The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Don drove me to the airport. Roger Lind759 will probably be coming to stay with him over the weekend. It isn’t that I object to this, really, but I can’t help wishing it were someone young and charming; he seems so cloddish.

  Don loathes his classes in dynamic reading. Yet he admits that he can already read twice as fast and still understand as much or more.760 He also admits that this technique may, in some utterly mysterious way, set him free to paint as he would like to—if he can bear to go on with it. This class and all it stands for—its sanction of normality, efficiency and the effort to make oneself able to play one’s part in modern life—deeply offends and brutally challenges all that Don stands for, as an out-of-step individualist. When Don got back from the class last Tuesday (November 21) he became almost hysterical about all this and I suggested, only half kiddingly, that he had better drop the class before it made him go mad. Don said, “I may die, I may even attain enlightenment, but I promise you, I’ll never go mad!”

  He said this partly because Ted is mad again. He got into an argument with a cop, threatened him with a ballpoint pen, was sent to jail, then moved to the prison hospital because of his crazy behavior, then bailed out by his parents—although Don begged them to let Ted stay in this time, in the hope it might teach him a lesson. Don is convinced that Ted’s attacks are brought on voluntarily and that the only hope of stopping them is to make Ted feel that they aren’t worthwhile. Yesterday Don and Ted were both at Thanksgiving dinner with their parents. Ted behaved so self-indulgently, obviously loving his own illness for the power it gives him over his father (who is tormented with guilt about Ted’s condition and blames himself ) that Don bawled Ted out on the way home in the car. He says that Ted was genuinely amazed. Don ended up with, “I don’t think I like you very much,” and Ted said, “I don’t like you either,” and he made Don stop the car and he got out.

  We visited Gerald two days ago—Michael gave us such a bad report of his condition that I didn’t want to postpone it until after my return from up north. He lies down all the time now—he can’t walk—and his voice is weaker than ever, I could hardly understand anything he said, though Michael still seemed able to. But he is radiantly cheerful and one feels that he is absolutely aware of his predicament and yet, with one foot in the other world, still capable of feeling strong human affection, toward Don and me for instance.

  November 25. I’m sitting on the couch in Ben Underhill’s spare room writing this while we wait for Angus Wilson and Tony Garrett to come and have supper with us. It has been a beautiful warm day though hazy. We spent a lot of the morning in two queer bookshops, the Adonis and Rolland’s, where we bought Sex Life of a Cop; Go Down, Aaron;761 Teleny;762 Like Father, Like Son; A Fool’s Advice;763 The Beefcake Boys. Buying such books is a sort of political gesture which is infinitely more satisfactory than actually reading them. It was also chiefly on principle, so to speak, that we watched two blue movies, one of which was called Jack the Rimmer and was literally blue because the color exposure was wrong. The other, a Japanese one, was better because the Japanese do these things with a ritual of seriousness and thoroughness; the very gradual penetration of the asshole by the penis was satisfactory because it was made visually important, it had, as they say, human dignity.

  Last night we roamed around Chinatown and ate at Sam Wo’s after drinking two margaritas at The Empress of China, my first in all this long while. Ben showed me the building where he works on the Poverty Program.764 He asked me if I thought he should get another job before the program is forced to fire all its employees, as may well happen if these conservative pressures continue. I said I didn’t see any use in worrying about such possibilities when the entire social structure is so shaky. Who knows if a Black Power revolution may not fragment the United States into two or more separate countries? Ben told me how the Chinese are afraid of the Negroes and how they are tending more and more to vote conservative.

  It seems awfully quiet here, in contrast to Santa Monica Canyon. In the night you hear only an occasional ship’s siren. Ben amused me by complaining of the noise made by a bus going up Lombard, one or two of them an hour!

  He is very sociologically minded and likes to go to seminars, rather than movies. He has just been to one by Buckminster Fuller,765 who says that smog is caused by factories and not cars, as we are usually told.

  Last night he dreamed that I had split into two people. One of them wanted to talk about literature and he and Benny went out to Marin County; the other was very cheerful and wanted to talk about boys. He was over in Berkeley, so Ben went across to him on the ferry (which doesn’t exist any more). Ben couldn’t make up his mind which Chris he wanted to be with. He says that this was an entirely pleasant dream, and that he had never had one like it before!

  I woke this morning thinking that the real point of a house-holder’s life is not simply that he is not a monk but that he loves a human being rather than God. So he must learn to love God through that human being. Very obvious and very important to remember.

  November 26. Angus looks just the same, red-faced with wavy white hair[.] Tony hasn’t changed either. Angus talked almost entirely about himself and “my new novel” (No Laughing Matter). As we were walking in the street and had momentarily paired off, Tony told me almost guiltily how much he liked A Single Man. His praise of it was so strong that it seemed defiant and I felt that he must regard it as a sort of disloyalty to Angus. Angus didn’t say one word to me about any of my books, so I didn’t mention his new one which I anyhow find impenetrable. We ate at a restaurant called Gordon’s which is queer but very respectable, except that the waiter addressed us as “child.”

  Angus was very good company, rattling away with vast good humor, and it’s impossible not to like him. At Ben’s apartment, before we left for supper, there was a rather dull man from Texas but Angus made the very most of him and rubbed him up the right way by asking about Galveston. The Texan disparaged it, saying it was run-down, but was pleased when Angus declared that he loved run-down seaside resorts! He also said he prefers plains to mountains. He was really funny describing the stuffiness of a graduate seminar he had recently had, at which they had discussed a novel by George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss, I think). Angus had remarked that George Eliot had been disappointed because her public hadn’t liked the chief woman character as much as the man—at which a prissy student had said, “Mr. Wilson, we’ve only got three hours to devote to this book; why do we waste our time on what the author thought?” Another Wilson mot I remember: “You can always tell a homosexual from behind; he looks as if he’s waiting for someone.”

  November 27. Am writing this on a bench in the sun in Washington Square, feeling very content to be in the warmth but like an old old person. I identify with that old Chinese lady for instance who has just shuffled past. Am waiting until it’s time to go and have lunch with Thom Gunn. Ben will be away at work until late this evening.

  Yesterday was perfect weather and Ben and I went flying. He drove me out to Buchanan Field which is an airport beyond the hills east of Oakland. We rented a four-seater Cessna with a re-assuringly middle-aged instructor named Dale. Ben sat beside him and had a first lesson which included taking off on his own: all you have to do is let the plane accelerate to sixty miles an hour along the runway and then pull back on the controls. We flew over a church which Ben said his father would be attending right at that moment, then out over the northern arm of the bay toward Mount Tamalpais, then down low over San Quentin because Ben works there, then south over the Golden Gate Bridge and the bare-ass beach and Golden Gate Park and right over the city and so back to the field. Forty-five minutes cost us twenty-five dollars. Again I was struck by the dull lifeless pallor of this landscape, and its terrible untidiness. Ben was distressed because there is so much man-made fill encroaching on the areas of water.

  November 28. Am in a very noisy Italian café on Grant, drinking real English breakfast tea, until it is time for Ken McDonnell to come and pick m
e up and drive me down to Santa Cruz. Everybody is talking Italian and there is a scoreboard with the results of football games in Italy and the record player has started the champagne song out of Traviata. I have quite a bit of a hangover because of wine at lunch yesterday with Thom Gunn and scotch with Stanley Miron and drinks with Fred Kuh766 at supper.

  Thom has now become very thick with John Zeigel, who has been staying with him and just left. Thom looks and seems wonderfully healthy and cheerful. He has a black beard, and is still lean and vigorous. He has given up teaching so he can write all the time. He seems to have decided quite definitely in favor of living in America, after a final trial stay in England. I forget what we talked about, but I left him feeling really invigorated. He is one of the strongest people I’ve met for a long time.

  Stanley Miron wasn’t strong, but he didn’t seem weak, either, or even depressed, as he told me about his marriage. He feels it was probably a ghastly mistake. Now he has a child coming. His wife is possessive, and they have almost no tastes in common. He has never told her about his past sex life. He doesn’t know what to do. The only solution seems to be to keep her down in the country (which she loves) and spend a lot of time in the city, with his doctoring as an excuse. Despite all of this, Stanley still looks young and handsome and basically cheerful. I think he has a very hard heart.

  The evening with Fred Kuh and a younger friend of his wasn’t disagreeable but I only arranged it because I couldn’t find anyone else to eat with. So I put the talk on automatic and got drunk. I also paid for the dinner which was unnecessary. Fred is rolling in success. I like him. He looks like a pig, an Edward VII pig.

  November 29. Like an idiot I left my two suits behind in Ben Underhill’s closet. No sooner had I pulled the downstairs door locked shut than I remembered this. Ken McDonnell clambered athletically around the back of the house, trying to find a way in, but he couldn’t.

  We drove down to Santa Cruz a roundabout way, through the beautiful woods, stopping for lunch at the Brookdale Inn—which, I now realize, is the same place I’ve been told of and have vaguely tried to find every time I’ve driven up this coast in the past twenty-eight years.

  Ken is a sweet companion. He loves these mountains because he used to come to them on vacations in his childhood, with Larry. Since I saw him last he has fallen in love with a girl he met through the girl he had taken acid with. He even thinks they may get married soon. He is very insistent that he is wild and she is wild and that their life together will continue to be wild, after marriage. In other words, he isn’t going to be trapped and pressured into taking a steady job and living like everybody else. . . . I kept my mouth shut.

  Ken hates the Diggers. He says they’re self-righteous.

  We got to Santa Cruz early and walked along the front by the amusement park and I told him about the Marple ghost. Then we went up to the U.C. campus,767 and reported to Miss Bartholomew at Crown College. When I introduced Ken to Dr. Thimann the provost,768 I watched Thimann very carefully to see if he was jumping to any conclusions about us. I’m sure he didn’t—and maybe the reason was because dear Ken looked so homely! He wanted to hear me talk, so I lent him one of my ties and he had supper with us first.

  A student (psychology, Jewish) from Crown showed me to my guest room which is in Cowell College. It seemed very nice and clean and there was a lovely view stretching right away out to the ocean. The student hastened to remark that he didn’t like the dorm itories in Cowell and that the ones in Crown were far superior. To prove this, he took us on a tour of them and we were proudly shown a room in which one of the occupants had hoisted his bed right up to the ceiling, and another in which both beds were hung with thick curtains like four-posters, and another which had a draped cloth canopy like a tent.

  After supper I talked a bit and then read a passage from A Single Man, about George arriving at college in the morning. The students seemed very enthusiastic, probably because they are nearly all undergraduates. Later I sat and talked to as many of them as wanted to listen. Lots of questions about Vedanta, particularly from a youngish man in a woollen cap, wearing a Zen beard. Later he told me that his name is Stanley Trout and that he isn’t a student but lives nearby in a shack in the forest. He has written a manuscript which I am to read. It’s my life, he said. He also said that he felt it was fated that we should meet here.

  This morning, my room is still nice and clean but the view of the ocean is hidden by blank wet cloud and the rain is pouring down. I have soon got to slosh through the mud to Crown College where I have been given an office in which to receive students all morning and a classroom in which to hold a seminar all afternoon. The woods are full of bulldozers working on the foundations of future buildings. There is first to be college number four (at present called College Four) and then, as the years pass, a succession of colleges up to the number of about twenty!769

  One of the disadvantages of my room is that it is surrounded by rooms in which there are pianos. Life here is unusually permissive. The library is open all night, and apparently the pianos are too. Anyhow, there was piano (and drum) playing last night until at least eleven-thirty, and it began again this morning at six!

  I have just had my breakfast; you have to eat it before 8:15.

  Extract from Sex Life of a Cop by Oscar Peck: “‘Honey, take time to shower with me,’ she begged, panting. He glanced down at the nude goddess lying there on the bed. Her suggestion sounded refreshing. ‘Sounds great, baby. You lead the way,’ he drawled.”

  December 1. We’ve just taken off (8:35 a.m.) from San Jose airport, homeward bound. This morning is brilliant, after two days of rain.

  My chief concern was not to let my only pair of pants get wet and baggy-kneed and to keep the water out of my only pair of shoes. (Why on earth I brought a raincoat but no rubbers I will never know!) Mud everywhere, and seesaw planks laid across puddles. The builders go ahead as if they were ducks, although the excavations were all flooding and the newly made paths were streaming with water. There are said to be more than a million redwoods on this campus—it used to be a ranch—and of course it is very right and proper of the college authorities not to want to cut them down; but the alternative, it seems will be to build a lot of the colleges down in hollows with trees all round and they’ll be as dark as tombs.

  They have an institution which they call College Night (I suspect it’s a British idea, for two of the three provosts are Englishmen); one night a week the entire student body of one of the colleges has a sit-down dinner—the other nights it’s self-service—and afterwards they are entertained by some speaker or other type of clown. The first night, College Night was at Crown, the night before last was at Stevenson, last night was at Cowell. At Stevenson I was bad, because dim with exhaustion from lack of sleep, so I consciously forced it by acting merry and bright. (I must never again tell those corny old show-biz stories.) Last night went much better, because I read again, and because the Cowell dining room is better to speak in than the Stevenson.

  The piano playing the night before last was truly incredible. Just slow chords struck at long irregular intervals but quite continuously from 2:30 to 3:30! I’m sure whoever was doing it was high on pot or something. Last night I made up my mind to sleep no matter what, so I exhausted myself by watching the dress rehearsal of an unthinkably ancient farce (by Sardou!) called Let’s Get a Divorce,770 and then reading. And then to add to this there was a knock on my door, well after midnight, and two girls wanted to know how to write a play they’d had assigned to them; so I put on my bathrobe and told them, for an hour. So then I did indeed sleep, until the student who was to drive me to the airport banged on my door, and I dove into my clothes and packed in the car, and here I am.

  Further notes: Dr. Willson,771 the provost of Stevenson, told me that there is already an amazing amount of individuality in the three colleges, so that they feel their experiment is a success. Stevenson is the “activist” campus.

  Saw two students who seemed definitely
turned on. A girl who joined a group of professors at lunch and didn’t seem to know where she was. And a boy who spent a lot of time with me yesterday, taking me to see the library etc.; in the evening, during the rehearsal, he came up to me with a wildly scrawled bit of paper saying how he had wanted to screw some girl and how she hadn’t wanted to because she said she only did that when she knew someone well and there was something more to it than just screwing. I felt sure he was showing me this as a sort of test; but I didn’t know how to react and he was disappointed and went away again.

  Two boys who wanted to talk about Vedanta came to see me with the air of conspirators, waiting until the others had left the office. One of them, named Mark Bristow, had a lopsided but rather beautiful face. Oh the incoherence of their questions, which nevertheless puts me on the defensive; I feel apologetically that I ought to be able to understand them, if I were the real intuitive type!

  The whole thing was a rat race, it always is; nevertheless, though depleted, I don’t feel ashamed. I think I did impart a little something to a few of them, and anyhow I didn’t fake it. I was, as far as it’s ever possible to be, myself. Last night, Page Smith,772 the provost of Cowell, held forth about the great revolution caused by the two world wars and the consequent vast gap between the generations nowadays. No doubt this is absolutely true, for squares. But I see more clearly now than ever before that our little gang in England in the thirties really dug all that stuff, although we used a different vocabulary. I’ve come away from this visit feeling pretty damn modern and not in the very least intimidated by the young. As far as I am concerned, the difference between the age groups is physical, far more than it is ideological. They want to stay up all night and make a noise. I don’t. But this is merely due to a failure of energy and appetite on my part. (To take just one example—when Edward and I sat up drinking and writing down our sensations as we did so—making noise like “into the forests of the ether”—weren’t we behaving psychedelically?)