The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  July 27. Am slipping into a do-nothing phase. I have to have my daily task or I start to ramble and putter and hum. Weather beauti ful, sea-stink less, relations with Don much better. I heard him tell someone on the phone, “I’ve broken the curse,” meaning that he had managed to paint something he didn’t actively dislike—I think it was a picture of me.

  The Stravinskys, Gerald and Michael came to supper yesterday. Michael brought a poodle puppy with him, although Don had told him over the phone that I can’t stand having dogs around in a room, they break up all coherent conversation. I was furious. Don said this was unworthy of me. Michael is such a bitch, he said, and should be ignored; your being angry pleased him. Anyway, the puppy did distract everybody and the evening was a mess. Igor seemed feebler and quieter and more withdrawn than I have ever seen him before. But this may just have been one of his bad days. Gerald rattled away about unidentified aerial objects.

  I suppose my disinclination to begin The Autobiography of My Books is simply that I know I ought to plan it in advance, and this is what I most hate doing. Vaguely, I see what it is that I want; I want an artfully rambling, seemingly casual, in-and-out book which wanders along with the inconsequence of conversation, jumping from subject to subject and yet follows a line of thought. Perhaps I could evolve a pseudo-conversational style, abrupt, slightly incoherent, yet not too obviously faked and not too badly naturalistic. A style which avoids “actually,” “well, now,” “I mean,” “kind of” and other such locutions and yet has the abrupt in medias res quality of real living speech.

  August 10. Still slipping. One of the many things I have failed to learn in this life is how to take a proper holiday. I either work or putter and waste time guiltily. Not that I deserve a holiday just now. I have lots to do and not so much time to do it in, either; because I may quite well have to take a movie job in the near future, that is, if one comes up. If I don’t earn some more money, we shall have to dig into our savings.

  (Note. Right now, we have more money saved up—forty-five thousand dollars—than I have ever had at any time in my life. Even allowing for inflation. But insecurity knows no limits. If it were forty-five hundred thousand, I’d still be fussing.)

  There is no reason why I can’t go quickly ahead and finish the second draft of A Meeting by the River. However poor it may be, I can still make it a great improvement on the first. I ought to do at least two and preferably three pages a day.

  As for The Autobiography of My Books, that remains a problem. The tone is still wrong; I can’t hit it. But I should go ahead, because collecting the material together is at least a valuable first step. (Dodie, in a letter this morning, advises me to write the book about my life in America first. She thinks that if I do this Autobiography, I’ll never write the other; and she says a direct autobiography is more interesting, anyhow.)

  The night before last, on the way back from having supper at Malibu with James Fox (who is rather a doll, in all senses of the word), Don began getting such violent pains in his chest that he couldn’t shift gears, I had to do it for him, as we were in the midst of traffic and couldn’t stop and change places. Toward two in the morning, the pain got so acute that he could hardly breathe. Finally, I called Dr. Allen, that public benefactor, who arrived quite quickly, in perfect good humor, and gave Don a shot. Apparently it wasn’t heart, or lungs or any other sinister ailment, only a muscle strain—oddly enough, because the chest is one of the strongest parts of Don’s body; he has been developing it at the gym all these years without ever hurting himself before. He seems almost entirely cured, now.

  While he was drowsy and a little high from the shot, Don told me that he really does love Ramakrishna, but can’t feel much for Swami. He has tried to ask Ramakrishna to make his presence felt. And he believes that Ramakrishna has shown him that the signal that he is present is pain—psychological pain just as much, if not more, than physical. This struck me very much, because I used to feel a certain joy in the sense of alienation I often had from Ramakrishna while I was living with Caskey. That was pain, too. I am so happy that Don is getting this kind of experience. It is better than anything else I could wish for him.

  Also, a few days ago, he did two paintings of Budd Cherry which really pleased him.

  A William Linville (did we ever meet him?) sent me the program of an amateur performance of I Am a Camera in Bangkok. With this heartrending comment: “A hot wet night. Lizards all over the walls. A miserable production.”

  After another long spell of cold sea-fog, it has been very hot here. Last night, for the first time this year, we ate supper out on the deck, barbecuing sausages on Old Smokey. Then I went down to the Masselinks’ to borrow Jo’s electric hot pad to put on Don’s chest. Passed a boy, very young, naked to the waist, very drunk. He shouted at me, “Do you know it?” How perfectly that expresses the characteristic mystique of this period!

  On August 3, Julie came to supper again, this time with her guy—it’s this actor Jim Murdock, who was on T.V. in “Rawhide” (I think). He seemed an almost entirely imaginary character; neither Don nor Paul nor the Masselinks could make anything of him. Now Julie has gone back to New York, and we don’t know if she will leave Manning or not.

  Finished Don Juan yesterday. Except for the thirteenth canto, I like the earlier part much more than the later. But what a truly modern work!

  August 26. What is there to be said at sixty-one? Sixty is monumental (if anyone cares; with me they didn’t) but sixty-one is just the beginning of late middle age. It only becomes memorable if you die. This is the thickest part of the cancer zone.

  Otherwise there’s just the usual command: there will be no retreat from this position.

  Am struggling on with A Meeting by the River. But it may very easily be that I’ll have to rush off to join Tony Richardson in Rome and work on Sailor. More of this shortly.

  August 27. Bill Brown showed up unexpectedly yesterday afternoon with two bottles of champagne from Vera Stravinsky, who had remembered my birthday. This was not only pleasing and touching, but it presented a good opportunity to seal the peace pact with Bill. I invited him to come with us to see Midnight638 at UCLA and have supper at home later.

  Bill says that Bob and Igor have quarrelled terribly. That is to say, Bob wants a split. So he spoke rudely to Igor at a rehearsal of their concert for the Hollywood Bowl. Igor said to him in French, “Please do not insult me in front of the musicians.” Igor has been trying to make it up ever since, but Bob won’t. It’s heartbreaking, that they should quarrel like this, after so many years, so near the end of the road. (Don says I’m being sentimental, and that such a split up can’t in itself be considered heartbreaking or the reverse.)

  Midnight is one of those heartless-sentimental farces about rich titled people and taxi drivers in Paris at the end of the thirties which somehow reek of the oncoming war; just as the fashions of 1913 make you feel that the First World War was already inevitable. This is all part of the culture of the doomed. But it was very funny in places.

  We drank Vera’s champagne, cooked on Old Smokey and ate on the deck. Old Smokey seems to get hotter and hotter. Last night, before I lit it, I found sparks in its ashes from the night before!

  Today I have been pushing ahead with a draft of the third section of A Meeting. I have to keep reminding myself that this is only the second draft and that I don’t have to bother about solving all the problems this time around. But I want this draft to be good enough to send to Edward for his opinion. It still seems awfully thin to me, especially in the characterization.

  October 2. The day before yesterday Don (who was planning to leave for New York this weekend) had Rex Evans down to look at his paintings. He’d been putting this off all summer, because, whatever one may think of Rex’s taste, it is a sort of verdict. However, Rex liked some of the paintings very much and offered Don a show in January, only suggesting that he should paint some nudes, full-length figures and groups to give variety to the present collection of head-an
d-shoulder portraits. Rex also suggested having one room full of drawings and the other of paintings, but I think he could be talked out of this idea. Then, yesterday, Don phoned Lincoln Kirstein in New York and found out from him that the portfolio of reproductions of Don’s ballet drawings, which is to be sold at the State Theater, won’t be fully manufactured until January. So it seemed obvious that Don should stay right here, get on with his painting and go to New York later.

  Don quite agrees to this plan and I am only sorry that I spoke too soon. Yesterday at breakfast, when we knew about the Rex Evans show but not yet about the portfolio, I urged him not to go to New York but stay here and work, adding that going to New York was an unnecessary expense and that we’re short of money— i.e. we are going to have to draw on our savings (which are admittedly higher than ever before, just over $45,000!). It would have been much better if I’d kept my mouth shut, and let him make the decision all by himself.

  Now we are definitely at the end of the holidays. Not because we haven’t been working all this time, quite hard, but because this brings to an end our summer period together and we have both been looking toward the detensioning of a separation, even if a short one. This summer together has been, on the whole, one of the best periods we have ever spent together, and I hope we will be able to extend it without getting on each other’s nerves. (I mean really getting on each other’s nerves, friction is inevitable and even absolutely necessary, like roughage in food.)

  Well, anyway—

  I am nearly through with the second draft of A Meeting by the River. It ought to be ready by the middle of this month, to be sent off to Edward, maybe also shown to Gerald Heard. Then I’ll think about one or other of the autobiographical books.

  But I also very much want to get a movie-writing job, now that they definitely don’t want me for Sailor from Gibraltar. (Am I disappointed? Not terribly. It would have been exciting and fun, but life on that yacht639 would have been a real psychological boot camp I know.)

  Very hot here, with marvellous beach days, the water bracingly cold, the sun scorching. Smog in town.

  This morning I counted (very roughly and liberally) the number of words in A Single Man, Prater Violet and (when the present draft is completed) A Meeting by the River. Estimates: Single Man, 53,504. Prater Violet, 37,422. A Meeting, 37,620.

  October 22. I finished the second draft of A Meeting by the River quite a long while ago, on the 10th. Since then, I’ve been in the usual state of drifing and idling and yet feel guilty about it. Why can I never learn to take an ordinary holiday? I suppose I just do not believe in holidays.

  I sent a carbon of A Meeting right off to Edward, and today I have an answer from him already. He feels that there should be much more drama, by which he means tension between Patrick and Oliver caused by Patrick’s efforts to get Oliver to leave the monastery.

  Now Edward may be right. I mustn’t dismiss this suggestion as being merely square, which is what it at present seems to me to be. As I have been seeing it, Patrick’s opposition to Oliver’s vocation is quite largely a kind of teasing, and not fundamentally serious. My feeling is that Patrick is really incapable of being serious enough and passionate enough to take any drastic steps to get Oliver out of the monastery—and that that is his tragedy. I am quite ready to agree that many of the moves and countermoves in the present draft of the novel are wrong, and perhaps Patrick’s fundamental indifference ought in itself to be dramatized more strongly. Perhaps Oliver should even reproach him for it. I think Edward is on much firmer ground when he says that Oliver ought to agonize more. Yes, I can see Oliver in agony because of the struggle Patrick has started up inside him; and Patrick not really caring—maybe even a bit incredulous, first amused, then apologetic, when he dimly sees how much suffering he has caused Oliver.

  Meanwhile, it’s very very hot, with smog right down to the beach two mornings ago. Gavin just returned from Europe. Yesterday morning we went with the Masselinks to see the IkeyaSeki comet—drove up into the Brentwood hills before dawn—but didn’t see it.640 I still haven’t had a definite offer from Pa[k]ula on that movie job, but have been asked more or less officially to be a Regent’s Lecturer on the Riverside campus next semester.

  Will try to keep this journal better for a while.

  October 25. Old Dobbin, after reading in the Los Angeles Times about the year 1985 and the population explosion and all the mass horror in store, stuffs himself with corn nuts, takes an afternoon nap and wakes to find himself too late for the sunset. It’s as though he had missed an appointment. In his dirty red silk wrapper he sits down at the table on the deck, in a hot wind, gulping low-calorie coke and staring in a daze at the afterglow. After sunset already, and he doesn’t really quite know it, doesn’t altogether accept himself in either aspect, a dying animal or eternal Brahman.

  I thought of that sunset he watched up at Santa Barbara, in Novem ber 1944.641 Little did he realize that almost everything good lay ahead, not behind him.

  And now?

  The Lawrence of Arabia Icelander on the beach asked me where Don was. He said, “I like to see you and your friend together.”642

  Two nights ago I had supper with Vidya before the Kali puja and we discussed A Meeting by the River. He has read the second draft and made notes throughout, with great care and a good deal of intelligence. Of course he is the best “technical adviser” one could wish for. Also, he had typed out an entry from his diary, January 8, 1964, describing his period of taking sannyas. It ends, “Chris remained till the day of our glory, and rushed up to prostrate. Bless his heart.”

  There is really a deep affection between us, I believe.

  November 13. I was just about to start writing this when something made me look into my little book of memorable dates, and there was [R.L.] Stevenson’s birthday and Ben Masselink’s. So I called and wished him a happy birthday. It’s grey today and sad but rather snug. Don has gone out to draw the George Axelrods’ moppet.643

  On November 1, I started the first draft of my autobiographical book, which I plan to call Hero-Father, Demon-Mother. Am having a lot of difficulties with it already. Anyhow, work on it has been held up while I sorted out a lot of letters and manuscripts to go into a box which Peter Gowland made to fit exactly to the measurements of the rack in the safe-deposit vault of the bank. We took it in yesterday. So something will be saved if the house burns down.

  On November 9, the Stravinskys, Bob Craft and Ed Allen came to supper. (This was the night of the great power failure and blackout over New England and New York. Gerald Heard says he is sure it was caused by UFO[s] (unidentified flying objects) and he points out how considerate they are: they chose the night of the full moon to do it, so people would be able to see their way around!)

  Igor was very shaky, but as bright as usual. He told me he has been reading [Dostoevsky’s] Crime and Punishment and that the language is marvellous, quite different from that of any other writer. He had also been rereading some of Tolstoy’s later stories but didn’t like them at all. He wanted to know how many words I write, on an average, per day and how many hours I work. I told him about one page and about three hours. This pleased him because it showed, he said, that I am very much concerned with technique. He believed that novelists didn’t bother about technique a hundred years ago, though of course poets always did. He disliked the frame around Don’s painting of Collin Wilcox (which now hangs over the fireplace) saying that it was only fit for a Renoir. (Don, so characteristically, took this as a rebuke to his inferior talent!) But Igor meant simply that it was fussy and overdecorated. We both refrained from telling him that it was Vera who gave it to Don originally, and we weren’t sure if she remembered this! Bob said the painting reminded him of Schiele, approvingly.

  He also remarked that Mondrian had abolished the picture frame. He has a superior, subtly embittered air nowadays. Ed Allen, who is now living in the house, has taken over his function as Igor’s attendant. It was Ed who helped Igor down the steps from the carp
ort. He also rose automatically when more drinks were needed and went into the kitchen to get them. Bob even remarked that they really must stop Ed from waiting on them so much. Bob hardly speaks to Igor directly.

  I somewhat tactlessly asked Bob, “When are you publishing another Stravinsky book?” “I’m publishing another Robert Craft book,” he answered. His piece about Aldous in this month’s issue of Encounter has greatly offended Laura and Juliette Huxley.644 I haven’t seen it yet.

  Ted is having another crazy fit. (So is Michael Leopold; he has gone to Camarillo for the second time.) Ted came into the house yesterday while we were out and left a would-be cute picture (framed) of a girl with pink hair playing a cello. He probably stole it from a drugstore. It was inscribed, “Merry Christmas in November with love from Ray DeLand.” Ray DeLand is Ted’s “mad” name. He left the picture on the mantelpiece, with a flower lying in front of it. This kind of behavior disturbs and infuriates Don, and Ted knows it only too well. His whole aggression is that Don is rejecting him.

  This morning I talked on the phone to [an acquaintance], for the first time since his marriage. [. . .]. He is now teaching drama [. . .]. Living [nearby].

  He began indirectly apologizing for his marriage at once—ah, how often I’ve heard that tone from backsliders into heterosexuality! “When you find your real goal in life, get on the right track, it’s really refreshing, it’s rather pleasant.” And then they assure you that they’re happy. (Happy, meaning safe, is the sure sign of one of these profoundly suspect relationships.) Oh yes, and then they tell you that the wife is a wonderful cook.