send it to Harper’s,537 to a man who wrote me the other day, named Roger Klein. He says he played Fritz in I Am a Camera at Harvard.

  My throat continues to worry me. It won’t clear up, although I’m now gargling with salt and water. I still feel it’s connected with my writing about Ramakrishna’s throat cancer. Not only did I happen to finish that chapter on the exact day of his death, but yesterday Lee Prosser sends me a batch of folders about the lakes and caverns around his hometown, Springfield, Missouri, and among them is one about the Meramec Caverns, where Jesse James and his gang used to hide out. On this folder it says that an old man claimed in 1948 to be Jesse James and that his claim could never be disproved, and that he finally died in Texas in 1951, aged 103—on August 16!538

  Over the weekend, I went to the men’s picnic with the swamis at the Camel Point house in Laguna and also spoke at the Santa Barbara temple. Driving home, Prema told me he definitely plans to stay on in India, if he possibly can. Either he will settle down as a spiritual recluse in one of the monasteries, and “maybe become spiritual”; or he will find some worthwhile project connected with the Ramakrishna Mission and give himself up to that. Here he feels rejected. The business with Usha still hurts him terribly. He told Swami how he felt, but Swami didn’t make the speech Prema doubtless hoped for—didn’t tell him he is indispensable here, didn’t beg him to come right on back here after taking sannyas.

  Don has done some very interesting paintings of dolls. One or two of them are curiously poignant. You feel the tragedy of their not being human—just as one occasionally feels the tragedy of some human being’s not being more human.

  I got the Volkswagen back yesterday, all nicely painted up and straightened out, to give me another chance to be a grown-up driver.

  Henry Kraft has left [his photographer boyfriend]’s at [the photographer]’s request, and gone to live with friends. What will he do now? Don is inclined to be severe; doesn’t think Kraft is serious about his photography.

  August 22. In swimming yesterday with Bill Brown and Don, the other side of Pacific Ocean Park pier, near their studio. The water much cleaner there and the beach nicer. Very little pain from rib. Bill has been helpful about Don’s doll paintings. Paul Wonner is gloomy and always tired. Fear some liver trouble. To Dr. Allen about my throat; I worked myself up into a state of alarm. Mustn’t it be at least a growth on the vocal cords. Again, Allen seemed very casual, though I described my symptoms. He peeped down my throat for an instant, admitted it was inflamed, gave me a shot of penicillin. Today the hoarseness is as usual, though the inflammation has gone. I get another shot tomorrow.

  Keeping on steadily with the rough draft of the last Ramakrishna chapter. Another letter from Edward today, again praising the novelette. He writes, “I dream that you are now beginning to tap an immense reservoir of experiences which for one reason or another have had to be dammed back until now”—which certainly sounds thrilling, if true! He also says that he wouldn’t mind if George were further disguised, that is, made less like me, “for reasons of nonliterary expediency.”

  Both Time and Newsweek wrote short bitchy notices of Clifford Odets’s death, and both quoted the old pun “Odets, where is thy sting?” So Gavin and I composed a telegram to the editors: “We protest against your remarks about the late Clifford Odets. An important American playwright deserves more than a perfunctory dismissal with a tastlessly exhumed pun.”539 Signed, John Houseman, Gavin, Jerry Lawrence and Bob Lee, Dorothy Parker, Lenny Spigelgass, Gore and me. And just now, as I’m writing this, a woman from the Time office out here calls to know if the telegram was authentic!

  September 3. Thank God the holiday is over, though the fine weather is too. Yesterday a delightful lunch with Joan Houseman, whom I now definitely like. Gavin Lambert’s staying with her, recuperating from this Mexican bug.

  Painfully slow advance on the last Ramakrishna chapter.

  Have been inscribing The World in the Evening for Henry Kraft. I am giving it to him for his birthday along with a copy of the French translation, so he can use the one as a crib for the other.

  The photo taken in Hawaii of a lunch at a Japanese restaurant given to a lot of famous actresses. All of them are mugging at the camera except dear old Gladys Cooper who is eating ravenously with her face nearly down on the plate. That’s so like her.

  Remember how Paul Wonner winced at the restaurant when that rich silly ass stuck one of their little plastic swords (for spearing olives in cocktails) right into a kachina doll540 he had just given Paul and Bill. Paul and I both experienced the horror of this outrage, and at the same instant. It was a terrific r
apport.

  One day, Don told me that Dr. Oderberg had completely taken my side against him; but he wouldn’t explain how or why.

  Gore Vidal gave me the Reader’s Encyclopaedia of American Literature for my birthday. Its only value judgment on my work is to say that The World in the Evening “frankly disappointed reviewers, who found it ‘commonplace.’” For this reason I had never bought the book before, which was childish of me.

  [. . .], the man who gave me coffee on the night of the accident with the two other cars,541 phoned me later to say that his friend [. . .] wanted to see me before deciding if he should testify that I was drunk at the time of the accident. I’m pretty sure this was his own idea. Because I gave him a big tip for driving me home, he thought he could do a bit of blackmail. Kind of saddening. I was very firm, however. Told him to talk to my lawyer. Haven’t heard from him since.

  September 4. I took Prema out last night to a sort of farewell dinner at the Malibu Sports Club place. How he dwells on the past! The party at Glenn Ford’s, for instance. In Sydney, they are renting a hall for him to speak in. Usha promptly said, “I hope the Vedanta Society isn’t paying for it.” His suspicions that [one of the monks] is making the scene with one of the devotees, and that Mark is impotent.

  Rain in the night. I feel utterly exhausted, these days, and my throat is bad again. The rib seems to be getting better, however. I long to return to the gym and do my Canadian Air Force exercises.

  Today came the news of Louis MacNeice’s death. I really hardly knew him, but he is the first of the Old Guard to fall. At fifty-five.542 Reached page 10 of the last Ramakrishna chapter today. A third, maybe, or more.

  Don in a very bad mood about his work—after temporarily recovering from a very bad mood about me. And Paul and Bill will be leaving the studio because they can paint in their new house. So more trouble ahead!