The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Yesterday I saw Gerald. An absurd feud has developed between Chris Wood and Michael. Michael insists that the little dog they gave to the Luces, and which the Luces almost instantly returned to them to look after while they were away, must never be left alone. So it was taken up to Chris Wood and his dog growled at it. So then Michael said they could never go there again, Chris Wood must come down and see them; without his dog, naturally. This Chris refused to do. So now Chris and Gerald can’t meet. They exchange letters. It is understood that things will be all right again when Michael returns the dog to the Luces at the end of the year.

  Gerald sanctions this bitchery by going along with it and not insisting on seeing Chris. Michael bitches me by always leaving the dog in Gerald’s room when I come to see Gerald. (Don says that, in order to be a real bitch like Michael, you have to be unconscious of your bitchery or anyway refuse to think about it.) Gerald is perfectly well aware of how disturbing I find it, having the dog in the room.

  Gerald suggested I ought to write about Peggy Kiskadden. I tried to explain to him that this would be almost impossible. Because Peggy is the kind of character you have to approach from what I regard as the wrong end; she is a noble self-sacrificing angel of mercy who turns out to be a devil-bitch. This is the sort of character which the debunker type of writer loves to describe; me it bores. Gerald said truly that you could make her interesting and touching by showing how she got to be that way. (How did she? I have no idea.) But even doing this wouldn’t take the curse off her, from my point of view. She is still only the heroine of a bad Joan Crawford movie. You are supposed to feel sorry for her at the end of it—and you don’t. There is only one thing to do about Peggy, forget that she exists.

  November 14. It has rained all day, lightly. Good for the plants and bad for our spirits. Ted called this morning and said viciously, “Give my love to my dear brother.” He told me he is attending a meeting of the Screen Actors’ Guild tomorrow and plans to renew his membership. This made Don laugh when he heard it; it’s so typical of Ted’s crazy spells.

  Today I tried hard to restart Hero-Father, but I can’t. Something inhibits me. I think I must find another way of writing it. My instinct is against straight autobiography; suddenly it rather nauseates me. What I keep returning to is the idea of some kind of lecture form, but that seems so contrived. Perhaps I should attempt a sort of notebook. What I dislike is the prospect of writing everything out in sentences and paragraphs; it seems too literary, too urbane. Yes, perhaps something can be done with a notebook. Must consider this.

  In any case, I must keep trying. It would be very bad to shelve this project now.

  Last night, we had supper with Tom Dawson (who says he came to see me as a soldier during the war, while I was living up at Vedanta Place) and a friend of his named George Woodward. Dawson is the part owner of an apartment building on Olive Drive, called French Hill. He furnishes all the apartments himself, with French tapestries and chairs and chandeliers, the main effect is glass and satin. These places are absolutely terrifying. You can pay four hundred a month for a large one, and there isn’t one spot in it where you could read a book or write a letter or have an intimate conversation. An ideal set for Sartre’s No Exit. The people who mostly rent these apartments are men who have just been divorced; the wife has the kids and the house and the furniture. They have room service and they appeal (I guess) to the girls the men bring home with them at night. To think that you could live in one of them makes you sick with horror. They sparkle so!

  I felt myself getting aggressive, so shut up. I had started to make ugly remarks about the dictatorship of the merchants.

  November 18. Last night, Swami told me that he’d been astonished to find “some old samskaras”645 which caused him to feel caste prejudice. An Indian had come to see him and he had realized, by various indications, that the man must be an untouchable. He had invited him to lunch, nevertheless, but had been “so relieved” when the invitation was refused!

  Swami was so sweet, telling me this. And really, the prejudice seems grotesque from a western point of view. Because Swami hadn’t (apparently) minded shaking hands with the man at all. It was just the idea of eating with him. “You see, Chris, they eat carrions.” “But this man doesn’t eat carrion, does he?” I asked. “Oh no—of course not!” Swami was shocked, “He is an educated man! He is sent by the Indian government!” But that didn’t seem to be the point. The man would have been eating Vedanta Society food off Vedanta Society plates in the company of Vedantists—but, just the same. . . .

  Jim Bridges reports another, much more drastic demonstration of the power of traditional folkways. He has been up in Utah on location for a Brando film he wrote.646 The film company has been hiring a lot of Navajo Indian extras. The Indians elected two men to collect their pay for them and divide it among them. Then they found that the two men had been cheating them. So they cut one man’s head off, and cut the other’s tongue and legs off, and then they burned them in a trailer. According to Jim, nothing is being done about this by the authorities, “Because it happened on the reservation.” Am not at all sure I believe this story. Jim just heard it.

  Four days’ rain in a row. Sunshine today, but it’s raining in town and another storm is expected to break this evening.

  Have given up wrestling with Hero-Father for the moment. Am now getting the notes lined up to prepare for starting the third draft of A Meeting by the River.

  Don said this morning that maybe he should postpone his show. He feels he won’t be able to sell any of the paintings he has done up to now.

  Dr. Allen has been checking up on me. He says, “You’ll live even longer than your mother.” A marvellous opening for a film would be one of his entrances, wheeling the little cart on which he carries his drugs, instruments, medical books and other necessaries. You have to see it from the point of view of a new patient, who is already very nervous about himself. The cart appears in the doorway, stops. Then Dr. Allen’s hand is seen, adjusting a clamp which holds some papers to its side. The hand withdraws. Then suddenly the cart is turned right around. A long pause. Again the hand appears and takes something from the cart. A long pause. Then slowly the cart begins to move. It has come three quarters into the room before Dr. Allen appears, pushing it. By this time the patient’s nerves are shattered. (During the whole of the business there could be low cries of pain and cryptic medical asides between doctor and nurse, off-scene.)

  November 30. On the 22nd, I started the third draft of A Meeting by the River. At present, most of the alterations I’m making are really just to set the stage, line up the reason for conflict and in general create more anticipation of trouble before the brothers actually meet. It is great fun doing this, almost pure play. But the fact remains, I still have to answer the basic question: in what way are the two permanently affected by their meeting?

  Have just written to Wenzel Lüdecke,647 who was here last week and left with me a gruesome German screenplay called General Frederik, for my opinion. It’s crude and corny beyond all description.

  Ted is still semi-crazy. David Smith met him on the street the other day with a shopping cart from a market. In it, he had a framed drawing of Myrna Loy by Don. (Don had only lent it to him.) Ted offered to sell the drawing to David. Now Don has told his parents and they have persuaded Ted to give them the drawing, and also one of Dietrich.

  December 1. Beautiful fall weather. Have spent most of the day working on A Meeting by the River. Now I begin more and more to realize what Edward meant; there must be a more direct struggle between the brothers—or rather, there must be more of a struggle inside Oliver, for I still don’t agree that Patrick is such a consistent and conscious opponent. I have everything much better arranged up to Patrick’s arrival at the monastery. After that, it gets confused and loses direction.

  There must be definite moves (in the sense of chess moves) in this game. What moves do I have so far? Patrick’s establishment of excellent and personal relations with the
swamis; making Oliver jealous. Oliver’s showing Patrick the swami’s seat; this is really a move against himself. Patrick’s involvement of Oliver with the journalist Rafferty; this is, as it were, an attempt to reduce Oliver’s situation to a farce. Oliver’s vision of the swami; this is a strong counter-move, putting Patrick in his place, though he doesn’t know it. Patrick’s confession to Oliver about Tom, and the ensuing “temptation scene” in which he leads around to suggesting that Oliver shall leave the monastery.

  I’ll only record one idea for the moment: what if Oliver’s vision of the swami is delayed until right before sannyas? Must think this through carefully, pro and con.

  December 10. Swami is still greatly distressed by Sarada’s defection. She won’t communicate, although she gets news of the center through her father. Before she left, she told the girls that she never had any spiritual emotion while doing the worship in the shrine. Swami recalls that he used to feel that the way she did the worship was “a little too sweet” (i.e. theatrical).

  As for Vidya, he is still uncertain if he will go to Chicago, Paris or India. But, according to Swami, it seems doubtful if they want him either in Chicago or the French center, because he is “a trouble maker.” His best bet would be to go to India and open a small center of his own, for visiting Vedantists from the West. Swami favors this because he thinks that Vidya can’t stay long in any place unless he is running it. Meanwhile poor Vidya is terribly upset and at a loss what to do. He called me this morning, but of course I couldn’t tell him all I know. I can only advise him to talk to Swami. Vidya obviously doesn’t like or trust Swami and regards him as a devious character. But even I can’t help feeling that the deviousness is all on Vidya’s side. He really is a mystery of self-deception.

  Things look very very bad on the international scene.648 And I have no job. I suspect that both the Pakula movie and the Riverside professorship are falling through. Still, there is the novel to be finished and that will take a long time and be very enjoyable. Now Don is supposed to have his show early in January, less than a month from now. So he is panicky. But we have been happy together—at least I certainly have been—for a long time.

  December 21. Two days ago I finished the first section of A Meeting by the River. It is six pages longer than the first section in the second draft, and I think really much improved because I’m setting the stage for the actual meeting much more elaborately.

  On the 16th Maugham died, the same day as Denny Fouts, the day after Laughton. According to the Los Angeles Times, Willie said on his ninetieth birthday, “I have walked with death in hand, and death’s own hand is warmer than my own. I don’t wish to live any longer.” Even allowing for misquotation, this seems curiously histrionic. What a masochist he was! But I wish I had kept in touch with him more. It would have been so easy, and it might have given a little pleasure. Today I absolutely must write to Alan Searle, I’ve kept putting it off.

  It now seems that Vidya will definitely go to France and from there to India, for keeps, presumably. He calls me whenever he’s in town, and I feel his affection—I must be almost the only person he’s at all close to, now. I’m fond of him too, but there is always the embarrassment of knowing how he strikes other people and not being able to speak freely to him about this. The other day he told me that Swami had said, “Chris is the same inside as he is outside—I like that.” Although this flatters and pleases me (I say flatters because alas it’s a million miles from being true) I’m quite well aware that Swami said it—as he says so many things—in order to deliver an indirect message to someone else; in this case, Vidya himself.

  Last Wednesday in the reading there was a passage (page 305 of the Gospel) in which Ramakrishna says, “As a devotee cannot live without God, so also God cannot live without His devotee . . . It is the Godhead that has become these two in order to enjoy Its own Bliss.” This passage obviously moved Swami very much. In fact he seemed unable to explain fully to us why it meant so much to him. This must be something he has actually experienced for himself.

  This is a period of maximum happiness with Don. Not that Don is happy—he is terribly worried about his show. Today we are to make a more or less final choice of the paintings. The other day he said, of one of his sitters, “He’s so crushingly ordinary, and yet a kind of person with it, too, which is so irritating.” How characteristic that is! He sees things with a subtlety which even I, who know him so well (and yet in some ways so little), can’t always follow.

  On the big lot at the end of Adelaide on Ocean Avenue, they have just started excavation for the dreaded apartment tower. It’s said to be going to have thirty-two floors, which will make it one of the highest buildings in the city. I feel threatened by this and all other such demonstrations of the city’s explosion—to an extent which is really neurotic. I find myself feeling exactly like M. as an old woman—her horror of “progress.” I must examine this attitude of mine, I don’t refer to it here as much as I should; if I bring it out into the open more, perhaps it won’t torment me so. Undoubtedly there is a great deal of snobbery mixed up in it—a snobbery which goes back into my heredity. The snobbish horror of my upper-class family at the triumph of the caste of the merchants.

  1966

  January 1. The usual bright deadness of New Year’s Day. Cold, sunny, clear, you can see right across the bay to the headland. Don in a flap about his show on the 7th, addressing hundreds of announcement cards. We seem to be inviting the whole earth. It’s truly amazing, how many people we know, when you consider how few we see.

  The Vietnam situation looks terrible, but then we don’t know what is really happening or what anybody really intends.649

  I got this half-offer to work on a script called The Defector for a director named Raoul Lévy.650 Clift is to play in it, and the suggestion was made through Jim Bridges. It will probably come to nothing because they don’t want to pay. The fact remains I have no other job in prospect. Pakula is utterly vague, and no word comes from Riverside.

  Have been working on the third draft of A Meeting by the River since November 22, but not nearly enough. By this time, on the usual basis of a page a day, I should have written forty-one pages; in fact I’ve done only thirty. Things are sorting themselves out, but much remains to be invented and I wouldn’t be surprised if I have to do a fourth draft.

  January 4. I have now finished the first two parts of A Meeting and I think they are greatly improved. The stage is set for a conflict.

  But what exactly is this conflict? Now I come up against the problem and I feel I must examine it from the point of view of construction, even though Don rightly warns me against being too logical.

  It’s clear that the main action of the book is temptation—the temptation of any saint by any satan. It doesn’t make any difference that Patrick’s kind of temptation is really more to be described as teasing, and is only partly intentional —it is still a temptation, and in fact this kind of temptation is much more usual than the intentional kind, which seems nowadays a bit square and unmodern.

  The key line is when Oliver says that he was inviting Patrick to come and judge the swami. He has to have Patrick’s okay. He doesn’t ever get it of course. What he does get is a spiritual intervention by the swami himself, proving to him that Patrick “belongs” whether he likes it or not, knows it or not. And this, in its turn, is sort of campily confirmed by Patrick’s taking the dust of Oliver’s feet.

  But how am I going to show all this, and what is the big scene between the brothers to be about?

  Suddenly all my foundations seem to be collapsing, except that I have plenty of good solid material with which to reconstruct them. But I have got to think hard before I write any more.

  January 8. The opening of Don’s show last night was really quite a big success. Nine pictures have been sold already, two drawings and the rest paintings. Anne Baxter started the buying. She rushed across the room into Jo’s arms screaming, with a kind of tearful triumph, “I’ve bought two!” Vidya w
as there, viewing the scene with the amused world-weariness of a swami about to depart forever into the depths of India; and Ronnie Knox seeming sad and lost in his new queer world, and Renate [Druks] who said of him that he is an ovary cutter; and Elsa Lanchester looking almost ladylike in a dark dress, gracious and bitchy-grand; and Jennifer Selznick in white, about to leave alone on a drive to Big Sur; and Jim Charlton drinking four times his share and telling me [about a woman who] is pregnant by Mark Cooper; and Dan[a] Woodbury quite drunk, saying it was a shame Rex didn’t exhibit Don’s nudes of him, and then taking a fancy to Jim and leaving with him; and Gerald Heard and Michael, bitchily arriving dead on time, and Chris Wood ditto; and old King Vidor being encouraged by his wife to paint again; and John Houseman, a little worried because he liked Don’s work so much, almost more than he felt he should; and Cukor sly but friendly, planning a memorial supper for Maugham; and Antoinette and Jim Gill dramatically reconciled; and Jack Larson annoyed because his portrait wasn’t among the exhibits though Jim’s was; and Bill Inge terribly depressed about his life, sitting glum like a bankrupt on a couch, etc. etc. etc. etc.

  On the 6th, Allen Ginsberg came to supper with us, bringing his friend Peter Orlovsky and a seventeen-year-old boy named Stephen Bornstein. We had prepared for them by inviting a “home team,” Gavin and Brian Bedford. Everybody got high, and Ginsberg recorded our conversation and chanted Hindu chants, and Orlovsky took off his woollen cap and let his long greasy hair fall over his shoulders and kept asking me if I had ever raped anyone, and the boy Stephen unrolled a picture scroll he had made, under the influence of something or other, to illustrate the Bardo Thodol.651 Brian, who is a very “good sport” on these occasions, joined enthusiastically in the chanting. Later, Ginsberg surprised me by showing great admiration for Hardy and introduced me to a poem I didn’t know, “[A] Wasted Illness.” While the chanting was going on, Don and Gavin watched in silence. Don sternly disapproving, Gavin demurely amused.