The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Don tells me he was possessed by paranoia and saw that Gavin is a witch, and when Ginsberg was out in the studio and remarked that Don’s line was too “hard,” Don says he really told him off. Also he actually shooed Orlovsky (who was leaving anyway) out of the house. But Don feels that his instincts in all this were correct, however hysterical, and I agree with him. Ginsberg came to the house prepared to show us up in one way or another (maybe he thinks he succeeded, I don’t know). All three of them are to some extent demon guests, harpies who descend and wreck the homes of the fat bourgeoisie with self-righteous malice. They are quite tiresome, but also quite fun, and the evening was an occasion, though not necessarily one to be repeated.

  At the beginning of this week they started excavating the site for the skyscraper at the corner of Adelaide and Ocean Avenue, and heavy trucks full of dirt have been roaring down our hill. When they are coming back up the hill empty they sometimes race each other abreast. It is hellishly noisy—how very noisy you only realize today, when there has been no work on the project. It is so tragic to look out over the Canyon, still so beautiful, and yet feel it is all ruined by the ever-increasing noise, jet planes, cars, motorcycles (the worst). I wonder how much longer we shall want to stay here and where we shall go if we leave. And again depression sets in, weariness at the prospect of this ever-crowding, ever-noisier future world. . . . Well, don’t think about it, get on with your work. Be happy that you have what you have. And thank God for Don. He is so absolutely the companion I need. I even need his faults. And I am so proud of him.

  Vidya said to me the other evening that the one thing he still feels is worthwhile in “worldly life” is to have someone you love who loves you.

  I have decided to rough through parts 3, 4 and 5 of A Meeting before going on to the careful rewriting. I must first of all see how things fall into place and perhaps I shall discover some new problems in the process.

  March 7. This long silence has been chiefly due to contentment, the contentment of being busy. I have just finished section 4 of A Meeting by the River. I don’t know what I think of it, maybe it’s all terribly stilted and contrived and literary, but at least it’s as difficult as hell to do, and that’s absorbing.

  Don has been in New York since February 15 and at present he plans to return about the 21st of this month. I don’t think he has accomplished much, though the engravings of his ballet drawings are ready at last or almost, but the trip was probably a very necessary holiday.

  I’m now going to Riverside (UCR)652 regularly on Tuesdays through Wednesdays, stopping the night at a motel, quite near the campus. It is fun and the students are both bright and beautiful. I only keep feeling a bit of a fake.

  Now Alan Pakula wants me to do a picture about the history of art. When we talk about it, we both feel we almost know how it should be done. But we don’t, not really. If only Don were here I know he’d be able to help me find an approach. The only other person who could do this might be Gerald, but Michael won’t let me see him because he is still weak after his stroke (or whatever it was) and because I might give Gerald flu. No use raging against Michael and his bossiness—Gerald certainly encourages him in it.

  When I do get A Meeting finished, I shall have to show it to Swami. I have no idea how he’ll react and I don’t want to think about this in advance. Some little bird had already told him that I was writing the novel, which I suppose is hardly surprising since I talk about it wherever I go.

  March 19. The day before yesterday, they hung up a big street lamp from the telephone pole in front of this house. The lamp makes a great light, I woke last night and felt its oppression. I do hope I’m not going to let myself get obsessed by this, it is one of the ways in which I’m near to madness.

  David Roth653 has a friend who, when he was being examined by the psychologist at the draft board, was asked, “Could you kill a man?” and answered, “Yes, but it would take years.”

  Last night, I went up to Vedanta Place. Spent a little time in the temple, trying to get some sort of feeling of awareness, but all the lines seem to be disconnected. As I went into Swami’s room I said to myself, I am going to visit a saint. I believe this was/is true, but I couldn’t feel it. The only thing is to make japam and trust.

  This week, on the night of [the] 15th, I went back as usual, to the motel in Riverside. I didn’t feel particularly drunk. I woke up all in one piece. But then I absolutely couldn’t find the galleys of Ned Rorem’s Paris Diary. After searching the room, I went outside to look in my car and found to my astonishment that it was parked way over on the other side of the motel lot. Only later I found out (without ever being able to remember it) that I had been given another room, complained because there was a peculiar noise in the pipes, and moved to this room, leaving the proofs on a table! This sort of amnesia, when you aren’t even drunk, alarms me rather. The least thing cuts me off from my memory, nowadays.

  I wish I liked Rorem’s diary better. I feel I should stand behind him, since he’s sure to be attacked as a fag. And yet that’s no good reason—

  March 31. Beginning of my twelve-day Easter vacation. Fog. Now it looks as if Don may not come back for another two weeks, but I’m to talk to him tonight.

  I have just read through the third draft of A Meeting as far as I’ve got, which is up to the beginning of the showdown scene between Patrick and Oliver. I must say, a lot of it seems boring, really chewy, and I feel the quality of the writing is poor. Granted that this letter form has to be written loosely, in a seemingly nonliterary manner, the way I have done it seems merely sloppy. However, the big thing is to push ahead to the end.

  What is right and what is wrong about the showdown scene as I have it in the second draft?

  I like the opening—Patrick saying to Oliver, I want to talk to you as I would to a priest, and then telling the story of his affair with Tom in deliberately gross sexual-fetishistic language, which disturbs Oliver.

  But what then? I think Vidya was right when he said he disliked Patrick’s asking, “What do you think I ought to do?” Patrick doesn’t really want advice. His confession is actually an act of aggression. What he is saying, in effect, is Here am I being utterly truthful about myself—dare you be equally truthful about yourself? And when Oliver doesn’t reply or react, Patrick prods him further, I suppose you think I’m unfit to go on living with Penelope and our children.

  This disturbs Oliver even more, because of his slightly guilty conscience about Penelope. So Patrick continues to prod. He says how understanding Penelope is. This angers Oliver because he feels that Penelope is being insulted by being put on the same level as Tom. Perhaps Patrick now tries to get Oliver to say that Patrick ought to choose between Tom and Penny. Finally he maneuvers Oliver into saying that he should leave Penny, because that is a duty. The moment Oliver has said this, Patrick can insinuate that Oliver’s motives are suspect, because he’s in love with Penny himself.

  That’s part of the scene. But how does it join on to the other half which must now follow?

  Don made the excellent suggestion that Patrick should say in effect, If you really believe in God, you’ll leave this place, because being a monk is just a way of hiding from your problems. And he goes on to accuse Oliver of suffering from ambition. And then he comes right out and gets Oliver to ask him if he shouldn’t leave the monastery at once, without taking sannyas.

  I suppose the link is, in fact, that very line about Patrick having been frank and challenging Oliver to be equally frank.

  Well, now I must try to get a rough draft.

  Rereading Edward’s letter about the second draft, I see one other thing which is very important. Oliver should turn on Patrick in this scene and ask him, either directly or indirectly, Why do you want me to stop being a monk? Perhaps I am wrong when I say, Oliver should actually ask Patrick this, but the question must somehow be raised. It must be shown, in other words, that Oliver’s way of life makes Patrick feel insecure and challenged—just as Patrick’s way of lif
e makes Oliver feel challenged (as we have already been shown).

  April 10. Easter Sunday, and according to my custom I managed to do quite a lot of work on the novel, in fact I have outlined the confrontation chapter very roughly to the end. Have reached page 100.

  Brilliant sunny weather with strong wind. Don will return from New York at the end of the week, I hope. I miss him and need him badly. Clint [Kimbrough] and Gavin seem to be settling down rather successfully, with poor old Jim [Charlton] and Ronnie [Knox] out in the cold.

  Anaïs Nin is really one of the best comic writers. This from her diary:

  June and I had lunch together in a softly lighted, mauve, diffused place which surrounded us with velvety closeness. We took off our hats. We drank champagne. We ate oysters. We talked in half tones, quarter tones, clear to us alone.

  This afternoon, a newspaper man called to tell me that Evelyn Waugh is dead.

  I have told Cukor to tell the people at USC that I won’t come to the Maugham evening on Thursday because Mrs. Luce is going to be on the platform. I wasn’t sure if I should refuse, it seemed childish, but then Don encouraged me when I told him about it over the phone. I know my motives are very mixed. I feel that Mrs Luce—and Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon for that matter654—will turn the meeting into a personal publicity stunt. But then aren’t I resenting that partly because it won’t be my stunt? Don’s attitude is more realistic. He doesn’t worry about my motives, he just doesn’t want me getting myself into a senseless rage against this woman.

  Virgil Thomson, who got into town today, says that Don is one of the most tactful people he has met in years. How strange this seems to me! I always think of him as wayward, impulsive, aggressive and passionate. In fact, I love him for those qualities. Jack Larson, Jim Bridges and Virgil had dinner with me at Chasen’s, it was Jack’s treat. Virgil, deaf and dogmatic but highly sympathetic with it, answered questions throughout the meal. When he said Camus was a phoney, I was so pleased that I shook hands with him. The Byron opera has been announced and will be performed at the Met in two years. Now Virgil merely has to compose it.

  April 17. Yesterday I got a painful disappointment, Don isn’t coming back yet—but the reason is a happy one, the portfolio of ballet drawings looks so good that Balanchine himself wants to be drawn and added to the collection. However—Missy655 also wants three of the portraits done over again. So Don must stay at least ten more days, probably longer.

  This morning I finished a draft of the big scene between Patrick and Oliver. I think it is fairly all right, but I shan’t go at it again until after this visit to Riverside.

  There is now really only one difficult bit to do, as far as I can see. That’s Oliver’s account of his vision of the swami. The two important points to be made there are: (1) that Oliver realizes that Patrick wanted to stop him becoming a swami because Patrick felt Oliver’s monastic life was somehow a subversion of his own way of life. In other words, what Oliver confesses about himself earlier in the book is also true of Patrick—Patrick is just as insecure in his own way, or more so.

  (2) that after the vision Oliver’s problem about Patrick and what he himself is to do is automatically solved, because he suddenly no longer sees Patrick’s world and his world as hostile opposites. It’s like the moment of satori in Zen, the koan becomes meaningless,656 Oliver and Patrick are united within Swami’s love.

  Have been preparing a stew all afternoon, because Ronnie Knox is coming to supper. I really look forward to this, I am greatly at my ease with him and am really fond of him. But I do hope we don’t get too drunk.

  On Tuesday Gavin and Clint leave for Mexico, and Swami leaves for Chicago and New York. Swami is much disappointed in the two assistants, Sastrananda and Budhananda, because they have both requested permission to go back to India. They find the work here too hard. Also their manner towards the monks and nuns is superior. Swami puts it down to nationalism, a reaction to being snubbed for so long by the British.

  April 23. A telegram from Don this morning to say he’s returning tomorrow night. So now we enter a new phase. As usual I feel a lot of joy and some apprehension. The very thing that makes living with Don so unique is the constant uncertainty as to how he’ll be from day to day—and the much greater uncertainty as to how he’ll be after a longer separation than just sleep. And this makes me apprehensive, always. At the same time, I feel that this very apprehension is good—it is how life ought to be, one ought never to be certain, because certainty is maya.

  Talking of maya, my spiritual life couldn’t possibly be deader. I say my beads every morning in front of the Life Magazine photograph of Swami at the shrine. And now I wrap myself in the chadar he gave me. Does it help at all? Apparently not, but I must have faith in it like radiation treatment—because what’s the alternative? For a longish time now I have been praying to Ramakrishna to be with me in the hour of death. Maybe he’s waiting for that.

  This weekend I haven’t gotten around to working on the novel, because there’s so much to be read—a great fat manuscript of part of a novel about China, by the divorced Chinese wife of a member of the Riverside faculty, a play by Jim Bridges called The Papyrus Plays, which I don’t understand much of but must reread before I see him this evening, three folders of a book about Mexico by Tom Wright, which I haven’t begun yet, and Gombrich’s Art and Illusion which I have to return to the man who lent it to me at Riverside. (This last is for self-improvement, chiefly, because I very much doubt if Alan Pakula’s art film will ever materialize, at least with me doing it. A Clockwork Orange is off—Brian Hutton657 begged to be excused.)

  Well, no complaints, please. I should be thankful for a truly miracu lous deliverance from a very serious accident. The day before yesterday, without the smallest warning, the clutch plate on the Volkswagen broke and the car stopped dead, just as I had backed up onto the road from this house. Imagine if that had happened the day before on the freeway! However, it did cost ninety-five dollars.

  One of the Riverside students, Ken Day, invited me to have supper with him and his girlfriend before going to see him play Tom in The Glass Menagerie. The two of them live together in a charming little wooden house. Ken said, “I had to go and see her mother and tell her that we weren’t going to get married, because that’s not my nature.” I think it was the girlfriend’s nature, though. She said nothing, and meekly served a delicious dish of fried chicken.

  Ken was excellent in the play, he is very Irish. He is also possibly the most talented writer on campus, though I can’t be sure how much his screwball style is meant to mean and how much it is meant to shock the audience.

  When I told Ronnie Knox about Ken’s remark about his nature, Ronnie was delighted. I think this is because Ronnie himself has designs on a teenage girl he met on the beach. He asked her, “Would you be ready to live in sin?” She asked, “With a boy or a girl?” and he isn’t sure if she meant this literally or is just dumb-innocent. The girl’s mother has said she must see Ronnie before the girl may go out with him.

  Ronnie is thirty-one. He says of himself. “I’m still a boy, really,” but he also admits that there’s less of the “tiger” in him than there used to be. I suppose most people would see him as a tragic figure, the ex-star, destined to end badly. But I’m not so sure. I hope a sort of fool’s luck will pull him through.

  Ronnie’s stories of football are of course all about his exploits, but somehow he doesn’t seem self-centered in a stultifying way. Even Renate says how wonderful he was when her son killed himself. He’s certainly irresponsible and a bit mad, but at moments he seems surprisingly strong and gentle. When he speaks to people on the street, you see how utterly he charms them. As for his writings, I’m not sure I showed him how to lay out this novel and the idea is really good and workable, and he has a lot of real humor—but he seems so undisciplined, his dialogue scenes are all over the place. A couple of times he has got me to read his stories aloud to him. When I did this he laughed wildly—either at his own jokes
or my reading and funny accent.

  May 31. Yesterday I finished the third draft of A Meeting by the River. It’s more than twenty pages longer than the second draft and there’s no question that it’s much better constructed, as a piece of artifice I’m quite proud of it, but I still have an uneasy feeling about the writing, I fear it is flat and thin. And now I have got to show it to Swami, which makes me squirm inside. I hate the thought of him reading the parts about Tom—but why should I, actually? I’m not ashamed of them, I would never apologize for them artistically or morally, they are absolutely right for the book, I know. Furthermore, Swami has praised me for being myself, making no pretences about the way I live my life. Just the same, I squirm. Am going to take him the manuscript tomorrow.

  Swami is very well, it seems, but he is very sad because of Sarada, who has now definitely told him that she doesn’t want to return to the convent and that he can tell Belur Math to take her name off the roll of nuns. This he has done already.

  Now I am confronted by this new job offer, Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman. At first glance the book seems corny beyond belief but I would like to do the job if I can possibly see how to, not so much for the money as for the sake of having something to occupy me—otherwise one feels so empty-handed after finishing a novel.

  Riverside leaves very happy memories on the whole, and I plan to go back there next year. My favorite students—Ken Day with his prematurely wrinkled sweet Irish eyes, beautiful puzzled-looking Bob Edwards the blond rugby footballer who always seems to be in tears because his contact lenses bother him, carrot-haired Mickey Kraft the politician in his suede boots, Jeff Morehead the Salinger Kid with his spectacles and soft blurry face and gangling charm, Larry Johns the golfer with his tangled golden curls and creamy skin and long Jewish nose and sly smile. All of these have talent, to some degree. Bob’s poetry is strangely aggressive, often directed against fat women in capri pants, Mickey will make a very intelligent political journalist, Jeff wrote a really moving and nostalgic little story about fishing, Larry writes strangely powerful nonsense verse. And there’s a boy named Christopher MacDermott(?) who works in the steel mill at Fontana and who showed me one story which I thought really really good—but I hardly know him at all.