The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  May 31. The day before yesterday, Dorothy came to clean house and told me that she had dreamed the night before that Jo had gone mad and had been put away in an asylum and that I had asked Dorothy’s help in getting Jo’s things together and packing them! Dorothy took this dream seriously and was concerned about it, so I phoned Jo—without telling her anything, of course. Jo told me that she had been in a better frame of mind for some time, but that, that last night, she had woken up sobbing.

  My symptoms are better, but I still have a slightly inflamed throat on the left side, plus early morning stomach spasms. Am now more inclined to believe that the whole thing was an infection, because one of the boys who comes to the reading at Vedanta Place said he had had the same ailment.

  Loneliness for Don. I miss him nearly all the time; I mean, consciously. Fancy being able to “miss” God as often as that! Yesterday Jim [Bridges] told me that he and Jack [Larson] were going down to San Diego for the day, to see the production of Hamlet which Ellis Rabb has directed. So I went along and had an enjoyable outing. Ellis has produced some striking theatrical effects, but at the same time has neglected to make his Hamlet and his Horatio speak properly; their gabbling was incoherent, almost ducklike. However we saw the zoo first, and later there was a pleasant party at the house of Craig Noel who runs the theater812—pleasant because of the warmth and sweetness of the young actors, and the one young actress: Amy Levitt, who plays Ophelia and seems the only likely-to-succeed member of the cast.813 After this we drove home, very very fast. Jim sat in the back with their stinky dog—I tried not to show my dislike of its presence—and Jack kept nearly falling asleep at the wheel; whenever he did this he unconsciously accelerated to almost a hundred. I had to talk, loudly and aggressively, to rouse him.

  June 10. Don is to return today. I can hardly believe it. My throat is bad, and I am full of anxiety. A kind of dread—but of what? Of new developments? Silly old superstitious horse. Even the smell of happiness makes him tremble and twitch his nostrils.

  I haven’t been so depressed in years as I was this last week. And of course it was quite largely about Kennedy.814 How nauseating these weepy liberals are, who cry that our society is sick with hate just because amidst millions one little foreign killer can be found!815 No—nobody is any sicker than usual (which is sick, all right); it’s just that the pot is being stirred. What comes to the surface has always been there.

  Julie Harris, whom I saw last night at Lamont Johnson’s, seems sadder than ever—forlorn, guilty, talking about her “infidelities”— almost a fit sister for poor old Jo. But both of them are tough inside.

  June 19. Don got home more than a week ago, on the 10th. I have never known him, or any other human being, manage to get through with so much baggage and not pay excess. At the Los Angeles Airport Customs Office a woman found the photos of his male nude drawings. She handed them to her superior, who said, “They’re trash but they’ll pass.” Don asked, “Is it usual to get art criticism along with a customs inspection?”

  Dorothy wanted to pray for Jo, or have her prayed for, I’m not quite clear which. In order that this might be done, I had to give Dorothy Jo’s maiden name. How surprised Jo would be if she knew this!

  Kubrick’s 2001 is one of the very greatest artworks of our time. We saw it last night. The overwhelming feeling you get from it is fundamentally religious—a religious awe.

  A strike has stopped performances of Cabaret everywhere except in England.816 Soon there will be no more money coming in.

  Papers and confusions and time wastings on account of the houses we have bought. I take out my irritation about this on Arnold Maltin. Don says he will deal with Arnold in future, so I won’t lose my cool.

  Don and I want to work together, but on what? The Praying Mantises for Anthony Page is no damn good and neither is The Barford Cat Affair for Hunt Stromberg.817 Have decided to begin my family book with a letter to Kathleen. Got this idea telepathically yesterday evening from Don while we were having dinner at Musso Frank’s. Now that he’s here I am functioning again. Back and stomach okay but throat still has something wrong with it.

  The next hurdle to jump, a talk on Saturday for the ACLU818 at Long Beach on “The Right to Dissent.” My difficulty is, I don’t give a damn whether or not I have the right to dissent, I just dissent or I don’t. The only question which arises in any given instance is, is it prudent, is it strategic? Or shall I dissent and keep my mouth shut?

  Have reached the beginning of 1909 in Kathleen’s diary.

  July 5. There was no problem with the ACLU talk because they sent me a paper telling me what to say. The day before yesterday I took part in a T.V. round table discussion (no table and a semi-circle) at Cal. State819 with Ray Bradbury, Leon Surmelian, Bob Lee and a man whose name I forget who produces Ray’s plays. Ray talked nearly all the time but I rather warmed to him, he’s so silly. At the beginning we each of us had to introduce ourselves, and I said that I was chiefly famous for the adaptations other people had made from my work, I Am a Camera and Cavalcade.820 This must have been subconscious bitchery, but I wasn’t even aware that I’d said Cavalcade until Bob Lee pointed it out!

  Have been working full steam on Kathleen’s diaries, determined to get the whole job finished if possible by the end of this month or soon after. Am in[,] now[,] February 1912.

  Don is rereading A Meeting by the River and we shall work on this together if it seems at all possible, without saying anything to Jim Bridges who, luckily, is now busy with a musical of his own.

  “Christmas Carol” is more or less finished until we shoot it. Lamont is still fussing with the script of Black Girl. He tried to get me to sneak Saint Joan821 into it!

  August 9. On August 5, I finished copying and cutting Kathleen’s diaries up to the end of the year 1915. It was such a tiresome job that it was almost worth it, merely as discipline. I mean, the nervous effort of it was tiresome. Reading the diaries was often absorbingly interesting, especially toward the end. And I feel that I know Frank now for the first time.

  I started this work on August 19, 1967, which means that I did 404 single-space pages (approximately) in 417 days, which doesn’t sound like much, but then I had to read right through each of the thirty-two diary volumes and at least seventeen packets of letters, some of these in fairly difficult handwriting.

  In a few days I shall begin reading through the typescript, making notes and hoping for a flash of inspiration as to how to present this material in a book.

  On July 12, Don and I started working together on an attempted dramatization of A Meeting by the River. In a couple more days we should have finished the first act—assuming, as we do at present, that the play is to be in two acts and that the first act will contain, more or less, the material in the first four chapters of the novel.

  Don is very much on the alert to prevent me from attributing ideas to him which I have actually had myself—this is part of what he calls buttering him up. Nevertheless I do genuinely find it hard most of the time to remember which idea belongs to whom. I think it was Don who suggested putting Patrick and Oliver into actual structures, cubes we call them, which represent their subjective mental worlds. And we certainly agreed fifty-fifty that Mother and Penny must be live actresses and not photographs projected on the back wall, as in the version which Jim Bridges and I began to write. (Jim and Jack are now both in New York doing Jack’s play which used to be called The Queer Valentine—I have a block against remembering its new title; and we hope to be able to present Jim with a rough draft of A Meeting by the time he returns.)

  In any case, I am thoroughly enjoying this project. I love taking things apart and putting them together differently; and Don is always wonderful to work with. He will become better and better I know, as he gradually gets to know the material through and through by manipulating it.

  August 13. On August 10 we finished the first act of A Meeting, and yesterday I started reading through the whole typescript of my cut version of Kathleen’s
diaries. I have also, incidentally, written a tiny foreword or whatnot for the paperback edition of Journey to a War which Faber is about to publish.822 I only did this because Wystan said he wouldn’t let his “Second Thoughts” be printed unless I wrote one too. Actually I don’t feel this urge to revise things.

  Peter Schlesinger’s horoscope for the day, yesterday, told him to seek the advice of an older person, so he called me to know if he should take two trunks with him to England! Told him of course not; he was going to pack art books, records and all sorts of unnecessary ballast.

  When Mark Bristow came to see me with his girlfriend Elise a couple of weeks ago, I was running around fixing them drinks, answer ing the phone, etc.; and then Mark said, with sweet gracious ness, like a host, “Sit down, if you’d like.” It was so funny and cute.

  Names for books, gleaned from chance remarks, advertisements, etc.: Lucky Blond, Pretty Boy with Big Feet, Food Smells from a Canyon.

  A synchronicity: yesterday Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife, came to see Don about having her portrait drawn by him. And yesterday morning I got from Ronnie Knox the current issue of a girlie magazine called Knight (which otherwise I never see, even on newsstands) with a story by him in it (called The Hunk)—and an interview with Sharon Tate!

  Yesterday, being Monday, we saw Gerald and Michael; we have settled down into visiting them every Monday now. The last few times he has scarcely been able to speak at all. But he still seems perfectly aware of everything said in his presence. I notice that one can always get a reaction of some kind from him if one mentions Chris Wood. If you make fun of Chris a little, he laughs a noiseless laugh. It is, so to speak, Love’s last faint signal.

  Swami seems much recovered and he shows it by his renewed concern about the affairs of the Vedanta Society. He has lately reproved Vandanananda for seeing so much of certain women devotees. He hopes Vandanananda will decide to go back to India. Asaktananda has already said that, if Swami dies and Vandanananda becomes head of the center, he won’t stay on! Swami is now considering getting a junior swami sent here as an assistant, so that Asaktananda would be the next in line to succeed him.

  August 31. News of the day: On August 28 Don and I finished the first draft of our play of A Meeting by the River. Don is now going to type it and probably take a copy with him to New York when he goes there in about ten days, to show to Jim Bridges who is there directing Jack’s play. (Jim says he’s very optimistic at this point; they have a good cast.) Me, I’m nearly certain I shan’t go, much as I hate being separated from Don.

  Now I’m gradually working through a set of notes on the type-script of Kathleen’s diaries. I reckon there will be about seventy-five pages of these. I don’t exactly know why I am making them, except that it seems to be the only evident next step. I just hope that making them will somehow suggest what the book itself is to be about.

  On the 29th, Dorothy Miller was bullied by Black Muslims while she was sitting waiting for a bus. They brought round pamphlets, and when the women who were waiting didn’t respond enthusiastically and ask them questions they told them that Black Power was going to burn America down and that by 1975 it would be in control. Then they overturned the bench on which Dorothy and the others were sitting. A bus came by but didn’t stop. Dorothy was later told by a cop that they have orders not to, if the driver sees there’s a riot in progress at the bus stop. Dorothy was so upset she didn’t come to work for us that day and didn’t sleep at all that night.

  David Burns823 showed up late last night, after we’d gone to bed, and again today with a little Japanese girl he’d just met [. . .] Dave is going to be as tiresome as ever. Last night he slept in a shack on the building excavation at the end of the street. But I can’t help feeling a kind of warmth toward him. Despite his crazy visions and pills he seems somehow sane and good. He doesn’t appear to mind being arrested one little bit.

  Tennessee, crazy in such a different way, is also here. And Gore has just arrived. Gore says that William F. Buckley called him a queer after losing his temper on their last T.V. appearance at the Democratic Convention on the 28th.824 Gore says that newspapers from all over the country have been calling him to ask for his reactions to this public insult, and that he has replied, “I don’t know what I did to deserve it. I always treated Mr. Buckley like the great lady he is.”

  At a party at Jennifer’s on the 24th, Rex Reed825 was rebuked by Richard Harris,826 seconded by Rita Hayworth and Mia Farrow, for being a little bitch and uninvited to boot—he had been brought by Denise Minnelli.827 We didn’t witness this but were told about it by Gavin. And sure enough, one of the T.V. film columnists, a couple of days later, announced that Harris had been drunk and Rita ditto, and that Harris had insulted several major stars. No doubt this was Rex’s revenge. The drunk part of it was certainly true. Rita, very sweet as usual, kept breaking in on Harris’s conversation, probably because she had hot pants for him. He turned on her and said good-humoredly, “Shut up, you fat mischievous old thing!”

  Ben Masselink married Dee a few days ago. Jo has been away, and we don’t know if she knows yet.

  On the eve of my birthday, at my request, Don arranged a dinner party at Chasen’s for the Stravinskys, Bob and ourselves. Igor seemed much better. I was worried by Vera’s exhausted appearance, but she tried heroically to be gay and we had a beautiful evening. Perhaps one of the very last. The Stravinskys seem determined to leave Los Angeles for ever and settle in Europe. Dinner cost at least $175, maybe more—because, although it was our treat, Vera wouldn’t tell us how much they tip the head waiter! My birthday itself we spent quietly. I went in swimming before breakfast, chiefly because I woke up with a hangover, having laid off all drink since July 7, which was the last time we had had supper with the Stravinskys! Since then I have been drinking a little, but it really does seem to depress me. Felt so sad this morning when I woke.

  Part of a letter from Anne Geller, July 23: [She says she has been unhappy because she didn’t say what she meant to about the check I sent her. She meant to comment not on the amount of the check but on Jim’s respect for my abilities and his affection for me.]

  September 2. Felt very low and blue yesterday, partly because Don told me the previous evening that he may go on to England to see [a friend] after his visit to New York. But this is something I have got to come to terms with, and I will. The other part of my blueness was due to David Burns who is really bugging us. He keeps showing up, always with “gifts,” a flower, an empty cardboard cup with a bit of crumpled paper inside it, or whatnot. He starts talking astrology and you can’t get a word in edgewise. He is always lurking around. He sits on the steps and writes poems which he keeps in a large paper bag. This afternoon Don almost trod on him before seeing him and let out a yell of shock. Dave left immediately but Don followed him in the car and gave him back his bag and told him never to come here again without phoning first. God knows if this will take. Anyhow Don is deadly determined to discourage him.

  Michael called in the middle of the morning and told us that Gerald was after all not up to seeing us today. I wonder if this is the end at last.

  Jo called. She knows about Ben’s wedding. She seems quite calm about it.

  Tennessee came to dinner with us last night. Also Bill Glavin828 and Ronnie Knox, who is driving the Stravinskys’ car to New York for them, starting today. It was a nice evening and Tennessee didn’t seem unduly drunk or otherwise fuddled. The only awkward thing was, he brought a copy of his screenplay of “One Arm” for me to read, more or less saying that I could work with him on it. This is of course out of the question because of the mix-up with Gavin, Jim Bridges and Ronnie Platt. Don called Tennessee a “situation queen.”

  September 5. Don and I had supper at the Vedanta monastery last night, Swami Swahananda was there on a visit. He’s the one who has just joined the center in San Francisco. Swami now says he’s glad that Swahananda isn’t going to work here; he thinks only of social work, and only in terms of success, h
ow many members does an organization have, how much money, etc. etc. Swami went on to say that the Belur Math itself is becoming just as bad. Gambhirananda is only waiting, Swami says, for the senior swamis who believe in meditation and the spiritual life to die off; then he’ll start changing the Math’s direction. Meanwhile, despite his indignation and pessimism, Swami looked wonderfully cheerful and well.

  Don and I went on to see 2001 for the second time. It seemed even more wonderful than before, and there was so much I had missed the first time. As before, it dominated the audience completely. When it was over, about three-quarters of them remained seated throughout the credits and we felt they were simply too moved to want to leave the theater immediately.

  On the night of the 2nd we had supper with Gore Vidal at the Bel Air. (Incidentally, his rooms there were quite like the eighteenth-century French suite in which the 2001 astronaut finds himself at the end of the film.) Gore looked slimmer than usual and very handsome. He says a fourth party will be formed, and when the election goes to the House of Representatives—as they believe it will—this party will force Humphey to change his policy on Vietnam, as the price of its support.829

  Haven’t heard any more from David Burns, knock on wood! Don asked me if my feeling of horror at having him around wasn’t a little bit like what I felt about Guttchen. Yes, perhaps. But Guttchen made me feel guiltier and I disliked him. I don’t dislike Burns, I’m very much touched by him, though deeply rattled and exasperated. He rattles me by making me feel that I’m the crazy one. His wandering life of meetings with strangers, his acceptance of whatever comes to him, including spells in jail or the funny farm, his ability to sit down anywhere and write poetry, his trustfulness and the little gifts he brings you—doesn’t all this add up to something marvellous and even supersane? And doesn’t my frantic demand to be left alone, my snarling at all invaders of my precious privacy, amount to a dreary sort of submadness?