The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  September 23. We went out to the Bavaria Studios. We had no appointment, no letters of introduction, no particular proofs of identity, no guide except an ambitious young man who runs the Her[t]z Agency here and who had just rented us a car. And yet, within half an hour, we met the second in command and were shown round the studio, and within an hour we were having lunch with the head of the studio, Dr. Rosa(?). Imagine that happening in Hollywood!

  Went to visit Herbert List after supper. Why was it so sad? Because he’s now dry and lonely and looks like an old lady and is collecting drawings by minor Italian masters? Probably he thought of me as a sad little figure too.

  October 8. What with work on the teleplay and idleness and the impossibility of doing anything private while one is with any director, I have left out the whole of our Salzburg visit and now I’m about to leave for London—this afternoon—and goodness knows how I shall ever be able to write anything at all while I’m there. I’m to stay with Neil Hartley and Bob Regester. And Danny will be itching and chafing to get the teleplay revised and retyped because he is mad to get back to his Gigi. Well, anyhow—

  Have been here just about two weeks, and this much I can say, Salzburg is one of my most favorite towns, along with San Francisco and London, I guess. Venice is too spooky and miragelike to come on the list and I don’t know Rio enough. But Salzburg is so snug in the best medieval way, ratlike tunnels and alleys and cellars, and the setting is so beautiful, and the two ridges of mountain block off the old part so that all the new shit has to be built on the other side and can’t be seen. The Austrians seem to be slightly sinister, with their unpleasant dialect and Disneylike unconvincing charm. The country is Disneylike too, so lawned and smooth and carpeted with green, and the improbable landscaped crags—but of course it is beautiful, beautiful like no other place, except maybe Japan, in its toylike way. After spending all these years in that junkyard, America, the sheer tidiness of Austria seems uncanny—everything, billboards, tin cans, neon signs, seems to have been swept under the rug.

  All this refers to tourist Austria only. The extraordinary thing is, how tourist Austria stops near Salzburg and you get into this other land. At Salzburg, or near it, this other Austria begins. For example, Oberndorf, or Eugendorf which we are actually going to make the film Oberndorf, belongs to the atmosphere of East Prussia almost. There are little hills, but what you sense is the dreariness of the appalling Prussian plains, the squalor of the sad winter-stricken villages—a tall onion-dome church, rat-faced peasants, telephone wires, cowshit.

  The weather has been beyond belief heavenly. So warm you could sunbathe, and the leaves all red and gold.

  There is much to write about Danny Mann, and I will write it by degrees, I hope. I can say this at once, we have gotten along surprisingly well, considering what sort of people we individually are—neither very easy.

  October 14. Here I am in London. Arrived on the 8th and this is my first entry. I doubt if it’s going to be possible to write much while I’m here. Anyhow, I’ll begin by copying out various notes I made while in Salzburg.

  Walking with Danny in the town. His vice: buying sweaters. He simply cannot resist. Also, he is passionately fond of cheese. The way the foodshop windows here are displayed makes everything look rare and delicious. He bought me a silk scarf, saying, “Perhaps this will remind you of old Danny.” He let me pick it out and I got a very nice one, but I have to wear it in the tennis-anyone style, which is not mine. Danny says of himself that he was a Don Juan at one period of his life. If this is true (and why not) it makes you reflect on the nature of sexual success: his face is blasted with acne like a Hiroshima. All that is left of the acne now is a lumpy, unpleasantly shiny red surface.

  Danny is sentimental about his own sentimentality—it seems wonderfully touching to him that he keeps photographs of his mother and father with him wherever he goes. He says that his marriage was a failure all along, and now he has so much alimony to pay that he must make $50,000 a year before he gets a cent. Gigi is the only love of his life, he says. (To Danny’s love I oppose my love—which is like a merciless religion—it offers no salvation to anyone else and yet damns anyone who doesn’t accept it.)

  He suffers from vertigo. When we went up in the bus to see Hitler’s house above Berchtesgaden, he couldn’t look out through the window. This I found sympathetic, because I was hardly bothered by it at all.

  Hitler’s house is such a grim paranoid little dump. And most of the time it must have been shut in by wet clouds. The long torture-chamber passage through the mountain to the elevator, which is lined with brass, like a receptacle for boiling victims in.

  The day Gottfried Reinhardt and I lunched at Mitteregg(?).676 The two of us, such utterly urban creatures, sitting out of doors under the trees at a plain wooden kitchen table with a check cloth, stuffing ourselves with cheese and white wine as we looked out over a fairytale valley and talked international politics.

  I love Gottfried as much as ever. He is really quite grotesquely ugly, with his great warts and spreading jowls; yet as soon as he begins talking you see only the beautiful intelligence and fun and sadness in his face. He dislikes everything about the Germans— they are utterly subservient, he says, and without any shame. They would support anybody who paid them. Their literature nowadays is worthless because it is written with complete cynicism. “I may be an idealist,” Gottfried said, “but I like books to have a point of view.” (And looking at him I saw that he really is an idealist.) He told me about an Australian manual for infantrymen which he was given while he was making training films for the army during the war. It told you that, if your best friend was badly wounded, you were to leave him lying there—and first you were to take away his water, because it would be more useful to you than to him!

  We talked and ate and laughed until we were both drunk. I was so drunk that I returned to the hotel and slept all the rest of that day, woke up at one in the morning, went back to sleep again and slept till breakfast!

  Salzburg notes: The surprisingly loud bangs of chestnuts dropping from the huge dark trees. There is nothing shorter than Austrian shorts. Every so often, on the right person, they are wildly erotic—but on most people so indecent that you quickly look away. The castle of Hohensalzburg need only be seen from below; inside, it is disappointing. But one must absolutely climb up to the Café Winkler; the view from it is the best in the city because it isn’t spoiled, like every other view, by the café itself.

  Salzburg is dobbintown. The mad marble dobbins on the Residenzplatz, vomiting water or squirting it through their noses, while the dear little live beige dobbins wait to pull tourist carriages through the city. The campy vain painted dobbins on the walls of the Pferdeschwemme.677 And Pegasus being so silly, showing off his wings, obviously drunk. There is nothing on earth sillier than a silly horse when it is drunk.

  The night before I left, I went into a cellar bar almost next to our hotel, where the wirtin678 sang opera airs. A very drunk young man from Innsbruck talked his ugly unintelligible dialect, aggressively, to show me that it was no good my knowing High German. I felt strongly that I wasn’t wanted and, being drunk myself, said sarcastically to a girl, “Bin nur ein Amerikaner.” “Nur!”679 she cried, with an indignant laugh, furious with me.

  The morning I left I went up to the festung680 and walked all along the cliffs to the Café Winkler. A beautiful walk on a beautiful morning. But I am incapable of taking walks. All physical acts become compulsive with me, as soon as they are consciously prolonged; and the walk is only around my head. (Oddly enough, I feared that a man who was apparently following me was a homicidal maniac. Even if he had been, it wouldn’t have mattered; there were too many people about. What was odd was that I very seldom have fears of this particular kind.)

  Gerhard Huber, my handsome young secretary, came to the hotel to say goodbye, with his fiancée, Irmi. They had nearly split up during my stay in Salzburg because Gerhard refuses to be bossed by her mother. Gerhard used to ex
plain to me about the student corporation (the Catholic one) to which he belonged, and all its complex relationships. You have “fathers,” “sons,” “brothers,” etc. Some student nicknames: Tristan, Orpheus, Taurus, Virus, Yogi, Rumba, Fouché, Dampf, Orplid.

  October 24. Up at Disley, with Richard. No time yet to write about London, or Disley either. Am reading M.’s diaries, my father’s war letters, etc. Will copy now some passages in M.’s diary relating to his death—because I don’t want to take the book away with me.

  1915. May 12. A telegram redirected on from Ventnor of last night “Lt.-Col. F.E.B. Isherwood reported wounded 9th of May, nature and degree not known.” And this is Wednesday and nothing from him or any hospital. Wired to War Office but no news forthcoming.

  May 27. Jack Isherwood came. His idea of comfort seems to be to catalogue and label the different degrees of dreadfulness of things that might have happened, then argue from the different hearsay reports that these things haven’t happened, and therefore why be anxious? Just as if the mere fact of not knowing where or how he is, is quite enough in itself for anxiety, without speculating about anything else that can have happened, but I don’t think the Isherwoods have much real feeling.

  June 6. Aggravating note from Eric . . . saying what a fearful and glorious fight they must have had on the 9th for so few to be left to account for the remainder.

  June 8. A letter from Mr. Isherwood681 in which Frank’s being a prisoner (which alas we do not even know) he seems to think is quite a blessing in disguise. It all makes me feel so lonely.

  June 10. A long letter with my fortune told by cards from Miss Cooke of Cappagh. My fortune all that could be wished with the return of my fair soldier.

  June 21. To King George’s Hospital just over Waterloo Bridge where Lady Wyman is working. Her son has been a prisoner in Westphalia since Mons, he was reported killed and she and her husband went to hospitals all over England to get news of his end. Three different soldiers and one a man of his own company told them in detail how he died. . . . Six weeks later he wrote to them from Germany and said he had never even been wounded. Could not help feeling cheered. It seemed another ray of hope. . . .

  June 24. In the evening came a terrible letter from Arlington St., the British Red Cross Order of St. John. “We much regret to say that according to the Geneva list of June 12 received here on the 23rd it is intimated that a disc was found on a dead soldier close to Frezenberg682 early in May with the following inscription: Isherwood, F.E.B. Y & L Regiment C. of E. We greatly fear this disc may have belonged to Col. Isherwood. I am faithfully, Louis Mallet.” And so passes hope and life.

  June 25. Wrote to Marple to Jack Isherwood as he and Esther [Isherwood], or at any rate the latter, continue to think it strange Henry [Isherwood] can see anything to be so worried about, they may still see hope. . . . I don’t know how the rest of the day passed except that time seemed to have stood still and there appeared a vista of endless hopeless days of loneliness ahead. . . . Everything reminds me of him, the places we used to go together, our outings and the way he had of making everything nice and all his thousand kind and thoughtful ways.

  July 11. Nine weeks today. . . . Now and then I have such hope and peace. . . . I think it must be well . . . and if he has gone beyond, think he must have found the things he loved, and peace, and it may be, the beyond is near if one could only know and see.

  July 16. I had a letter from Major Bayley yesterday . . . it said it made them all the more determined to wage this war to the end—bitter to the Germans as we mean it to be. It is due to the memory of your husband and others like him that we out here should do all we can to avenge them. Rest assured we all shall do our best. Which makes one feel the lives that have been given have not been given in vain, but serve to stimulate by their example . . . and that does so gladden one’s heart.

  July 27. A woman from Barker the mourning warehouse arrived between 10 and 11 laden with boxes of hats, bonnets, blouses and costumes and coats—all the latter designed for the very ample matron, and I was quite swamped. However we chose designs to have dresses made. M[ama] and I each a dull black silk and she a serge too. Hats, etc. Took till lunch.

  July 29. Letter from Col. Clemson quite sure it is all a mistake about Capt. Purden having identified Frank, as he had promised all he heard to let him know at once.

  July 30. Was fitted at William Barkers for my black silk coat and skirt . . . feeling all the time so hopeful . . . and yet there are alas no grounds for it.

  September 8. In the paper today under previously officially reported missing now unofficially reported killed is Frank’s name. A year and a day after he first went out. I think I miss him more every day and life seems harder and darker.

  September 11. Heard from Graham he had replied for me to the Keeper of the Privy Purse: Please convey to Their Majesties with humble duty our grateful appreciation of their gracious sympathy. . . . I should never have dreamt of putting “humble duty!”683

  September 27. In the evening I received from the War Office the disc bearing my husband’s name—very polished up and torn from its string. It didn’t seem real, somehow.

  September 29. Met Mr. Robertson at the entrance to Somerset House at 11:45 and he took me into various bewildering departments in connection with presenting the will and valuing the property, which but for him would have been very tedious and distressing . . . as it was it was after 1, and I had to return at 2:15 to take my oath and be asked more questions—felt so proud to say there were no debts . . . few can say that.

  October 5. Mr. Robertson from the Probate. . . . They cavil at the dates being given as the 8th or 9th and have inserted instead “between the 8th and 11th” though what difference it can make I can’t imagine.

  October 6. Heard from Mrs. Cobbold that Major Robertson was killed last week, this completes the casualties to those travelling on the 7th of September in the same carriage from Cambridge as Frank. Nothing has happened to any of those in the same carriage as Col. Cobbold. . . .

  Have also read some of the letters which my father wrote to M. before they were married, in 1902. Here is one extract (November 12, 1902):

  I am reading a book on Esoteric Buddhism which is very interesting but rather difficult to understand. It doesn’t seem to be incompatible with Christianity exactly either. . . . It appears that although we shall not really spend Eternity together we shall each think the other is with us! Do you think that satisfactory? Goodbye, my dear. I do hope we are going to have a very long happy time together, even though we don’t get Eternity.684

  The adjectives my father applies to M. are most often “kind” and “sweet.” He says of himself that he is “early English,” which seems to mean masculine, a bit crude and overdirect—as opposed to what he calls “party men”—smooth talkers, clever and over-subtle. Poor old Uncle Harry is put in this category. But that was how my father saw himself, not necessarily how he was.

  October 29. I got back to London on the 26th. I’m to fly to California on November 2.

  Richard was planning to drive down here with Dan and Mrs. Bradley (who wanted to see the motor show) and me. At the last moment he called it off, so I came on the train. Dan thought that perhaps Richard wanted me to himself for our parting. He gets jealous if he thinks other people are cutting in. But it may also have been that Richard simply wanted to slip away to Wyberslegh and spend the day quietly drinking. What is impressive about Dan is that he discusses Richard with real affection and unbitchy humor. I liked both of them greatly. Mrs. Dan is big and jolly and her cure for everything is to cook lots and lots of food. They are sort of ideal north-country working-class people—probably you don’t find them like that any more; they are both in their fifties.

  Richard’s way of drinking is really most strange. He doesn’t gulp or guzzle, he keeps quietly and prudently pouring small doses of beer into a glass; these he sips at. He started at breakfast some days and kept at it all day. He never seemed to get drunk, though he drooped t
oward evening and stopped speaking. If he throws up, Dan says, he will go right on drinking afterwards. Dan says that he usually only drinks at weekends; but while I was there he drank nearly every day. This surprised me, because I wasn’t aware of any tension between us. Indeed, we have never gotten along so well. I spent a lot of time on the material I want for Hero-Father, Demon-Mother, and Richard was unfailingly bright, clear and helpful; he recalled names and dates and other facts without the smallest hesitation. He seems to have the past at his fingertips, and maybe this is partly because he can scarcely be said to live in the present at all. He does nothing in particular, except go over to Wyberslegh in the car, putter around and leave again. He says that walking uphill makes him breathless, so he doesn’t go for walks any more. He eats almost nothing. He has a terrible cough and refuses to have his chest x-rayed. He no longer smokes, however. And he is much tidier. No more dribblings of food. Most of the time he wears a nice clean suit and a tidy tie—these are due to Mr. and Mrs. Dan, it’s true. His only sloppiness is often to leave his fly unbuttoned. He doesn’t strike one as in the least crazy or in any sense an invalid.

  Several times, he told me how happy he was that I had come, and I think he meant this. Nevertheless, I discovered that he had really only expected me to come for the weekend—the time I had allowed for my visit was perhaps too much, at least from the Bradleys’ point of view, since they had to clear out of their bedroom for me.