The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Margitt Michel. An old Jewish woman who has huge charm. Lesbian? She roams around the beach and watches people and writes little sketches and fables.

  Ursula Moore.628 Crazy and really a menace. She has hallucinations about plots against her activities: she is trying to promote a universal method of conversing through gesture, without language, and she believes President Johnson will order it introduced all over the country, in all schools. By a fiendish coincidence, she is the manageress of the apartment house in the Canyon where Lee and Mary Prosser live.

  Thomas Victor Siporin (accent on the or) is an ugly-attractive young student who plays baseball and basketball although one of his arms is deformed and the hand no more than a bent claw. He is very bright and writes funny-Jewish stories. He is a mathematician. He calls me Chris. I like him very much.629 Keith Gunderson is a professor in the philosophy department. He is young and cute with bristly short hair. Writes verse in curvy lines. I like him.630 Christine Dickson. A strikingly pretty girl who has money of her own (this came out as the result of my questions) and lives independently. She may have talent; can’t tell. She intrigues me.

  Robert Livermore. A strange big-headed young man who is experimenting with a friend in hypnosis, and experimenting in writing a drama in pseudo-Shakespearian dialogue. I am doubtful about his talent but he is certainly bright. He intrigues me a lot.

  Miss Paz631 (don’t know her first name). Is from Argentina. She has talent. Writes stories. Takes the square atheist line—belief in the supernatural is a sellout from reason. The worst of these people is that they have to balance their lack of God with humanism, and this compels them to pretend that they love humanity a whole lot more than they actually do. I rather dislike her. She looks like she may grow a moustache later.

  Violet Hamilton. Wrote a story about cockneys, while she was in England. Nothing special, but not bad either. Quite like her.

  April 19. I had intended to make an entry yesterday, because it was Easter, but there was no time. I did at least get on with my novel—I still have absolutely no notion if it adds up to anything or not—and with some revisions of the notes to Exhumations. These should be finished in a few days.

  Beautiful weather at last. We were on the beach. The water full of surfboarders, about fifty of them. Which reminds me to mention that allied sport, skateboarding. It is almost incredible, but I believe I have never mentioned it here. The Christian Science Monitor, while recording that a son of John Houseman is among the American youths who have just introduced the skateboard into Paris, says that skateboards started in the United States as early as 1960. Ben Masselink thinks even earlier. . . . Anyhow, their long trainlike sound has become one of the basic Canyon noises. The little kids are sometimes incredibly graceful and adept; they’ll take off at all hours of the day, even in their Sunday suits before leaving for church. Michael Sean632 rides a skateboard right down our hill. His technique is pretty good, but he looks ridiculous because he is so big and a grown-up.

  On the 15th, Don and I drove downtown on the newly opened Santa Monica Freeway. Downtown at night now seems mostly very clean and empty. Big shining new glass office buildings with no one in them; almost like models on show. We ate at the nostalgic old Clifton cafeteria—the one with the redwood decor: the other has been torn down. I must say, the food reminded me of that breakfast in jail when I was waiting to be bailed out on my drunk driving rap. And then we went to see Youngblood Hawke (perhaps the most ridiculous film ever made about writers and publishers) in a rather wonderful old theater called The Globe. It looks as if it had been legit. These downtown visits are especially moving with Don, because they recall the days when he used to come there with his mother and Ted to see films on Saturday mornings, from their home with the palm tree near the railroad station in Glendale. He and I went to look at it, once, when I was leaving by train for San Francisco. The palm tree had been removed.

  June 13. This morning Don called from New York, as he has done every Sunday. It now seems that he won’t be returning till near the end of this month. (He went back to New York on May 20.) This seemed quite a blow, which is unreasonable of me, for he hasn’t even been gone a month yet, and he must finish his drawings of the New York City Ballet for this book, even if Lincoln ends by never publishing it.633 I have just finished making him some brownies, which I will mail off to him tomorrow or the next day. It was quite painful to do this because I kept thinking about him so intensely while I was doing it.

  As soon as Don goes away, I get older. My legs are very thin, with white spots all over the shins—chalk deposit? They dry out and I have to keep them oiled.

  Many thoughts of death. Chiefly the sadness of having to go. I remember Laughton saying, “I don’t want to go.”

  Well, work is the great tranquilizer. Today I did six and a bit pages on A Meeting by the River in rough. I have eighty-six pages of the first draft already written and I’m pleased to think that I managed to do most of this while working at UCLA. I gave my last class there on June 1, but I still have a lot of manuscripts to read, and more that have been sent me by non-UCLA writers.

  Jack Larson is playing Androcles in a local production of [Shaw’s] Androcles and the Lion. I am very much at ease with him and Jim Bridges (who is working on a screenplay of the origin al Mary Shelley Frankenstein story) and of course with Gavin. We, and Budd Cherry (who has been staying with Gavin and not being a success—he will leave soon) all went last night to a newly opened French restaurant called Eve’s in a cellar on San Vicente. Discovered too late it is a snob place, no menu and they charge you nine dollars a head, and the domestic wine costs five dollars! We got about eight courses—but I didn’t, because I had to leave after the fifth to talk to a youngish man named Charles Sweeting who was in my class and wrote a chapter of a novel for me to read. He was leaving today for England, hence the rush. He is one of those excessively polite people that you just know are awful bitches. He described several people as “a Trinity man.”

  [An acquaintance], thanking me for letting him and his cute friend [. . .] sleep in the front room because it was late and [the acquaintance] was very drunk, describes this, over the telephone, as “a fraternal gesture.”

  Reading bits of Marchand’s Byron. I want to read Don Juan right through. Also finish [Apuleius’s] The Golden Ass. God, am I sick of these manuscripts! They are a kind of punishment, I sometimes think, because I refuse to read most of the best-loved authors of our day, such as Wouk, Bellow, Malamud, etc. (Last night, Gavin had an outburst against the Jews—their utter thick-skinned indifference to other minorities. Jack and Jim were a bit shocked but rather thrilled. I sat there thinking smugly, well, I didn’t say it, this time!)

  June 22. Yesterday I finished the first draft of A Meeting by the River; it has taken me exactly three months, to the day! I have just finished reading it through. There is something in it. But it seems quite boring in parts. Perhaps it needs cutting down to a long short story. It’s now 110 pages—let’s say a bit over 35,000 words.

  The boringness is partly due, I think, to generalizations. I could cure it by going into more detail. Also, the line of development is unclear. The graph of Martin’s feelings about Tom does not relate very much to anything that happens at the monastery. One doesn’t know really why Martin makes such a play for Swami and asks him about Hindu philosophy. And Martin’s tone is all wrong. He writes in such a fuddy-duddy elderly style, and his falseness is made so apparent that it’s corny. Leonard’s style is a bit better but could be improved. These, of course, are things you don’t expect to get right in the first draft. Especially with my method of thinking and inventing while I write. This means that everything is spur of the moment and therefore not my best.

  And yet—something has been created. This confrontation problem has been solved, basically. You feel the importance of it.

  I think I was wrong in saying, earlier in this diary, that something “dramatic” has to happen as the result of the confrontation. I now very much doub
t this. The obvious thing would be for Tom to kill himself, but I don’t buy it. It would prove nothing.

  Leonard’s professional background seems all right, but I question Martin’s. He should be more important. A producer, if in the movies at all. Or a director. (Tony Richardson would suspect it was him!)

  I had a dream early this morning that there was a vast earthquake here, a really tremendous one, but I wasn’t really scared. An earthquake is foretold by astrologers at the end of this month!

  Well now, I have finished the novel for the time being. Don must see it, and maybe even Gavin, before I attempt a rewrite. So let me not lapse into laziness. I should get ahead with all my other tasks. Thank goodness, I finished that huge bugger of a manuscript by Edward Peters yesterday—548 pages about union politics, quite instructive and even interesting in a way, but suffocating in bulk!

  July 3. I dreamed that I was in a bedroom that was haunted, talking to a rather attractive boy who had been sleeping there. The bedroom was quite light and unsinister, but very strange. The house it was in appeared to be on a very steep hillslope, almost a precipice, with the result that the window in the back wall was very high and the window in the front very low, and a strong breeze blew through the room, coming up from the depths below. The style of the architecture was like that of a fortress.

  The boy was about to leave and I was going to take the room over. I felt a bit heroic and pleased with myself about doing this, also fairly confident in the power of the mantram to protect me from the ghost, but not entirely confident. Underneath I was somewhat scared.

  I told the boy (expecting that this would shock or repel him) that he ought to pray every night before going to sleep in such a room. He answered that he did pray, but that it didn’t help at all.

  Then he went away and I was left alone to sleep in the room. (It did not seem to be night, however.) The ghost didn’t appear, but it somehow spoke to me or put a thought into my head. It said, “I want you to sleep here, so I can get into your dreams.”

  This really frightened me and I tried to cry out. I woke myself by doing so, and immediately heard a soothing noise from Don, who was himself half asleep. This was a happy surprise, because Don has been home such a short while that I haven’t yet got it deeply into my consciousness that he’s here. As a rule, I’m aware he is here even while I’m asleep, or so it seems to me. That doesn’t necessarily prevent me from having nightmares, but I had a feeling that I wouldn’t have had this particular nightmare if I’d known he was here!

  He returned from New York two days ago.

  David Selznick died on [ June] 22.634 I wrote my last entry in this diary before I heard the news. In fact, Jennifer had been talking to me on the phone that morning about going there to supper on the evening of the 23rd, and it can only have been a short while after our talk that she got the news of David’s attack at his attorney’s office. An hour later he died in the hospital.

  The funeral was on the 25th at Forest Lawn. I was one of the pallbearers. It was a sad grey day with drizzle. George Cukor gave us directions; he was having a great time, and talked so loud that someone came in to shush him. He told Sam Goldwyn, “Now Sam, you’re to go in front of the coffin, with Bill Paley. . . . The rabbi will go first, of course.” “Why should the rabbi go first?” Goldwyn asked. This may just possibly have been a deadpan joke, but he certainly seemed a little gaga, vaguely smiling and telling everyone, “You look good.” He said to me, referring to David, “He was very fond of you,” and then added, “We’re all very fond of you.” So I had to forgive him. If I’m not careful, I soon won’t have any mortal enemies left—except Peggy Kiscadden—and I’m no longer even sure how to spell her name!635

  Katharine Hepburn636 read Kipling’s “If.” When she got to the last line, she turned toward the coffin and said, “. . . You’ll be a Man, my son!” I later heard that George Cukor thought this a supreme touch of artistry. I thought it farcical. One expected David to put his head out of the coffin and exclaim, “Now she tells me!”

  July 4. Yesterday I forgot to record that, on the evening of June 30, I got a traffic ticket for going through a red light. It happened largely because the engine of the Volkswagen kept stalling and I darted forward to avoid letting it die on me. Anyhow, the cops followed and signalled me to stop, so I turned right off Santa Monica Boulevard on to Colby, and stopped behind a parked car. While one of the cops was writing out my ticket, the other strolled over to the parked car, flashed his light in and found a young man, with a beatnik beard, more or less passed out inside it. The young man was dragged out and apparently the cops decided he was high on some kind of dope. A car with two young plainclothesmen arrived, evidently summoned by radio, from the station nearby. The beat became semiconscious and searched for something among the litter of clothes in the car, maybe it was his license. While he was doing this, I saw how the uniformed cop half drew his gun from its holster and stood ready with his finger on the trigger. One saw how easily a suspect might get himself shot, especially not knowing that he was covered like this. . . . I felt a bit guilty about the whole affair. I had actually led the cops to the spot. Otherwise he might have sobered up and never been caught.

  Thick white sea-fog, again this morning. We have been cursed with it nearly every day for at least the past three weeks. Laura, Tom Van Sant and others are coming down for the fireworks, but will there be any?

  I’m worried about my ear, it is sore. Perhaps the beginning of an inflammation.

  Don has gone to his studio for the first time. Let’s pray he will be able to work, this visit. The fog disappoints him bitterly, of course. He has been so looking forward to beach life, while in New York. As for me, I’m simply happy to have him here. As I’ve realized so often before this, without him I am not altogether alive.

  July 9. The sea-fog has continued like a curse, but yesterday and today it partly yielded to weak sunshine. This morning we even went on the beach.

  Don can’t paint and feels utterly frustrated but, as he says, for some strange reason not in despair.

  As for me, I’m marking time. I want to rewrite A Meeting by the River but I don’t feel a great urge to, and so I don’t press Don to finish reading it. He has to do that first and we have to discuss it before I can start.

  On the 7th, I had supper with Jennifer, alone. I had been afraid it would be sad and embarrassing, but it wasn’t; in fact, I felt I was really communicating with her for the first time. She told me that David had had a dream—a nightmare, in fact—shortly before his death, in which he felt that he was shut in on all sides, with only one way out—toward India! Two clairvoyants foretold his death. One said that someone very close to Jennifer would die, the other named David. David himself, after his heart attack, said to her, “When you have looked around the corner, you know that there’s nothing to be afraid of.” But Jennifer says she still can’t quite believe that it has happened. “I keep expecting the telephone will ring, and it will be David calling from New York.” (When I told this to Don, he gave a kind of gasp and I suspected that he had had a sudden glimpse of how he might react if I died!)

  Jennifer says that she thinks she will stay on in the house. She feels closer to David there. She would like to act, but doesn’t quite know how to go about it.

  About the funeral, she commented on the false impression which the rabbi gave by his address. He tried to make out that David had been a zealous and orthodox Jew, “a proud Jew” was how he expressed it. He told how David had been about to crown his career by undertaking a great project—a project which would be greater than Gone with the Wind—to film John Hersey’s The Wall. But Jennifer says that David gave up this project a long time ago, because he realized that the problems of the present-day world were far greater than the problem of any one minority.

  July 24. Today the weather is beautiful but the sea stinks like bad cabbage. I went into it, without joy. I have lost my joy in this beach. It is always crowded. I am developing my crowd obsession alarmingly
.

  Don says he hasn’t been able to paint since he returned here. He wants to live a more independent life, sleep out in the studio, eat breakfast alone, etc. He feels overpowered by my being around. Aside from this, our relations are good. Indeed, they cannot be otherwise for long, because we are really not each other’s problems. Don has to come to terms with success-failure. I have to come to terms with death.

  Julie Harris to supper yesterday evening. I drove her back to the motel near Warner Brothers Studios, where she is making a film called The Moving Target,637 in which she is tied to a chair and tortured. She told me that she may leave Manning. She has found another guy. She says she has been attracted to someone in every play she has been in, and often they have slept together. Julie’s attitude to adultery is so solemn and weepy that it seems almost like a gag. I couldn’t help laughing. But there is cruelty in my amuse ment. I aggressively refuse to take the woes of heterosexuals seriously. So Peter grows up without a mother—am I to fall on my ass?

  Am reading Paul Goodman’s Making Do with delight. It is a real human marvellous modern serious fun novel. He redeems singlehanded the drivel of the other Jews.

  Don loves A Meeting by the River, Gavin seems impressed, though with reservations. They seem to agree that Leonard (all these characters should be renamed) is undeveloped. More about this. More also about my problems with regard to the two auto biographical books; for I think there must be two—The Autobiography of My Books, and a piece of straight narrative, based on my diaries of the first years of my life in America. (A good place to stop would be the production of I Am a Camera in New York at the end of 1951; a period of twelve years.)

  Dorothy Miller came back and cleaned house for us today; the first time since she got sick last year. Needless to say, she took the line that the house was almost irreparably filthy. “I just want to get the hard dirt out of it.” Her best saying so far: “The best religion of all is the Jewish religion, because you only have to make one payment.” I don’t know what she meant by this and don’t want to know. It has the charm of utter mystery.