The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Violent last-minute attempts to get my name off “The Legend of Silent Night,” which we finally saw on the 17th. It is unspeakable. Danny Mann is trying to get his name off too.

  December 25. Wet Christmas. 10:00 p.m. Jim Charlton just called, back for the holidays from Honolulu. Dave Burns rang our doorbell yesterday morning and went off with his mail, except that he left the copies of Life behind; they are already billing him for them. He has again “escaped” from Camarillo. And Don came back from Christmas dinner with his parents with the news that Ted has definitely flipped again. I met Henry Kraft coming out of the movie I was about to go into this afternoon; The Seagull. He didn’t exactly look older, only less interesting. He wasn’t in the least pleased to see me.

  Today I finished chapter 3 of Kathleen and Frank.

  Yesterday I trotted on the beach. Very cold. An old seagull dying on the sand with wings flopped open and legs crumpled under it. It kept opening its beak in terrible fierce gasps. I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately.

  Yesterday evening we and Gavin were invited to supper with Jack and Jim and watched the Apollo 8 rocket getting out of the lunar orbit and starting back to earth. Jack didn’t like Gavin’s attitude to it; not respectful enough. And he didn’t like my saying that the crew’s quoting Genesis was in poor taste—first because it was addressing the population of the earth, which doesn’t entirely consist of Judeo-Christians, second because equating the exploration of the minor little moon by little us with the prime creation is surely a bit presumptuous.841 But Jack has now definitely sponsored the moon, just as he sponsors the young American offoff-Broadway dramatists.

  1969

  January 7. The prospect of this year, the very look of its four digits, scares me. Nothing to be done about that.

  Lots of Hong Kong flu around. Swami has just had it and I feel very slightly guilty because, the day I went to see him last, which was the 2nd, I felt as if I might be coming down with it. My throat was sore and I had chills but I took Coricidin and nothing happened. Swami showed me a letter he’d just got from Ritajananda about Vidya, saying how bossy he is and how he makes enemies. Ritajananda obviously didn’t want to make a big fuss but Swami is sending a copy of the letter on to Belur Math and it will probably result in Vidya being recalled to India, or else being put into a position in which he is forced to resign from the order. I am glad I haven’t written to Vidya, as I have had the impulse to do several times this winter, because then I should have to conceal from him what I know and I should feel part of the conspiracy against him. I suppose Swami is right about him, but that is Swami’s affair.

  Ted is having another breakdown. He came by yesterday with a bottle of liquor, gift wrapped. I guess he knows he is being “naughty.” Don refused to let him stay even a moment, ordered him out. It’s so awful for Don whenever this happens. He still minds, more even than he realizes.

  A mysterious swelling on the middle joint of the small finger of my left hand. A tumor, seemingly, quite hard and without feeling.

  Have got as far as Frank’s proposal in the book, about halfway through chapter 4.

  Gore Vidal is in town, his father is dying of cancer in a hospital. His greeting to me on the phone: “Mole? . . . Toad.”842

  We have paid off the last of the mortgage, so now own this house.

  A copy of our Meeting play has gone off to John Houseman. Jim Bridges is now to start passing it around.

  January 8. We had supper with Vera Stravinsky and Bob yesterday; it was Vera’s birthday according to the modern calendar reckoning. Don got her a white bag at Saks. She was pleased we remembered. They both looked worn out. Igor didn’t come down; evidently he didn’t feel like seeing us. He is terribly depressed and has all manner of things wrong with him, but Bob says his musical appreciation is still amazingly sharp; he really thinks of nothing else now. I felt Vera doesn’t expect him to recover; they are all holed up together for the duration, including sweet little Hideiki (or how ever you spell it) who cooked the dinner last night and bowed when complimented, closing his eyes.843 Bob had given him champagne a short while ago and he had been so excited he hadn’t slept at all, he said. We drank champagne, lots of it; Dom Perignon and something else, very cold and calming and pure, like the waters of some magic spring. It is like going to see members of a royal family, either just before a revolution or in exile; a bit of both, because you feel their expectation of a debacle but at the same time the humorous quietness of resignation. Vera is, all in all, about the best woman I know and one of the best I have ever met in my life; truly kind and generous and strong. She complains but without the smallest self-pity and never feels herself a victim; what she does for Igor is done absolutely as a matter of course, out of love, not duty.

  An unappetizing fat-faced ass named Sander Vanocur844 inter viewed Rita Hayworth on television last night. The whole interview was designed to show that poor Rita was all alone, unsuccessful, unhappy; and then he ended up by saying that the younger generation should be inspired to think that she could remain so marvellous and sexy and vital right up into her fifties! It’s this not knowing what you’re saying, and not giving a damn anyway, which is so hideously characteristic of nowadays.

  A news item I forgot to record: “The Legend of Silent Night” was duly telescreened845 on Christmas Day with our names on it, despite all our efforts—and The Hollywood Reporter and Variety both gave it very good notices!

  The English have at last graciously condescended to give Forster the O.M.846—for being ninety.

  January 9. Dr. Allen saw the swelling on my little finger, says it’s a cyst. If it gets harder and larger he’ll remove it but he doesn’t want to because it’s near the nerve. As a sort of consolation prize he gave me a Hong Kong flu shot. While I was waiting to see him I tried to read Konrad Lorenz On Aggression. It is only just barely possible for me to make myself attend to this sort of writing, greatly as I am interested in the message of it. I think I got through three pages in nearly an hour!

  Talk about [Don’s friend] last night; Don had phoned him in London and he may just possibly be coming out here. The really important thing is that we do talk about him and similar problems. It’s when we don’t talk that the tension builds up.

  Saw Swami yesterday evening, in bed but very cheerful. Swami Asaktananda presided at the reading after supper. He is quite a little schoolmaster; he points with his finger and gives curt orders. I’m not sure I should like to see him in command. Anyhow he has a lot to learn.

  A nice letter from a woman named Rosemary Leonard with whom I’ve been corresponding for several years. She has just got a master’s degree in philosophy and has been preparing a book on the enormous increase in the use of noun-noun sequences over the last two hundred years (Example: school football field, instead of football field at school ). In “Mr. Lancaster,” she informs me, I used 199 such sequences. In a passage of the same length, Meredith used only 121 in 1859, Johnson only 10 in 1759. Richardson and Fielding used 69 and 46 respectively. What does this prove? I must wait to read her book and find out.847 But it is nice to have given someone so much occupation, and presumably pleasure.

  January 10. Don has been suffering from stomach pains a lot lately. It frustrates him so, especially as he is working well. Rex Evans has again suggested he should have a show, this spring. Don says it’s impossible; he can’t get enough pictures finished.

  Last night we had supper with Gore. He told us that he has had a researcher look into the early history of his family, chiefly to try to prove that he is racially Swiss, because he has been applying for a permit to reside in Switzerland and this would be helpful. Gore got his permit and has taken an apartment in Klosters. Meanwhile the researcher, going back to Austria in the thirteenth century, has discovered that the Vidals were then Sephardic Jews. The funny thing is, before Gore told us this, we had both independently thought he was looking curiously Jewish! He talked chiefly about success and money, his own and other people’s. Don had the impress
ion that he is deeply worried about his life.

  January 11. This morning I got up at 5:30 and drove into Hollywood, to read the Katha Upanishad at Swamiji’s breakfast puja. Don wanted to come but I dissuaded him, in view of the social ordeal of having Swami Ranganathananda there as a guest; that sort of thing is always easier to cope with alone.

  After I’d read, I went in to see Swami, who is still officially sick but actually quite himself and looking absolutely radiant. The reading had turned me on more than usual; I think because of Krishna who somehow filled the shrine room with joy. Anyhow I wanted to talk about it to Swami but couldn’t. I mean, I wanted to ask him to make me feel like this all the time instead of once a year. But, as so often, he seemed to know my thought and said, “Just think, Chris, Swamiji himself appeared in that shrine, and he liked your writing!” I suppose Swami was referring to his vision of Swamiji and Maharaj; but that hardly mattered to me. What mattered was that I knew Swami knew what I wanted.

  As for Ranganathananda, he was hardly tiresome at all, beyond giving me a long mimeographed report on his lecture tour in the United States, twelve pages—but that I needn’t read. He must be around sixty but he looks like an athletic coach of forty, big shoulders, erect walk, close-cropped hair. At breakfast he embarrassed us by taking only Horlick’s Malted Milk. He says he never eats and drinks at the same time.

  Got home and ran with Don on the beach. At least, we both ran, but separately because he runs so much farther and faster. The tide will be right for running now, for at least five days. So I’ll try to run.

  Jim Bridges has gone off to New York because he is so upset by the reception of his plays—although he knows that the only really bitchy notice, in The Hollywood Reporter, was written because of personal spite. Jack is urging him to write a really important full-length modern play. Don thinks this may mean that he’ll lose all interest in A Meeting by the River.

  January 15. We have just heard via Jack and Jim (who is still in New York) that John Houseman is very enthusiastic about our play and that we’re to send him two more copies to show to people there. Jack seems terribly upset about Jim’s general state of mind just now, but more of that later.

  This afternoon, just as I was about to go down to the beach to run with Don, I somehow hurt a muscle in the calf of my left leg. It feels like a cramp. I can’t rise on my toes without pain and this would make it awkward to drive my car, so someone is coming from the Vedanta Society to pick me up tonight.

  This is a blissfully happy time with Don.

  Very very slow progress on my book. And yet there really is no obstacle whatsoever. Just tamas.

  Such a nice party on the 12th, lunch at the Vadims’. I do like both him and Jane, and Gore was there, about to retire next day to his slimming farm, and also beautiful broken-nosed Michael York and his wife Pat. We had them to supper last night.

  Here is something I want to write about January 11 but didn’t type out. I only scribbled it down in pencil, so now I’ll copy it before continuing:

  “Swami lying in bed, so snugly tucked in, and me prostrating before him. He looks out at me over the edge of the bed, as though he were in a boat and I was swimming alongside. Then he makes an effort and raises himself a little, in acknowledgement.”

  Gavin continues to go to seminars held by Krishnamurti at Mary Zimbalist’s house up the coast. Krishnamurti says thought is bad, intelligence is good. Thought takes you round and round in circles, it doesn’t solve anything. Intelligence is not personal or collective, it is something else. . . . Krishnamurti acts roles, in order to set problems for his students. “I’m an old man, I’ve lost my wife, I’m lonely, help me, feed me!” His tremendous energy. Gavin says he doesn’t seem to love anyone or need anything. He doesn’t read books—“that’s an escape”—but he does watch T.V. He hates the word meditation.

  January 16. Last night I saw Swami again. (I had to be driven in to Vedanta Place because I’ve somehow slightly strained a muscle in the calf; it’s better this morning.) I asked Swami about his remark, on January 11, that Swamiji liked my writing. When I asked this, I noticed something I’ve noticed before—if you fail to ask Swami a question about one of his statements and you ask it some days later he always seems to have been expecting the question and he knows just what you’re referring to, and he smiles, and seems pleased. He explained that when Ashokananda objected to a sentence in my introduction to Vedanta for the Western World (something about how Vivekananda could have become a great national leader if he had wanted to), he, Prabhavananda, had felt very unhappy; but then he had seen Vivekananda in the shrine and had felt reassured that Vivekananda approved of what I’d written and didn’t find it offensive.

  It is in cases of this kind that you really get a glimpse of the way Prabhavananda’s mind works. The fuss with Ashokananda happened twenty years ago—and therefore, so did the vision. But the vision is at all times absolutely “now” in Prabhavananda’s mind. Theoretically, of course, I can see that this should be so; but I still have to marvel that it is so!

  Meanwhile, in the more usual “now,” Vandanananda has been acting up again, taking advantage of Ranganathananda’s presence to demonstrate Swami’s tyranny and show that he, Vandanananda, can have no will of his own about anything. There was a ridiculous instance of this at supper, when Vandanananda absolutely refused to decide what time Ranganathananda should leave for the airport this morning; Swami had to be appealed to. And Ranganathananda was anyhow only flying to San Francisco, so he could have caught another plane if he missed one. The girls are very much in this act, which is disagreeable; sometimes they really seem to understand nothing but bitchery. Also, I seemed to detect signs of impudence toward Vandanananda on the part of Asaktananda, who now feels secure in Swami’s favor. All this would be far worse than it actually is, if Swami seemed in the slightest degree gaga, but he sparkled with vitality. He still claims to be sick and exhausted but probably he is just instinctively conserving energy. Also, I’m sure, he didn’t want to have to listen to Ranganathananda’s nonstop table talk.

  Meanwhile Don saw Jack Larson and agreed with me that he seems very worried about Jim. But there were no confidences.

  January 24. Rainstorms on and off, more or less, since the 18th, and another five days of it are predicted! Am glad at least we didn’t go down to stay with Truman Capote in the desert yet. Maybe by the 30th, when we’re due to, it’ll have let up. Because of the rain, my car has stalled twice. It had a new battery put in, but that has made no difference. Don’s phone went out too; the rain leaked on the wire[,] which brought the ants who electrocuted themselves and short-circuited it. The young phone man told me he has been working sixteen hours a day. He said climbing poles in the rain wasn’t as bad as going down manholes, because in the manholes you have waterfalls rushing all over you.

  Igor is very ill. That is, his physical condition isn’t worse than usual but he is in a state of terror, presumably about dying. Bob recommends getting a psychiatrist in. Vera feels that nothing will help. She says, “When I come in the room, his eyes are looking with such a fear. Never his eyes are quiet.” What disturbs me is that Igor’s religion, his cult of his icons, doesn’t seem to strengthen him at all.

  Don says he wants to go to England before we leave for Australia. I am sad about this, but it’s the way things are, and who am I to complain, considering how things are for other people? I am the most pampered creature of my age I know of. It’s just that I’m so happy with him.

  The sprain in my calf seems to have cleared up. Maybe tomorrow I’ll even run on the beach in the rain; unfortunately the tide isn’t right. The cyst seems unchanged, neither harder nor softer, larger nor smaller.

  Today I finished chapter 4 of Kathleen and Frank. Fifty-nine pages in all. It’s a grim effort but I keep on.

  Last night, Paul Wonner and Bill Brown took me to see Fortune and Men’s Eyes. (Don had seen it in New York with Bob Christian in it and couldn’t face it again.) It is terribly silly and woo
lly and well-intentioned. A cute blond boy of nineteen (Don Johnson) gets fucked by a prison bully (Sal Mineo) up against some bars, facing the audience. His jockey shorts are dragged down and the bully pretends to go up him from behind. He grimaces and yells.848 I suppose this is a milestone on the road to freedom. But how wonderful when we have really explored fucks and can get on to the moments of postorgasm; there you have a whole almost unexplored dramatic territory!

  Have seen Sybille Bedford about Aldous, for her biography. She is a hypochondriacal mess but intelligent, really perceptive. There’s also a man who is writing about David Selznick, but Jennifer tells me neither she nor David’s sons have seen him and they don’t want that sort of book written; so I’ll make that an excuse not to see him. His name is Bob Thomas.849

  Ted still crazy, walked into the house unannounced yesterday. Don yelled at him and drove him out again. It is awful because it is partly pathetic, partly an attempt to be reconciled with Don, and mostly a quite conscious drive to trick Don into giving way, just for the sake of tricking him.

  January 25. The rainstorms keep blowing in through the Canyon from the ocean. The waves are brown. A tremendous torrent is pouring out of the hills down the channels; on Rustic Road the water takes the curves like a racing car, so that the whole stream tilts sideways, spilling out over the road. An alarming lot of our hillside has gone down onto Ocean Avenue, including part of the wall and railing of our pie slice of property. It even looks as if the corner of the steps below Don’s studio could be threatened if this keeps up. We walked down to the beach in a lull between storms and talked to Jo, alone in her gaudy little flat. She told us she can’t ever see Ben’s father again because he has had Ben and Dee to visit him.

  Talk about death with Don after reading an ill-written but quite interesting piece by Gary Fisher, a weird boy we met at Laura Huxley’s, who administers lysergic acid to some of the terminal cases at Mt. Sinai(?) Hospital to help them overcome their fear of death.850 (We have even been wondering if he could help Igor.) Don says that his LSD experience was like being shut in a closet. When he came out of it, it was as if there were several hangers with suits of clothes revolving around him, and he chose the one which was Don Bachardy. “Since then,” he says, “I sometimes feel as if, when I came out of the closet, I came out into a dream.”