The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Today, Don finished typing the first of the two acts of our play. It is obvious already that the speeches at the end of the act are far too long and that the whole thing will have to be rearranged. But it is an achievement and I’m already very pleased with parts of it. There are several distinct improvements on the novel, I believe. Don isn’t so pleased with it, however. He still doubts if the material is suitable for the stage, at all.

  September 11. Two days ago, Don left for New York, at 11:[1]5 p.m. That morning he finished typing a fair copy of our Meeting by the River play. (Whether it is to be ours or just mine isn’t decided yet; he still has mysterious scruples about this and is going to consult Jack Larson—exactly why, I still can’t figure out.)

  As we were driving to the airport he said, “I think the Animals have been managing their life together much better lately,” and he said that he had enjoyed this summer very much. I asked him if he hadn’t been unhappy about his failure to work, or rather, to produce pictures he liked. He said yes, but he added that he keeps getting ideas all the time, “and that must mean that I want to be an artist, mustn’t it?” He is planning to go to England, I think, though he won’t say so in so many words; everything, as usual, has to be left open till the very last moment.

  That morning we went to see Gerald, who amazingly could even talk a little in a relatively clear voice. But you couldn’t follow him properly, he kept rambling off.

  Poor old Larry Holt is going to have an operation under his tongue. I’m afraid it may be a malignancy. He called me and held a tedious conversation about the vulgarity of background music in films. I feel all these topics which he raises are somehow symbolic.

  Ray Henderson has a tape of the whole rough version of the Dogskin musical and really it does seem to have something. Listened to it yesterday with Burgess Meredith, who seemed quite enthusiastic; but Elsa says he isn’t to be trusted. He is a great raiser of false hopes.

  Don called from New York last night. He had seen Jack’s play and had liked it quite a lot. It is called Cherry, Larry, Sandy, Doris, Jean, Paul, which is one of the most off-putting names I have ever heard.

  September 14. Yesterday I went down on the beach—I am hoping to go on the beach and in the water or to the gym, or both, every day that I am alone here; it’s a valuable discipline and part of the survival technique which I am interested in following, after my disgraceful misuse of Don’s last absence. I’m not indulging in self-pity or sentiment. This is strictly an experiment. Elderly people are apt to get left alone, anyhow, and they should know what to do about it. I am only trying to learn, rather late, what many of my friends seem to be experts at, already. I am bad at it, because I’ve been lucky and pampered. Well, anyhow—after that digression—I went down to the beach and the first thing I saw was a playing card, so I picked it up and it was the king of hearts. And then I saw an empty book of matches, with a drawing on the back of it of a sexy stud youth, advertising a bar on Melrose called The Tradesman; “a friendly bar” it said. Two good omens?

  Also yesterday morning, a mild synchronicity. In Brother Lawrence I read, “So little time remains to us to live; you are near sixty-four. . . .”830 And, in The Education of Henry Adams, “To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately seeking education. . . .”831

  Talking of omens, last night when I came back into the house after supper, I found a cat. It must have got in by way of the balcony. This has never happened before. A messenger from Don? I keep hoping he’ll call.

  This afternoon, I’ve started roughing out the “letter” to Kathleen which is supposed to be the introduction to my book. I find it curiously exciting, writing “to” Kathleen in this way. It opens something up. It’s a bit like meditation was, when I first tried it in 1939.

  The thought came to me today that perhaps writing this letter to Kathleen will come easier to me because I am alone while writing it. Somehow being alone strengthens my sense of the confrontation between the two of us. We are both in states of waiting, as it were, and therefore have something in common. I’m not trying to think myself into the idea that Kathleen is alive somewhere or that she can hear me. Whether she is alive or not is neither here nor there. It’s just how I feel.

  September 16. The letter won’t do. I find I have plenty to say in it, but it isn’t the right form; it seems so artificial. Now I don’t know. Should I bash on through it, hoping the annoyed unconscious will exclaim, as so often before, “No, no, idiot—here, let me—”? Or should I start again on the original draft of the book and try to write it better? Or should I aim at an annotated text; basically just Kathleen’s selected diary extracts and Frank’s letters, with my comments? I don’t know. Maybe Don will be able to help me, when he gets back. Last night he called and said he would probably be returning in a day or two. He wasn’t very enthusiastic about this, naturally; it doesn’t seem to have been much of a visit for him and he hasn’t accomplished anything beyond doing a couple of drawings. I kind of wish he had been able to go on to England and see [his friend]. But only kind of. I want him back but I want him back happy. If only only only he could somehow begin to paint!

  However, I think Jim Bridges does truly like our play, and Jack has told Don he should have his name on it, so that’s to the good. Jim wants to do it here, early next year, and then in England.

  An American love story: Bob took his car into a filling station to get a tire fixed. A boy named Jack was on duty, a medical student studying dentistry at UCLA. They fell for each other instantly. Jack was so rattled that he couldn’t do anything right. “I felt sorry for him,” Bob says. It was nearly time for the station to close, but Jack worked on, doing various things inefficiently to the car, for two and a half hours! Yesterday evening Jim, who had just arrived back from New York, brought them both to have dinner with us at La Mer. It was Bob’s twenty-first birthday (Jack is twenty-four). We drank Bob’s health. I said, “I hope your life will be as happy as mine”—in other words, I was a little carried away. In the next booth was Henry Willson, the agent,832 with some new tall beautiful client. As he left, he told the waiter that Bob was just the boy he was looking for, and he left his card. Much discussion, should Bob call him? Jim said to him, you’re not an actor; then to Jack, but you are. And it turned out that Jack had played in summer stock. On the way home, as we rounded the traffic islands on Ocean Avenue, I murmured “the islets of Langerhans”833 and Jack knew what they were—which was more than I did, exactly.

  It seems Gavin didn’t like Jack’s play.

  I have resolved to do more acts of recollection during the day, it’s the only thing I can do; I seem incapable of meditation. So I’ll try making japam at noon and again at sunset, with my beads whenever possible.

  October 6. Today is one of the saddest greyest days we have had in a long while. Don did get back on September 17, but the day after tomorrow he’s off again to England. More about that some other time.

  Since he has been back from New York we have done quite a lot of rewriting on our play, building up the parts of Mother and Penelope and improving the end of act 1. We finished this on October 1. Jim is enthusiastic but obviously hasn’t reread it properly; he is in the midst of rehearsals of this play Niagara Falls which he’s directing. Gavin read and liked our play he said, though perhaps not madly. He calls it an anti-play. Actually I don’t agree with this view at all. Just because the characters aren’t always addressing each other directly, that doesn’t mean that they are speaking unrelated soliloquies. They are addressing each other indirectly, which is something quite different; and I believe this will be apparent as soon as the play is actually performed—always provided that it is performed properly! Now the question arises, what’s the next step? Who shall be shown it? Gavin suggests the APA.834 Certainly we don’t want to have anything to do with Gordon Davidson if we can help it, though the Mark Taper does seem the obvious first choice.835 Don may show it to Tony Richardson.

  (Speaking of the Mark Taper, it now seems that Bl
ack Girl will be done as the second production next season, that is, in April; because Gordon is determined to direct a play of his own choosing first. But he still hasn’t signed a contract with Lamont Johnson. Lamont is trying to pressure him into doing this or at least into signing the two leads, which would amount to the same thing. Lamont wants Cicely Tyson and Stacey Keach.836

  Chris Wood told me a strange thing. Last time he saw Gerald, about five days ago, he started talking about Joe Ackerley and his newly published last book, My Father and Myself. Gerald got intensely interested and suddenly began, according to Chris, speaking quite coherently and altogether behaving not only normally but “like a young man.” Chris says Michael said he hadn’t seen him like that in many many months. Chris didn’t perhaps say everything he thought about this phenomenon. He seemed to me to be implying either that Gerald still playacts a bit for visitors or that Michael is such a powerful depressant that Gerald usually appears to be far more decrepit than he really is!

  On October 4, Don got a letter from the Marquis Company, asking for his biographical data because they want to put him into Who’s Who in the West!

  Seth Finkelstein has just given me back my Berlin clock,837 repaired and cleaned! He is such a sweet boy and I am racking my brains to think of something I can do for him. Talking about a date he had with his girlfriend that evening, Seth said, “First we’ll have dinner and then come back here and enjoy the fruits of love.”

  Four nights ago Don and I were having supper at the Fuji Gardens, which we rather love, when I suddenly got and started to describe an idea for another novel. It’s very vague, of course. Two old men—one of them more or less Swami and the other a writer who, a long time ago, seriously considered becoming a monk but then returned to the life of a householder. They have always kept in touch, however. They are neither of them at all solitary. Both have households, religious in the one case, secular in the other. In both households there are people who disapprove of or sneer at their friendship. The religious think the writer is a dirty old man who writes dirty old books. The secular think the Swami is an old imposter. I don’t know any more yet. Except that the Swami gets very ill, nearly dies and then recovers. And that the writer then does actually die. All this wouldn’t be quite as autobiographical as it sounds. I see the writer more as Henry Miller, though probably queer. It has some roots in Hesse’s Narziss und Goldmund, some in [Mann’s] Death in Venice. But very different, really. Essentially all about love—the only friction being between the supporting characters. As I was telling it, I felt that spooky thing, the sense of a vast terrain of almost virgin subject matter, waiting to be explored; and the gasp with which one recognizes and says to oneself, but that—that would have to be a masterpiece or nothing. . . . Don felt what I was feeling. His eyes filled with tears of excitement.

  October 16. Don did leave for England on October 8 and he’s there now. One of the reasons why I haven’t been writing in this book is that I’ve been writing letters to him, which has exhausted my urge to record. Also I’ve been so busy.

  All I want to put down now is one thing, because it is worrying me. Yesterday morning, shortly before getting up, I had a very vivid dream. The dream was that Don was with me; I felt his presence intensely, and I saw him, I think he was lying beside me on the bed, or rather, sitting beside me, anyhow he was quite close. The terribly painful and disturbing thing about the dream was that we were actually in the act of parting, I felt he was slipping away from me; indeed that he had only partially come back to visit me and that, although he wanted to, he couldn’t stay. He said something about the nerve ends not being connected—I think that was the expression he used. Why I am so worried about this is that it had all the atmosphere of an appearance before or at the moment of or just after death. It had that kind of frustration and poignancy. Immediately after it, I woke, and the time was exactly seven o’clock.

  The last three days I have had a letter from him every day. But the latest one is dated last Saturday, the 12th. Until I get one from him written after the moment of the dream (which would be October 15, 3:00 p.m. London time) I shan’t feel easy, and I shan’t feel quite easy until he’s home again. Of course I could call him on the phone but I don’t want to because we agreed we wouldn’t phone, and anyhow surely [his friend] would have let me know if anything bad had happened. Also, I was idiot enough to tell him about the dream in one of my letters, though of course I didn’t say what I feared it meant. But he’s so quick to sense things like this and it might upset him too.

  November 5. Don got back last night safe, though looking tired. No more about this at the moment. I rejoice.

  Today we voted and I feel sick, thinking of Nixon’s most probable victory. I actually couldn’t manage the voting contraption and had to be shown how, like several other gaga senior citizens. Which reminds me that Don brought back with him some capsules called K.H.3 because Ivan Moffat is taking them and recommending them strongly. This stuff—procaine hydrochloride—is supposed to improve mental alertness in the elderly and reduce irritability and depression, it also gives you more energy and makes your skin less yellow. Well, I’ll try it—chiefly because Don took the trouble to buy it for me, it was a loving thought.

  Dorothy Miller, last time she was here, said that Jackie “took the rag off the bush,” referring to her marriage.838

  Have run on the beach quite a lot lately and been in the ocean: did both today. I’m really in a very good state of health I guess, though fat bellied. And I have an almost constant pressure headache.

  Don talks of our going to Australia while Tony Richardson is making his film about Ned Kelly.

  The last time I saw Swami (October 23) he was in a wonderful exalted mood. He said, speaking of Maharaj, “Chris—to think of it! I saw him!” I said, “And we see you, Swami.” He said, “You see the dust of his feet.” His joy, and the nowness of it, was so beautiful.

  November 22. We finally got Jim to read our play through again and make definite criticisms, so now we are rewriting it. We think it will be enormously improved. The idea is to make Oliver’s moods more dramatic.

  Today has been thick fog and so my car won’t start and I have had to miss going to the gym. I try to exercise every day. What I prefer is trotting on the beach. It is empty now and often so beautiful, when the tide is far out and you can splash through the shallows. Have also started taking Alertonic,839 which was recommended to me by the Masins. I wrote them to ask what they thought of K.H.3 and they said it is absolutely useless! Don and I discussed the advisability of telling Ivan Moffat this and decided not to. The Masins didn’t say it was harmful, and if he believes in it, it probably will help him.

  Have got into the second chapter of the Kathleen-Frank book. Very slow going but I’m quite pleased with it. Don loved the first chapter.

  Here is a fan communication. No name or address on the envelope. Postmarked New York:

  On Spanking a Friend

  I did not know that I was strong or that

  You would challenge me.

  I was standing bored, unaware that I

  Could so pleasingly

  Defeat your shaft of impertinence and

  Turn you over to reward you.

  But you were pleased and we did it again

  And now I see that

  Behind my sharp hand there exists an

  Aspiration of hope

  So strong that I pass it to you and wish

  That from my strict message

  You may receive my lesson of endearment.

  SEIVAD DRAH[C]IR with admiration to a fine writer.

  I feel pretty sure that the signature is looking-glass writing for RICHARD DAVIES.

  Dave Burns is presumably now in jail. Someone called me a couple of days ago, saying that he himself had been in jail on a driving charge and Dave had told him to call me and get me to bail Dave out, or he would be removed from Santa Monica to the jail downtown before the friend who would pay the bail could be reached. I said no. Don say
s I was right, and I know I was from one point of view; but I still feel uncomfortable about it.

  I lost the turquoise and silver Indian ring Don gave me and hunted everywhere for it without result. Then Jack Grinnich(?) who just happened to be down at Elsa’s house next door,840 miraculously noticed it lying beside our trash cans!

  Have just had a long telephone talk with Vera Stravinsky. After leaving Los Angeles “for ever” they are quite glad to be home. Only Paris got good marks for beauty and food, but it was so terribly expensive.

  No more news about Black Girl. It still hasn’t been announced.

  December 20. So windy and cold. I feel shrunken with the solstice. A withered little old thing. However I think Alertonic has helped, some. I do have quite a bit of energy and my joggings on the beach have become much longer.

  Am only in the third chapter of Kathleen-Frank. It is terrible toil, especially copying out extracts from the diaries and letters, but I do see quite clearly how to write it. The main difficulty is to avoid cuteness.

  Our revised version of A Meeting by the River is typed and Don has also xeroxed two copies, so now it must start out into the world.

  Black Girl is definitely scheduled and the opening date is March 20 or thereabouts.

  Dave Burns is still in jail or at least not yet heard from. Someone called about picking up his mail but never did so, and our box is getting slowly jammed with it.

  The night before last, we saw Vanessa in Isadora. She was really wonderful in some of the dancing scenes: the good-natured silly girl, so full of shit and arty phrases, being possessed before your eyes by the god of the dance. It’s uncanny, almost terrifying.