The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Gary Fisher says that we escape from identification with the self in the act of creativity, and that this helps us not to fear death, because fear of death is identification with the self. But, in that case, why is Igor so afraid? He, more than most people, has experienced the escape, surely, through his music?

  February 2. On the 30th we drove down to Palm Springs to see Truman Capote, and got back yesterday. I spent yesterday afternoon and evening studying a book by Edgar Holt on the Boer War. I have read most of it now, looking up the places in the Times Atlas, and have really quite a good temporary grasp of what the war was all about. So I’ll get on with chapter 5 before I forget. The history of the York and Lancaster Regiment still hasn’t arrived. I sent chapters 1-4 off to Richard from Palm Springs.

  Truman seemed as insecure as Gore and perhaps also sick or in fear of being, and quite obsessed by money. He says he has given up sex almost altogether. I got childishly angry the first day we were there because we weren’t alone with him at all. The Irving Lazars and a director named Frank Perry and his wife Eleanor, who writes scripts and is a bit of a fart.851 But really it didn’t matter so much, except that I got extremely drunk (they all did a bit) on margaritas and later fell down and mysteriously hurt my side. And the evening before we left we were alone with Truman and he was his fascinating self. Thank God, he at last is writing about the rich!852

  Still don’t know if Don will leave for England or not; it depends on whether Dicky Buckle can get him appointments to draw the Harwoods (not sure if that is the right spelling of their royal name).853 And then of course [Don’s friend] may have gone off to Peru to see his sister. Anyhow, Don has been so angelically sweet the last week or so that it is almost literally angelic; our relationship seems to exist in a better world than this one. When it’s like this—and, after all, it quite fairly often is—my only pain is a feeling of poignancy; that it can’t go on for ever, that I have to die. I think of death very very often, much more often than of God, these days. Which reminds me that both Don and I forgot to bring our beads with us to the desert!

  Last night, Don dreamt that he and I sat watching a show put on by Elsa Lanchester, some kind of act in which she had a wolf. And the wolf attacked her and she was terrified and ran away. Her fear was horrible, Don says.

  February 17. They say there will be more rain, but at present the sun is shining. We have been soaked on and off all month. The destruction of California by earthquake and flood is now predicted by somebody for early in April.

  Brian Bedford didn’t like our play, thought the characters literary and the whole thing more suited to radio. The offhand, superior way he told us this offended both of us; we had to drag it out of him, in Gavin’s presence, at Matteo’s. Now we both feel we don’t want him to direct A Single Man; he isn’t the sort one wants to work with. (But Paul Bogarde,854 the other contender, isn’t either.)

  With Lamont Johnson on the other hand, I get along fine. Rehearsals have started on Black Girl. The whole thing has practically turned into a spade musical with African singing and dancing, directed by native experts. Don is to have a drawing of me printed in the program, side by side with a drawing of Shaw (by [Feliks] Topolski); I can’t help feeling that this is lese majesty on my part.

  At the first rehearsal, which was on the 14th, it was amusing to see how the British and Canadian actors spoke out like trumpets while the black actors threw the lines away, in little squeaky method voices. But Monty will cure all that; he is admirably good-humored but firm.

  Still no news from England. Don is unsettled, unhappy, aggressive, then sweet again. This is one of the cloudy periods. There is much we can’t discuss. Earthquakes are in the air. As for me, I am horribly fat, gassy, worried about the cyst on my finger which sometimes seems to press on the nerve and pain me. And oh how bored I am with the Boer War part of my book! I am fat because of a psychopathic gluttony caused by my uneasiness. I sneak into the kitchen and stuff myself with dates.

  February 21. Yesterday evening, [Don’s friend] called from London. So now it looks like Don will go there quite soon. Everything is uncertain, otherwise. Shall we go to Australia? Will John Lehmann come here?

  More rain is due. The house Dick Spencer built above the Pacific Coast Highway between Sunset and Topanga has slid down to the edge of the cliff and the highway is closed; so people have to drive downtown by way of Topanga or Malibu Canyon!855

  Am depressed and tamasik, but that’s not important; just internal weather. As for Kathleen and Frank, there is nothing to do but get on with it.

  Don is happy, now he smells England. I say I want nothing but his happiness. Well then, why aren’t I rejoicing? Because I’m jealous. So what else is new?

  We had Leslie Caron to supper last night. She is quite likable but not an utter darling, too cold-blooded. Her skinny cold ill-mannered husband856 came in later. Why do we entertain people? We both hate it. And tomorrow, no less than five and maybe more people are coming in to watch Renate [Druks]’s films.

  Robin French and his girlfriend got married on February 14; our sixteenth anniversary!

  February 26. In six months I shall be sixty-five. I seem to understand less and less about life. I try to think about it, or indeed about anything, and it all blurs. Why aren’t I wise, like it tells you you will be, toward the end? One is a dull-witted, gluttonous, timid, ill-natured—I was going to write animal, but let’s leave the animals out of this; the thing I am isn’t fit to touch their hooves or paws. . . . I do not write this in humility or even dismay, however. I know I have made a mess of my life but so do most of us. With the advantages I have had, the friends I have known and indeed all the happiness which still surrounds me—greater in some respects than ever before—I ought to have become a living wonder. And I, to put it very very mildly, haven’t. So? Krishnamurti would tell me that self-improvement is a delusion and Vivekananda would tell me that duty is a snare. Perhaps I know this, deep down. Perhaps duty and self-improvement efforts are really just part of a game I play with myself—something I do to get “the click in my head.”

  I do have this angst, though; there’s nearly always something to worry about, and when there isn’t I just worry anyhow. Yesterday morning, a really big bit of the bank below our pie slice slipped down and entirely closed Ocean Avenue, including great chunks of the retaining wall. They had to break it up with drills before they could truck it away. Yesterday evening, wicked old Mrs. O’Hilderbrandt called me, trying to make my flesh creep with hints of how the house was doomed from the beginning to slide down the hill, how the first tenants had pulled out of it in terror after hearing the geologist’s report—and then tempting me to buy the lot she owns across the street from us.857 All very well to retort that the house has stood here since 1925; the fact remains that the pie slice embankment and the retaining wall did too, only because there had never been a steady downpour like this one we have just had—and with more of it predicted for the weekend.

  Leslie Caron came by yesterday afternoon. Don drew her and she bought one of his new paintings.

  Also Dennis Altman had supper with us; he’s on his way back to Australia. Shall we go? Still don’t know. Still don’t know if Don will go to England; he is waiting for word from Dicky Buckle. John Lehmann is probably coming, around the 14th of March. The day before yesterday I finished chapter 5 of the book.

  Dennis has been seeing a lot of Negroes while here. Two of his impressions; that those who talk loudest about Black Power are the ones who are most apt to have non-Negro lovers, they “talk black and fuck white”; that black homosexuals are queers first and blacks second. Dennis felt a terror of New York this time (he had been there before), said you didn’t dare to look people in the face when you passed them on the street, for fear it would involve you in some sort of fight. He thinks Los Angeles is much more friendly and much less tense. He also remarked on the growing hostility between blacks and Jews.

  There has been interracial hostility in the Black Girl company too,
but Lamont thinks this was all to the good. Susan Batson and Douglas Campbell have had real open fights, and Susan has led the other black actors in complaining that this play isn’t a proper protest play. But Lamont can handle them. The blacks respect him because he has done these two T.V. films, one in Watts and one in Stockton, about the ghetto life.858 And I believe Susan may be really good in the part. She is a grotesque neckless little Hottentot of a thing but she is fascinating, sly, animal, childlike, campy, weird, tender, furious, wise; she can do all the moods and aspects which the different scenes demand. And the African drumming and singing are going to help a great deal, provided they don’t become too much of a floor show on their own account. Lamont had me go down there last Sunday and radiate satisfaction and confidence; in fact, I put on a bit of an act for him, as I used to do for John [van Druten] during rehearsals of I Am a Camera.

  Poor old Jo’s Mexican money pig has been stolen from her apartment by two teenage youths (the barber saw them go up and come down); nothing else was taken. So now she has a new moan: “I feel so scared there, all alone—whenever I hear someone coming up the stairs, I feel scared.” We have neglected her shamefully. I really would like to help her somehow, but when I’m with her this awful self-pity repels me every time.

  February 28. More rain, and yesterday evening a mild earthquake (the radio says) which smashed some windows in the Los Angeles area—we didn’t feel it.

  Last night we went to see Dr. Mabuse859 at UCLA, and found they’d moved it from Royce Hall to a much smaller theater and there was no room for most of the people who came. So we were fit to be tied. During supper Don broke the news to me that Jim Bridges had called to tell him our play has been rejected by the board at UCLA. A woman called Frances,860 who has to report to the board on suggested productions, hadn’t liked it (“They’re only interested in their cocks”) so naturally her account of it was most unattractive; no member of the board had bothered to actually read the play. So that’s that. Maybe it is a blessing in disguise. But it has shaken Jim’s morale, and Don’s too, though not so severely.

  After supper we went home and ran some of our old home movies, which were sweet and nostalgic but saddening. Don of course mourned over the disappearance of the enchanting kittenish bright-eyed boy. I marvelled to see how fat, grotesque, anxious-eyed, nervously grinning, stiff-jointed and joyless-laughing I already was—at that time when I still preened myself and imagined I was quite attractive! What phantoms such film-figures are; the bright flicker of activity and compulsive fun, gone in an instant and forever. And behind it, the mystery. What is Life really about?

  This morning a cable from John Lehmann, who is coming for two or three days, and a cable from [Don’s friend], who wants to know if Don is coming to England right away, as he’d like to go with him to Morocco. Much discussion forthcoming about this.

  Jim Bridges tells me the latest expression current among the young: heavy meaning good, marvellous, inspiring—“It was a heavy experience.” This expression was actually applied by Jim’s friend Bob (see September 16, last year) to a performance by The Living Theatre of a show they call Frankenstein, at the Bovard Auditorium on the USC campus. Jack and Jim are both wild about this company and I must say I was thoroughly interested when Don and I went to see them the day before yesterday. I went with a good deal of preliminary hostility, because of Jack’s uncritical ravings, because of the irritating claims implied by the title Living that all the company’s competitors are dead, and because of the holy-superior note in their program: “These ensembles are participating groups of the RADICAL THEATRE REPERTORY, in the vanguard of a new phenomenon in theatrical and social history— the spontaneous generation of communal playing troupes, sharing voluntary poverty, making experimental collective creations, and utilizing space, time, minds and bodies in manifold new ways that meet the demands of our explosive period.” We’re going again on Sunday, to see a different show, Paradise Now, so will write more about them after that.

  March 6. Today we heard that the National Portrait Gallery has bought Don’s drawing of Wystan. His first sale to a public gallery! And to add to the brightness of the day, Don’s father was really pleasant to me (more so than ever before) when he came by with Glade to see if he could fix Don’s car! And Nicholas Thompson (who is over here on a visit) seems to be really enthusiastic about our Meeting by the River play. He is coming to supper tonight. (Incidentally, he is going to settle here sooner or later and take over the literary department of Chartwell Artists and so presumably become our agent. Robin hasn’t said a word about this to me.)

  We never did see Paradise Now because the Living Theatre was closed down a couple of days previously. Some of the audience were encouraged to take off their clothes; one man allegedly took off his pants and shorts and then his tie, which he draped around his cock. The closing wasn’t due to indecency but because the fire department said it couldn’t be responsible for the safety of the audience!

  There has been a flap over Black Girl. The black actors felt that the marriage of the Black Girl to the Irishman was a sellout. They denied this completely, after they realized how silly they sounded, but anyhow there were hot arguments. So Lamont devised a sort of happening in which the actors step out of character and discuss the play, and I typed it up as best I could and then they hated that, so the whole thing has been dropped (or so it seems as of this morning) and the play remains as is. I felt no resentment against the blacks or indeed against the whites, who got quite nasty, but I did feel that Lamont rather lost control—unless indeed his yielding can be regarded as a sort of judo. Douglas Campbell was really eloquent and made a lot of sense. Susan Batson was childish but dramatically impressive. Douglas told her she was wallowing in self-pity and refused to be intimidated by the ghetto-childhood references; he’d been raised in the slums of Glasgow, he said, and had to become a killer until he realized that violence is no good.

  March 19. John Lehmann left yesterday morning. He had been staying in the house since the 14th and it seemed like two weeks. He is very big, he made the place seem tiny and there was nowhere for us to talk to each other where he couldn’t hear, except the studio. We slept there, as we had given him the “basket.”861

  He didn’t really want to see us. It was all symbolic. Now he can say we have entertained him and introduced our friends to him. But it is the symbolic aspect of anything which really impresses him—for instance, that Don has had a drawing bought by the National Portrait Gallery and that he is going to draw the Harewoods. And John himself thinks of his life in terms of his CBE862 and meetings with the Queen Mum. I sound venomous but I am not; I ended up, as always, feeling simply sorry for him. He is quite stupid and thick-skinned and he expects to be waited on hand and foot, and he was scared lest he should somehow be maneuvered into having to buy us a meal. His talk863—actually a paper which he read aloud, badly—was so dull and dead that I was quite embarrassed, because I’d introduced him to the audience by saying that he was an absolutely unique authority on the thirties; the only person who had known its poets on three levels, as friend, fellow writer and editor-publisher, etc. etc.

  I took him to see the Towers of Watts. They seemed more wonderful than ever—both as spires in the distance and as structures seen from below. They are an absolutely no-shit statement of individualism. You feel, everybody might do something like this in his backyard—and why the hell don’t we all? But the purity of the whole thing consists in the fact that there wasn’t anything else like it anywhere around; it has the purity of a monomaniac’s hobby. (Actually, Simon Rodia did dream of being famous—“I had in mind to do something big, and I did”—but his way of going about it was so fantastic (although, actually, it succeeded) that it still seems like a hobby.)864

  It was a beautiful afternoon and Watts itself looked anything but a sinister ghetto—so spacious and airy, with its little houses and wide roads; calm and rural, almost, after the teeming freeway.

  Black Girl is as all right as it ever will
be in this production. Susan is splendid; perhaps she will one day become a great actress. Douglas is so fat and old and ugly, but we should be lost without his voice. The black dancers are very exciting and one boy in particular, Fred Grey, is a brilliant mime and at the same time sexy and sometimes beautiful in the grace of his movements. Gordon Davidson did everything possible to rock the boat; he nearly drove Lamont to resign. He is rude in a special Jewish-theatrical way; he doesn’t know how to make suggestions or give advice without insulting people, and he keeps reminding them that he’s the boss and that his word goes. He ought never never to be put in charge of a theater; he is a ruthless back-seat director.

  The critics are coming to see the play tonight. The official open ing is tomorrow.

  March 22. The reviews (Los Angeles Times, Herald-Examiner and Variety) were all bad. The critic of The Nation says she is going to write a piece praising the play and attacking Los Angeles taste, but that won’t appear until after we’ve closed. Monty talks of letting audiences of high-school and college kids in free, to fill the theater. It is tiresome, but I know the play isn’t that bad—not nearly as bad as Shaw’s own worst—and Susan is quite an experience. Probably we’ll do wonderful business elsewhere later.

  Don is now definitely booked on a plane to leave here for England on March 31. Everybody talks of the earthquake, which is predicted for either April 4, or 13, or 17, I think. Definitely April anyhow.

  Am crawling steadily on with Kathleen and Frank.