The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  They have just reissued Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk. I am quite horrified to see from the jacket that I praised it, saying that it was “truly a work of art” etc. Rereading it, it seems so stiff and mannered and empty. The first sentence starts to rustle already, like a lady novelist’s (Elizabeth Rydal’s?!) brocaded gown: “The Cullens were Irish; but it was in France that I met them and was able to form an impression of their love and their trouble.” Again: “In the twenties it was not unusual to meet foreigners in some country as foreign to them as to you, your peregrination just crossing theirs; and you did your best to know them in an afternoon or so; and perhaps you called that little lightning knowledge, friendship.” It is the rustle of a writer who’s determined to write a truly elegant, sensitive novel. Those elegant pauses, while he visibly, in view of the audience, searches for the exactly right, perfect nuance! This is hairsplitting pretending to be truthfulness.

  August 21. The day before yesterday, a girl named Jean Person came to see me. She had called first and asked if she could—so there was no reason for her to expect I’d be angry. However, when I opened the door, she jumped back a yard, covered her face with her hands, and exclaimed, “Oh, I’m so frightened!” Don says, rightly, that I should have told her to leave, then and there. I didn’t, of course. She sat around, with bulging reddish-blue eyes which looked as if she’d been crying. She was fetchingly dressed, or meant to be, in a very tight little skirt, and wanted to know what she should do about her life.

  Yesterday evening we went to Lee Heflin’s and saw the film he has made, partly about his friend Duane [Hansen]’s body, partly about this other friend wandering along Hollywood Boulevard in a plastic bag. There were shots of really startling beauty, but the overall effect was too jerky and made me nervous.

  So often I wake in the mornings with a sense of uneasiness. I feel that the situation is altogether out of my control. My life is out of my control. In fact, I get the feeling that I am my life. If I could sincerely say, “We are in God’s hand, brother, not in theirs,” that would be fine. But I feel, if anything, much more in “their” hand.

  My character (that quaint old word) is simply awful. I am full of resentments, pushed this way and that by all manner of compulsions; and I am dull witted and unfeeling. Never mind all of that. But I do wish I could just occasionally feel able to say, Chris is a mess but THOU ART. . . . I’m not writing any of this in a mood of self-dissatisfaction. I just want to try to describe what I am now. I mean, I want to register the resolve to start trying to describe it. This will be very difficult and at best something which can only be done piecemeal. But I really ought to start. (Some aspects I caught in A Single Man, but there it’s all too simplified, because George is not me.)

  August 22. I forgot to mention that we had supper with the Stravinskys on the 19th. Igor seemed pretty well. Poor Vera had hurt her leg. She was driving alone, and not attending, and she ran smack into a stationary car! You feel she is getting old and a bit vague. Bob called from Santa Fe, where he had been conducting Wozzeck.667 When he is away one misses his rather brutal bossiness—which produces champagne and other goodies for the guests.

  Igor told me that he has just finished a fifteen-minute piece which is some kind of a requiem and commissioned to be performed at Princeton.668 He said that the music was so dense (I think that was the word he used) that it was equal to a whole symphony by Haydn.

  Saw Ronnie Knox last night and we talked about his play. The other day he had another of his rows with his stepfather and his allowance was cut off. (It has been reinstated again since then.) Because of this he was depressed and complained to his French girlfriend, who replied, “Then why don’t you kill yourself ?” So the girl is in disfavor and Ronnie has started seeing Renate again. He says, “Whenever I get involved with a woman she starts trying to compete with me.”

  On the beach we saw Michael Sean, who comes out weekends from the clinic at Downey669 and stays with the Gowlands. [. . .] He makes dates with all sorts of people and they have to take him around. Last Sunday they were humiliated because Michael made them arrive hours late at somebody’s house for supper and the hosts were so furious they told Michael and the Gowlands to leave again. But Michael insisted on staying, and the hosts fed them contemptuously, “as if they were servants.” Jo Masselink is strongly prejudiced against Michael. She also says quite bitter things about Ricky Grigg; that his behavior to Sandy is impossible, [. . .] etc.

  [. . .] On the beach, [Michael] certainly seemed unable to stop talking, and it was all about his crazy fellow-patients at the clinic, including one who is masturbating himself to death, although he has to pull a catheter out of his penis in order to do it. [. . .] While we were talking to him, Peter Gowland dropped a hint that we should help with Michael’s transportation to and from Downey. This we’re certainly not about to do!

  September 1. Don gave me three marvellous presents for my birth day, a Girard-Perregaux wristwatch, a pair of very powerful Japanese binoculars and an Uher tape recorder, which I have only just discovered how to work. The birthday was peaceful and happy, with a visit to Swami in the morning and supper with the Masselinks. But somehow it wasn’t the psychically right moment to begin a new volume of this diary, so I’m waiting.

  Swami is now in hospital, with visiting forbidden, and the doctor admits that he had a slight heart attack but doesn’t seem alarmed. As always it is very hard to judge how sick Swami is, because he relaxes so completely toward his illness. For the same reason it is very hard to know how he feels about death. He seems nervous about his health, and never attempts to hide this by putting on a stoical act; and yet one suspects that he’s quite relaxed about it, under neath. If he does worry it’s because of his concern for all of us, and the Vedanta Society. Those idiots at Belur Math have chosen this time to suddenly start rocking the boat—demanding that the girls shall be separated from the boys. As though heterosexuality weren’t actually the least of Swami’s worries! Meanwhile Swami blames Vidya for mischief-making while in India, but at the same time (how characteristically!) repents of the severe letter he wrote Vidya and plans to write him another one since Vidya hasn’t answered.

  And then Pavitrananda—having first, of course, been told about this by Swami—said he felt definitely that my novel shouldn’t be dedicated to Vidya as Swami Vidyatmananda. So I wrote this to Vidya, who replied that he didn’t want me to dedicate it to John Yale, since John Yale was no longer alive—so the dedication is going begging! I am tempted to dedicate it to Gerald Heard, but that would raise the problem of hurting Michael Barrie’s feelings. The way out would be to dedicate it to Gerald and Chris Wood, thereby excluding Michael on the grounds of an older relationship. But the whole business seems tricky and tiresome. Maybe better not dedicate it at all and have a sort of invisible dedication to Vidya! But Don is against this, he thinks it is encouraging Vidya in his sulks and sorriness for himself.

  Discussion with Don about what happens to the mind during del irium or under the influence of drugs. Perhaps it can be described in the language of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras—manas, the recording faculty, continues to receive impressions through the sense organs, but buddhi and ahamkar are out of action,670 so the impressions cannot be classified and the ego sense is not operating to decide what belongs to “I” and what doesn’t. The result is a terri fying total onslaught of impressions which cannot be attended to individually because they can’t be graded and arranged. So they make the mind feel that it is losing its own identity and being swept away in a flood—which is the terror of madness.

  Tomorrow Danny Mann and I are supposed to confer with people from the ABC network and then decide what to do next about “Silent Night.” I have a feeling that Danny, for some personal reasons, doesn’t want to go to Austria yet. I do want to go, as soon as possible, because I have no other plans. More and more I feel that this visit to Europe will turn me on, somehow or other, and show me the way toward another book—not to mention Hero-Father, Demon-Mo
ther for which I require all sorts of documentation from the papers at Wyberslegh.

  September 2. Every morning (almost) I wrap myself in the chadar which Swami gave me and sit down on the couch in my work-room to make japam in front of the photograph of Swami doing the worship at the Hollywood shrine. I get almost nothing consciously from this, my mind takes off almost at once, skimming over all the current resentments, anxieties, wants and distractions. And yet I would feel a lack of something if I didn’t do it. Am trying to get myself into the mood by first reading from Vidya’s anthology of Vivekananda’s writings.

  Am rereading John Horne Burns’s The Gallery, because I just found a hardcover copy at Needham’s. (Getting a new or different copy of a book often stimulates me to reread it, because it becomes a slightly different book which you can open for the first time, as it were.) The parts I have read so far seem excellent, better than I’d remembered, and I can see now why Hemingway admired it so much. What strikes me is the recurring theme of the unreality of the war, because I so constantly feel the same thing about my life nowadays. I wonder if one doesn’t always feel this way when one is very much involved in the present day-to-day existence? It is so hard to feel the weight and depth of experience except in retrospect—and I seem to think so seldom about the past. The difference between me and the characters in The Gallery is that they were all presumably dissatisfied or dully miserable or acutely wretched and afraid—whereas I am living a life of contentment, by and large, and even very considerable happiness. How often I say to myself—especially with regard to Don—that this experience would be vividly and even poignantly beautiful if I could stand back and look at it!

  Don said of his work, the day before yesterday, “My drawings are studies made under stress.” The operative word is stress!

  September 11. Now, suddenly, Austria is very much on. Danny Mann is prepared to leave about ten days from now, and we are to start getting tickets, passports, travel money immediately. My reaction to this is a bad back, for of course I now am unwilling to go, I cling to the pleasures of home—all the more strongly because I haven’t been away since the beginning of 1965. So my back hurts and I am using Jo’s hot pad on it.

  The wonderful summer, the best in years, is holding on into a warm slightly foggy fall. I do so hate to leave it.

  September 17. Well, now it’s settled: Danny Mann and I are to leave next Wednesday, the 21st, by plane for New York, then on by another plane, Lufthansa671, to Munich, then by car to Salzburg and Oberndorf. I realize already that Danny is a pusher and a penny-pincher (although the pennies are really not his but ABC’s, he is no doubt anxious to prove to them that he can be an economical producer). So I shall have to show him, in the friendliest way, that I refuse to be either rushed or made uncomfortable.

  The television, the other night, was giving forth some commercial which urged you to “accept your financial maturity” and buy the product in question.

  Don and I were sitting at breakfast out on the deck—as always nowadays, because of this glorious and prolonged summer weather. We watched through the Japanese field glasses the elder blond brother in the garden of one of the houses below as he did some carpenter work. He made a great play of doing this work in a grownup dead-serious way, frowning, taking measurements, regarding the wood with intense concentration before sawing it up. Meanwhile the younger blond brother hovered in the background, longing to be included. But the elder brother severely excluded him. Don exclaimed, “How badly people behave to each other!”

  Ronnie Knox and I were on the beach. Ronnie took a piece of broken seashell which he had picked up (he pretended to me at first that he had had it with him for years) and put it into his mouth as a kind of horror tooth, the sort a werewolf would have. I said, “It ought really to have blood on it”—so Ronnie promptly scratched himself quite deeply in the thigh with the shell and got the blood. That’s an example of his sort of craziness, tiny and minor but so characteristic.

  A visit to Gerald Heard—the first Michael has permitted since their return from Hawaii. Gerald doesn’t look nearly so fragile now, and he talks freely and brilliantly, without any impediment that I could detect. He does, however, hold himself crookedly when he stands up. Chris Wood hasn’t been to see him at all, yet, and Gerald was making fun of Chris for this, saying how difficult he was, because he wouldn’t come exactly when Michael told him he must.

  When Michael had gone out shopping, Gerald told how he had written to one of the editors of Life Magazine, whom he knew, because of the caption Life printed underneath a photograph of a village in Vietnam being bombed. Gerald protested against the tone of the caption, which, he said, was characteristic of the increasing inhumanity of people in this country nowadays; they simply do not care about human suffering. So far he has had no answer from the editor. He says he hasn’t told Michael about the letter to Life because Michael is very sensitive about anything to do with Mr. and Mrs. Luce, and would be hurt if he knew. (Don raised the question, how did Gerald get the letter off without Michael’s knowing about it. The answer must be that there is an underground line to the outside world through Jack Jones!)

  Gerald then talked about dolphins—how, it seems, they really do not want to communicate with us, although they have a language; all they want from us is love. The right whale has an even bigger brain than the dolphin, but if we don’t do something quick, it will be wiped out by the whalers.

  Gerald also spoke, with considerable self-satisfaction, about his behavior during his stroke. He says he wasn’t in the very least alarmed when he lost the power to move his arm—and that Dr. Cohen had said later that he was “edified” by Gerald’s attitude. Gerald also says that Cohen had been shaken (I think that was the word he used) by Aldous’s attitude to death—i.e. his refusal to admit to himself that he was dying. The moral of this was that Cohen’s faith in the value of spiritual disciplines had been shaken by Aldous’s behavior but restored by Gerald’s! Vanity on the very brink of the tomb.

  I also saw Swami yesterday, at the convalescent hospital on San Vicente they have just moved him to. How utterly without pretension his behavior is! He seems much calmer now, though he still gets excited about Vidya, who is maintaining what seems a very bitchy silence. Apparently there is even a suspicion that Vidya told the Belur Math people that they should close the center altogether after Swami’s death—but this is really more than I can believe. Swami is also sad about Sarada. “As long as she thought I was going to die,” he says, “she was eager to come and see me. Now she doesn’t care to.”

  However, he is seeing Maharaj in his dreams nearly every morning, early. Once they were sharing a bed. He also had an anxiety dream in which he was looking for Maharaj at Myavati672 and couldn’t find him, and meanwhile Krishna ran over someone in the car and cut off his leg!673

  September 21. As Don was driving me to the airport, he advised me to dedicate A Meeting by the River to Gerald Heard only—not to Gerald and Chris Wood. If I just dedicated it to Gerald, he said, Michael and Jack Jones wouldn’t have any excuse to feel offended. He’s going to ask Gerald about this.

  Danny Mann had come with Gigi (her surname is Michel, and I now discover to my surprise that she’s thirty-one and has never yet been married, so I was probably all wrong about her being a gold digger.674 Don and I parted discreetly at the car door. As for Gigi, I politely kissed her goodbye on the cheek. Danny took out ten dollars’ worth of life insurance (which pays off three hundred thousand, I think he said). Danny spread his between his children and Gigi, I guess. So I took out the same amount in favor of Don—just to show Danny that we animals are every bit as valuable as humans.

  In the first class (American Airlines) the television is a tactfully small box between each pair of seats. Danny didn’t want to watch it either. So he read [Edmund Wilson’s] Memoirs of Hecate County and I read Whitman’s Specimen Days.

  When we got near New York there was quite a long holdup, about two hours, circling around with occasional bumps and
waiting to be allowed to land through rain and low fog and lots of air traffic. I was calm, thanks to Librium and drinks. Danny was pretty worried. “I’m an orthodox coward,” he said several times—maybe this was a Jewish joke (almost all jokes made by Jews are Jewish, by queers queer). Anyhow I like all his behavior so far and really begin to think we shall get along.

  The Kennedy Airport, when we did finally land, was in that state of yelling confusion and impotent haste which seems to be what I always encounter when I arrive there. A tall handsome German boy told us we’d missed the plane to Munich but could get on one to Frankfurt. Danny was much annoyed. I merely rejoiced that we didn’t have to drive into New York—the only way one could have left the airport within an hour would have been in an ambulance. On the plane we were separated. I sat next to a manufacturer of rubber goods named Hans Christian Pauck, and practised my German on him until we were both thoroughly drunk. “You have not made any mistake for half an hour,” he finally told me. He gave me a jar of gänseleber pastete.675 I slept snugly, wearing dear little blue slippers which the Luft Hansa gives its passengers.

  September 22. Danny decided he couldn’t face any more flying, so we came on to Munich by train. It didn’t leave until the early afternoon however, so we had to wander around Frankfurt, which seemed stodgy and dull. On the train, I slept. Danny reported to me that, while I was asleep, some students in the carriage said to each other that only Americans would sleep on such [a] journey and never even open a book. Danny claims that he rebuked them, saying “We’ve been up two nights,” and that this silenced the students. I say “claims” because Danny really speaks very little German, though he does make himself understood to an amazing degree in Yiddish.

  We failed to get rooms with baths in Munich, because the Oktoberfest is on—the great beer-drinking festival. It makes the streets very loud at night. We are opposite the railway station, which is full of questioning eyes. But no opportunity or indeed inclination to explore. I woke suddenly in the night with a hunger that was like the sexual drive of a rapist. Quicker than it takes to tell, I’d plunged my hand in my bag, got out the jar of gänseleber pastete and eaten all, all. Was this the first symptom of loneliness?