The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  February 24. Another sweet letter from Don today, suggesting that we go to Monument Valley at Easter, just as we did twelve years ago.618 One of my daily meditations ought to be on just exactly what it means or should mean, to me, at my age, to have Don in my life. It is nothing less than a blazing miracle. My situation is infinitely less usual than that of being a millionaire. It is less usual, even, than that of being a major artist. It is so extraordinary that perhaps, after all, I had better not dwell on it, or maybe I shall be reduced to grovelling terror of losing him.

  Am very discontented with myself in relation to my class at UCLA. It is getting completely out of my control; partly because it is too big, partly because I have failed to make an appropriate program. I see now that I must do this. I must have something that I keep getting on with, whenever the interest starts to lapse.

  Pagli (spelling?) at Vedanta Place had her room burgled the other day. Telling the story, she remarked, quite seriously, that she felt humiliated because her room was so untidy.

  Lately we have been having some wonderful sunsets, with violet tints in them. Gerald says that these are the last of the “Krakatoa sunsets.” He claims that the dust from the explosion of Krakatoa has been drifting around the world since 1883; sometimes it circles the southern hemisphere, sometimes the northern. It has moved up from the southern hemisphere now for the last time; soon it will disperse altogether.

  March 15. Grey, cold. Am in bad shape. Got drunk two nights ago at the Masselinks’ and fell and hit my head against the bathtub. It still hurts, and also I have a bad cold and feel very depressed, old and exhausted and generally impotent. Am way behind with my novel and with my letter-answering chores. I just long for Don to come back.

  Jack Larson called today to say that one of their dogs ran out of the house last night and got killed by a car. It was probably scared by our freak thunderstorm, a single flash of lightning and a terrific crash. (The rest of the storm was miles away over the mountains.) Jack says that he and Jim were up all night, and he started to cry as he told me about it. “I haven’t a clue,” he kept saying, “what to do when things like this happen.” All I felt, I am sorry to record, was pleasure that dog wouldn’t bark at us again—yes, and a slight irritation at the fuss Jack was making. But I’d have understood and been most sympathetic if it had been a kitty.

  Tony Richardson was here last week. He ran The Loved One, and the Filmways people didn’t like it.619 They even got Terry Southern to call Tony and suggest alterations. But Tony’s morale remained quite high. He says that he feels, for the first time, that he has done something good. Also that he has a great creative period ahead of him—to be followed, he implies, by his death.

  Some interesting information gleaned from Sheldon Andelson.620 Entrapment, legally speaking, is when you are persuaded to do something which you would normally be disinclined to do. Enticement is when you are persuaded to do something you are anyway inclined to do. According to this definition, a homosexual cannot be entrapped into committing an offense related to homosexuality; he can only be enticed and enticement is permitted to police officers. . . . Evidence collected by listening devices, tape recorders, etc., is only valid if it has been done while you are overtly talking to the victim. You can record a conversation without telling him you are doing so; but you can’t bug the house or sneak up to the outside wall and listen in while he is talking to someone else.

  Prabhavananda, when I saw him last, on the 11th, told me that he now feels quite indifferent whether he goes on living or dies. It is all according to Maharaj’s will. He is aware of Maharaj all the time. He quoted Ramakrishna’s simile of the magnet, saying that he now feels the attraction of the stronger magnet, drawing him away from everything else. “You know, Chris, He is everything. Nothing else matters.”

  And I, what do I feel? Stupid, dull, unfeeling, fat, old. Utterly unfit to associate with Prabhavananda, or with Don either. A stupid old toad—and not even ashamed of being one. Too dull for shame.

  March 20. The weather is warmer, my toothache and other aches are better, so I’m pulling out of the depressive phase again.

  Have just been looking through the draft of my novel, A Meeting by the River, of which I wrote twenty-five pages and then stuck. It is all wrong. Not just that every word of it is wrong, which is to be expected at this early stage. The method is wrong.

  Why is it wrong? I think because the overt confrontation—what the brothers actually say to each other—isn’t what deeply matters. By staging these meetings as dramatic scenes, with or without insight into what the two of them are thinking, I have put a wrong emphasis on the story. What seems to me (at the moment) better is to tell the story through letters and a diary or diaries. Maybe Martin, as the outgoing one, should write letters, while Leonard, the introspective one, should keep a diary. Can the whole story really be told in this way? That’s what I have to find out.

  Letters mean confidantes. I have to work out carefully, before starting, just what Martin’s situation is, how many people he will be corresponding with, what their relations are to him, etc.

  The problem of the story itself remains unchanged, however. This confrontation doesn’t only take place in order to display the contrasted characters of the brothers. It should also produce some results in their lives. The confrontation must at least alter Martin’s and Leonard’s attitudes toward their lives to some degree. And, although nothing really dramatic can happen at the time of the meeting in India, it is quite possible that some very dramatic things happen later on—Martin enters into a new relationship, or doesn’t, Leonard leaves the order, or maybe they meet again under quite other circumstances, or one of them kills himself. So perhaps there is an epilogue.

  I must also consider the possibility that there are more than two central characters. Does Martin come to India with a companion, a wife or a mistress or a sister or some other man? I’m afraid of this because it seems to take away from the dramatic simplicity of the confrontation; but it must be considered as a possibility.

  One thing is for sure. There must be an awful lot of background to this meeting. I have to know all about the lives of Martin and Leonard from the time they were born right up to this point, with all their involvements.

  What do I know?

  I think they are half brothers, with a mother as their only surviving parent; the stepfathers are dead or quite disappeared. They were both born in England, and I think the mother is there still. But Martin emigrated to the States, where he is doing well or rather, impressively and successfully, at something or other. Yes, what the devil is he? It is important not to sneer at him by making him something vile, like a Madison Avenue boy. I’m even afraid of making him connected with the movies, although that would be the easiest for me to describe. If he is in show business, it must be made clear that he isn’t just a hack. He must have his serious side . . . As for Leonard, I think he first went into some sort of social service, maybe with the Quakers and then met a swami of this order, not in India but somewhere in Europe and lived with him there for a while before coming out here. I feel he hasn’t been in India long—if only because that would have had a kind of effect on him which I don’t feel able to describe. (One great advantage of the letter and diary method of narration is that I don’t have to be so precise about the nature of the order, the other monks, etc. Thus I can avoid too great similarities to the Belur Math.)

  Provisionally, I’m inclined to think that Martin has three correspondents; all women—his wife, his mother, and some girl for whom he may be about to leave his wife. Owing to the shortness of Martin’s stay in India, these women won’t be answering Martin’s letters, which is very good. It keeps them in the background. They will be subjective characters; projections of Martin’s consciousness. And the physical background—the monastery and its surround-ings—will also be subjective. Martin will describe it, from his point of view. Leonard will take it more or less for granted. That, too, is helpful. It is what I’ve wanted from the beginnin
g—that the setting of this narrative shall be, as it were, “mental.” I am emphatic ally not writing about the humors and quaintnesses of the Orient. This is not a realistic novel.

  Yesterday I went to the Stravinskys’, where a German named Liebersohn(?) was making a film documentary of Igor’s daily life.621 Gerald, Michael Barrie, Mirandi Levy and I were to play intimate friends who drop in at teatime. Gerald of course hogged the show; he could hardly be stopped talking. But Igor did have some fascinating and rather touching moments, when he told us how he loves the act of composing, he is so “content” while he is at it, it doesn’t matter to him if the work will be performed. Sometimes he gets an idea and notes it down in the middle of the night. He doesn’t so much care where he is, he can work anywhere, provided there is not too much noise. He seemed to be just what Aldous once called him, “A saint of art.”

  The day before yesterday, we had this awful memorial dinner to Aldous, at USC, in the presence of about four hundred “Friends of the Library,” and then—Laura, Cukor, Robert Hutchins and me—got up on the platform under blinding lights and were filmed as we reminisced about him. It went quite well, thanks chiefly to Cukor, who really is a director.

  This is from the brochure they put out beforehand, announcing the dinner:

  The wondrous works and warm ways of the late, great Aldous Huxley will be the subject of an evening’s “conversation” for the University of California’s Friends of the Libraries and their guests Thursday night. . . . First there will be a dinner with a menu that the gaunt genius always favored—a couple of vegetables “not overly cooked,” and good meat. The dessert will be one which Mr. Huxley himself created.

  Needless to say, the food was foul and cold.

  While I’m documenting, here are the titles of some lectures scheduled currently at UCLA: The Electrical Conductivity of a Partially Ionized Gas. Growth Mechanism in the Young Polar Front Cyclone. Do Fibroblasts Make Antibody? Play of Inhibition Within the Motor Cortex. Regulation of Extrarenal Electrolyte Excretion in Birds. Methodology for Social Technology. Advanced Structural Concepts. . . . It is stunning to think that Aldous could probably have talked intelligently on any one of these subjects!

  April 2. Rain and thunderstorms, since the day before yesterday. The radio says the rain will continue through tomorrow, which is a shame, because Don is coming back and I would have loved for him to be welcomed by sunshine.

  He is literally everything I have in this world. He is what keeps me alive. When he isn’t with me, I am in a partial coma, most of the time. Which is okay. Because the alternative would be pangs of misery because of our separation. I eat abnormally and am fat, but not as fat as I would be if I drank. Haven’t touched any kind of alcohol since March 15.

  The new line on my novel is the right one, I believe. So far, it seems to be. Not that I am progressing very easily. I need to invent so much about the offstage characters. Am very tempted to make Martin a bisexual counterfeiter— I mean, to make him cheat on his wife with a boy. This further suggests that Martin seduced Leonard when they were young, and that Leonard, knowing himself to be homosexual, has decided that it’s wrong and that he must cut out sex altogether. Hence his inclination toward celibacy.

  A little while ago—this year, anyway—Laura Huxley was visited by a medium from Seattle(?) who told her that Aldous was about to give her positive proof of his presence. The medium then told her to take down the third book on a certain shelf and look at the 23rd line on the 17th page. Furthermore, he made her go into two other rooms (in Jinny Pfeiffer’s house) in which there were books, take down the corresponding book and look at the same line on the same page. Here are the results:

  The first book was a report by the PEN Club on a conference held in Brazil in 1962. Aldous had been speaking and this was the beginning of a speech made by someone else to thank him. “Aldous Huxley no nos sorprende en esta admirable comunicacion. . . .”622 The second book was about parapsychology. The indicated line read: “Parapsychology is still struggling in the first stage. These phenomena are not generally accepted by science.” The third book was My Life in Court by Louis Nizer. The passage referred to the libel action brought by Quentin Reynolds against Westbrook Pegler:623 “. . . it suggested that he was a slacker who, though six feet five. . . .” (Aldous’s height, says Laura, was six five. However, Gerald and Michael maintain that he was only six four. This may or may not be bitchery. They both had to admit that they were nevertheless greatly impressed.)

  What is astounding is that anything referring to Aldous and the circumstances of the test could have appeared within such narrow limits of reference. Even if the medium had been a cheat and had been left alone in the house all day in order to fake the test, he would have needed an awful lot of luck to produce these results.

  Had supper with Jim Bridges last night. His story of his first great love affair in school: the only place they could make love in safety was in the college theater, high up in the flies, under the roof. One night they risked screwing on a bed on the stage—it was the set for Death of a Salesman—and were nearly caught by a cop.

  Jim says that when the dog was killed Jack actually screamed and beat on the wall and talked of suicide. I couldn’t help showing that I found this absolutely beyond my understanding. I can understand a lonely bachelor like Chris Wood feeling the loss of a pet as much as the loss of a human being. But Jack. . . . I cannot help suspecting his behavior was a kind of aggression toward Jim.

  (N.B. The medium’s name was Keith Rheinart.)

  April 14. Don has been back here since April 3. We have been very happy together—although, in a way, everything has been against it. Don isn’t well, there’s something wrong with his liver. He has to see Dr. Allen again about this on Friday and I’m worried, of course. Particularly because I suspect Don isn’t telling me everything Allen said. He did let drop that Allen wanted him to go into hospital, but that he refused; then Allen seems to have told him to stay in bed, but Don is running around and working as usual. The only point on which he has obeyed Allen is that he has given up drinking, which he doesn’t do much of, anyway.

  No doubt also partly because of this thing with his liver, Don has been terribly depressed about his painting. He says he doesn’t know what to do with it. He wishes he had a lead, a gimmick, a line—something which would make him able to do a whole series of paintings in the same manner. This makes him envy many other painters he knows, even when he doesn’t admire their work at all.

  It is absolutely impossible for me, involved in this as I am, to have any opinion any more about his painting—even if my opinion about painting in general were worth anything, which it almost isn’t. I am rooting for him so hard that the problem appears purely psychological, not artistic at all. I cannot help noticing that he refuses to show his work to people who might know. Yes, it’s true, he did show it to Bill Brown and Paul Wonner and they were lukewarm. But that was all. It simply is no test.

  Well—we just have to sweat this out.

  Talking of Paul and Bill, we never see them any more and I guess we never shall. I have hardened my heart against Paul. I find his sulks thick-skinned and tiresome.

  Other news. Mike Leopold was mad but better now; he tried to cut his wrists and throat. Budd Cherry was sad but better now; he is staying with Gavin.

  I keep on with A Meeting by the River. It may well be only a short story, or nothing. But I will bulldoze a draft through to the end.

  We have had the longest spell of rains I can remember. Today is warmish and springlike, but they say there will be clouds and showers again tomorrow. The two cypresses that Mr. Garcia transplanted have both died, so we have two more. Everything else is growing like mad.

  To my astonishment, when I sat down and made a list, I find that I have talked to twenty different people already about their writing. One or two, I don’t even remember what they had written. Here is a list of the remembered ones: some of them are students at UCLA, others come to my class from off campus.


  Dinny Johnson. I think she’s married to a professor at UCLA. Young. A friend of Alison Lurie. She wrote a worthless but somehow quite readable novel of musical-chair sex. Very sympathetic.624

  Ira Sohn. Very superior good-looking verbose intelligent Jewish boy. Is writing a novel without any dialogue. Admires Conrad. Okay.

  Mike Oppenheim. Really talented playwright. One-acter about a maternity ward, called The Population Explosion, black comedy. Very sour and disgusted because they won’t perform it at the drama department.

  Lee Heflin. The kookiest of them all, bearded, works at the new research library. Very talented, I think, but apt to wander off on Gertrude Stein trails. Writing queer novel. Also paints. The only one who has had me to his home. My best supporter in the class with bright questions. Treats me with formal politeness, Sir and Mr. Isherwood. Paints abstract. I like him and suspect him of being remarkable.

  David Arkin. Wrote a play, not so hot. Made dates with me and didn’t keep them, so I write him off as rude casual Jewboy.

  Hillary Russell. Has written two somewhat piss-elegant queer novels about a fatal love ending in murder and suicide. An older man with a southern accent, very pleasant to talk to. Interesting relation with a straight son who nevertheless isn’t shocked by the novels and gives his father advice on them.

  Cliff Osmond. Big fat actor. [. . .]. Talented.625

  Deena Metzger. Swarthy Jewess. Wrote turgid love novel. But she is bright. I rather like her.626

  Frederika White. Very attractive girl, partly Negro. Seems very bright. Hasn’t shown me any work yet.

  Ramaswamy. Very handsome small middle-aged Indian professor. Treats me like a guru. Interested in films. I taped a bibliography of my works for him. A bore but sympathetic.627 Edward Peters. A middle-aged union official who has spent his life working for labor groups. Like him very much. Has written very interesting studies of labor negotiators.